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Lex was practically soiling herself in terror, but Ferbus managed to eke out a zinger. “Didn’t quite catch that, what?”

  “ON THE GROUND!” Megaphone yelled, even louder than before. “HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK!”

  As they got on their knees, Lex looked up at Uncle Mort and gave him the dirtiest look she could muster. “What?” he said innocently. “I did warn you.”

  Everyone was handcuffed. Except, Lex noticed, Grotton and Driggs, who had conveniently escaped by way of disappearing—or turning so transparent that no one could see them in all the confusion. Her jaw tightened, but she did her best not to show any emotion, not wanting to suggest to the guards that they’d missed a couple of their intruders.

  Please be okay, she thought.

  They were taken through the main entrance. Inside, the foyer was so expansive that despite being rushed through by the guards, Lex had time to look around and get a feel for the place..The ceiling soared above their heads, several stories high, and light streamed in through the massive window-walls—which, impossibly, seemed to be made of one single pane of glass. Several flat-screen televisions were suspended throughout the room as well, all displaying the same woman.

  “Good afternoon, Necropolitans! President Knell here with some wonderful news!” she said in a friendly drawl, a huge red smile plastered on her face. Her eyes were beady but shrewd, her nose so sharp it looked as though it had been cut with a laser. Lex couldn’t place her twangy accent—maybe Texan, maybe Midwestern, maybe old-timey gold prospector. She wore a set of green pearls around her neck and a smart suit jacket, its gray color perfectly matching that of her short, stylish hair. “The fugitives from Croak have been apprehended and are now in custody. So rest easy, Necropolis,” she said with an even bigger grin and a singsong voice. “We’ve taken them a-li-ive!”

  “Well,” Lex said, “that’s not creepy at all.”

  At opposite ends of the circular room were two escalators spiraling up the sides of the building like the twists of a soft-serve ice-cream cone: up on the left, down on the right. Grims briskly hopped on and off the moving steps, stopping only to stare at the commotion in the middle of the foyer.

  And commotion was indeed what they were making. The Juniors clacked noisily across what was enough dark green marble to tile every bathroom in America. Ferbus was yelling as hard as he could into the ear of the megaphoned guard, while Bang’s teeth were tightly clamped around the arm of another.

  Lex just went along quietly, looking down at the large symbol in the middle of the floor—a sort of Grimsphere crest featuring two crossed scythes. She’d resisted plenty of arrests by now in her criminal career, and she’d learned one lesson: It was rarely worth the effort.

  Uncle Mort had reached the same conclusion, striding silently alongside the colossal ogreish guard who had pinned his arms behind his back. He even seemed to have a spring in his step. At the front desk, between the two escalators, he greeted the flustered receptionist with a smile. “Hey, Marlene!” he said, graciously bestowing upon her the Wink of Trust as he was yanked away. “Long time, no exchange of pleasantries!”

  Fed up, the guard holding Uncle Mort socked him in the face with a fist the size of a boulder. That shut him up.

  Or maybe it was the sudden appearance of Norwood, who sauntered out of the elevator and approached the group, his smile so wide it had to hurt. “Welcome to Necropolis, Croakers!” he said, arms open, eyes still crazed and darting.

  “Crap,” Lex hissed to Uncle Mort. “We’re too late—he’s already here! He’s gotten to the president already!”

  Uncle Mort said nothing, blinking blood out of his eyes and trying to get a better look at Norwood. Lex clenched her fists. How could Uncle Mort do this to them, walk them straight into a trap?

  “The president,” Norwood continued, “is none too pleased with what you’ve been up to. I’m sure she’d like nothing more than to sentence you herself, but she’s somewhat on the busy side these days—with Croak and DeMyse currently offline, Necropolis is handling the deathload for the entire country. So she has authorized me to deal with you as I see fit.”

  He turned to Megaphone and said with great relish, “Throw them in the Hole.”

  Lex’s pulse quickened. That was why the president was so happy to take them alive. So she could hurl them into the Hole—probably on live television, for all of Necropolis to see.

  “YES, SIR,” Megaphone answered, but Norwood was heading straight for Bang, a strange new glint in his eye.

