Natalie flipped her sweatshirt hood up over her hair again, but it didn’t matter. Now all the police seemed to be staring at her. While they were distracted, Emma took a testing step forward, closer to Ms. Morales and the gap in the fences behind her. The police didn’t do anything.
That gap . . . Is that where the abandoned house is? Emma wondered. Are we that close?
Ms. Morales stepped farther out into the street, closer to all the police.
“I demand to know what’s going on here,” she said. Her eyes seemed to take in not just the police and Natalie and the three Greystones, but the Gustano kids cowering together, their handcuffs clinking in the sudden silence. “Why are those children—”
Natalie hurled herself at her mother, crying, “I did what you told me. Isn’t that all that matters?”
Natalie plowed into her mother’s side. Emma hoped it looked more like a hug than a tackle to the police officers. But Ms. Morales was knocked sideways, and she would have fallen if Natalie hadn’t clung to her so tightly.
“Come on!” Emma called to her brothers and the Gustanos. The Gustano kids hesitated, seeming equally terrified of Ms. Morales and the police surrounding them. Then Chess grabbed Finn in one arm and Other-Finn in the other and took off running. Rocky and Other-Emma bounced along behind him, half running, half dragged.
“Mom, you better not have unpropped that door,” Natalie muttered, pulling her mother along, too.
Emma raced around the corner of the fence, and, yes! The abandoned house stood before her. She sprinted for the front door. The can of corn was still there, holding it open. Emma crossed the porch in one step, burst through the door, and swung it open wide, making room for the other kids and Ms. Morales behind her.
“No! No! No!” Other-Emma screeched. “We’ll be trapped! Again!”
“There’s a tunnel!” Emma yelled back over her shoulder. “We’ll escape!”
“A tunnel?” Some of the police who’d hesitated before began running after the kids.
Do they know about the other world? Emma wondered.
Then a worse thought occurred to her: What if these awful people follow us into the other world?
As soon as Natalie and Ms. Morales scrambled from the porch into the house, Emma reached out and yanked the door shut, slamming it as hard as she could.
Locked, she thought disjointedly. It locks automatically. Now no one else can come in.
She turned and sprinted toward the basement stairs alongside Natalie and Ms. Morales.
A second later she heard a crash and the sound of splintering wood.
The police officers were hacking their way into the house.
Sixty
Chess
Chess shoved Finn toward the basement stairs and screamed, “Don’t stop until you get to the other side!”
Chess wanted to turn around and grab Emma, too, so he could make sure she was safe. Maybe Natalie and Ms. Morales as well. But he still held Other-Finn in his arms, and the little boy was struggling to get away. Rocky and Other-Emma were trying to pull Other-Finn away, too.
“I’m taking you to safety!” Chess screamed at them. “I promise!”
“We’re not going into another dark basement!” Other-Emma sobbed. “We’re not!”
Then a horrid thud sounded behind them. Daylight streamed in through a crack in the wall that hadn’t been there a moment before. Chess looked back and saw the blade of an ax coming through the drywall.
A matching echo came from the kitchen, and then, from the other corner of the living room. Were the police smashing their way into the house from all sides?
“This is the only way!” Chess screamed, dragging all three Gustanos toward the stairs.
They screamed but didn’t resist. Emma and Natalie came up from behind and shoved the Gustanos as well.
It was a wonder everyone didn’t just fall down the stairs. Chess pulled and tugged and pushed as he ran, and he lost track of whose elbow he yanked forward, or whose handcuff smashed against his face. The lights came on when Chess was about halfway down the stairs, and he realized that Finn must have hit the light switch. In the sudden glow, Chess saw that Finn had also swung the door of the little side room open.
“Come on! Come on!” Finn called from beside the door.
“Keep running!” Chess hollered back. “Don’t wait for us!”
Then they were at the bottom of the stairs. Chess heard footsteps from above. The police were in the house now.
“Go! Go! Go!” Chess screamed.
His voice blended with Finn yelling, “Come on!” and Emma and Natalie shouting, “Hurry!” and the Gustanos shrieking in such panic and fear that Chess couldn’t make out any exact words.
He couldn’t hear Ms. Morales.
He turned around and she was running, too—mostly, it seemed, because Natalie was pulling her. But she had such a dazed expression on her face, she didn’t even look like herself.
“Make sure the next door is open!” Emma shouted ahead to Finn, and Finn disappeared into the little room. Chess and the whole jumble of everyone else followed along, aiming for the door back into the tunnel.
“It’s dark in there!” Other-Finn wailed, and Chess was surprised to realize that he was still mostly carrying the little boy, still dragging him along.
“There’s light on the other side!” Emma called back.
Chess kept running. Before, stepping back into the tunnel from the alternate world had felt so odd, almost as if he’d ceased to exist. But this time as he crossed the threshold, Chess felt his mind clearing.
Because I understand what’s happening? Chess wondered. Because I’m shaking off the alternate world, and that’s worse than the tunnel?
He could still hear the police in the abandoned house behind him.
“Shut the door!” he screamed over his shoulder to Natalie. “Lock it if you can! Or jam something against it!”
But the police had axes. What would stop them from hacking away at the door to the tunnel, too?
