There was a seam on the bottom of the puzzle box, circular and so fine that it couldn’t be made out with the naked eye. Bracing her fingers against the wood, Gigi pushed. A disk popped out—and off.
Step one complete. A puzzle box could have five steps or fifty. For now, all Gigi had to do was focus on step two. Not on Brady, not on Knox, not on knives or scars or secrets or sunshine.
Step two. The wooden disk Gigi had just removed was no more than a centimeter deep. The area that had just been revealed was circular, with two metal arrows—one shorter than the other—attached at the center. The wood around the edge of the panel had been notched at even intervals. Twelve of them.
One of the notches was labeled with the numeral 3.
Pushing a dozen different memories out of her mind, Gigi brought a finger to the tip of one of the metal arrows. With the slightest touch, it moved, and Gigi thought back to the first time she’d worked a puzzle box.
Her father’s.
Beside her, Brady spoke. “Hands on a clock.”
Gigi snapped back to the present just in time to hear Knox’s reply: “What the hell are we supposed to do with that?”
Gigi took a deep breath and answered. “Look for details.” She flipped over the disk she’d removed from the box. On the back, with a tiny, victorious thrill, she found words etched into the wood:
Just after dawn is far too soon
The middle of a night for a raccoon The perfect time to earn your boon November, April, September, June
“Another riddle.” Knox sounded only slightly murderous, which Gigi took as a sign of personal growth.
“Another riddle,” she confirmed. “Dawn is too early. Raccoons are nocturnal.”
“Soon, raccoon, boon, June.” Brady’s voice hummed with concentration as he brought his hand to Gigi’s on the disk. “They all rhyme.”
“Noon.” Knox’s voice was sharp as glass. “Middle of the night for a raccoon, rhyme with June. The answer is noon.”
Gigi moved the minute and hour hands to point upward, using the 3 as an anchor. Nothing happened. “November, April, September, June,” Gigi said intently. Four months—and not just any months. “They’re the only four months with thirty days. Noon plus thirty…”
She moved the minute hand, and there was a pop. I can do this. I really can.
Gigi tipped the box over, and the clock fell off, hands and all. Beneath it, there was another circular section, cut into wedges like a pie. Gigi tested each wedge separately, pushing and prodding at them to no effect.
“What now?” Knox demanded.
They didn’t have forever. Dawn was coming—and with it, a reckoning, one way or another.
“When you hit a dead end on a puzzle box,” Gigi said, “you go back to the beginning and look for something you missed.”
A trigger. A catch. A hint. In the past year and a half, she’d bought dozens of puzzle boxes and solved them all. It wasn’t an obsession. Just like the Grandest Game and the reverse heists weren’t obsessions. Just like she’d never obsessed over a person she’d been told was Very Bad News.
A person who worked for someone worse.
A sponsor? Gigi pushed the thought out of her head—for now—and gave the box and the wedges another once-over, then turned her attention to the discarded pieces: the wooden disk and the clock. Her gaze landed on the
minute and hour hands.
They’re made of metal. “What if they aren’t just metal?” Gigi said. The buzz of energy building inside her, Gigi pried the hands off the clock. Gripping the minute hand by the thinner end, she ran the arrow over the pieces of the wedge. When that didn’t work, she tried the hour hand.
Bingo.
“It’s a magnet!” Gigi breathed. In other circumstance, she would have grinned, but she was beyond grinning now. “There must be something metallic embedded in the wood.”
And so it went, step after step after step after step. Finally—finally— they made it to the center of the box, to a compartment and the objects inside it.
Cotton balls. Two of them. Gigi ran the tips of her fingers over the words carved into the bottom of the compartment—their hint.
USE THEM.
