Kingdom Keepers VII

by Pearson, Ridley

  Finn Whitman is dancing with Amanda Lockhart. Truth be told, he doesn’t hear the music. He’s pretty much in an alternate universe—a realm in which Amanda is the sun. She throws off heat and brilliance that make his cheeks redden. Four whole hours of this—whoever came up with the idea of prom night should be immortalized, Finn thinks. They deserve a national monument in Washington, D.C., a library on the banks of the Mississippi, and a statue in Central Park.

  Amanda’s arms are clasped around his neck; his hands hold her waist. They aren’t all glued together the way some of the other kids are. There’s a sliver of distance between them that feels magnetic; Finn has to hold himself back from pressing closer.

  “This is nice,” Amanda says. The queen of understatement.

  “Not really,” Finn says. He feels her body tense in apprehension. A cloud of confusion suddenly hangs between them. Amanda seems ready to push away. He speaks in a whisper. “It goes so far beyond ‘nice,’ so far beyond amazing and perfect and brilliant and glorious and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, that you ought to have to sit in the corner for making it sound so underwhelming.”

  Amanda’s arms slip down from around his neck to his back and she compresses the space between them. For an instant, they hug. It’s quick, but powerful.

  “Thank you.”

  Her breath, so close to his ear, sends chills down his spine.

  “My only complaint, and it’s a small one: it had to be Disney World.”

  “Can you believe it?” She laughs. “More work than treasure.”

  He nearly corrects her. The expression is “more work than pleasure” or “more work than leisure.” But he lets it go. Learning to care about someone means trying not to correct or criticize.

  By work, Amanda is referring to Finn’s own version of an alternate universe, a universe in which she and her sister, Jess (who isn’t her biological sister) have become full-fledged citizens. Amanda and Jess now travel in the same orbit as Finn and his four closest friends, who have all earned full college scholarships by serving as models for Disney hologram hosts in the theme parks.

  The internal Disney technical term for the role Finn and his four friends play in the parks is Disney Host Interactive or Daylight Hologram Image: DHI. What started essentially as a modeling job has grown into something more complex; the kids—they were so young when they all started, Finn thinks—learned that they’d actually been recruited to form a five-person strike force, the Kingdom Keepers. That’s the nickname the Internet community has assigned Finn and the other DHIs. Their real job was to enter the parks at night and battle a dark force attempting to corrupt the park experience. Disney villains who wanted to take over the parks—dubbed Overtakers—were wreaking havoc. The DHIs were meant to put an end to all that.

  It turned out that the OTs’ ambitions went far beyond stealing cars from Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin; they meant to destroy the magic of the parks, the magic of Disney. They were instigating a revolution, and the DHIs turned out to be the only force standing in their way.

  For the past several years, Finn and his co-DHIs, Philby, Charlene, Maybeck, and Willa, have been more Navy SEAL than hologram host. And even though Amanda and Jess are not official DHIs, Philby and the Keepers have secretly installed the girls’ data onto the DHI computer servers, enabling them as holograms. All of the Keepers have, on numerous occasions, risked their lives to keep the magic alive. If they’d known from the start what they were getting into, maybe they wouldn’t have volunteered. But the expansion of their responsibilities just kind of crept up on them. On one level, Finn thinks, their mentor and leader, an original Disney Imagineer, tricked them into accepting their roles: they were told that if they bailed, Disney would never be the same. Thanks for the warning, Finn thinks grimly.

  It has been three years since Finn lost his friend Dillard Cole in the Mexican jungle. Dillard died because of the Overtakers. Since that dark day, the Kingdom Keepers have enjoyed three years of relative quiet. Yet not a single night has passed that Finn hasn’t dreamed of that awful moment. Finn can’t help but feel that he was responsible for Dillard’s death. But according to their fellow DHIs, that is far from the truth.

  After he returned from Mexico, Finn’s parents made him go to counseling. That came to an abrupt halt when Finn showed up one day as a DHI and shocked the psychologist by walking through the office door without opening it. It was the psychologist who needed therapy after that.

