“Watch your step!” Teddy shouted behind him.
Danny felt his face turn bright red with anger as he dusted his hands and stood back up. He forced himself to take a deep breath as the twins ran to catch up to the rest of the class. His teacher and the tour guide hadn’t noticed, but there was a ring of titters and pitying glances from his classmates. He didn’t want to let them spoil this day, but he couldn’t help it. Danny’s blood boiled, and he couldn’t force his feet to follow the others.
At the top of the stairs, he went the opposite direction.
He knew the rules. Do not separate from your group. Do not wander on your own. Do not get lost. But wasn’t that what he was? A lost boy.
Danny’s heavy feet echoed down the long hallway of smooth marble floors. This place was so fancy there were gold flecks on the ground. He pretended he was in some great home that belonged to him alone. Ahead of him was a corridor of closed doors. Were all these rooms full of rare books like the tour guide said? In that moment, he wished more than anything that Pili were with him. She’d make up a story to go with every door and turn it magical. A room filled with never-ending kettle corn. A room where it was always summer outside. A room that always had the book you were looking for … Two years and three months had passed without seeing her and he missed her more than ever. But thinking of her this way made his gloom fade.
Bright sunlight filled the hallway from an intricate metal window at the end. Danny wasn’t ready to return to his class yet. He turned the door handles and peered into empty rooms along the way. One looked like an old-fashioned classroom. Another was filled to the brim with dusty, old books and a table full of unopened mail. He didn’t think he should be there, so he closed the door.
As he let his anger drain from his body, Danny slowed his pace. Each of his footsteps made an echo, and for a moment he was afraid that he’d get in big trouble for leaving the group. But no one had come looking for him. Sometimes it made Danny angry how invisible he felt. Other times, like now, it was freeing.
The warm, early September sun shone down on him. From this side of the building it was like everything, from the walls to the floors and everything in between, was painted in gold. Danny remembered a story Pili would tell him, about a lost city of gold.
“I wish you were here, Pili,” he said out loud. But his voice was too small and low in the great wide corridor.
Danny began to turn and follow the sound of Anjali’s voice, but a flash of movement caught his eye. He whirled around and expected to see Freddy and Teddy playing games with him.
The only footsteps on the marble were his own. The only shadow on the ground was his. But the sound he heard was not coming from the lobby full of tourists. It surrounded him. At first, it was like listening to wind chimes blowing in the breeze. The metallic clinks moved all around him, louder and louder. Danny tried to cover his ears but it didn’t muffle the sound. The prickling sensation on the back of his neck returned and he didn’t have the twins to explain it.
That was when he realized that the golden light wasn’t coming from the windows but from beneath his feet. For a moment, Danny couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He took several steps back and rubbed his eyes like he did when he woke up after a dream.
The floor lit up with golden ribbons and vines. At first, he thought that there were strips of light in the ground. But what was appearing beneath his very feet was incandescent and pure gold. There was only one word he would use: magic. There were dozens of them, shaped like curling arrows and twisting roots. Danny was struck with a sense of familiarity. But he’d never seen anything as marvelous as this. Some golden lines swirled in rings, like puppies who chased their own tails. Others wiggled like garden snakes between blades of grass. Light flooded the hall, like it was right beneath the tiles, waiting to burst out. He crouched down and tried to touch one golden arrow, but it only felt cold, like sticking a finger in a glass of ice water.
Danny closed his eyes. He counted backward from ten. There is no such thing as magic. He repeated the words in his mind, then out loud. But these weren’t shadows. This was something else entirely.
He looked again. He could feel his heart racing as he opened his left eye and then his right.
The arrows were still there. Their gold light lit up on the surface of the marble tiles. Danny took a step, and they moved forward, the sharp points turning in one direction.
“This can’t be real,” Danny said. Who was he trying to convince? Himself or the grown-ups in his life?
A small voice in his mind whispered, Of course it’s real.
Danny glanced over his shoulder. No one had noticed he was gone yet. He lifted his feet and tested to see what would happen if he walked away. The arrows froze. He set his foot back on the tile. The arrows whirled and pointed in the opposite direction of where he was walking. They wanted Danny to turn around.
“Where are you taking me?” Danny whispered. He cut a glance down the hall, but the coast was clear. He wasn’t sure how he’d explain this, or even if he could.
His mind was a carousel of thoughts. First, he knew he was breaking the promise he’d made Mrs. Contreras. But the golden arrows had appeared to Danny. He hadn’t gone looking for them. The arrows undulated again, and with every step he took, they led the way to the dead end of the hall. Danny sucked in a breath as the arrows disappeared from beneath him. They’d moved whippet fast ahead.
“Slow down!” Danny whisper-shouted, though he wasn’t sure if the golden arrows could understand.
He hurried along, following the swirling, illuminated lines until they climbed up the last door in the corridor.
Danny looked down the hall. He already wasn’t supposed to be there, he most definitely shouldn’t be opening a closed door, and he most, most definitely shouldn’t be talking to magical glowing arrows. He could just picture the disappointment on Mrs. Contreras’s face when he tried to explain it to her. Worst of all, the anger on Mr. Garner’s face if they got a call about Danny breaking into rooms he shouldn’t be going into.
But what about what Danny wanted? He realized he’d also given up on his promise to his sister. Remember. He had to remember magic, fairy tales, wishes, stars. He had to remember that Pili was out there somewhere.
The vines grew brighter and brighter. Their light made him squint as they wrapped themselves around the brass handle and their force swung the door open.
The lights were off, but rays of sunshine broke through the windows and illuminated the bare room. Unlike the cluttered spaces he’d peeked into up the hall, this room had only a long table encased in glass. There were no paintings, no shelves, no plaques on the walls. It was like the only thing that mattered was whatever was displayed in that table at the center of the room. Danny took a step and the wooden floorboards made a sound that reminded him of his eighty-year-old neighbor moaning about her joints. As he approached, the gold arrows slid from the ground and up over the table. They sort of looked like the ivy that clung to the side of a really old building in his neighborhood.
Danny stepped closer, one careful foot at a time.
There, under the glass, was a book laid open. It seemed small, considering it had an entire table for itself. The pages were faded and splotchy, like paper dipped in brown tea and left out to dry. One time Ms. Esposito made them do that for an art project, but these pages were truly old. Fine slanted letters were scribbled in black ink. He thought of what the tour guide had said about rare books. This one was so special it had an entire room to itself! Danny wished he could open the glass to have a better look, but he was afraid of setting off any alarms. He glanced up, but there didn’t seem to be any cameras in the high ceilings. He had seen Mission: Impossible because of Mr. Garner, so he knew he should at least look.