“Don’t lose her!” Emma shouted, and we all took off running after it, slipping and sliding on the ice, rounding the corner into the snow-choked alley that ran between the glaciated building and the one next to it.
The bird was gone.
“Drat!” Emma said. “Where’d she go?”
Then a series of odd sounds came up from the ground beneath our feet: metallic clanks, voices, and a noise like water flushing. We kicked the snow away to find a pair of wooden doors set into the bricks, like the entrance to a coal cellar.
The doors were unlatched. We pulled them open. Inside were steps that led down into the dark, covered in quick-melting ice, the meltwater draining loudly into an unseen gutter.
Emma crouched and called into the darkness. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“If you’re coming,” returned a distant voice, “come quickly!”
Emma stood up, surprised. Then shouted: “Who are you?”
We waited for an answer. None came.
“What are we waiting for?” said Olive. “It’s Miss Wren!”
“We don’t know that,” said Millard. “We don’t know
“Well, I’m going to find out,” Olive said, and before anyone could stop her she’d gone to the cellar doors and leapt through them, floating gently to the bottom. “I’m still alive!” her voice taunted us from the dark.
And so we were shamed into following her, and climbed down the steps to find a passage tunneled through thick ice. Freezing water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the walls in a steady stream. And it wasn’t completely dark, after all—gauzy light glowed from around a turn in the passage ahead.
We heard footsteps approaching. A shadow climbed the wall in front of us. Then a cloaked figure appeared at the turn in the passage, silhouetted in the light.
“Hello, children,” the figure said. “I am Balenciaga Wren, and I’m so pleased you’re here.”