  Next, they put Finn on “medication.” That ill-conceived solution lasted all of one week. He slept better and didn’t dream about Dillard, but he didn’t feel like himself. Finn and his parents decided it wasn’t worth it. Weirdly, the ordeal drew him closer to his parents, especially his mom. For a long time he’d felt alone as a Kingdom Keeper. His mom eventually rallied behind him, but then became a victim of the Overtakers herself. Not a good situation. Throughout an entire fifteen-day voyage on a Disney cruise ship, Finn worried he might never get his real mother back. Now their family was reunited, feeling somehow stronger than before. And Finn’s mom knew what it was like to live with the fear of the Overtakers.

  “Can you believe how long we’ve known each other?” Finn asks, and then feels stupid. “Sorry! That came out awkward.”

  “No it didn’t.”

  “I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant—what you mean. I know you, remember? You mean that we’ve been friends—just friends—for a long time now. That both of us…that sometimes it doesn’t feel exactly like friends.” Amanda giggles softly. Nervously.

  For Finn, the sound of her laughter is sweeter than any of the songs the DJ has played.

  “So I’m just going to say it,” Amanda continues.

  “Why don’t you?”

  Another giggle. He wills the song to keep playing. He wants this dance to go on for the rest of the night.

  “We’re more than just friends,” she says.

  “We are.” Can she hear his heart beating?

  “But we’ve kept it like this because to lose this isn’t worth what we might gain by it not being like this. Does that make any sense?”

  “It does.” Did it just get hotter in here? Is anyone else sweating the way he is? “But things change.”

  “They do,” she says.

  She can’t look at him. Is that good or bad? he wonders. “And as much as we’d like for things to stay the same, that isn’t how it works.”

  “No,” she says.

  He’s not sure how to take that. Does she mean that’s not how it works? Did he overstep? He says, “It could ruin things, right?”

  “Totally.”

  “And that would be horrible. The worst thing ever.”

  “The apocalypse.”

  They laugh. The couple next to them shoots them a look that says, Shut up!

  “Vampires,” he says. He kisses her neck, pretending to bite her.

  “Werewol—” His kiss catches her off guard. She stops talking so quickly that it sounds as if she inhaled an insect. “Do that again,” she whispers. “Please.”

  “I was just kidding around.”

  “Oh…”

  The moment passes. Finn could slap himself. She asked you to bite her neck again, you jerk! So he aims for the same spot.

  “No!” She stops him. “Never mind.”

  They dance through a chorus and another verse. “See?” Finn says, “I’d be horrible at this.”

  “I had to stop you because I didn’t want to faint on the dance floor.”

  It takes him a few seconds to process this. He relaxes. She isn’t angry. She isn’t going to walk off the dance floor and leave him standing alone.

  “Maybe just friends is a good thing,” he says.

  “Definitely.”

  He leans back so that he can see her eyes. Colored lights spin across her face. She seems to be glowing from within. Finn knows it’s just an effect of the lighting, but he convinces himself it’s more than that. They’ve stopped dan
cing despite the continuing music. She didn’t mean it. He didn’t mean it. This is it: the moment. He never quite pictured it like this. But here it is. Their heads move slowly closer. Her lips part ever so slightly. He can’t believe it’s finally going to happen—again, now—a lifetime after their first kiss.

  “Finn!”

  Finn and Amanda jump away from each other. Whatever they just had shatters into pieces on the floor and melts away. Finn can’t breathe—but he could put a fist through Philby’s face.

  What is he doing here? Philby doesn’t even go to their school. And he isn’t dressed up for a prom; he’s dressed the way he always is, like…well, like Philby: preppie, with the Scottish air that comes from his red hair and freckles. But Philby has clearly finally hit his long-delayed growth spurt—he looks like he’s grown about six inches since the end of the DHIs’ Disney cruise. In fact, all the Keepers look different now, Finn realizes. It’s like they’re not themselves anymore.

  Except Amanda. She’s the same person, but somehow better than back then. Amazing Amanda.

  “What the—?” Finn is trying to process the interruption.

