Floors #2: 3 Below Read Online Free PDF

said. “Let’s get in.”
    “Wait, what? Are you crazy?” Remi complained. “She’ll duck-bill us to death.”
    Leo crouched low and sat inside with Betty, staring at the card but not picking it up.
    “There’s not going to be room in here for both of us and seven ducks,” Leo said. “Get in here!”
    Remi looked at the ducklings. They were eager for more food and, actually, they weren’t that small anymore. They were growing up fast. If they got him on theground, Remi imagined, the six of them could really do some damage.
    “Move over,” he said, squeezing in next to Leo. Betty stared at them both, then at the ducklings, then honked in Leo’s face. Her breath smelled like pond water.
    “I think she wants you to shut the door,” Remi said. He was intuitive with animals that way, always had been. “She wants a break.”
    And it was true. The ducklings weren’t as young as they’d once been. They were demanding, and Betty did like the idea of getting away for an hour, a day, maybe even a week.
    “It’s not like they won’t get fed,” Leo said, thinking it through. There were mechanical feeders on the roof that filled with orange pellets twice a day. The ducklings would be fine.
    “Let’s do it,” said Remi.
    As soon as Remi closed the door, he pulled the down lever and the duck elevator began its leisurely descent to the lobby of the hotel. It was a magnificently slow elevator.
    Betty turned away from both boys, staring into a corner, and for a moment Leo thought she was either sad or angry. He was dangerously close to the back end of a duck in a very small space. It was terrifying.
    “How much do you trust this duck?” Remi asked.

    “Not that much,” Leo answered. “She can be unpredictable.”
    Leo carefully picked up the key card and turned it in his hands. He’d fallen asleep the night before doing the same thing, trying to find a clue to its secrets. It was dimly lit in the duck elevator, but he saw the same patterns of color in the card. Blues and purples, reds and greens, appearing in a line down the long end of the card, kind of like the bar on the back of a credit card, the one you swipe through a machine to pay for groceries.
    “What’s she doing?” Remi asked, peering like a mind reader around Betty’s feathery rear end, up her long neck, and into the very thoughts of the duck itself. She was staring at the corner of the duck elevator, as if there should be something there. She was completely still, focused.
    “Let me see that card,” Remi said, and Leo handed it to him. They were only halfway to the lobby and Leo was already getting tired of the thick smell of wet duck.
    “I see what Betty is staring at,” Remi went on, gently reaching over Betty’s head and placing the edge of the card into the top corner of the elevator. It had seemed like a normal corner, but it was not. There was a thin gap there, about double the length of the long edge of the card. Without thinking twice, Remi inserted the card and swiped downward slowly. As he did, the elevatorwalls changed — they danced with color! — and Betty quacked and hopped up and down excitedly. When Remi pulled the card out, Betty backed up, crowding the boys into corners of their own. She was hogging the very center, staring down. The walls of the elevator returned to the milk-chocolaty color they had been. For a few seconds, nothing else happened. But then the soft sound of the elevator moving came to an end.
    They had stopped.
    This, in and of itself, was not that unusual. Leo had stopped the elevator many times and gotten out into secret passageways that ran between the floors. The same door they’d entered would open, and out he would go. But this time it was different, because a different place opened than had ever opened before. Or at least Leo had never seen it happen.
    A wall simply dropped down, like it was on rollers that let it slide below the elevator. This was unfortunate for Remi, because he was leaning