Blindly, Chess kept running forward, deeper and deeper into the tunnel. Two lights suddenly glowed around him—the flashlights from Natalie’s and Ms. Morales’s phones. Those lights provided just enough glow that Chess didn’t trip or run straight into a wall. The whole group ran in silence now, as if everyone had lost words, or lost the breath to speak words. Chess’s mind kept spitting half thoughts at him: If they follow us . . . to our house . . . we should . . .
What if there wasn’t an end to that thought? What if there wasn’t anything they could do?
Somehow, suddenly, there was more light around him, and Chess could see shelves lining the walls. Familiar shelves: the ones they’d been so surprised to see that Mom had stocked with cans of food and shoeboxes full of cash.
Mom . . . , Chess thought. Where’s Mom now? Did she escape, too?
Chess heard footsteps behind him, but they were too heavy to be Mom’s. And there were too many of them.
These footsteps had to be the police.
They were in the tunnel, too.
“Hurry!” Natalie gasped, breaking into the brighter, more open space behind Chess. “That man—Joe—he said there’s a secret way to shut off the tunnel if anyone follows us. He said we get to the area with the shelves, and then—”
“Don’t let them catch us!” one of the Gustanos shrieked in terror. Chess was a little surprised to see that it was Rocky.
“Don’t worry. We won’t,” Emma said, patting his back. “Natalie, how—”
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Ms. Morales said. She had an expression on her face like she’d just awakened. “What was I thinking? Running like that just makes us all seem guilty. No matter what happened out there, this isn’t the way to handle it. I just need to talk to—”
“Mom, no!” Natalie said, grabbing her mother’s arm. “You don’t understand!”
“Natalie! The secret!” Emma called.
“It’s the same lever as before,” Natalie called, even as
she tugged back on her mom’s arm. “You pull it straight out from the wall like you’re trying to break it, not just turning it side to side. But—”
“Chess, help!” Finn called.
He was already trying to climb up the shelves toward the lever. But it was too high over his head.
Chess heard the footsteps behind them getting closer and closer. How much time did they have? What if the secret lever didn’t even work, and they still had to run and run and run? He saw the Gustanos on the floor, weeping. Would he have to carry all three of them up the basement stairs next? He saw Emma scramble toward the lever, too. He saw Ms. Morales shake off Natalie’s hand and turn around, as if she still intended to solve everything by talking to the police. She took a step back into the darkness.
In one huge stride, Chess crossed the floor and grabbed the lever. He jerked it straight out from the wall, and it broke off in his hand.
A split second later, everything exploded.
Sixty-One
Finn
Finn blinked and blinked and blinked. Dust settled around him, blocking his view.
“Chess!” he screamed. “Emma!”
“Finn?” Two voices answered: his brother’s and his sister’s.
No, it was three voices—there was an echoing “Is that you, Finn?”
Other-Emma.
And then a fourth, slightly deeper: “Are you all right? Is everyone okay?”
That was Rocky.
Finn lifted his head, still blinking. He was jumbled up on the floor with Chess and Emma: Her elbow was in his ear; Chess’s knee was in Finn’s rib cage. Beside them, the Gustano kids were equally tangled together.
But no one looked hurt. No one was bleeding. No one had any broken bones sticking out.
“Natalie?” Finn called.
“Over . . . here.”
Her voice sounded weaker, but maybe that was just because she was farther away. The air seemed clearer now: The dust had settled, and the stench was gone. Behind Natalie, shelves leaned and sagged. A pile of cans and jars lay beneath the shelves, all of them dented and squashed and broken, scattered across the floor. While Finn watched, another can slowly dropped to the floor, a delayed reaction. He blinked again, trying to make sense of what he saw. In a few places, the wood of the shelves had splintered and cracked, and dirt and bits of drywall sifted down through the holes, as if the earth behind the shelves was straining to fill the entire basement.
There hadn’t been shelves behind Natalie before. There hadn’t been dirt either. There’d been a huge, hollow tunnel.
And Ms. Morales.
“Mom?” Natalie called. She sat up straight. “Where’s Mom? She was right here!”
“She . . . she stepped back. . . .” Chess seemed to choke on his own words. He looked at the metal lever in his hand, and scrambled to his feet. He hit the broken lever against the wall. “There’s no place for it to fit anymore! No sign that it was ever attached! It’s like—”
“Like there was nothing here but a hidden room,” Emma said, her voice stunned. “Like it wasn’t a tunnel to anywhere.”
Natalie whipped out her phone.
“I have service again!” she cried. She hit her finger against the phone’s screen, then screamed into it, “Mom! Answer!”
A ringing came from beneath a pile of smashed jars at the bottom of the shelves.
“Her phone’s here, but she isn’t?” Natalie cried incredulously. She let her own phone drop to the floor. She stood and began digging her fingers into the dirt trickling through the broken shelves. “Mom!”
“The phone must have mostly been in this room,” Emma said. “Ms. Morales mostly . . . wasn’t.”
Finn went over and wrapped his arms around Natalie’s waist.
“Your mom,” he said. “My mom. And Joe. They’ll find . . .”
