The test car flew toward the end of the line. Finn knew where to expect the sensation of being slowed by the brakes, and it didn’t come. Instead, the car maintained speed as it swung left, following the track. The left wheels lifted off the concrete, then thumped back down. The car swung right as the narrators both said something but the car was moving too fast for Finn to hear it. Finn reached out and grabbed for the dash as the car entered a second brake test at a speed he’d never felt before. Propelled down a straightaway at an unbelievable speed, it seemed certain to crash. Again Finn fought the seat belt. Again, he did nothing but tighten it a notch across his waist.
“Braking!” the woman’s voice shouted.
But the car didn’t brake. It swung left again and, as before, nearly jumped the track—throwing Finn to his right, the left wheels lifting, the car balanced only on its two right wheels, then slamming down as it turned right.
It rolled to a stop inside the heat chamber, the narrator saying something about “extreme test conditions.” Banks of infrared lights came on and the room quickly warmed. Finn knew the ride, knew the car was supposed to continue right on through to the next chamber. He could see it ahead: the cold room.
But the car stopped. The hundreds of heat lamps remained on and Finn felt the temperature quickly rising, dangerously rising. For a moment the heat had actually felt good, but now it did not. He guessed it was well over a hundred degrees inside the car and gaining rapidly.
105….
110….
He was beginning to bake. Sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. He struggled against the restraints. His face was burning. The metal of the car was too hot to touch. He pulled his hands in. He thought he smelled his hair burning.
Plastic began to melt. The disintegration moved toward him from both sides, trying to meet in the middle. If that kind of heat reached him…
Smoke rose from the vehicle. A label adhered to the side caught fire, flames licking up to his right.
Finn was crazy now, jumping and bucking and fighting the seat belt restraint, trying to slip up and out. The thing was impossibly tight. If he hadn’t tried so hard to break out earlier he might have made it; but it had cinched so tight that he felt choked around the waist, and he wasn’t coming out of it. If he could calm down he might all-clear his way out, but he was anything but calm.
“Welcome…”
He looked up through his blurred vision—it felt as if his eyelashes had burned off—and into the blue-and-white cold room only twenty feet in front of him.
She was taller than he remembered, her green face longer, her chin more pointed, the purple lining of her robe more…purple. Smoke swirled around the car. The melting plastic inched toward him, a thermometer warning him of how little time he had. He was going to combust.
“You never know when to quit, do you, Finn?”
He had never liked that she knew his name. Did not like to hear her say it now. He understood the heat now—it had less to do with the lights, and much more to do with this witch. Her association with electricity—was she part electricity herself?—explained the intense temperature. And what better place to trap him than in a room adjoined by a walk-in freezer big enough for a car?
“Where is he?” Finn called out.
“You never let well enough alone, young man.” She raised her hand and pointed at him and what looked like the trail left by a laser welder crept up the car’s hood, melting a line into the metal.
Finn could smell burning rubber. The tires were going.
“You are dabbling where you shouldn’t be dabbling,” she said.
“You and Chernabog should have kept moving, should have moved on. But you can’t, can you? You can’t leave the parks. You’re stuck here, where you were created. You want so badly to scare us—to scare everyone—but you’re pitiful really. A sad, silly witch who can’t do anything but make trouble. How sick is that?”
She moved her green finger and the red laser line melting through the sheet metal of the hood changed direction as well.
“Silly? You still think so? It’s fun to watch you burn. To watch you pay for all the trouble you’ve brought me. You and your self-righteous friends. You will come and go, the five of you, your friend Wayne. You’ll see. But I will live here forever. I am immortal, am I not? Fifty years old and I haven’t aged a day. You try that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Finn said. “You look a hundred to me.”
She didn’t like that. She twisted her horrible face into a ball of meanness, of spite and hatred.
“It wouldn’t do to just kill you. You must be made to suffer first.”
Where had he been? What had he been thinking?
He felt like Dorothy in Oz: he’d been wearing the slippers all along. Slippers that this green witch did not know he possessed.
