Floors: by Patrick Carman

fun and give too much away, but Remi was right. The seventh, eighth, and ninth floors were bizarre, to say the least.
    “Let’s keep walking, see if we can find that arrow.”
    The winding path the two boys were on was sunk into the floor so that the model lay all around them at belly-button level. They could reach out and touch whatever they wanted, and Leo imagined Merganzer doing just that. He could see his old friend placing a tree here, a statue there.
    Real water flowed under arched bridges, and the Lake was strewn with tiny boats and wobbling ducks. There were fountains, the Great Lawn, the Central Park Zoo, skating rinks, a carousel, baseball fields, and tennis courts. Leo stopped in front of the statue of Alice in Wonderland, thinking he might have seen an arrow, but he was mistaken.
    “Is it just me, or is it getting dark in here?” asked Remi.
    “My sensors say yes, undoubtedly,” said Blop. “Switching to reserve power.”
    As if there were a quickly moving sunset, the room was growing dim as they approached Belvedere Castle.
    “Look there, it’s a boy and his mom,” said Remi. “The only two people in the park, right?”
    “It’s Merganzer,” said Leo. “And that must be his mom.” He could tell by the wild hair they both had, the way it flipped up in the back and looked like the feathers on the head of a merganser (the duck, not the person).
    Stars filled the ceiling and the castle lit up as the room went completely dark. A moon appeared, bright and round, and shadows filled the room. The lights on the baseball fields came on, hundreds of tiny lampposts glowed yellow, and the sound of a distant train filled the room.
    “Where’s it coming from?” asked Remi. The sound was every where and nowhere at once. But Leo had grabbed Remi by the shoulder, staring off into the dark with fear in his eyes.
    “Someone’s in here with us,” he said. In the darkest corner of the room, a shadow worked the controls, changing the lights, making the moon come up.
    “Who are you?” asked Leo . He was too afraid tomove, but he began to wonder if they’d found Merganzer hiding in the Central Park Room.
    The train whistle blew and Leo jumped. Lights began to dance on the Great Lawn, spinning and circling like fireflies.
    “What’s happening, Leo?” asked Remi. He was an adventurous boy, but this was getting scary.
    “He’s trying to help us,” said Leo.
    “Who’s trying to help us?”
    “I don’t know, but look.”
    The lights on the Great Lawn had started to settle, gathering together to form words. Leo and Remi read them silently, and when they did, the words burst into tiny flames and the room was light once more.
    The sound of the train was gone, and so was the shadow.
    Leo said the words to Remi.
“Every arrow needs a bow.”
    Both boys had been to Central Park enough times to know what it meant right away. It had to be Bow Bridge, the most famous bridge in the park, which stretched across the Lake.
    Blop went full throttle about all the bridges in the park, for there were many, and for once Remi wished he could get the robot to be quiet. It was no time for detailed information about why they used cast iron tobuild bridges in the park and how the Bow Bridge, built in 1862, had been photographed about a billion times.
    “If you put him facedown, he’s harder to hear,” said Leo. Remi picked Blop out of his jacket pocket and turned him upside down, dropping him back inside. His wheels spun back and forth with a
whir
, but his muffled tin voice dropped into the background.
    When they arrived at the Bow Bridge, Leo was the first to spot the hidden arrow. Under the arch, near the water, a cluster of ducks was staring.
    “There it is,” said Leo.
    “It makes me wonder if there’s an arrow under the real bridge,” Remi pondered. “I’ll have to get a boat and see next time I go there.”
    Leo smiled at this idea, because he’d been thinking the same thing. Maybe the two of them could go