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was, he was going to try to help Henry leave.
    Henrietta was confused. It would have been easy to think that Henry was doing his own exploring and trying to make his own way out of Kansas without her help. The two letters looked that way. But his eye panic had been real. He had no reason to fake blindness. Unless he was working on some kind of plan.
    Chewing her lip, she looked around the room. She needed to stop thinking. She needed to make a decision and do something. If Henry was being a weasel, she had every right to explore on her own. If he really was sick and couldn't explore himself, he would need her to do it for him. If he was dumb enough to trust the letter guy, then she should intervene.
    Henrietta picked up Grandfather's journal and turned to the diagram of the cupboards. Then she stepped back and looked up at Henry's wall and down at the ink on the page. Grandfather's key was in her pocket. She could do it right now if Anastasia didn't catch her. She would.
    She picked a door on the wall, a small, almost diamond-shaped door near the compasses in the center. It was labeled 18 in the journal. She looked at its name. Treb/Actium/Constant. She would just go through far enough to get a feel for the place. She wouldn't do a full explore. That would mean loading a backpack and getting ready and everything, and she didn't want to wait and end up changing her mind. She had to do it right now.
    Henrietta flipped pages until she found the combinations. Then she knelt on the end of Henry's bed, inhaled slowly, held her breath, and twisted the left knob through all the symbols until its large arrow was in place over the horseshoe-looking thing with little circle-ends. And then she turned the right knob, clicking slowing through the Roman numerals until it was on IX. Shedouble-checked the combination and slid back off the bed. She picked up the two pieces of paper and, along with the journals, tucked them under Henry's pillow. Then she turned and hurried down the attic stairs.
    On the landing, she waited, listening. She could hear Penny talking downstairs, but no Anastasia. She checked the bedroom that she shared with her sisters, and when she was sure Anastasia was either downstairs or outside, she went to Grandfather's door.
    Though her father had thoroughly mulched its surface trying to get in, it was as solid as it had ever been. Henrietta ignored her shaking hand and slid the key into the small hole in the wood. It turned, and the door swung open silently. She stepped inside, put the key in her pocket, and shut the door behind her.
    Henrietta swallowed hard. The last time she had been in the room, both of her parents had been unconscious on the floor. A stain as dark as oil marked where her father had bled. The room was silent and dusty, books lay on the floor where they had fallen the last time she'd gone through the cupboards alone, and the end of a short rope stuck out from beneath the bed. Against the wall, beside the bookshelves, was a plain cupboard door, halfway open and large enough to crawl through.
    Before she could change her mind, Henrietta got on her hands and knees and crawled into the door. The inside of the cupboard was dark and silent, and her breath tasted like dust. She inched forward, waiting.
    * * *
    The rank smell hit her in the face, the smell of sewage and hot salt water, of burning wood and tar and flesh. Voices followed, screams and yells, commands and curses. Splitting timbers.
    She felt the floor moving beneath her, and her hand found the back of a small door. She pushed, and the door swung open. Golden heat struck her in the face as she squinted out over hundreds of men scrambling across the deck of a heaving ship. Some were armed with swords or bows, and others were stripped down to loincloths, wearing blood and sweat while they crawled around huge-timbered catapults. While she watched, frozen in shock, a storm of arrows ripped through the crowd of men. A crash like subterranean thunder shook