“So why do you want to make a door? Where do you want to go that you can’t use the tube to get to?” Lani shook her head slightly, puzzled.

“Oh, I dunno,” he said lightly.

Lani narrowed her eyes. She put her paintbrush down and gripped Alex’s arm. “You want to go to Quill, don’t you?” she whispered. “Why would you do that, Alex? You’re going to wreck everything!”

“Shhh!” Alex said when Ms. Octavia glanced in their direction. “I don’t want to wreck everything. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You want to see your brother! Oh, Alex, why? He’s not like us! He’s evil!”

“Keep your voice down! Sheesh, Lani. Aaron is not evil. He’s exactly like us. He did artistic stuff too—only I took the blame for it. He should be here!”

“It’s not right! You’ll put Artimé in danger. What are you thinking, Alex?” Lani shook her head in disgust. “It’s too late for him. Maybe he should have been here too, but it’s too late. Did you tell Mr. Today about him?”

“No! And you’d better not either.”

Lani sighed and slumped in her chair. “Please don’t do it, Al.” Alex sighed too and stared at his painting of the window, shaking his head. Then, he ripped it off the easel and tore it into little pieces, disgusted. “At the rate I’m going, you have nothing to worry about.” He sighed and rested his head on the window ledge.

When he looked up through the glass, he saw Will Blair walking across the lawn in the distance. Will stopped and stood for a moment; then he turned toward Ms. Octavia’s classroom, raised his hand impatiently, and pointed to the library. Alex’s stomach clenched. Why would Will Blair want Alex to meet him at the library? Alex turned quickly to see if anybody else saw, but Lani and the rest of the class were focused on their work. All except for Samheed, that is, who stood at an easel at the back of the class, looking out the window. He nodded, his face serious. Then he packed up his things quietly, and when Ms. Octavia was involved with another student, Samheed slipped out of the room.

The Library

After several visits to Mr. Today’s office, Alex had Aaron’s dorm room door memorized, right down to the knots and scratches in the wood.

Every evening, as Alex worked privately in his bedroom to perfect a 3-D doorway to Aaron’s room so he could save him, he couldn’t stop thinking about Will and Samheed sneaking off to the library. They did it at odd times, sometimes during assemblies and sometimes during large group training. Sometimes late in the evening. Once, Alex tried to follow them, but when he tubed into the library, they had disappeared. What could they possibly be working on? At first Alex didn’t care—he was just glad that Will hadn’t actually been gesturing to him that time in Ms. Octavia’s room. But he grew more curious as his long, lonely nights of drawing and painting wore on with no one but Clive to talk to.

And Clive wasn’t making life easy for Alex, either.

“What are you doing in there?” Clive would ask every ten minutes or so. He obviously hated that Alex worked in the cramped sleeping area between the bed and the wall, rather than out in the open living room where Clive could actually see for himself what was going on. And ever since the “episode,” as Clive liked to call it, he hadn’t left Alex alone.

“I’m not doing anything!” Alex would always say, growing more exasperated all the time with his nosy blackboard. “Leave me alone, will you?”

“No-o,” sang Clive cheerily.

After one such episode Alex, frustrated, rolled up his paper, tucked it under his arm, and stormed out of his room, as stormy as one can be when entering a tube and pushing a button. He didn’t want to give Clive the satisfaction of knowing where he was storming off to, so he pressed lounge, and then when he got to the lounge, he stayed in the tube and pressed library instead. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Meghan and Lani at a table having milk shakes, but then he was gone again.

Inside the library he roamed to all of his usual workstations, but all the big tables were occupied, and he needed a big table to spread out his 3-D drawing. He moved to the seldom-used stairwell and walked, rather than tubed, up to the second floor and then, seeing more stairs, up to the third, where he’d never been before. In fact there was no button for the third floor in the tube—he’d only thought there were two floors all this time. There was an old-looking sign that said ARCHIVES on the stairwell wall next to the door. Alex went in. It was dark inside, but little lights popped up as he traveled down the rows of books, charts, and maps. It smelled musty and old. His stomach flipped as the door clanked shut, and he ran back to make sure he wasn’t locked in. He wasn’t. With a sigh of relief he meandered between the shelves to a large table in the back corner, perfect for what Alex needed. His rolled-up doorway drawing bumped a seven-foot-tall tiki totem pole statue with three stacked faces. The middle face opened an eye, scowled, and then closed its eye again.

“Sorry,” Alex whispered. He unrolled his paper and, when he spread it out, said, “I wish there was more light.” The table lit up with a bluish-white light that shone through the paper. Alex, surprised, looked at his drawing, each line now feeling very individual and defined, the blueness of the bright light pointing out the flaws that had kept the drawing from working the way it was supposed to work.

Alex whistled under his breath as parts of the drawing deepened before his eyes.