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center of the room, the air stream took a ninety-degree upward turn, like it had hit an invisible wall.
    The ceiling was too high for them to follow the flow all the way up, so Joel pointed toward the back wall. He and Leah circled around their camp mates and followed the stream in the other direction.
    About a foot before they reached the wall, the stream angled downward and gradually condensed until it was no more than half an inch thick, just wide enough to pass through a thin opening at the bottom of the baseboard.
    “How does it do that?” Leah whispered.
    If she expected him to know the answer, she was going to be disappointed.
    He pushed on the baseboard but it stayed rock still.
    “Try sliding it up,” she suggested.
    He pressed his fingers against it and attempted to lift it away from the floor. There was a moment of resistance, and then it began to move upward until the gap was about two inches wide.
    “What are you guys doing?” Courtney asked.
    Joel moved to the side so the others could see the opening. “The air’s going in here.”
    “What are you talking about?” Dooley said, strutting over as if to prove them wrong. “That’s impossible.” When he felt the flow, however, his smug smile disappeared. He followed the stream back to the point in the center of the room where it angled up. “It’s got to be some kind of trick.”
    “It’s some kind of something all right,” Leah said.
    While Courtney, Kayla, and Antonio felt the strange flow, Dooley returned to the wall and shined his light through the gap along the baseboard. “It’s gotta be another room.” He stood back and examined the wall. “Which means this must be the door.”
    He ran his fingers over the surface, pushing inward every few inches to see if he could find the way through.
    “Why don’t we just try this?” Leah said.
    She cupped her hands around the baseboard opening and pulled. There was a pop not unlike that of a house settling, and then another, and finally a groan as a five-foot-wide section of the wall swung out.
    Though the door looked heavy, it appeared to move fairly easily, as if it had some kind of counterweight or specialized hinge system.
    When it was all the way open, Dooley played his flashlight across the backside of the door. “Whoa.”
    The others moved in for a closer look. Not only was the door made of metal, it was at least four inches thick. Like a door in a bank vault, Joel thought.
    Antonio looked into the new space. “There’s another door.”
    Joel pointed his flashlight into the space. “That kind of looks like an elevator door, doesn’t it?”
    Dooley pushed past the others and moved through the doorway, obviously trying to make up for being aced out of entering the cold room first. About twenty feet in, right before the elevator door, the hall took an elbow turn to the left.
    Dooley disappeared around the corner and then yelled back, “There’s some stairs here, too.”
    Up until the moment Joel had discovered the strange behavior of the airstream, investigating the building had been kind of fun. Not any longer. “Maybe we should head back. We’ve been gone a long time, and Mike’s probably already returned to camp. If a counselor catches him, he’ll give us up in a second.”
    Dooley stuck his head around the corner. “Are you kidding? This is getting good.”
    “We can always come back tomorrow night,” Joel suggested, though there was no way he’d be joining any repeat expedition. Something was wrong about this place.
    Dooley snorted and disappeared again.
    “I’ll go in if you go,” Courtney said to Kayla.
    “Come on,” Antonio said, grabbing Kayla’s hand and pulling her inside. She smiled back at Courtney, who followed.
    “Maybe we can just take a quick look,” Leah suggested to Joel. “And then if you want to go back, I’ll go with you.”
    Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea . Though the warning blasted in his mind, Joel’s hormones overrode it. He nodded and stepped