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  “I’m on what?” Ramp couldn’t hear her, and he spoke so loudly we both jumped.

  “Shh! Child watch.”

  He still couldn’t understand. “I can’t hear you. What?”

  I glanced around, nervous.

  “Child watch!” Celia yelled. “We need you to make sure the children don’t find us!” There was a faint squeak from the path on the far right.

  “Is that you, Santa?” a sickly sweet voice called. The only other team that was still by the entrance took off running.

  “You shouldn’t yell, Celia,” Ramp chastised, as if her yelling hadn’t been his fault in the first place. “We’re supposed to be sneaking around those automatons.”

  Celia looked like she was about to start yelling at him, but I grabbed their hands before she had the chance and pulled us down the middle path.

  “Santa, that is you!”

  I heard the child’s voice as we slipped between the maze’s walls, followed by the crackling sound of fire. I hoped the robot hadn’t set the whole pile of mail ablaze.

  We found a quiet spot after a few sharp turns in the maze. We passed several more piles of mail, so at least we’d be able to fill our bag up on the go. I opened our bag and pulled out a letter from Eliot McAvoy:

  “Workshop. Animals division.” I stamped it and passed it to Celia, who looked around to orient herself. Ramp peeked around the corner, keeping a lookout for more child-bots. I hoped his eyesight was good enough to be helpful.

  “Animals is back by the entrance.” She grabbed the letter and took off running. We followed after her, and I opened another letter while we ran, from Nora Carter:

  “This one’s Workshop. Beauty.” I figured getting a hairbrush for her sister was probably the best solution.

  “Watch out!” Ramp yelled. I reached out and grabbed the back of Celia’s suit, tugging her back from a corner as flames shot out from the other side.

  “Santa, where did you go?” The girl’s voice echoed around us. We hid against the wall, in the dark, while the child-bot rolled around the corner. This one had hit its face on something, leaving the paint scraped off where one of its eyes should have been. The mangled metal baby-doll face rotated around the hallway while we held our breath. “Santa, I miss you!” We pressed our bodies against the wall and pulled each other slowly around the corner. We sighed with relief when the bot moved out of sight, which was nice because I had completely forgotten about breathing.

  Celia led us back to the entrance of the mailroom and then right back into the maze on the far left. Sure enough, before the first turn there was a slot in the wall that said WS: ANIMALS. She brought the letter close, and the pipes sucked it in and away.

  “Peanut brittle!” she swore.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Beauty is right next to it, but the maze is in the way.” She was right; since the departments were in alphabetical order, Beauty would be just a little bit farther down the wall. Unfortunately, because of the shape of the maze, we’d have to turn and go deeper into the center to find our way back. “Open another one and see if it’s closer.”

  I found one from Abraham Danton:

  “What’s taking so long?” Ramp was sweating, and it made his whole body smell like mothballs. I heard the whoosh of fire and someone screaming deeper in the maze.

  “Abraham Danton won’t get to the point!”

  Celia rubbed her temples. “Let’s just send it to G&P—I’ll find something for him later.” I nodded and went to stamp it, but suddenly it was knocked out of my hands.

  “Sorry, superdorks. Looks like I got that one first.”

  Buzz holstered a stamp gun back on his belt and sauntered over to us. He picked the letter off the ground—it was stamped with a picture of Santa Claus playing the marimba.

  “That’s not fair, Buzz.” Celia frowned at him. How did he know to bring a stamp gun? How did he know to make a stamp gun? “That letter was ours!”

  “And now it’s mine. You said G&P, right? Thanks for reading it for me.” Buzz took off running, but stopped suddenly at an intersection. He counted with his fingers—three, two, one—and a child-bot rolled past the corner. He waited for it to pass and ran down the hall where it had come from.

  How did he know it was going to be there?

  “What a jerk.” I split open another letter, this one from Mindy Ratchford:

  “Wish Generator.” We aren’t supposed to make weapons, but her wish could at least provide a little bit of energy for the city. “She wants a cannon.”

