Why hadn’t Mom taught Emma, Chess, and Finn everything they needed to know about the alternate world from the very beginning?
People were starting to stare at Emma for being different, for not turning around and looking back toward the huge screen at the front of the auditorium like everyone else. One tall, scowling man with thick glasses even tilted his head and made a shooing motion with his hand, as if her steady gaze was making him angry, and he just wanted her to go away.
No. He wasn’t shooing her away. He was showing her something in his hand, but keeping his hand cupped so no one else would see it, too.
The thing in his hand was a paper.
A paper unfolded to reveal a crookedly drawn red heart.
Forty-Five
Chess
Chess was already having trouble standing up. He wasn’t sure if he was holding on to his brother and sister more for their sake or his own. So when Emma began tugging on his arm and pulling him back, he almost fell over.
“We can’t—” he began.
It was too hard to say the rest. Not to mention dangerous. We can’t stand out. We can’t save Mom. Or the Gustano kids. Or ourselves.
The only thing they’d achieved, coming to the alternate world, was to doom more people.
It made his heart ache to think of the people he’d personally endangered by not sending them back: Finn. Emma.
And Natalie, who wasn’t even related, who didn’t have the same reason they all did for wanting to save Mom.
Emma pulling on him was just another reminder of how badly he’d failed.
“We have to follow someone!” Emma whispered, yanking on his arm harder and harder. “Someone who can help!”
It was odd: Emma didn’t look or act like she thought they were doomed. She was practically jumping up and down. A moment ago she’d been as slumped over as Chess and Finn and Natalie. But now her eyes shone and her cheeks were rosy; it was possible to believe that if she touched his arm again, he’d get an electric shock.
“Okay, okay, shh,” Chess whispered, more to calm her down than because he believed there was any hope.
The four of them silently began skulking through the crowd, with Emma leading the way. The people around them were milling about and muttering, clearly impatient for the trial to start again, so Chess hoped the kids’ movements wouldn’t stand out too much. Emma seemed to be following a man a few paces ahead of them in a dark blue jacket—not that that was unusual, since so many in the crowd were wearing dark blue or orange. This man was tall like Chess remembered his father being; he had dark hair and dark skin, and in his dark-colored clothes he could step into the shadows and hide a lot better than the Greystones or Natalie could. Even his horn-rimmed glasses seemed like a disguise.
When they got to the edge of the crowd, Chess thought maybe Emma had lost the man completely. Then he saw the man’s hand reach out from behind one of the pillars with one finger curled back, summoning the kids forward.
Chess grabbed Emma by the shoulders.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “This is like every ‘Stranger Danger’ lecture ever! What—”
“We can trust him,” Emma said. “I’m sure of it!”
“Why?” Natalie challenged.
Emma’s answer was to speed over to the man and whisper in his ear. He pulled something out of his pocket and held it out. Even in the dark space behind the pillar there was enough light for Chess to see the heart on the paper.
“Hey, I drew that!” Finn said. “Well, not that exact one, I guess, but the heart just like it on Mom’s phone. . . .” He spoke softly—for Finn, anyway—but he still glanced over his shoulder as if terrified the guards would come again.
Chess squared his shoulders and tried to look taller and more confident than he really was. He stared straight into the man’s eyes, past the man’s thick glasses.
“Where’d you get that?” he demanded.
The man seemed to cower back into the shadows even more. His eyes darted about.
“Someone mailed it to me years ago. Your . . . mother. That is, if I’m right about who you are.” The man spoke slowly, as if he wasn’t all that confident either. His gaze came to rest on Natalie’s face. “Though, I thought there were only three of you. . . .”
“Natalie’s just helping,” Finn volunteered, and Chess despaired again. Hadn’t Finn learned his lesson? Would he ever not talk too much?
Natalie took the heart drawing from the man’s hand.
“You expect us to believe that Mrs. . . . uh, that some woman sent you this heart picture her kid drew?” she asked skeptically. “When you don’t even recognize the kid?”
The man held his hands up, a gesture of innocence.
“Hear me out!” he begged. “It’s true! We needed a symbol we could show, in case we ever had to meet and . . . and it wasn’t safe to identify ourselves otherwise. I didn’t even know what Ka—er, what the woman I was talking to—really looked like until today. It wasn’t safe. But this heart . . .” His finger brushed the paper. His voice turned husky. “It’s a good symbol. Everything we’ve done was for you and other kids like you. For our hopes for the future. Your future.”
Chess wanted to weep. He wanted to scream, Don’t you see there’s no hope now? Couldn’t you have shown up and saved her sooner?
“So you do know who we are,” he said, biting off the words. “We don’t have to tell you. But we don’t know you. Be fair. Tell us your name.”
The man’s face spasmed between sorrow and fear. He jerked his head around, and muttered as if he was only talking to himself, “I swept this area for any listening device. I rerouted the security camera on this pillar. It really should be safe. . . .” He clenched his teeth, looked back at Chess, and said, “Your mother knows me as Joe.”
