“What did she look like?”

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t see her. But your mom said she wasn’t very tall, but she seemed tall, if that makes sense. She could do cartwheels and other tricks. And when your mom was sad, Ms. Trixie would sometimes smooth her hair.”

That didn’t sound very interesting to Theo, at least, not as interesting as a ginormous wolf with too many teeth, but he was pleased to hear that his mom had had a friend once, too. Everyone needed friends.

Now the only one awake at eleven p.m., Theo wished he still believed in Pink, still believed he had a wolf to watch over him while he caught some sleep. But it seemed that he and Tess had switched places again. They had gone to bed early, at nine thirty, and she hadn’t twitched once. Ono was cradled in one arm. Jaime was sprawled out over the top of his sleeping bag, breathing softly, one ’loc on his forehead lifting up and then dropping down with each breath. But Theo could not get comfortable. He worried that his mother wouldn’t be able to find Nine and Karl, that they were gone forever. He worried that Tess wouldn’t be the same after. Maybe Cricket, too.

Theo worried until eleven forty-five, and then he woke Tess and Jaime. They zipped themselves into Aunt Esther’s coveralls, figuring that the station was bound to have workers wandering around and there might be a chance they could blend in. They stuffed tools—a wrench, a screwdriver, a chisel, a small hammer—in their pockets. They arranged their bedding and the sleeping bag so that it appeared they were still in them. Then, they eased open the window screen and climbed out to the small deck off the third floor. Even though Theo’s parents slept with a dragonfly fan whirring overhead to drown out the noise of the street, the three of them crept down the wooden stairs as slowly and quietly as they could. They waited in the backyard for a few moments, just in case, but no lights went on in the house, and nobody came rushing out to ask them why in the corn nuts they were out of bed, for peanut butter’s sake?

They hopped on the N train. Anywhere else, you might expect the trains to be empty at midnight, but New York was as alive at night as it was during the day. Plenty of people still packed the Underway cars all the way from Queens and into Manhattan. In their shapeless uniforms, no one looked at them twice, not even the Guildman manning the train. Ono watched the caterpillar drift across the wall of the car, and whispered, “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” to himself.