  Philby keeps his voice low so that the nearby dancers cannot hear him over the throbbing music. But Finn hears, Amanda hears. “Your phone,” Philby hisses in a patronizing tone.

  “I’m dancing here,” Finn says, gesturing toward Amanda, whom Philby has yet to acknowledge.

  “Hey, Mandy,” Philby says. “Sorry.” Polite, gentlemanly. Then back to Finn, and now he’s condescending again. “Your phone is off.”

  “It’s on Do Not Disturb. As in: Do Not Disturb!”

  “Something’s going down. They need us.” Philby looks at his friends intently. “They need us to take a ‘nap.’”

  For the last three years since the cruise, things have been quiet. The Keepers have officially done little more than some image maintenance and new voice recordings for their in-park holographic guides. Unofficially, they have gone on occasional DHI “surprise inspections” of the Walt Disney World parks—late night walkabouts to make sure the peace is being kept. Now this.

  One everyday skill that all the Keepers have developed as a result of their DHI service is the ability to fall asleep easily. All the Keepers, and Amanda and Jess too, can lie down and drift off in a matter of minutes. Once asleep, they can be “crossed over” and make the jump to their DHI hologram form—a bio-electronic mechanism that hasn’t ever been fully explained to any of them. Nor is it fully understood by anyone but the old man who serves as their mentor, Wayne Kresky.

  “Where?” Finn asks.

  “Everyone else is in the back of Maybeck’s van, waiting.”

  Finn looks Philby up and down, taking the measure of his seriousness, and decides this is not a practical joke.

  With one word, Amanda lets Finn know that she both understands the situation and feels hurt nonetheless—a one-two punch that leaves his stomach in a knot. “Go,” she says.

  OUTSIDE THE TUNNELS, Tia Dalma takes her rest in the shade of a tree beneath the blue moonlight. It is sweltering, the air thick as mud. Jungle birds caw and complain. Creeping critters crush and disturb the oversize foliage, their intrusion very much felt though they go unseen.

  Tia Dalma raises her hand like a priestess. The buzzing jungle goes instantly quiet. As still as a pond on a windless morning.

  A rhythmic thumping intrudes, like a hammer striking metal. It amplifies the pain in her head, encouraging anger to rise from her belly like lava. A mechanical, entirely human sound, it has no place in the thick of the Mexican jungle. She wills it away, but to no effect. The unwanted clanging is as steady as a heartbeat.

  The remains of the walls and temples are revealed in the moonlight as rubble, oversize cubes of weathered limestone tossed about as if a child has wrecked his castle of wooden blocks. They form a festive weed-and-vine-covered courtyard, with a sacrificial table at its center. Two pyramids have been lopped off at the top, like bridal cakes decapitated. A third remains intact, the stones stacked in diminishing tiers like massive stairs rising to the heavens. The rock is crusted with colorful lichen, reminding Tia Dalma of spilled blood, with white splashes of bird droppings and vivid green weeds, air plants, and orchids forgoing dirt and living off the wet of the air itself. The pyramid has stood scabbed in silence for thousands of years, has no doubt witnessed atrocities, marriages, deaths and births, cyclones, deluge, and drought. But this constant, dull pounding from the distance arrives as an abomination.

  Already agitated by her general lack of progress in the catacombs, Tia Dalma can take it no longer. A woman who gets what she wants and suffers no fools, she plots her course, electing to climb the stepped central stripe that symmetrically divides the pyramid. No stranger to religious ceremony, she is mindful of this elaborately carved aisle’s possible significance, imagining—even sensing—a procession of high priests ascending it in colorful robes as thousands of jungle-dwelling peasants gather to witness the spectacle. She can see herself among them—a high priestess, in gold and jewels, clad in a breastplate of hammered silver and a necklace of mummified animal heads, carrying a black ironwood staff topped with the hollow-eyed stare of a human skull. She carries herself accordingly as she climbs: square-shouldered, straight-backed. Her mystic powers transcend the present; instead of the intrusive pounding, she hears thousands of voices chanting a guttural language she cannot understand. It drives her and the priests ever higher. No commoner is allowed the privilege of seeing the world from the top of the temple’s peak, of looking into the future, of viewing the past, of talking directly to the gods.