Chess had never been a violent kid. When other boys wanted to fight on the playground, he always walked away. But rage swelled within him now. He slammed the palms of his hands as hard as he could against Joe’s chest. He didn’t worry for an instant about Joe hitting back. He didn’t even worry about guards hearing him. All he wanted to do was accuse Joe:
“It’s your fault she’s here!”
Forty-Six
Finn
Finn watched his calm, sane, perfect brother go crazy.
The big man—Joe—wrapped his arms around Chess, more like he was hugging him than trying to fight back.
Strangely, Emma was doing the same thing, as if she were on Joe’s side, not Chess’s.
“Don’t breathe,” Emma commanded, putting her hand over Chess’s mouth and nose. “Don’t inhale at all.”
“What?” Finn said. “Emma, that’s backward. When people are upset, you’re supposed to tell them to take deep breaths. You say, ‘Breathe in. Breathe out. . . .’”
“Not here,” Emma said. “There’s something wrong with this air. Something that makes people more upset. It’s worse every time the smell’s worse.”
“Really?” Finn said.
Chess stopped struggling. Joe pulled away from Chess to stare at Emma.
“You may be right,” he whispered. “That explains . . .” He clutched his hands against his head. “What other horrors did they come up with while I was away that I don’t know about? What else am I missing?”
“It’s just a theory,” Emma said modestly.
Natalie put her hands on her hips.
“Let’s back up,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at Chess. “You know this Joe guy?”
“I heard my mom on the phone with him,” Chess said. His shoulders slumped. He exhaled a little, took a shallow breath—a mere sip of air—and admitted, “Or somebody she called Joe. It was the night before she left, and she said, ‘If you don’t fix this, I will.’ I think she was talking about rescuing the Gustano kids.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Finn saw Mom’s image on the screen behind them again. He wanted to gaze and gaze at her. But he didn’t want to hear if she told any more lies.
“
Order!” the bossy man’s voice came again from the front of the room. “We are about to resume.”
Finn turned his back to the screen and glared at Joe.
“So she wouldn’t even be up there if it hadn’t been for you?” Finn asked forlornly. “She’d still be safe at home with us?”
Joe began shaking his head no. But the way the corners of his lips turned down, it was more like he was saying yes.
“I—I have kids, too,” he said. “Kids I was trying to protect. And I didn’t think her plan would work, to come back here. I didn’t know what to do.”
“But you’re here now,” Natalie offered.
Joe bowed his head.
“And I still don’t know what to do,” he whispered. “There’s no way to rescue the four of you, the Gustano kids, and your mom—and get all of us out of here alive. This has gone too far.”
Behind Finn, the public address system crackled, and then he heard his mother’s voice boom out throughout the entire auditorium: “I killed everyone who disagreed with me. . . .” Finn put his hands over his ears. But he could still hear.
“What good does that do?” Emma asked, pointing back toward the screen. She had tears in her eyes. “How are those lies supposed to help anyone?”
Joe lifted his head and let out a bitter laugh.
“Oh, she’s not saying any of that. This world—they have technology that doesn’t exist in the other world. The leaders can take the image of anyone and make it look like they’re saying anything. And no matter how much you analyze the video, you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.”
“But she’s sitting right there—” Finn pointed behind him, though he couldn’t look himself. His eyes were too blurry with his own tears.
“People can only see the screen,” Chess muttered. “Not her. And they think they see what she’s really saying and doing.”
“It’s like a magic trick,” Emma said. “An evil magic trick. All about distraction.”
“Yes.” Joe put his hands on Finn’s shoulders. “They’re making it look like she’s saying everything live, right now, speaking into a microphone this very minute. But that’s a fake tape they prepared ahead of time. The leaders can destroy anyone they want that way, by controlling what people see and hear, so they only get lies. That’s what we were fighting against, your parents and I. And our allies. We were gathering proof of the leaders’ crimes—proof that couldn’t be denied for once. We thought, in the safety of the other world, we’d have time and space to put it all together. But . . . then the leaders found the other world, too.”
“This place sucks,” Natalie said, and now it sounded like she wanted to punch somebody.
Was Finn the only one who still didn’t understand?
“But I told people the truth!” he said. “They heard me! Why didn’t that work?”
Once again he felt the horror of the moment after the old lady grabbed him. She’d whispered, “Hide, before they kill you!” And he’d peeked out from behind her coat, and people were looking back with murderous expressions.
Finn had never seen anyone look like that before. Certainly not looking at him that way.
But if it helped Mom, I’d do it again, he thought.
Wouldn’t he? Couldn’t he be that brave?
Joe shook his head. It seemed like all he ever did was shake his head.
“Only a few people heard you before the guards came. It was just lucky I was standing nearby. One little boy’s feeble voice against an entire totalitarian government—it’s not going to work. You’d need the entire auditorium hearing you all at once. And even then . . .”
“That one old lady did help us,” Emma offered. She cupped her chin in her hand, as if that helped her think. “She didn’t show us a heart picture. So she wasn’t someone working with you and Mom, right?”
“Not that I know of,” Joe said, spreading his hands helplessly. “We’ve had to operate in such secrecy—it hasn’t been safe for anyone to know more than one or two contacts.”