  “I’ll just be taking this.” He yanked the Wrong Book out from under her arm. For a brief moment Grotton’s grayish face appeared next to the book, flashing a triumphant sneer at Lex.

  “No!” she whispered. Uncle Mort swore under his breath as well. How was she supposed to Annihilate Grotton now, with Norwood stealing him away?

  Norwood turned on his heel, his eyes never leaving the gold letters on the cover of the book. He walked past the front desk to a bank of elevators sitting behind it, glass cylinders that soared up through the open air of the foyer. He boarded one and quickly disappeared up the narrow glass tube into a hole in the ceiling.

  Behind the elevators was a door. The Croakers were led through it, down a long corridor. The guards took them into an empty room with a linoleum floor and white, sterile-looking panels for walls. The kind that could easily be hosed down should anything red and sticky splatter onto them.

  “CIRCLE THEM UP,” Megaphone instructed, closing the door and locking it with an audible click. The guards, holding the Juniors from behind by their handcuffs, roughly shoved them into place so that they were all facing one another. Lex tried to exchange glances with her friends but stopped once she got to Elysia. She just looked too scared.

  Megaphone took a stance in the middle of the circle and turned around slowly, looking each of the prisoners in the eye.

  Lex’s knees started to shake. This was really weird. Previously as a detainee she’d experienced taunting, questioning, and always a bit of roughing up. But never this calm, detached staring. What the hell was going on? Why weren’t they following Norwood’s orders?

  The answer came as Megaphone unholstered a gun and aimed it straight at Uncle Mort’s face.

  ***

  Lex didn’t remember yelling, but the screams bouncing around the stark walls of the room suggested that she and the other Juniors had all cried out when the guard pulled the trigger. Yet Uncle Mort stood right where he had a second before, unharmed.

  The big guard who’d been holding his handcuffs, however, was flat on the ground.

  After a bit of a delayed response, the other guards sprang into action, but Megaphone was too quick for them; six more shots rang out in succession, each one aimed at the guards’ noses with exquisite precision. In less than five seconds, all seven guards lay crumpled on the floor.

  But not one of them was bleeding. Lex frowned, as did the rest of the Juniors. Their gazes jumped from the guards to Megaphone to Uncle Mort . . .

  Who just so happened to be grinning like an idiot.

  “What,” he said to Megaphone, staring excitedly at the gun, “is that thing?”

  “MY OWN INVENTION,” the voice blared back. “OH, SORRY, HANG ON—” The mask came off and was hurled to the floor. “Oh, God, that is an obscene amount of face sweat. Obscene.”

  Lex blinked seventeen times. The woman looked just as she did in the old photo in The Obituary, when she’d been a Junior with Uncle Mort and LeRoy. It didn’t even seem as though she had aged much—she still wore her hair in those long black braids, though a few strands had escaped and were now meandering wildly across her head—and her eyes were bright and friendly. Though she was missing a single front tooth, her playful expression plus a mess of freckles made her seem as if she were seven years old and the loose tooth had simply wiggled out of her gums during recess.

  “Hi, Croakers! I’m Skyla.” She gave them a deep bow, then pulled out a key and started to unlock each of their handcuffs. “Mayor of Necr
opolis, head of security, and, as of this very moment,” she said with a glance at her fallen comrades, wincing and grinning at the same time, “fellow fugitive.”

  “Returning to my previous question,” said Uncle Mort, yanking the gun out of Skyla’s hand with a daring and—was it flirty?—expression, “what is this?”

  “Amnesia gun,” she said in a cocky, teasing tone. “What, never come up with such a thing in Mort’s Bargain Basement of Gadgets?”

  Uncle Mort scowled as he inspected the barrel. “Never could get it to work without causing permanent disfigurement,” he muttered.

  “Hey!” a disembodied voice shouted. Driggs appeared out of nowhere, posed in a ridiculous, ready-to-fight stance that in no way would have been able to fend off a squad of highly trained guards. “Let them go!”

  To their credit, not one of the Juniors laughed—though it was difficult not to. “We’ve got this, Driggs,” Uncle Mort said, easing him down. “But thanks for your initiative.”