  Ramp shook his head. “Kids these days, all violent.” He looked dangerously on the verge of a much longer complaint. “It’s those video games, I tell you. Turning their—uh, our brains to mush. Because I love those video games. Mush my brain right up, I say!” He did a motion with his hands like he was squishing brains between them.

  Celia and I stared at him. Then Celia said, “Okay, well, the Wish Generator slot is in the back of the room, on the other side. I guess we’re just going to have to try to get through the maze.”

  I said, “I heard this thing where, if you put your hand on the left side of the wall and follow it, you’ll eventually get everywhere in the—”

  “I don’t have time for this!” Ramp cut me off and leaned over to pull off his shoes. I held my nose. His pants were so baggy and low that I couldn’t see his feet, but he looked very relieved, and wobbled back and forth for a second. “Give me the letter.” I handed it to him warily.

  Ramp tilted his head to look up at the top of the wall, like he was measuring the distance. He bent his knees a little, then suddenly sprang up from the floor and landed on the top, balancing perfectly. Celia and I gasped, startled.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and took off running along the tops of the walls, bounding across the maze. Within a few seconds, he was back standing above us.

  “How did you do that?” I examined his shoes to see if they had any special tricks inside them. They seemed normal.

  “We don’t have time for stupid questions. What’s the next one?”

  I ripped open another letter—I want to be Bigfoot—and said, “Workshop. Costumes.”

  Celia thought for a moment and told him where to go, and he bounded off in that direction again. We must not have been the only team to have this idea; I saw the triplets tossing each other across the walls above us while we were waiting for him.

  Our plan seemed to be working pretty well: I figured out where the letters should go, Celia remembered where the slot was, and Ramp jumped over the walls to get there. We had to keep moving almost constantly to avoid the child-bots, but it was still way faster than doing everything as a group.

  We only ran into the team of Claus children once—Klaus was barking orders to Sally and Bertrand the whole time. Bertrand had a little mechanical penguin on his shoulder scanning and sorting letters quickly, and Sally made a toy that threw her voice and distracted the child-bots.

  I saw Kurt a few more times; he and the redheaded girl were roller-skating through the maze like they’d done it a hundred times before. Buzz wasn’t with them, probably because he was off stealing letters on his own.

  I saw one team get in a fight over which one of them was being lazier, and all three yanked off each other’s hats and threw them right into a child-bot’s mouth. It quickly grabbed them in its pincer hands and dragged them outside while they kicked and screamed.

  Luther got caught because his vest glitched and stuck on maximum brightness. He shone the word JERK like a beacon for the child-bots, but at least he was so short that the fire didn’t even hit his body, just burnt the hat right off his head. So he was out.

  When the ten-minute warning sounded (Rudolph’s translated voice blaring across the whole warehouse), Celia, Ramp, and I were all exhausted. Ramp landed on the ground next to us, and I handed him his shoes, which he took a long time to put back on—I think he stuffed them with something from his pockets. As he was bent over tying them, I started to pan
ic.

  “Uh-oh, uh, guys, um—” I stammered. Celia and Ramp both looked at me while I danced back and forth on my feet and pointed at Ramp’s head. I’ve never been very good at getting my words out in high-pressure situations. “His—the, um—” I pointed to my own head and jumped up and down.

  “What, elf? Spit it out,” Ramp grumbled, “and stop dancing. I’m tired enough without seeing you put on this shameless display!”

  “Oh no.” Celia’s eyes widened as she realized what I was trying to say. “Your hat! You lost your hat somewhere.”

  Ramp reached up and patted the top of his toupee. His hat was definitely gone.

  “Peppermint bark!” he swore. “I must have dropped it while I was delivering letters.”

  We only had ten minutes to search the whole maze—and before we could even try, one of the child-bot’s voices rose from around the corner.

  Celia’s eyes widened. “Holy jingle bells!” she started off yelling, then pulled her voice back down to a whisper. Suddenly a huge smile broke out on her face. “I get it!”

