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chattered out a click-click-clack.
    Will and Sally searched for adventure together nearly every day. They knew exactly what adventure looked like because of the storybooks Will read. Giants. Monsters. Cake. That was what the knights in the storybooks always found on their adventures.
    Well, Will had added the cake part himself, but it really did belong in any good adventure.
    Will pulled himself all the way down to the first floor, then all the way back up to the twelfth. He passed Mrs. Castillo’s apartment on the eleventh floor, heard her brushing her teeth. He passed the Sansonis on floor ten, listened awhile to the game show they were watching on TV. And he passed old Mr. Watkins on the ninth floor, heard him hollering about gum in the elevator. At every stop, Will nudged his face into the cracks of the mostly plastered-up wall to see what he could see.
    No adventure.
    Slowly, Will made his way back to the twelfth floor and squeezed out from behind the wardrobe in Marigold’s bedroom.
    That was when he heard the noise. Although it was less of a noise and more of a flip-you-on-your-head-pound-your-pancreas-to-pudding sort of tumult. The crash shook the whole floor, the whole apartment. It had come from the living room, where Zane had been reading.
    Will and Sally reached the living room at the same moment as Marigold. “What was that noise ?” she asked. “What happ—”
    At first Will didn’t understand what could possibly make his sister freeze in the middle of a sentence like that. At first, all Will noticed was Zane, sitting silently in the armchair, his face white with terror, his eyes round and unblinking.
    And then, of course, Will noticed the rest of it.
    Where just minutes earlier there had been a living room wall with a wide window, now there was nothing. Only swirls of fog. Zane sat before the enormous gaping hole, clutching the chair’s armrests so tightly, his knuckles were purple. A small black bird flew past and, just for a moment, nipped at the knitted doily on the back of Zane’s chair.
    Sally hopped down from Will’s shoulder and scurried across the floor to the edge where the wall had been. “Sally!” Will cried as he followed her, picking his way across the rubble. “Careful!” He scooped her up.
    “What happened ?” This time Marigold managed to get out a full sentence.
    Will dropped to his belly for a closer look, his nose dangling over the edge as he gazed down, down, down into the fog. “It looks like . . .” he said slowly, not quite sure he believed his own eyes, “. . . a hot air balloon.”
    Click-click-clack. Sally seemed to agree. It was a hot air balloon, smashed to bits on the sidewalk twelve stories below. The basket was crumbled, the red-and-blue striped bag ripped and deflated. The passengers were nowhere to be seen. Cars were honking, a passerby with a ruined bag of groceries was cursing at the sky. But as far as Will could make out, nothing had been damaged besides the Ashers’ living room wall.
    It wasn’t quite an adventure, but it sure was something.

9

    Toby
    S OMETHING HAD HAPPENED ON THE HIGHWAY, THAT’S WHAT they were saying on the radio. A hiker had fainted or fallen or some such thing, which had caused several fender benders, backing up traffic for miles. Which was why Toby now found himself turning unfamiliar corners in the fog.
    Toby had been making the same run to the airport every day for over a decade, purchasing the cast-off luggage that no one had come to claim so that the contents might be resold at the Emporium. And every one of those days, from dawn to dusk, had been more or less the same. Far from grand but not too horrible, either, like a pebble underneath your sock that’s not quite large enough to bother removing.
    Today, it seemed, was different. Toby had never had such a huge haul from an airport run before. And there had even been one of those old powder blue suitcases, a St. Anthony’s, which ought to make the old man happy. ( That