The Twilight Prisoner by Katherine Marsh

won’t we already be back? Then we’ll be safe?”
    Jack shook his head. “The dead stay underground during the day, but they’re allowed to go up into the city at night. In order to get back to the living world, we can’t just join them aboveground, we have to go back the same waywe came.” He squeezed her hand. “Butit’s okay. We’ll just go up for a couple of hours, till everything settles down, and then we’ll go back to the stream. It’ll be fine.”
    Cora looked skeptical. “How are we supposed to get aboveground? I’m not seeing any stairs.”
    Before Jack could answer, Euri led them around a corner of the tunnel and flew into a small, dimly lit circular room with earthen walls. On a stool in the middle of it sat an elderly ghost with combed-back white hair and dark eyebrows, reading a book titled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. Without even looking up, he pressed a clicker three times. “‘What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have,’” he murmured to himself.
    â€œWhatever that means,” said Euri. She waved goodbye and was instantly sucked into a pipe overhead.
    Cora looked at Jack in astonishment. “Just keep holding my hand,” Jack shouted as they rose in the air, their bodies flattening as they whirled up through the green copper pipe.

VIII | The Dancing Bear
    Jack could hear Cora’s screams, but they sounded far off and dreamlike. His fingers, which felt as long and unwieldy as tentacles, twisted around hers. Then suddenly, with a pop, a pungent animal smell filled the air, and Jack was sitting next to Cora in the dark on the lip of a small basin tucked into an alcove. A pair of paws loomed above them, and Jack flinched before he realized it was just a statue of a dancing bear standing on its hind legs.
    Euri grinned. “That’s why no one likes to take this fountain. The bear reminds them of Cerberus.”
    Jack smiled as if to show he hadn’t really been scared.
    â€œWhat just happened?” asked Cora.
    â€œWe fountain-traveled,” said Jack. “The dead use the city’s fountains to travel aboveground for the night.”
    He stood up and looked around. Strange sounds filled the air—braying laughter, spine-tingling roars, high-pitched nonsensical chatter. In front of them was a series of brick arches topped with a clock; on a balcony beneath it, Jack could see the silhouettes of animals: a kangaroo playing horns, a penguin playing a drum, a goat playing panpipes, a hippopotamus playing a violin. It was the Delacorte Clock.
    â€œWe’re in Central Park,” Cora said with a puzzled look.
    Jack nodded. “In the zoo.” He had walked through it many times on the way home from Chapman but had never seen it at night.
    A gate creaked open and a living zookeeper, his head bobbing to the music on his headphones, exited the seal enclosure with a large pail.
    â€œHe’s going to see us!” Cora said, looking around for a place to hide.
    â€œNo, it’s okay,” said Jack. “He can’t. Remember, we’re still technically a part of the underworld, so no one living can see us.”
    Cora watched as the zookeeper walked right past them. Even though he stepped through Jack’s foot, his eyes never once shifted in their direction. As soon as he passed, Cora pulled out her cell phone. “I want to call my mom.”
    â€œShe won’t be able to hear you,” said Euri.
    But Cora was frantically pushing the power button on her phone. “It’s dead!”
    â€œPhones don’t work in the underworld,” Jack explained gently. “But we’ll be back before she even knows you’re gone.”
    â€œShe needs to be able to reach me,” said Cora.
    â€œWhy?” asked Euri.
    â€œBecause she does!”
    Something bayed from the corner of the zoo. A moment of silence followed before