  “Get what?” I asked. Celia pulled us back into the shadows while the child-bot passed by.

  “Did you eat your milk and cookies, Santa?” it asked. The voice sounded scarier and scarier every time.

  “The pattern. They’re following the same paths, over and over!” Celia said. I thought about Buzz and how he knew to wait for one of the child-bots to pass by. “Ramp, I know you had your hat when you sent that letter to the Jawbreaker Department, because you said it was ‘ugly and annoying and no one with any sense would ever wear it.’ Do you remember anything after that?”

  Ramp thought for a second. “Oh, yeah. I took the hat off and threw it on the ground because I hated it so much while I was delivering the personal letter for Gary Goblin.”

  “You what?!” Celia yelled.

  “Personal letter!” I tried to keep us focused. “That means the back of the maze, right?” As far back as we could possibly go.

  Celia nodded. “Follow me.”

  Ramp groaned. “I can’t keep doing this. I’m too tired.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “That’s okay. You helped us a lot today!” I tried to give him my biggest, most supportive smile, even though inside I was kind of upset with him, too. “If you want, we can get it and meet you back at the entrance.”

  “You’d better.” He started walking away without as much as a thank you. “I’m not losing this challenge because you couldn’t find a hat!” He kept grumbling as he got farther away.

  Celia frowned.

  “We wouldn’t even have had a chance of winning without him,” I reminded her. “Plus, he’s old. I think.”

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?”

  I shrugged, so Celia shrugged, and then we both shrugged at each other again and laughed.

  “Focus, you goofball!” she chided.

  “You’re the goofball!” I replied. She stuck her tongue out at me, then signaled which way to go with her head and started running through the maze. I followed as close behind her as I could and paused when she signaled. The difference was amazing; now that she had figured out the pattern, we hardly ever even saw a child-bot. We also didn’t see anyone else, so I guess most people had found their way out by then.

  I kept my eyes on the ground but never saw the hat. I was starting to give up hope—maybe someone had grabbed Ramp’s hat because their own had been burned—when I heard a quiet flapping noise.

  We were all the way up against the back wall, and the ball of Ramp’s Santa hat was stuck in one of the mail slots. Goblin, Gary. Just like he’d said. The pipe was too small to suck the hat all the way in, so the air current was making it flap up and down. Celia and I grabbed it together and yanked it free.

  Suddenly, a siren started playing. Rudolph’s voice came over the loudspeaker: “Five minutes left, wannabes. And I’ve got a surprise for you punks who think it’s a good idea to cut it this close.”

  Celia put her face in her hands. “I don’t want to know,” she groaned. We were as far from the front door as it was possible to be. The sirens stopped, and the squeaking of wheels we had been hearing for the past two hours doubled in speed.

  “Santaisthatyou?” Even the voice of the child-bot had sped up and turned high and unnatural. It whipped around the corner at lightning speed, barreling toward us on its one wheel with terrifying purpose. It was the bot with the missing eye … back for vengeance!!!!!!!

  “RUN!” I yelled. Celia and I bolted back into the maze, the child-bot on our tail. Every once in a while it would shoot flames at our heels just to remind us it was there. About a quarter of the way back, another bot spotted us and joined it. A few turns later, a third and fourth.

  “SANTAITISYOU!” they screeched in chorus. I saw Celia’s foot get caught in a blast of flame, but other than a little singe on the face of a kitten, the suit protected her. We barreled to the front door, where Ramp was huddled in a corner.

  “I don’t like these automatons,” he babbled as I threw him his hat. He tugged it on, and Celia shoved open the door for him to run through. “Not one bit!” I let Celia go out ahead of me, then glanced back. A one-eyed giant child face was inches away from my face; I was staring directly into its scary, painted-on mouth. The flamethrower’s hatch fell open.

  “DIDYOUEATYOURMILKANDCOOKIESSANTA?”

  I leapt backward out the door and slammed it behind me. I fell on my butt while flames licked out from the cracks in the door. Celia was bent over, hands on her knees, panting. Ramp was looking grumpy as ever.

