“Dad always drew the line at me being able to parallel park, because he said he didn’t want to be part of the news story: ‘Twelve-Year-Old Steals Parents’ Car and Goes on Joyride Through Side of Building.’ But I don’t see why . . . Ahmad!”

She sighed as Ahmad, not waiting for the car to properly stop, leaped out the passenger side.

“It’s a doorway of some sort!” Ahmad called back over his shoulder giddily. There was a strange electricity sparking through him. It felt like when he spent hours wandering over terrain in a new video game, trying to find the next quest—and then, suddenly, his controller gave a little jiggle in his grasp or his character found a new path to go down, and the adventure continued.

“I think we’ve been down this alleyway before,” Winnie said, walking up to him. She frowned at the colorful neon archway looming over their heads. “Funny, I feel like I would have remembered this.”

“You don’t because it wasn’t here before,” Ahmad hissed excitedly.

This was their next challenge. He could feel it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

AHMAD STARED PAST THE flashing neon doorway. He couldn’t see much in the shadowy passageway that it led into. It looked like a cross between one of the rides at Coney Island and maybe a Halloween haunted house.

His heart pounded.

“This wasn’t here before,” he insisted. “Not in my sketches at home, and not when we walked this way toward Madame Nasirah’s shop.”

Winnie’s face was doubtful. “We did do a lot of walking, and everything here kind of looks the same after a while.”

“This is Paheli, remember? And it’s a game. You said before: If it sticks out, it must mean something. Maybe this is the challenge!”

“I don’t know, Ahmad.”

There was a hiss in the sky, reminiscent of Fourth of July fireworks. Ahmad and Winnie started, gazing upward at the red holographic timer. It was slowly ticking backward from ten minutes. The countdown had begun.

“Is that good enough for you?” Ahmad asked. “Remember that jungle level? We weren’t even awake when that one started.”

Winnie peered down the dark corridor. When she looked back at Ahmad, her jaw was clenched and she nodded her head.

“I guess we don’t have much choice now.”

Ahmad bent down and rummaged through the knapsack. “I wish we had some form of light in here,” he grumbled. “Oh, wait!”

His fingers closed on the handle of the lantern. It didn’t look quite like a lantern as Ahmad had seen them before in hardware stores. It was shaped more like the bulbous abdomen of a firefly, oval, with glass that had the transparency and separated segments of an insect’s wing. When he tapped tentatively against its side, it beamed to life, each segment giving off its own hue of bright yellow.