“So there could be lots of people here who are secretly on our side!” Finn said excitedly. He thumped Emma on the back, as if they’d figured out something together. “They just need to know it’s safe to unite! All we need to do is give Mom a microphone—a real microphone. And she could say from the stage what’s true and what isn’t. And then—”
“Huh,” Joe said, tapping a finger against his cheek. Was that like Emma cupping her chin? Was Joe taking Finn’s idea seriously?
“You had that little electronic device that made the guards think Finn’s voice was a recording,” Emma added excitedly. Her eyes shone. Finn loved seeing his sister this way. He could tell her mind was racing. “Do you have a microphone hidden in that coat, too? Could we drop it down from over the stage? Or, I don’t know, there’s got to be some way to make this work!”
Finn looked from Emma to Chess to Natalie to Joe. Chess and Natalie looked like they were thinking hard, too.
But by the time Finn’s gaze reached Joe’s face again, Joe was already slumped back against the pillar. Giving up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s no endgame in that plan. No escape hatch. See that clear wall keeping the crowd back from the stage?” He pointed. “We couldn’t get past that to rescue your mom if the idea didn’t work instantly. And there are guards by every door. We’d endanger ourselves even more. The guards would just take the microphone away from your mom before she got two words out.”
Chess slouched. Emma hung her head. Finn blinked hard, trying to make sure that no tears began rolling down his cheeks.
But Natalie bolted suddenly upright, staring past Finn’s ear. She grabbed Finn’s arm and Emma’s shoulder, and spun them around. Then she yanked Chess forward, too.
“Guys, guys, guys!” she hissed. “Do you see what I see? Or am I only imagining it, because . . .” She laughed, a strange noise that came out sounding strangled. “Because it’s what I want most?”
Natalie pointed at the screen. Finn had been trying so hard to block out everything the booming voice of his mother was saying behind him. He’d actually kind of succeeded. And he’d kept himself from staring adoringly at her face the whole time.
But Mom’s face had disappeared from the screen, replaced by another woman’s. This woman had long, flowing hair and a ruffled collar. She had a firm chin, a determined gaze, a proud tilt to her head. She looked like she could take care of anything.
“Don’t you see?” It was hard to tell if Natalie was laughing or crying. “It’s my mom! She came to save us!”
Forty-Seven
Emma
“No, it’s not,” Emma said. This felt like the cruelest thing she’d ever done, killing Natalie’s hope. “That’s this world’s version of your mother.”
Natalie squinted at Emma. The corners of her mouth trembled.
“No! It has to be . . .”
“Your mother was wearing a neon green exercise shirt when she dropped us off at our house this morning,” Emma said. Logic had never felt so mean. “She wouldn’t have gone home and changed before following us. That woman is wearing a robe under that ruffle. Why would your mom do that?”
“And she’s sitting in front of a sign that says ‘Judge Susanna Morales,’” Chess added quietly. “Your mom isn’t a judge.”
Natalie let out a wail and turned to the side, hiding her face.
“Natalie’s mom is nice in our world,” Finn said. “So wouldn’t this world’s Ms. Morales be nice, too? If she’s a judge here, won’t she say, ‘Order in the court!’ and let Mom go?”
Now Emma needed to use logic to be cruel to Finn. She needed to remind him that he couldn’t count on anyone or anything being the same in this world as back home. This world’s Mrs. Childers hadn’t been friendly like their familiar neighbor back home; this world’s version of their house wasn’t happy and welcoming like theirs was. . . . Whatever original difference had split one world from another had also led to one ripple of other changes after
another.
How could Finn understand this, when Emma was struggling herself?
Before Emma could say anything, Joe bolted out of the shadows. He shoved Chess, Emma, and Finn to the side, and grabbed Natalie by the shoulders. He whirled her around, so he could stare her directly in the face.
“You’re Susanna Morales’s daughter?” he asked. “Who’s your father? Is it . . . is it . . . ?”
“R-Roger Mayhew,” Natalie stammered. She jerked away from him. “Let go of me!”
Joe was leaning in like he wanted to hug her, but he took a respectful step back. His expression, which had been so hangdog a moment ago, now glowed with joy.
“So you three crossed into this world with Natalie Mayhew,” he muttered. “Natalie Mayhew. Genetically indistinguishable from Susanna Morales and Roger Mayhew’s daughter in this world. Either your mom’s a genius, or you kids are, or . . . or we are the luckiest people ever!”
“What do you mean?” Emma asked.
Joe waved his arms, like he was dying to hug someone. He settled on Finn, scooping up the little boy in his arms so joyfully that Finn’s legs swung side to side.
“This changes everything,” Joe whispered, holding Finn tight. “Now Finn’s idea will work!”
Forty-Eight
Chess
“I don’t understand,” Chess whispered. But nobody was listening.
Natalie stood beside him, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, her head tilted so far to the right that her hair seemed several inches longer on one side than the other.
“I’m someone important here?” she whispered. “Or my family is? Is that why those boys the other day were so scared of my mom?”
She gazed off toward the huge image of her mother—no, this world’s Susanna Morales, the judge—up on the screen, pounding a gavel and looking severe.
Greystone Secrets #1 Page 20
