Badd flashed back to that bizarre discussion he'd read on the bulletin board regarding the basement. Supposedly a dangerous place...but you put the most danger in the place you wanted to keep people out of. If Aguilar had guards or monsters down there it was for a reason.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I've heard a little talk about a downstairs area, or a basement. Do you know anything about that?" A sane builder would put the stairs to one level at the same place as the stairs to another level. A builder wanting to hide something would put the stairs to the more important places somewhere the prisoners couldn't get at.

And yet someone had. Why wouldn't they share that information with the class? Probably the same paranoia that had kept Javert and his friends so quiet.