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my breath stopped. Ainsley, Basil . My eyes darted to the side: another box, labeled the same. I moved slowly down the row of shelves, counting at least a dozen boxes all labeled with my brother’s name. Only the last box bore a different label: Ainsley, Lark .
    I stood there staring upward, the letters of my own name burning through the gloom, when the sound of the door banging open jerked my attention toward the entrance. A pair of women wearing blue coats came through the door. I fled behind the shelves again.
    “Yes, but why would she come here?” The woman’s voice sounded exasperated. I heard the scrape of a chair and a wooden creak, not far away.
    “How would I know? Do you really want to be the one to question the Administrator?”
    The first woman gave a nervous laugh, punctuated by the sound of fingernails tapping on the tabletop. “Good point. Still, if I were a kid loose in the Institute, this would be the last place I’d aim for.”
    “Well, this one’s not exactly a kid anymore.”
    There was a door not far away on the back wall. I might be able to make it undetected, but . . . From where I hid I could just see the edge of one of the boxes bearing my brother’s name.
    “I suppose we just wait here until they find her,” sighed one of the assistants. “They’re setting the pixies loose, so at least it’ll go quickly.”
    A jolt ran through me. I took one last look at the box overhead and then tore myself away, heading toward the unmarked door on the back wall. I slipped through, shutting it silently behind me.
    I stood with eyes closed in the corridor, willing my racing pulse to calm and my aching head to ease. I pressed the palm of my hand against the door I’d come through, as if somehow I could summon the answers through it. I’d been so close. I had no idea why they had an entire shelf of boxes devoted to my brother. The sum of information they’d given my family after his death would have fit on half a sheet of paper.
    And why would they have any records at all about me?
    It was only a matter of time before the pixies found me, and I couldn’t be found here. It was clear I wasn’t supposed to know about those files high on the shelf.
    Ahead of me stretched a much more utilitarian corridor than the other I’d passed through, the lights overhead stark white, the floor dull gray. The hall branched into three a few paces away, but only two of the paths had plaques. The righthand path pointed the way to the Biothaumatic Laboratory while the left read ROTUNDA. All I had to do was follow that corridor. I could say I’d just gotten distracted by how astonishing the rotunda itself was, and ended up separated from Emila.
    I turned to head down the hallway when a flicker caught my eye. The third path was unlabeled, nothing to indicate where it led. I stared down the corridor, head throbbing with the magic hum of the lights, willing whatever I’d seen out of the corner of my eye to return.
    It had a barely perceptible curve, making it impossible to see what lay at the end of it. As I watched, a section of the lights flickered and went dark for a brief second. Just a malfunction of some kind. I started to turn away again when the panels overhead went dead with a sudden, blessed cessation of the awful buzzing of the lights. Before my eyes could adjust, they came on again with a blaze of painful magical backlash, leaving me gasping. It was dark now a few steps down the path, and I staggered into it to escape the sound of buzzing Resource slicing into my brain. The lights went out just ahead of me again. A ripple of darkness continued on down, lights going out and coming on one by one, around the curve and out of sight.
    I took another step, and the patch shifted one bar of lights. It was responding to my movements. It was leading me.
    I hesitated. I knew I had to head back to the rotunda, pretend I’d seen nothing I wasn’t supposed to see. I shouldn’t draw any more attention to myself than I