THE FUN HOUSE—what the photograph had shown to once have been called The Nightmare—was a rickety two-story building covered in peeling white-and-orange paint. Its few windows sported crooked shutters and slatted boards long ago nailed across them. There was no glass. Spiderwebs, some as thick and dark as yarn, were strung across the overhang of the wraparound porch. As they passed beneath it, Adrian glanced up at the headless clown. He assumed it had once had a head, but it was hard to know for sure. The place was so creepy it was only with exaggerated imagination that he could picture what it must have once been—a place of amusement and whimsy. A place that people didn’t enter while their stomachs filled with dread.
The porch groaned beneath his weight as he stepped up to the double-door entrance, where a mural of twin ballerinas had been painted to welcome in the visitors. One of them had a speech bubble that read, “Welcome to our fun house!” And the other, “Enjoy your stay!” And Adrian could just picture their little heads spinning around as he pushed open the doors, their tinny voices adding, with a haunting cackle—Or else …
But the mural was just a mural and there were no eerie voices when he and Nova stepped into the first chamber of the house. There was no noise at all beyond the distant carnival music coming from the amusement park they’d left behind.
This first room was without windows, and he held the door open long enough for them to get their bearings, though they could not see very far into the old attraction. A wall was built only six feet in front of the door, encouraging visitors to move quickly beyond the foyer and into whatever lay beyond.
“Someone’s been here recently,” said Nova, pointing at the ground, where clear footprints could be seen passing through the years of accumulated dust.
Nova reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out a small device. She gave it a snap and it began to glow luminescent yellow. She tossed it into the next doorway.
“That’s neat,” said Adrian.
“Exothermic micro-flares. I make them myself.”
He smiled at her. “If you happen to run out of them, I could also draw a flashlight.”
She scowled as she stepped forward into the shadows.
Adrian let go of the door and it creaked loudly, then shut with a resounding click, trapping them inside with the stale, silent air. He followed Nova around the bend and through a series of switchback paths that looped back and around on each other a number of times. Nova left her micro-flare as they passed it, perhaps as a way to track the direction they’d come, lighting another and then another as they made their way through the narrow lanes. Adrian trailed his left hand against the wall to keep them from treading back over old ground, and though the maze seemed a little childish, he could imagine how disconcerting it would have been to try to traverse it in pitch-blackness.
After turning into two dead ends, they found themselves at the end of the maze, standing before a long hallway that was made up to look like the corridor of a quaint old house. Two small square windows donned lace curtains and the walls were covered in blue-checkered wallpaper.
They stepped out into the hallway, and the floor tilted beneath them.
Nova gasped and tumbled to the side, knocking into Adrian. He instinctively wrapped his arms around her as his back crashed into the wall.
They froze, neither daring to move while the hallway settled around them. He could feel Nova’s heartbeat pounding, and when she met his gaze, her cheeks were flushed.
He couldn’t keep his fingers from curling, just slightly, into the fabric of her uniform.
Nova let out a self-deprecating sigh. “Heads up—the floor moves.”
Adrian grinned. “You don’t say.”
To his disappointment, Nova pulled herself away, leaning on the wall for support instead. “It’s activated by weight,” she said. “If we both stick to this side, we should be able to keep it pretty steady.”
“Wow, you really are good at physics.”
She glowered at him. “Now you decide to become sarcastic?”
Cheeks twitching, Adrian followed her through the corridor, each of them keeping their footsteps as close to the wall as possible to keep it from swaying beneath them again.
At the end of the undulating hall, they pushed through a hanging curtain and Adrian spotted two shadowed figures rushing toward them. He yelped and grabbed Nova’s elbow to pull her behind him, when his brain caught up with his eyes and he realized he was staring at their own reflections.
At least, their own distorted reflections. One of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors was curved to make Adrian appear short and squat, while Nova’s was altered to look eight feet tall.
He exhaled. “Sorry. This place might be making me a little jumpy.”
Nova pulled her arm away and turned to face him, settling her hands on her hips. “For the record, while it’s very charming that you keep trying to protect me, I would like to remind you that I actually know how defend myself.”
He grimaced. “I know. It’s just … instinct.”
“Well, stop it.”
He held his hands up. “Won’t happen again.” He hesitated. “I mean, unless I’m pretty sure you’re about to die, then I’m absolutely going to rescue you, whether you like it or not.”
Rolling her eyes, Nova headed into the hall of mirrors, which was another sequence of corridors that wound back and forth, so that at times they were surrounded by countless versions of themselves reflecting into infinity, and at other times the optical illusion of the hall made it impossible to see where the next break in the mirrors was, so that it felt as if there were no way out. At one point, Adrian found himself gaping at a version of himself in which his legs and head were shrunk to doll proportions, leaving his torso to stretch eternally between them, when from the corner of his eye he could have sworn he saw Nightmare herself dart past his view.
