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By Root 819 0

There was Bethany and her team, chasing after a girl in a red shirt. There were the Brookville Brains, making things more confusing with their own bright blue T-shirts. The Brains had suffered through their own flat tire, but it looked like they had caught up again. And there was Brendan Root’s team, sitting on a park bench, studying something on a piece of paper. So they were still hard at work, trying to figure out that sixth answer. Was anybody nearly as close to winning as they were? Surely not. Winston almost felt like giving up—they could just go to the nearby pizza parlor for an Italian ice while they waited for Brendan Root and his team to win. It could happen at any moment.

“There!” Jake shouted. He pointed to a purple shirt and began running. Winston and the others tried to keep up, but that was impossible when Jake was going full tilt, as he was now.

By the time the rest of them had caught up, Jake had already been asked the riddle, answered it, and been handed another letter tile: E.

Mr. Garvey was the last to arrive at this second checkpoint. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, trying to catch his breath. He looked like he wanted to lie down on the ground for a while.

“Should we not run?” Jake asked him, a little too sweetly.

“No, no,” Mr. Garvey gasped, waving a hand. “It’s fine. I’m just . . . I’m just”—he took a deep breath and tried straightening up—“I’m just old. And it’s been a long day.”

Mal said, “So where are we going now? What riddle did we just answer?”

Jake said, “If you turn me around, I can no longer see. The answer was a mirror.”

“Oh! We just passed that one!” Winston said, spinning around, trying to find it again. “I saw it! I know I did.”

“If I have to run to sixteen more places,” said Mr. Garvey, “the one after that is going to be a hospital. You guys go ahead and finish this. I’m going back to our bench. Go fast! Maybe there’s still time.” He glanced over to where Brendan Root’s team sat. He was keeping an eye on them, too, waiting for the moment when they would all start leaping around in victory.

So as Mr. Garvey walked slowly back to their bench, Winston and his friends ran, arms swinging and legs pumping, for the next colored T-shirt.

This was a tall, rail-thin guy in a yellow shirt. “You must break me before you can use me. What am I?” he asked.

They had to consult their notes before answering, “An egg!”

The thin guy was pleased. “Yes!” he said to them. He dug into this pocket. Winston expected another letter tile, and he was not disappointed. This time it was a U.

“R-E-U?” Mal said as they ducked into the shade provided by a tree.

“Is that going to spell anything?” Jake asked.

“Reunion?” Winston suggested. “But the thing is,” he added, “if we’re spelling something, we might not have started with the first letter. We could have started somewhere in the middle of the message. Let’s just keep going and see what happens.”

This turned out to be good advice. They went to the next three people in order and collected an N, an S, and another U. The last riddle sent them in search of a picture of a belt.

They searched all over and for a few minutes thought maybe this guy had wandered away from the town green entirely. They finally spotted him off in a corner. As they ran up to him, Winston frowned. He looked familiar. Hadn’t they already spoken to him?

Yes, they had, as they discovered when he asked his riddle: I will not burn in a fire, and I will not drown in the water.

“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “We already answered that, didn’t we?”

“Hey, yeah,” Mal said. “Ice. This was first person we spoke to. He’s steering us back to the guy with the ice cube on his shirt, and then we can keep going around and around in a little circle. Fun!”

Winston groaned. “You’re right. I must have made a mistake. Mr. Garvey’s going to kill me.”

“What letters do we have now?” Jake asked.

Mal had been collecting them. He opened up his palm to reveal a half dozen sweat-damp letter tiles. “R-E-U-N-S-U,” he read out loud. “Roonsoo!”

“That’s not a word,” Jake said.

“All right,” Winston