  Wooden drums take up the beat of the chant as the priests climb higher. The high priest arrives at the summit, stops, and turns dramatically to look down on his flock. His face is painted like a monster’s. Bare-chested men in the crushing crowd begin leaping and cheering; women faint. Children cry.

  Tia Dalma finds herself standing upon the flat-topped pyramid, her right arm extended as if holding a staff, looking down at the tangle of jungle that has consumed everything in its path but the most inhospitable rock.

  From behind her comes the rhythmic punch of metal on metal, the sound like the ticking of a giant clock. She spins to address the intruder, but is faced with the treetops of jungle as far as she can see. If there are roads, they do not reveal themselves; nor do structures or villages. Tiny specks—flying birds—interrupt the sky, some in groups, some solo. Only through focused concentration is Tia Dalma able to detect a smudge of gray at treetop level—a faint stain of discoloration in the verdant green, like a watermark on a kitchen window.

  The longer she stares, the more evident the tiny cloud becomes. There must be lights beneath it. This place is the source of the mechanical heartbeat. This surgical hole in the jungle’s perfection. Humans. Environmental cancer.

  She thinks to stop this sound, to inflict her powers of witchcraft upon anyone vulgar enough to imagine they can disturb a holy shrine such as the one upon which she stands. The hubris! How reprehensible are those who disturb and disrupt without awareness of those around them.

  But the longer she stands atop the temple, her foul mood festering like an open sore, the more she feels a slight vibration rising through her bare feet, into her ankle bones, and up her shins. She kneels and places her open palms on the warm rock. Yes, the ground is shaking.

  She zeroes in on the underbrush below and to the right, the earthen roof of the catacombs through which she has just wandered. The tunnels are part of the limestone cave systems that can be found in abundance throughout Central America. Here, the priests dictated a human fashioning, carving and connecting, blocking and redirecting, turning what nature offered into a labyrinthine puzzle that only they could navigate. If a commoner entered, he or she never came back. The priests’ abilities anointed them as superior and god-chosen. Untouchable.

  But if Tia Dalma’s knees feel the tremor, so too do the limestone walls and ceilings of the catacombs.

  Only now, as h
er unflinching eyes tear up, does she realize she has gone about this all wrong. Worse, she has condemned the people—the humans—responsible for the vexing sound. Instead of condemnation, she should have tried understanding. Instead of repulsion, she should have embraced, even praised their technology!

  She sees so clearly where she has gone wrong. If the Beast remains alive in the suffocating chambers beneath her, there may yet be a way to free him.

  THE WORKER’S SUN-BAKED SKIN is the color of tobacco, his unfocused eyes bloodshot. He stands, facing the jungle lit primarily by moonlight. Behind him, several electric lights reveal a tangled mass of machinery that connects to an assemblage of aluminum and steel rising like a church steeple. From here tolls the impertinent pounding of metal on metal that drew Tia Dalma. If the temple from which she has just walked represents a sacred place where humanity can connect to the gods, this place is quite the opposite.

  In her hand, Tia Dalma holds a doll crudely fashioned from leaves and twigs, bound together with tendrils of green vine. It follows a human form: legs, arms, the stub of a neck upon which is lanced a chicozapote fruit to symbolize the head. Reminiscent of a child’s plaything, it is anything but. It serves no little girl’s purpose. It is not a soldier in a boy’s imaginary army. This doll serves a far more devious purpose. Her purpose.

  Following her silent summons, the worker is drawn to the jungle’s edge.

  Tia Dalma adjusts the doll’s left arm—and grins perversely as the worker’s left arm moves accordingly. Right arm. Echo. Swivel of the head left to right—perfection!

  “The process must be compromised,” she says, speaking the man’s native Spanish so fluently, and with such a fine accent, that she might be this man’s mother. In his mind, the voice sounds like a fusion of his mother’s bidding and commandments from God. There is no denying it, no refuting its authority. To disobey would be tantamount to committing a sin.