Q gazed up at the atrium’s shelves. “Which means that our search for an umbrella just expanded to a whole lot more than one dresser.”
“Any luck?” Raya called over her shoulder from a ladder across the atrium.
“Define luck.” Q clung to his ladder and pushed a drawer shut. “Because if it means finding more socks than the human population of this planet, I am, without a doubt, the luckiest person alive.”
“I hate to break it to you,” Raya said, “but that would have to be me.” They had examined every shelf and drawer on five levels of the atrium and had yet to find a single umbrella, helmet, or hard hat.
Q chuckled, making his ladder shake. “I just want to know how people lose this many socks.”
“I’m just glad they’re clean.” Raya climbed higher. She stood on tiptoe, balancing on a rung to reach for a large storage box. “Please, please, please do not be socks.” She lifted its lid and peeked inside. Notebooks filled it to the brim. “Q, you need to see this.”
The box was too large and heavy to carry while climbing down the rickety ladder. Q and Raya loaded their arms with as many of the notebooks as they could and emptied the box in three trips. They set the dusty books in a pile on the floor.
“I hope inhaling all that dust was worth it.” Raya coughed and flipped through a notebook. Spirals filled every page.
Q looked up from a notebook. “From the look on your face, I’m guessing that we found the same thing. Spirals?”
“Everywhere.” Raya thumbed through a second notebook. Then a third. A fourth. And a fifth. She tossed a sixth aside, adding it to the growing mound of notebooks filled with nothing but spirals. She cracked a seventh open. A bold red line divided its first page into two columns. The first contained a list of items, the second, a series of symbols. Raya knitted her brows.
“Find something?” Q said.
“I’m not sure.” Raya handed the notebook to him. “What does this look like to you?”
Q scanned the notebook. “It looks like a list of the objects in the valley.”
“Yes, but why list them down like that? And what do those symbols mean?”
“Why fill a notebook with spirals? Why build this tower? Olly was going mad, Raya. Who knows why he did the things he did?”
Their last hope was empty, dimly lit, and smelled like must. Raya surveyed the tower’s topmost level, covering her nose with the upturned collar of Q’s coat.
“This doesn’t look promising.” Q’s palm muffled his voice.
“What happened to all that talk about believing?” Raya said.
“Sorry.” Q wrinkled his slightly crooked nose. “Can I blame the smell?”
“I’ll open a window.” Raya strode to a large circular window made from eyeglasses. A familiar shape, partially hidden in shadows, caught her eye. “It’s the dresser.”
“How’d it get all the way up here?” Q walked over to her.
“I saw a lot of things being shuffled around,” Raya said. “Including the wall that was behind this dresser. It broke into squares and scattered.”
“I wonder if that jar is still in here. We could use more light.” Q pulled the dresser’s top drawer open. A faint glow spilled out of it. Q took the jar out, its halo barely bigger than his hand. “Well, that didn’t help much.”
A tiny flickering light flew around inside it, reminding Raya of the flares Rasmus had given them. She pushed away the image of Olly going through a full jar of flares, his hope dwindling with each one that fell to the ground, unseen. “Give it a shake.”
Q shook the jar and set it on the dresser. It grew brighter, casting its light over a large spiral etched into the wall. Various symbols were carved over it.
“These symbols—” Raya’s eyes darted around the etching. “They’re the same as the ones we saw in the notebook.”
Q shut his eyes, laying his hand over the wall and feeling his way across the marks. “They’re the scratches we found earlier.” He looked at Raya. “They’ve been rearranged.”
“That means that this is where the wall originally was when Olly carved the spiral,” Raya said. “When the tower was folded into a tree house, the spirals and symbols got jumbled up.”
Q looked at the round window made of eyeglasses. “I imagine that this spot gets a lot of light during the day. I would have chosen this place too if I needed a studio.”
“Or,” Raya said, “Olly etched the spiral and those symbols here so that he could see what he was trying to re-create. Remember those mounds of watches and wallets we saw? What if these symbols on the spiral correspond to where they’re located in the valley? What if the notebook we found isn’t a ledger? What if it’s—”