  Driggs looked sheepish for a moment, then turned to Ferbus. Not Lex. Apparently the silent treatment was still in full effect. “What’s going on?” he asked him.

  Ferbus was staring at Skyla, baffled. “Dude, I have no idea.”

  “Me neither,” Lex said, now so out of the loop she couldn’t remember how it felt to be in a loop. Any loop at all. “Someone explain this!”

  Annoyed at having to cut his weapon inspection short, Uncle Mort handed the gun back to Skyla and faced Lex. “Remember how I told you about the band of hooligans I was a part of when I was a Junior? Meet Hooligan Number Three.”

  Lex turned to Skyla, grimacing as she rubbed her wrists. “Is this how you treat all your old friends, with a welcome party of weapons?”

  “Nah, Mort’s special.”

  Lex chose to ignore the smirky look Skyla gave him.

  “And don’t worry, the guns aren’t lethal—they’re stun guns, designed to incapacitate you so they can throw you in the Hole. Still hurt like a bitch, though.”

  “But why did you arrest us?”

  Skyla put her hand on Lex’s arm. “Because if there is any chance of succeeding at this ridiculously dangerous, exceedingly harebrained, impossibly impossible scheme your uncle has dreamed up, we’re going to need everyone in this city to believe that I am doing everything in my mayoral power to stop you from assassinating the president.”

  “Assassinating the what?” Ferbus yelped. “We never agreed to that!”

  Uncle Mort rolled his eyes. “Of course not. But that’s what everyone will think we’re trying to do.”

  “When in actuality,” Lex said, catching on, “we’re here to destroy the portal.”

  “Actually, destroying the portal is my job,” Skyla said. “Problem is, it’s all the way up in President Knell’s office, which is locked up so tight that no one—not even me, her head of security—is allowed to enter. Though she seems to have made an exception for Norwood.” She snorted.

  “Norwood can Damn now,” Uncle Mort explained. “There’s a good chance he threatened her.”

  “Maybe. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t need much convincing.”

  Lex nodded in agreement. The president hadn’t stopped Norwood from taking over as mayor of Croak or from sentencing all the Juniors to the Hole. Clearly, the woman was not a fan of Lex and Company. “And now he has the Wrong Book,” she added sourly, “which we have to get back.” Otherwise she couldn’t Annihilate Grotton and there would be no resetting for any souls, Driggs or otherwise.

  “Exactly,” Skyla said. “So you’ve got a plethora of reasons to claw your way up to the top of Necropolis, which gives me a plethora of reasons to chase you. It’s the perfect excuse for me to gain access—the president will think I’m trying to protect her, when in fact you guys will just be paving the road so that I can get into her office. But we’ll have to be convincing; otherwise she’ll catch on. Which brings us to the hard part.” She cocked her gun. “You’re going to have to outsmart me.”

  The Juniors looked from Skyla to Uncle Mort, then back to Skyla. “Huh?” said Ferbus.

  “I can give you a few hints,” she said, “but if we want this to look real, it has to be real. Most of it, at least. Otherwise we won’t fool anyone—not Knell, not Norwood, and definitely not the people of Necropolis. They’ll be glued to their televisions, following the hunt like it’s a high-speed car chase.”

  She yanked a flattened roll of papers out of the pant leg of her uniform, crouched down, and rolled them out across the floor, prompting a snicker from Uncle Mort. “Ah, the return of Schematic Skyla. I’ve missed her so.”

  “Shut up, Warty Mort.”

  The two of them exchanged a series of familiar expressions so fast that Lex felt as if she were watching a sexually charged tennis match. It wasn’t that she never expected her uncle to have a social life outside of Croak, it was just that . . .

  Well, okay, she didn’t expect it at all.

  “Necropolis is made up of three sectors, thirty-three stories each, for a total of ninety-nine,” Skyla explained, pointing at the blueprint of Necropolis. With its triangular shape and the way the three sectors were marked off, it looked like a piece of candy corn. “The bottom third, Local, is home to all Grim-related operations for the city of Necropolis—our hub, our Field, our Lair, public relations offices, and so on. The middle section, Residential, is where all citizens of Necropolis live. In addition to their apartments, it’s got a whole district of Grimsphere-famous themed restaurants, plus bars, museums, libraries, bowling alleys, arcades—”

  “Remember the pool table?” Uncle Mort murmured.

