Is the Adventure Over?

The morning after the puzzle was finally, completely finished, Felix arrived at the treehouse carrying an old wooden frame under one arm and a determined expression that did not match how carefully he was climbing the ladder. Maya was already there, laying out cardboard backing and a small bag of mounting supplies with the seriousness of someone performing surgery.

"Careful with the corners," she said, without even looking up.

"I am always —" Felix started to say, and yanked the frame back just in time, saving it from a collision with one of the wooden beams holding up the treehouse. "— careful," he finished, a little uncertainly.

Maya glanced over, half-smiling.

Sketch, who considered himself the true supervisor of all treehouse projects, walked in a slow circle around the puzzle and then sat down directly in the middle of it, tail curled neatly around his paws.

"Sketch. We are trying to frame that."

Sketch gave him a look that suggested framing sounded like somebody else's problem.

Maya laughed and gently scooted him aside, then knelt over the picture instead, quiet for a moment. The city glowed up at them from the floor — silver towers catching invisible sunlight, roads floating above roads, and right in the middle, the one glass building that seemed to shine a little harder than everything around it, as if it simply mattered more.

"Why do you think it's this place?" Maya asked. "Out of everywhere the puzzle could have shown us."

Felix shrugged, though it wasn't really a shrug about not knowing — it was the kind of shrug you do when a question has been sitting quietly under your ribs all morning and you don't have a good answer for it.

"Maybe some mysteries like to keep their secrets," he said.

Neither of them said the other thing they were both thinking, which was that once this picture went up on the wall in its frame, it would just be a picture. A very beautiful one. But a picture all the same. No more golden light. No more doors.

It was, Maya thought, a strange kind of sad — being sad about something ending that had also been completely wonderful.

Felix picked up one side of the puzzle to slide the cardboard underneath it, carefully, the way you'd lift a sleeping cat.

And something in the picture moved.