He gripped the tranquilizer gun and spun to chase after her, promptly crashing into a wall. When he did make it around the corner, he saw only Nova frowning at him. “What’s wrong?”
Blinking, Adrian shook off the vision, realizing that it must have only been her that he’d seen, his own imagination getting carried away with another distorted reflection.
“Nothing,” he said. “How do we get out of here?”
They fumbled around for another minute until they found a staircase. Adrian noticed small holes in the floor as they made their way up, and he suspected they were intended to blow bursts of air, probably up into the skirts of unsuspecting girls, but whatever mechanism had caused it must have been out of order, and they made their way to the top without incident.
Adrian stared down the next corridor. It was wider than the one downstairs. There were no windows here, just dark wood floors and a collection of framed oil paintings hung on the thick-striped wallpaper, mostly portraits of stoic-looking aristocrats. Stacked up against the nearest wall were dozens of burlap mats.
Adrian stepped out first this time, preparing to catch himself, but the floor held stable.
They made their way forward, side by side, waiting to discover what new surprise this room had to offer.
“I think they used those burlap mats for slides,” said Adrian, peering at a painting of a man with a wiry gray beard. He frowned. There was something off about the picture. Something about his eyes that made Adrian pause. Had he imagined them moving, tracking him and Nova across the hall?
An optical illusion, probably, but he couldn’t quite resist stepping closer to it, when he heard a loud ka-thunk and Nova screamed.
He spun around just in time to see Nova disappear through a square trap door. Adrian launched himself forward, trying to grab her, but the door snapped shut. All he’d caught was the sight of a metal slide leading back down to the floor below.
“Nova! Nova!” He fell to the floor where she had fallen through, trying to dig his fingers into the edges of the trapdoor, to no avail. Standing, he stomped around in the same spot, but the door did not give. “Nova!”
From down below, he heard her calling, “I’m okay!”
At the same moment, the painting in front of Adrian popped open and a head launched itself forward. Adrian cried out, lifted the gun, and fired.
The tranquilizer dart shot past the disembodied head, clunking harmlessly into the wall beside it.
“He-he-he-he!” chortled a high-pitched mechanical voice. “You’ve lost your pal, oh boo-hoo! But don’t stop now … the only way out is through!”
The head bobbed a second longer, and Adrian could see it was attached to a springy base, like a jack-in-the-box toy. It was painted like a clown, with garish red lips and a black diamond on its cheek, and he wondered if it was supposed to be the missing head from the doll outside.
The picture frame slammed shut. Inside the wall, he heard the click of gears as the mechanics reset themselves.
He swallowed, and realized he was shaking.
“Adrian?” Nova yelled from below.
Panic ebbing, he tucked the gun away and dug out his marker. “Hold on, I’m coming down to you.” Kneeling over the floorboards again, he started to draw a trapdoor of his own.
“No—wait!”
He paused, tilting his head to listen more closely.
“I think there might be two routes through this place,” Nova yelled. “We should keep going—check them both out.”
He frowned. There was nothing appealing at all about being separated, especially when this really might be Nightmare’s secret lair. Though the longer they stayed, the more Adrian questioned how anyone could stand to spend more time here than they had to.
Finally, Adrian forced his shoulders to release some of the mounting tension. “Okay,” he yelled down to Nova. “I’ll meet you at the exit.”
She didn’t respond. Perhaps she had already moved on.
Adrian took a moment to draw himself a new tranquilizer dart and loaded the gun before leaving the corridor. He opened the door at the end and froze as he found himself standing in a hexagonal room, where each wall bore an identical green door.
“Fine,” he muttered. Letting the door shut behind him, he turned and marked it with an X, so he would know he’d already been this way. He pulled open the first door to his right, revealing a plain brick wall. He reached out and knocked and, determining that they were real bricks and not an optical illusion, shut the door and marked it.
He opened the next door and his pulse jumped.
The room before him was painted, floor, walls, and ceiling, in swirls of black and white, making it appear that the room got smaller and smaller as it stretched out before him.
But this was not what had given him pause.
Rather, the optical illusion was broken up by three things.
A sleeping bag. A pillow. And a large black duffel bag.
He stepped into the room, eyes darting over every surface. He half expected Nightmare to appear from some dark corner, but there was nowhere in here for her, or anyone, to hide.
Adrian crouched beside the duffel bag and pulled back the zipper. Inside, he found a change of clothes, a pair of sneakers, and the bazooka-size gun Nightmare had used to throw those ropes around him during their fight above the parade.
It was all the confirmation he needed.
Standing, he raised his wrist and sent a quick message to Nova, asking her to meet him back up on the second floor. Then he alerted the Council, informing them of what he and Insomnia had found.