  She looked up at him with a randy expression. “Distinctly.”

  Lex glanced at Elysia, who made a barfy face.

  “And finally, the uppermost sector, Executive, consists of offices for the national headquarters of the American Grimsphere government, including—ta-da—the president’s office.” She drew her finger all the way up to the tip of the cone, then tapped it for emphasis. “This is where you need to get. Now, under normal circumstances, you could either take the escalators, which wind up the sides of the building just like the staircase of a lighthouse; or, if you had top security clearance, you’d be able to take the express elevators that shoot up the center. There’s just one little problem with those options, and it’s currently breathing on my arm.”

  She turned to Lex, who shrank a little and shut her mouth. “Sorry.”

  “Even if you did have the balls to travel out in the open, every guard in Necropolis is trained to arrest you on sight,” Skyla continued. “And citizens are required to report any leads immediately.”

  Skimming the map, Lex’s gaze caught on a large block of the Residential section labeled DORMITORIES. “What about the Juniors?” she asked, daring to hope. “Are they on our side? Would they be willing to help us?”

  Skyla twisted her mouth, thinking. “Juniors are a wild card. A few of them are fed up with the way the president has been breathing down their necks, but most think that once the main Junior threat is eliminated—you—the oppression will disappear. The majority of the citizens feel the same way. So. You’ll need to get creative.” With that, she stood up and pulled a new set of schematics out of her other pant leg.

  Lex scowled. Get creative? The woman even talked like Uncle Mort.

  “I highly suggest you use the Backways,” Skyla said, spreading out the pages to reveal a similar diagram of Necropolis, but with a different floor plan. “Any of you ever been to Disney World?”

  Ferbus gave her a harsh look and pointed around the circle at each Junior. “Foster kid, orphan, foster kid, disowned—”

  “Okay, so no,” she said. “But perhaps you’ve heard of the place. What you might not know about it, however, is that the streets of the Magic Kingdom are the second floor of the park. The first floor is actually a gigantic underground network of hallways that connect up to the park via hidden doors and secret passageways, all so that the cowboy
s from Frontierland can get to their saloons without swaggering through Futureland and looking like crackpot time travelers. The same idea was applied here in Necropolis, to allow for safe and efficient passage in the event of an emergency. But since better evacuation plans have evolved since the Backways were built, no one uses them anymore—or even knows about them.”

  “No one but architectural geeks,” Uncle Mort added.

  Skyla elbowed him in the groin. “Architectural geekery is what’s going to save your life.”

  “The more you say it, the more it sounds like a cry for help.”

  “Long story short,” she continued, seemingly accustomed to ignoring Uncle Mort’s snark, “the Backways are your best-bet highway to the top. I’m not even supposed to know about them, so it won’t look suspicious if I pretend to be confused about where the hell you are.” She rolled up the plans, stuck them back into her pants, and put her hands on her hips like a plucky SWAT-team Peter Pan. “Though just so you’re prepared, they’re not a totally comprehensive network, so there will be a few places where you’ll have to sneak back into the public areas of Necropolis.”

  “And how are we going to do that?” Elysia asked.

  Skyla grinned. “Beats me. Can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

  “All right, enough fake planning,” said Uncle Mort. “I’m assuming these guys aren’t going to be knocked out forever—”

  “Two hours,” Skyla said with pride.

  “Two—” Uncle Mort stared at her with an expression that morphed from outrage to envy to unadulterated lust. “Brilliant. We might just have a little time left over for—”

  “What?” she said, smirking as she packed up her stuff. “Eight ball in the corner pocket?”

  Uncle Mort reddened and adjusted his pants.

  Lex leaned in to Elysia. “I don’t even know how to handle what’s happening right now.”

  “I can take you as far as the hub,” Skyla said. “But after that, you’re on your own.” She asked Mort to help her climb up onto his shoulders to retrieve a prepacked bag hidden inside the ceiling tiles. After throwing it over her own shoulder and climbing down, she approached the far wall of the room and popped open a door that had previously blended in with the wall panels. Within lay a darkened hallway.