“Are you hungry?” said Adrian.
She nodded.
But they had come too far. All the food stands were back toward the more popular areas of the park.
Dragging in a breath, Nova pointed. “There’s a popcorn stand this way. Past the…” She licked her lips. “Past the gallery.”
The gallery was a long wooden tunnel that divided the children’s corner of the park with the faster, more adventurous rides on the other side. The paneled walls of the tunnel were hung with old photos of the carnival’s history, from when it had first been founded nearly seventy years ago. As they entered the tunnel, Nova gravitated toward the first collection of photographs, feigning curiosity as she read the caption beneath a photo that showed a clown posed behind a group of kids. The next photo showed the horse statue at the park’s entrance from back when it was brand-new. The third photo, a woman in a paper hat handing a cone of cotton candy to a man in a suit. It was all very old-fashioned, very quaint. Before the Age of Anarchy. Before the rise of the Renegades. A different place, a different time.
“Amazing it’s lasted this long, isn’t it?” said Adrian, strolling along the opposite wall.
Nova stayed where she was, hoping he would see it. Hoping he would find it on his own …
“Amazing,” she breathed. She continued down the row of photos. Slowly. Expectantly. She was no longer seeing the photos—she’d seen them plenty the night before, anyhow. Happy families boarding the rickety old roller coaster. Happy couples stepping into the gondolas in the Tunnel of Love. Happy children waving from the carousel.
“Nova.”
She knew immediately by the tone of his voice that he’d found it.
She stilled, closing her eyes, and exhaled.
“Nova, look.”
She turned and found him staring at the picture. The picture, the one that had taken her three hours to alter, using a photograph Honey had of the fun house, taken during Winston’s time. She had carefully put it in the place of the original photograph the night before, when the carnival was silent and still.
For seventy years, the fun house that had been abandoned and left to rot in the back acre of the carnival had been called, simply and uninspired—THE FUN HOUSE.
But here, in this photo, painstakingly edited, the name had been changed.
Nova came to stand beside Adrian, peering at the framed black-and-white photograph, and the letters over the yawning entrance. Not THE FUN HOUSE, but THE NIGHTMARE.
“Coincidence?” said Adrian.
“Maybe,” she responded.
“It’s just called the Fun House now, right? I wonder when they decided to change it.”
She said nothing.
He looked at her, and she could already see the conviction there. He did not think it was a coincidence at all. “Do you think we should go talk to your old boss about it? Maybe he could tell us when the name was changed, or…” He trailed off and it was clear he was grasping for any sources that might lead to a real clue, no matter how tenuous the evidence was.
“I doubt he would know much,” said Nova. “It was the Fun House during the Age of Anarchy, so the name must have been changed a really long time ago.” She swallowed, before adding, “I think we should just go check it out.”
Adrian did not hesitate for long before he nodded. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
“Are we supposed to call for backup?”
“We haven’t found anything yet,” he said, sounding almost—but not quite—amused. “But we will, at the first sign of trouble. Agreed?”
She curled her fingers at her sides. “Agreed.”
As they left the gallery, Nova could sense that everything had changed. The lightness and ease that had been emanating from Adrian all day was replaced with tension and renewed focus. She saw that he was holding his marker again, almost like a weapon, though she wasn’t sure when he had grabbed it. She found her own hand curling around the hoops of her belt, though why she should be anxious made no sense.
She knew exactly what they were about to find.
There was no gate that they could see along the perimeter of the chain-link fence, so Adrian clamped the marker between his teeth, clawed his fingers through the wire mesh, and climbed over. The metal rattled from his weight, but he was a nimble climber. He dropped down to the soft dirt on the other side and glanced back to check on Nova, but she was already to the top herself, perched delicately on the metal crossbar.
“Look,” she whispered.
Adrian did. His body stilled for only a moment, before he walked forward and crouched down beneath a patch of soft dirt. He pulled back the weedy grass at its edges, revealing the crisscrossing paths of boot prints. The treads of thick rubber soles denoting a clear pathway between the far corner of the fence and the abandoned rides in the distance.