The 2nd City Reliquary itself was a storefront in the neighborhood of Williamsburg, a tiny place packed with all sorts of odds and ends. Old Underway tokens, soda bottles, maps, posters, baseball cards, miniature Liberty Statues, a display of porcelain unicorns, and a very old shovel labeled VERY OLD SHOVEL.

“This is a museum?” said Jaime. “Kind of looks like my great-aunt Sylvia’s house.”

A man stepped out from behind the counter. He had long curly hair that matched a bushy curly beard. He wore a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt and shiny running pants with flip-flops.

“Welcome to the Reliquary, my dudes and Ms. Dude. You looking for something in particular?”

“Just visiting,” Tess said.

“We like visitors who are just visiting. Especially cat visitors who are just visiting,” the man said, when Nine sniffed at his feet and then nudged his knee with her nose. “Hey there, cat friend.”

“She must like you,” Jaime said.

“Thus, I am truly blessed,” the man said. “So let me point out some stuff to you and your kitty, here. We’ve got lots of cool stuff. Some Liberty Statues over there. Baseball cards back there. Old Underway maps. Some different pieces of rock and schist from all around the city, some of them we think date back to the time when the Underway was first excavated. Ridiculous, right?” He was grinning, so Theo assumed he meant ridiculous as in “awesome” as opposed to ridiculous as in “ridiculous,” because what was ridiculous about schist?

“Ridiculous,” said Theo.

“Obvi,” the man said. “Oh, and the Community Collection on display is an array of animal bones.”

Tess’s head snapped up. Nine stopped sniffing.

The clerk held up both hands. “No animals were harmed to make the collection! All the bones were found on hiking trails and in barns and parks and attics and the like. City bones, the bones of history! You should check it out for yourselves, young ones.”

“Why would you want to display a bunch of mouse bones?” Tess said.

“Maybe because there’s beauty even in things we associate with endings,” the man said, “Or maybe the point of the collection is that there is no end, not to us, not to anything. Anyway, feel free to take a look around.” The clerk went back behind the counter and starting flipping through a comic book.

Before Tess could ask all the questions clearly piling up in her head, Theo and Jaime steered her toward the VERY OLD SHOVEL.

“We don’t have time for you to ask the four thousand questions you want to ask,” Theo said before Tess could open her mouth. “We have to find the puzzle and figure out the next clue.”

“Let’s split up,” Jaime suggested. “This place isn’t that big but we can cover it quicker that way.”