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The walls had been decorated with black-and-white photographs of Skelton’s bone tattoos, all of which Antigone had quickly shoved into a small closet—only because Cyrus hadn’t let her throw them away. There had also been one threadbare armchair. Now there was one threadbare armchair and a wooden chair stolen from the dining hall.
    Every corner of the tiny bathroom was covered with tiny white tile, and every white tile had been covered with a filthy gray sedimentary skin. Antigone had scrubbed the place with bleach every day for a week. Now the tiles glistened like fresh false teeth, but the grout between them was a crumbly and rotten set of gums. The shower occasionally drooled a chilly trickle and occasionally blasteda fleet of sizzling liquid lasers that could blister skin. And the toilet sang like a dying bullfrog in the night. But it was all still better than the Polygon.
    Off the central room, there had been one empty bedroom with one window, a moldy curtain, and absolutely nothing else. Now the room held two hammocks, slung in opposite corners. Cyrus had wanted a hammock. Antigone had wanted to sleep anywhere that wasn’t the floor. Beneath each hammock, there were cardboard boxes that held what little the two had been able to salvage from the Archer. Cyrus’s clothes were piled into another box. Antigone’s were hanging in the little closet.
    The remaining three rooms were unusable. The first was an active volcano of old boxes. Crates and cartons and chests and bins had at one time been stacked from floor to ceiling, but those stacks had slumped into each other and become a monolithic heap of dust. They called it Dump Number One and never bothered with it. The next room held a pile of exactly the same size and shape, but made entirely of books. Cyrus called it the library or Dump Number Two. Antigone called it the Book Dump.
    They didn’t know what was in the last room, because they had never been able to open the door. Cyrus’s silver Solomon Key had released the lock, and the knob had turned easily. But the door had merely wiggled in place. And it was a completely interior room, so there was no chance of using a ladder to break in through a window.
    Rupert Greeves stepped into the long central room and looked around. On the timber mantel above the fireplace, there was a small ebony box, left to the Smiths by William Skelton. Leaning against it was a battered book titled
How to Breed Your Leatherbacks
. Hanging by a string from the ceiling was a spherical rice paper Chinese lantern with a map of the world inked onto it, and oceans full of scrawls written in a language Cyrus and Antigone had not been able to identify.
    “And the two of you,” Rupert said, “have done half a notch more than nothing.”
    “Hey!” Antigone stepped forward. “Look in the bathroom and you won’t say that.” She crossed her arms. “Besides, what were we supposed to do?”
    Rupert looked around at the bare walls. “Furniture? Art? Lamps wouldn’t hurt a bit.”
    Cyrus looked at his sister. He knew she hated the rooms. He knew she desperately wanted to overhaul everything. Antigone sniffed and tucked back her hair.
    “How?” she asked. “Rupe, how? We don’t have a car. And if we did, we wouldn’t be allowed to leave. We don’t have money—Horace says there’s barely enough still in the estate to cover our Order dues. You’ve been gone forever. Dan’s in California. How would we do anything?”
    Antigone’s eyes were actually wet. She wiped them quickly. Rupert looked stunned.
    “Do you think we want to live in a place like this?”Antigone asked. “ ’Cause we don’t. We don’t come in till we have to sleep, and we leave as soon as we wake up.”
    “You do,” said Cyrus quietly. “Sometimes I do, too. It depends on what the shower is doing.”
    Rupert’s big shoulders sagged. “Antigone, I’m sorry.”
    Antigone wiped her eyes again. “I can fly an airplane, but I can’t drive to a furniture