Before the door sealed shut behind me, I caught a glimpse of a lone vehicle that had opted to use the Holland Transit Bridge. It was a large shipping truck and the metal sides of its trailer bed had been dented from the inside as if something in there were fighting to be freed. The truck’s general direction suggested that it was heading toward the area of town best known for its shopping district, its well-kept parks, and, perhaps most notably of all, its world-class museum.

36.

We cornered the Eye four hours later in a cave toothed with stalactites. It didn’t thrill us to discover that the Eye could scale rock faces like a spider. Tub, in a fit of bravery, grabbed for it and was whipped with its stem—poisonous, we discovered, when the welt began to inflate. The injury slowed us, and the Eye squeezed itself through a one-foot drainage pipe with the sound of a straw sucking up the last liquid in a glass.

Without the Eye to chase, without the astrolabe, without a healthy ARRRGH!!!, the wrong turns multiplied until we were lost. Frustrated and tired, we turned a blind corner to find ourselves in a tunnel bisected by a ray of light—it was morning already. ARRRGH!!! and Blinky retreated like spooked livestock and I could see the rocky stiffness that had already set in their joints. They were in pain, but neither Jack nor I permitted them recovery time.

The arrangement was awkward: ARRRGH!!! led with her nose, but because of the danger of sunlight, Jack, Tub, and I had to walk in front. It was slow and arduous, and as we continued along a downward labyrinth of forgotten sewers and abandoned mines, the air grew colder and thicker. When we came upon yet another tunnel that split in three directions, it was Jack who sat down on a boulder and held his masked head in his hands. The trolls stopped, too, out of ideas.

Their despair was contagious. I squatted and stared at the obdurate rock between my shoes, thinking of everything I was missing back in the brightly lit human world: Pinkton’s math test, preparations for the big game, the final ragtag rehearsal for a play now missing its female lead, the fitting of the head stone into the Killaheed Bridge, and whatever panic or self-delusion Dad was going through. We’d been down here for almost a day. Hope was dwindling.

Tub’s voice surprised all of us.

“Huh,” he said. “Don’t normally see a whole lot of pink down here.”

He was pointing near my feet. I shifted my gaze a few inches and saw a scrap of polyester still clinging to a rubberized zipper. It was pink and I’d seen it a thousand times before.

“Claire’s backpack,” I said.

“Claire’s backpack?” parroted Tub.