  “Well”—Ramp looked around at the tired, sweaty crowd with a sour expression—“I suppose we didn’t do terribly.”

  I saw Goldie, one of the triplets, roll his eyes. “Ya hear that, Frank?” He elbowed his sister in the ribs.

  Frank punched him back in the shoulder. “Yeah, Goldie, I heard that. Ya hear that, Myrle?” She smacked her brother in the back.

  Myrle hit her in the stomach. “I heard ’em. They think they did good! Whatta bunch of twerps.” All three of the triplets laughed in exactly the same way. Celia and I pretended not to hear them.

  Rudolph trotted through the crowd to us as a group of elves with clipboards sifted through to mark which contestants lost their hats. He passed Kurt, Buzz, and the redheaded girl, who all still had theirs. The Claus sibling team was safe, too, and Klaus looked confident. (He always looked confident, though. Maybe that’s just his face.)

  When Rudolph arrived at our team, he lit his nose up as bright as I had ever seen it—we couldn’t look directly at him. Everything, especially the snow, was bright red.

  “You got lucky this time, wannabes. Looks like enough hats got burnt that you’re barely scraping through.”

  Celia and I beamed at each other. We made it! I saw the triplets shrug in the corner of my eye.

  Rudolph turned back to the group, and his nose blinked on and off like a strobe light.

  “You’d better watch out,” he called loudly over us all. “You’d better not cry. You’d better not pout—”

  “Why?” an elf in pigtails interrupted.

  Rudolph glared down at her and snorted. “I’m telling you why.” He returned his focus back to the crowd. Falling snow gently piled on his antlers. His nose stopped blinking, and he tapped a hoof on the ground twice, roughly. “The Santa Trials have only just begun.”

  The next month went by really slowly. It felt strange to go back to my regular Games & Puzzles work after so much deadly excitement. Santa never gave us a clue about when the next trial would start, so the only choice was to keep moving. The Workshop wasn’t boring—there is nothing boring about Christmas—but it felt like when you cry during a really great movie and then realize, when you walk out into the sun, that everyone else was just having a regular day. The contestants in the Santa Trials had been through a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but we still had to make sandwiches and go to the bathroom. Celia said she was relieved for a break from the excitement,
but I’d never seen her working harder.

  “How many new blueprints have you turned in today?” I asked as she slipped another rolled-up piece of paper into the air tube on our office wall.

  She counted in her head. “Eight. No, nine. Wait, are you counting today as starting at midnight, or business hours? Because at two a.m. I sent in plans for a trash can that sings when you throw things away.”

  “I think that already exists.” I was programming the paint in a dollhouse to change colors when no one was looking and had already coded the furniture to move around when everyone left the room. It was actually one of Sally’s designs: a truly haunted doll mansion.

  Celia shrugged. “Well, I made a better one.”

  I got the hint that she didn’t feel like talking. When I was through painting, I powered my paintbrush down, waved good-bye, and slipped out of our office into the hallway.

  Hallways in The Workshop are busier than streets, especially around lunchtime, so I let the flow of the crowd pull me along toward the grand staircase. An elf woman with blond hair in a big, neat tower on top of her head was leading two children along by the hand so quickly their feet were coming off the ground.

  “Oh, yeah. We brought the whole family to watch the rest of the Trials. This is history, you know. These guys”—she lifted her kids high off the ground and wagged them in front of her friend—“are a little too young to compete, but the memories will last a lifetime. Won’t they, boys?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the kids chimed together. They looked a little overwhelmed. Their mother’s friend, a skinny man in a long, fuzzy robe, nodded.

  “I feel bad for his son Klaus.” The man spread his arms out wide and shrugged. “He’s a hard worker who deserves to be Santa. This must have come as a terrible surprise.”

  “I think an elf should win. Wouldn’t that be a nice change?” The woman apparently grew tired of leading the kids by the hand and set one of them on each of her muscular shoulders. They held on to her hair tower to keep from falling off.