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Winston and Jake fought the crowd and made their way to their teacher. The staccato pops and bangs ended as suddenly as they had begun, the final explosions lingering in the summer air, along with several blossoms of gray smoke.

Winston looked around. Who had set off the firecrackers? He couldn’t tell. He expected to see a couple of teenage boys, standing off to the side, laughing at the panic they had caused. But there was nobody.

People started coming back to the ride, and Mr. Garvey dismissed the event. “All right,” he said. “Is Mal back yet? I’d like to get out of here already.” He craned his neck, trying to figure out which car Mal was in while the ride was temporarily stopped.

At that moment, the guy running the ride said loudly, “Where’s my key?” He was standing at the ride’s mechanism, looking around, a bewildered expression on his face. He was in his early twenties or maybe not even that old, and had a scruff of beard and a pierced lip. “Hey!” he said. He turned to the people coming back to the ride. “Did you take my key? That’s not cool, man. I need that.”

Winston and Jake and Mr. Garvey watched the fellow pat his pockets and scan the ground for the missing key. Mr. Garvey’s face reflected terrible understanding. He elbowed his way in and said, “What key? What did you lose?”

“The key to the ride! What do you think? The key to the Ferris wheel, man!”

Winston looked up at the ride and finally saw Mal. He was still in his car, fifty feet in the air.

The cheater. The cheater had set off the firecrackers, distracted everybody, and then snatched the key to the ride. A whole bunch of teams had people on that ride, and the cheater had bamboozled all of them in one go.

Mal, trapped on the Sun Wheel, was yelling something and pointing urgently. Winston tried to focus on what he was saying. It sounded like . . . “There! There!”

Winston and Jake whirled around, and they saw him, just for a fraction of a second: A man in a green jacket, a backpack over his shoulder, elbowing his way through the crowd, trying to get away.

Jake took off after him.

Mr. Garvey yelled, “No! Jake! Get back here!” But Jake wasn’t listening. He ran at full speed—he might as well have been shot out of a cannon. Jake was one of the school’s better athletes, a fact Winston sometimes forgot simply because Jake never bragged about it. Well, he was certainly reminding them now. He dodged through the crowd like an afternoon breeze, slipping sideways through tight spots, weaving around baby strollers, until Winston couldn’t see him anymore.

Mr. Garvey grabbed Winston by the shoulders and shouted into his face. “Stay here! Do not move!” He took off after Jake, although at a much slower rate. Mr. Garvey didn’t look like a guy used to running.

The people on the ride were beginning to realize they had a problem. Some of them were shouting “Get me down!” and “Hey! Why aren’t we moving?” The guy operating the ride didn’t seem to know what to do, other than pace back and forth uselessly.

“Is there another key?” Winston shouted to him.

“I don’t know where the key is!” the guy shouted back, irritated.

Winston tried again. “Where’s another key?” But the guy didn’t answer, just kept looking at the ground as if the key might burrow out of its hiding place like a woodchuck.

Winston glanced up at Mal, who was clutching the bars of his skybound jail cell like a prisoner in a science-fiction movie. Beside him, Elvie was doing the same thing. At this rate, they were going to be stuck up there for a long time . . . unless somebody jumped in to solve this nasty little problem.

Knowing Mr. Garvey might actually kill him, Winston ran. Someone had to have another key to the ride, and Lip Ring didn’t look like he was going to figure that out anytime soon.

He ran past Bethany and Giselle. “Where are you going?” Bethany yelled to him.

Not stopping, Winston yelled back, “The business office! They’ll have another key!”

To Winston’s surprise, Bethany burst into a run and quickly