He had just sent the message when he heard the squeak of floorboards. He stilled, holding his breath to listen. After a long silence, in which he could once again catch the tinny notes of faraway carnival music, he heard another groan of ancient floorboards.
Returning to the door, he peered into the hexagonal room. Trying to guess where the noise had come from, he adjusted his hold on the gun and stepped across to the opposite door. He opened it slowly. Silently. Grateful when it did not creak on its old hinges.
Inside was a narrow hall, just wide enough for one person to walk through. It was pitch-black, but for a series of tiny round holes on each wall, placed at varying heights in sets of two. Adrian stepped forward and the door shut behind him, throwing him into near blackness. He approached one set of holes and bent down to look through. On the other side of the wall, he recognized the corridor with the portraits, where Nova had fallen through the trapdoor, and quickly realized that he was staring through the eyes of one of the paintings.
His blood chilled as he recalled the peculiar sensation of one of the paintings watching them.
He turned to the other wall and found himself staring into another crooked room, where the walls were painted to trick the mind into thinking it was walking downward, and pitching to the left, while the floor itself was slanted the opposite direction. There were doors at each end of the strange room, and as he stared, the door to the left opened.
He waited for Nova to appear, but instead a figure in a black hood swept into the room.
He stifled a gasp, his lungs squeezing painfully in his chest.
Nightmare.
He had found her.
Without pause, Nightmare stalked purposefully to the next door and disappeared into the hexagonal room. Adrian listened as doors opened and slammed shut, then he thought he heard her shuffling things around in the room where he’d found her bag. His brow knitted. Did she know her location was compromised? Was she preparing to run?
He set his jaw, determined not to let her get away again.
Breaths coming in short bursts, he readied the gun and slipped back into the hexagonal room and paced across to the other door. His hand landed on the handle, but from the corner of his eye he noticed the black X he’d drawn onto the next door, and the next.
Wouldn’t Nightmare have noticed—
The gun was yanked out of his hand, and a foot slammed into the back of Adrian’s knee, knocking him to the ground.
He drove his elbow back, catching her in the stomach. Nightmare grunted and pitched forward, crashing into Adrian’s shoulder. He went to shove her back, but in that same moment she had grabbed on to the hem of his own jacket and yanked it upward, trapping his arms in the sleeves. She shoved him to the floor and he landed hard on one side. As he struggled to rid himself of the restraining jacket, he heard a door open and slam shut, her footsteps pounding away as she ran.
With a furious cry, Adrian ripped his jacket off and threw it on the ground. He was panting, though more from frustration than anything else. Snarling, he grabbed for the door he thought she’d gone through and found himself staring down a long horizontal cylinder. There was no sign of Nightmare.
Snarling, he raised his communicator. “Sketch to HQ, calling for backup. I’ve located Nightmare. She’s on the run—I’m pursuing her now.”
He ripped off his T-shirt, then, revealing the top of the Renegade uniform, and ran. He stumbled through the cylinder, which didn’t even surprise him when it started to pitch and roll under his feet, then through an obstacle course of swaying rope bridges and down a spiraling staircase. Through a gallery of animatronic marionettes that, thankfully, did not come to life as he weaved between them, then up another optical illusion ramp, until he finally shoved his way through a set of double doors and found himself outside.
It was darker now than when they had entered. Dusk came on fast this time of year, and already the shadow from the fun house stretched long across the overgrown grasses in front of him.
He paused, his eyes darting in each direction, searching and listening for any signs of Nightmare—or Nova, for that matter—but this desolate corner of the park seemed as abandoned as ever.
Nova.
He didn’t want to worry about the fact that he hadn’t seen or heard from her since they’d been separated, but now that he knew Nightmare was close, fears began to crowd into his mind. What if Nightmare had found her? What if …
What if.
There were too many what-ifs to waste time on any of them. Right now, he either had to find Nightmare or he had to find Nova.
He jogged down the exit steps and peered around to the back of the building. He saw nothing. Heard nothing.
Frowning, he turned back to the fun house. Was she still inside?
No sooner had he had this thought than his eye caught on the shadow of the fun house stretching across the ground, and the hooded figure standing at its peak.
Adrian’s eyes shifted upward.
Nightmare stared down at him, calmly posed at the edge of the pitched roof. Her hood was pulled down low over her face, and with the sun behind her she appeared almost like a shadow herself. She had a weapon in each hand—his own tranquilizer gun and a revolver.
She lifted the revolver.
Adrian glared and crouched, preparing to launch himself up toward the roof, when she fired—
And missed.
By … a lot.
The gunshot was still ringing in his ears when it was replaced with an amused chuckle. “I thought I trained you better than that, Nightmare.”
Adrian whirled around.
Directly across from the fun-house exit, perched on the stage of an old puppet theater, sat the Detonator.