Each other, he wanted to say. Another way out. Us.
Emma and Chess limped over to the broken shelves, too. They patted Natalie’s shoulders and pressed their hands against the shattered wood and the wall of dirt. Both Emma and Chess moved with the same air of disbelief as Natalie.
“We went to rescue our mom,” Chess said dazedly. “And . . . we lost your mom instead.”
Natalie collapsed against the broken wall and splintered shelves, her face buried in her arms. Now it was more like Chess, Emma, and Finn were holding her up.
“We’re sorry,” Emma whispered.
Finn had never heard his sister sound like that before, so utterly defeated. So utterly lost.
He turned his face to the side, because he couldn’t bear to look at her, couldn’t bear to see her and Chess and Natalie reaching out again and again to touch the dirt that had replaced the tunnel. He couldn’t bear to watch them trying to understand what couldn’t be understood, or accept what couldn’t be accepted. He couldn’t even bear to watch the cans still rolling off the last shelf and dropping to the floor one . . . by . . . one.
But Finn caught a faster movement out of the corner of his eye: Rocky, Other-Emma, and Other-Finn on the floor behind him, all of them scrambling for the phone Natalie had dropped.
“Look,” Finn whispered, and Natalie, Chess, and Emma turned around.
Before them, Rocky stabbed his finger against the screen, hitting numbers. Then all three of the Gustano kids clustered around the phone, screaming into it, “Mom! Mom! We got away from the kidnappers!”
“We’re free now!”
“Come get us! Oh, please, come get us!”
Finn couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, and that was probably a good thing. It would have made him cry. He looked back, and Natalie had tears streaming down her face as she watched the Gustano kids. Emma and Chess did, too.
“We saved them,” Emma said.
“We did what Mom wanted,” Chess whispered. “And she said . . . she said she’s protected by what she knows, and those kids weren’t protected at all. . . .”
Finn realized that he’d been trying to say things wrong before.
“And next time we’ll save her,” he corrected himself. “And Ms. Morales. And Joe. We’ll find another way in. Another tunnel. Next time.”
He expected the big kids to get that look in their eyes that meant they were going to lie to him. He expected them to pat his head and put on fake cheer to assure him, “Of course! Everything’s going to be fine!”
But Chess only straightened his spine. Emma lifted her chin in the air. Natalie clutched his hand. It was like Finn had helped them.
And then Other-Finn tugged on Finn’s arm. He smiled his gap-toothed smile, and behind the snot and tears and dirt smeared across his face, his eyes glowed. They were the exact same shape and color as Finn’s. And for now, they held the exact same hope and confidence.
“You can do it,” Other-Finn said. “If you could rescue us, you can do anything.”
Epilogue
Chess, Emma, Finn, and Natalie
The kids emerged from the Greystone house into a neighborhood swarming with police and firefighters. Yellow tape was everywhere, stretching from tree to tree carrying the words, “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” The Gustanos stiffened at the sight of the police, but Finn, whom they seemed to trust the most now, whispered to them, “No, no, these police are good guys. Everything’s okay.”
And somehow the Gustano kids had the sense not to ask questions in front of the adults, who were all shouting questions of their own.
“Did you smell any natural gas odor in there?”
“Did you see any flames?”
“Has everyone from your house been evacuated?”
Emma was the only one who managed to get a question in edgewise: “You think we just went through a natural gas explosion?”
One of the firefighters took pity on her and answered, “Well, that or an earthquake. Plain old sinkhole’s another possibility—right now nobody’s getting the story straight.”
And then one of the cops noticed the handcuffs on the Gustano kids, and Natalie
and the Greystones had to focus on getting their story straight.
“We’ve been away because our mother’s out of town on business, and we came back to check on our cat, and these kids were trapped down there,” Chess said.
“They said they’d been kidnapped in Arizona, and the kidnappers kept moving them around—they just arrived here today,” Natalie added.
“Please, can you take care of them?” Finn ended, smiling his most innocent smile. “Get them back to their parents as soon as you can?”
And then the Gustano kids were whisked away, and the Greystone kids and Natalie only had to deal with firefighters for a while.
“I’m sure your parents are going to want to know that the four of you are safe,” one of the kindliest-looking firefighters said.
“Well, my mom dropped us off, and then she was just sitting in that SUV over there waiting for us, and . . .” Natalie did not have to use any acting skills at all to make her eyes widen at the sight of the empty SUV. She took off running toward it, crying, “Mom! Mom! Where are you, Mom?”
The firefighters ran after her, and for a moment, Chess, Emma, and Finn were left alone. They could hear the firefighters speaking gently to Natalie: “Young lady, can we call someone for you?” “Oh, your father . . . can you give us his number?”
Chess put his arms around his little brother’s and sister’s shoulders.
“They’ll be asking us that question soon, too,” he warned them. “And when they can’t find Mom, we have to be ready to . . .”
“Go live with strangers,” Emma finished for him.
Chess was surprised that she’d reached that conclusion so quickly, without first suggesting their old babysitter, Mrs. Rabinsky (who, he had to admit, always seemed tired out after just one night with them) or some neighbor like Mrs. Childers.
Greystone Secrets #1 Page 24
