“A temperature dial?” Brian asked, frowning and moving closer.
“You can’t see it’s not an ordinary dial?” Lila looked at them as if they were crazy.
“No,” Mia, Brian, and Nolan chorused.
Lila sighed. She turned and examined the dial carefully, then looked at the book. “It’s not in the book.” She frowned. “In thebook, there’s just some secret hidden vault. But David finds it by flipping a switch...” Her eyes widened. “It can’t be that easy.”
She laughed, then clicked the dial a few times. “Click zero to the left, then two, three, four, which is three clicks to the right and...”
A click.
A hiss.
The black wall parted.
Lila swung it open, and they all gasped.
There was a vault. It had a small window and a very complex-looking keypad.
“Does David Dare know how to open that?” Brian asked. Then he astounded them all by rattling off statistics about how many possible combinations there could be.
Another number popped into Mia’s head.
Without thinking, she rattled off her birth month and year, then her mother’s birth month and year, then her father’s.
Lila typed them in.
The vault opened.
“That’s just a letdown,” Lila said, disappointed.
“And kind of lame,” Brian stated. “Everyone knows not to make passwords out of birthdates.”
“They’re old school,” Lila said to Brian, making Nolan and Mia glance at each other in mortification. Mia made a mental note to change all her passwords.
They were about to step in, but Lila stopped them.
“No.” She shook her head firmly. Her hand snaked around the corner and switched on a light inside the vault. “Don’t.” She pushed them all back. “In the book, the vault looks like this.” She flipped through the pages, and to everyone’s surprise, the cartoon version looked just like the real vault. She flipped to the next page. “It’s also booby-trapped, and only two people at the most can go in.”
“I’ll go,” Nolan said immediately.
“I’ll go with you,” Brian offered.
“No!” Lila stopped them again. “I have to go. This entire room is a puzzle. One wrong move and you’re either knocked out or...” She glanced toward a cabinet with a sliding door at the end of the vault. “Everything in what I assume is the safe behind that closet on the far wall gets instantly destroyed.”
“Honey, that’s just in the book,” Mia sighed.
To prove her point, she stepped into the vault.
Something clicked.
Nolan reacted instantly.
Strong arms grabbed her and yanked her backward just as a huge rubber ball swung down from the ceiling. It would have hit her square in the chest if Nolan hadn’t pulled her out of the way.
“You were saying?” Lila looked at her mother.
“Fine,” Mia agreed, shaken and still in Nolan’s arms. She was reluctant to have him let go. “But you’re not going alone. I’m coming with you.”
