CHAPTER 76 GIGI

Chapter 76

GIGI

U se them how?" Brady said, staring at the words carved into the puzzle box.

Gigi's mind was whirring. She refused to blink as she cataloged and re-cataloged and re-re-cataloged the puzzle box's contents. Cotton balls. Two of them.

"Nail polish remover," Knox said suddenly. "You use cotton balls with nail polish remover."

Something about his voice made Gigi wonder if Knox had ever removed Calla Thorp's nail polish for her, back before she'd given him that scar.

Focus! Gigi told herself. Focus like the wind. "There's no nail polish to remove," Gigi said, thinking out loud. Her gaze flicked to the other objects.

The yarn.

The wrapping paper.

The sunglasses.

"The liquid might not actually be nail polish remover," Brady said. "Something with a somewhat similar chemical composition, yes, but—"

"Invisible ink?" Gigi suggested. She reached for the wrapping paper, then pulled her hand back. Something was niggling at her. It took a moment to realize what that something was. "There are two of them."

Two cotton balls. Gigi's gaze went back to the objects. Two lenses. She doused a cotton ball in the nail polish remover and grabbed the sunglasses, running the cotton ball over the lenses.

"It's working," Brady said. "Something's coming off."

Gigi had no idea what that something was—not nail polish, that was for sure, because they'd been able to look through the sunglasses. But as she poured the rest of the contents of the "nail polish remover" over the lenses, the dark layer that coated them—whatever it was—came off entirely. The lenses changed color.

Instead of black, they were red.

"The wrapping paper." Knox rolled it out and flipped it over.

The back was red. Gigi put on the modified sunglasses. The altered lenses filtered out light waves of the same color, revealing…

"Symbols! Three of them!" Gigi passed the sunglasses around so the other two could see, and then, together, the three of them searched for—and found—those symbols among the dozens carved into the shelves.

"Push them inward?" Gigi suggested.

"They wouldn't push before," Knox pointed out.

"We didn't try to press these three symbols at the same time before," Gigi told him. She was able to reach two with her own hands. Brady did the third. The symbols depressed. There was a pop, and one of the bookshelves swung inward.

A hidden door. Gigi stepped through it into a small room with a tile floor and corkboard walls.

Stuck into the walls were pushpins.

"The yarn," Gigi said. "Connect the pushpins with the yarn!" She had no idea how much time they had left before dawn, but it couldn't be much.

Get out. Get down to the dock. Then deal with the rest.

"What order do we go in?" Knox demanded.

"They're all different colors," Brady said. "Rainbows."

Like the wrapping paper.

Like the yarn.

"Roy G. Biv." Gigi felt like her body was a drum set, and her heart was a drummer going to town on it. "Start with red, then orange!"

How much time do we have left?

Enough to stretch the yarn between the pushpins. Enough for the light from the ceiling to cast a veritable spiderweb of shadows down onto the tile floor.

At the center of that web was a lone tile.

Knox placed his palm flat on the tile and pushed. The floor beneath them gave way—another trapdoor, which led to another staircase, which led out the back of the house and onto the rocky shore.

It was already light out, but the sun wasn't visible on the horizon—not yet. They had time—minutes, maybe, or seconds, but time .

Knox tore off over the rocks, toward the dock, Brady on his heels. Gigi ran, forcing herself to keep up with them, pushing as hard as she could, as fast as she could, across rocky terrain—

And then her toe caught on something.

And then Gigi fell.