He closed his eyes and pictured a train tunnel.
“Don’t you dare pass out on me, boy! I want to hear you scream. I want to see you suffer. Open your eyes.”
He pictured a deep, bottomless void of black—a cool dark pit so perfect that no sound escaped.
He felt his hands tingle.
She might have been saying something, but he didn’t hear.
He felt his legs twitch and jump with static, like his nerves misfiring just before sleep.
The train’s light came toward him, growing brighter and more intense. He leaned forward and came out of the chest strap—there was no heat, no cold. He felt nothing but the intense tingling in his limbs and a fullness in his heart. He sat forward. The waist strap passed through him. He pulled up and out of it.
The melting plastic crept from either side and joined, melting the seat he’d been sitting in, just as the witch’s laser went straight up his legs and chest, passing right through him.
In complete disbelief she looked first to her finger and then to the boy, as if there had to be something mechanically wrong, as if she needed to put another battery in her finger, or sharpen her dark purple fingernail.
Finn stood in the smoking car, shimmering.
“Things are really heating up,” he said to her, moving to jump out of the car.
“Finn! Catch!” It was Philby! He was running up the track toward Finn, his left forearm raised against the intense heat. He threw the sword. It flew through the air, end over end, and Finn reached to catch it, to snatch it out of the air the way they did in movies. But he was all-clear and the sword passed right through his hand and landed. He would have to come out of all-clear to pick up the sword—and that would also make him vulnerable. His arms tingled. He picked up the sword.
He slashed and sliced as he jumped free of the vehicle and marched steadily toward Maleficent, who was already retreating deeper into the cold chamber.
As she backed up, the heat on Finn’s back quickly lessened.
Finn heard a spray behind him: Philby had grabbed a fire extinguisher.
Maleficent was backed up to the end of the cold room now. Finn didn’t feel the cold, only the swinging steel in his hand.
The infrared lights went off as Philby doused the last of the flames.
“We will defeat you,” Finn said, still advancing steadily. “The longer you drag this out, the less likely it is that your character will survive. You understand that, don’t you? The stories can be rewritten. Some of us die, it’s true. But others are simply written out of the story. Edited out of the film. Removed. Permanently. Erased.” He witnessed her reaction—a horror he’d not seen on her confident face before. “It’s what you fear the most, isn’t it? What you Overtakers are running from? Erasure? Insignificance? The fear that your ride, your attraction will be removed from the park the way others have been? One day you’re here. One day you’re gone.”
“What do you know?” she said.
He didn’t quite believe his eyes as he watched her melt into the gray concrete floor, watched her reform into a snake equal in size to Gigabyte, but bearing a definite green hue. His hands and feet tingled, and he realized tha
t fear had gotten the better of him.
He didn’t like snakes.
She came after him with a flick of her mighty tail, slithering toward him with blinding speed. She opened her awful mouth, revealing a pair of fangs that had to be two feet long.
He raised the sword and prepared to strike.
Maleficent flicked her tongue in the direction of the half-melted test car, and the car made a popping noise and came to life, its headlights snapping on brightly. It rolled toward Finn, gaining speed.
From the front—Maleficent in snake form. From behind—the car. And Finn in the middle, raking the heavy sword left to right, right to left, keeping the eager snake at bay. Maleficent lunged, fangs extended, but Finn sliced for her head and she retreated.
“Look out!” Philby said. “Jump when I say!”
Finn dared not look back. Maleficent struck again. Finn caught her on the side of the head with the blade. She bled—green blood—crying out as she jerked her head back.
“Now!” Philby said.
Finn jumped straight up.
The car cut under him. He tumbled backward, rolled along the hood, and was dumped into the seat area, where Philby grabbed hold of him.
“Duck!” Philby roared.
Finn tucked into a ball just as Maleficent’s bleeding snake head cut through the air overhead, its fangs dripping a venom that looked like pus.
The car took off, gaining speed. The narrator said something about robots and picking up the pace.
The car moved faster and faster. And faster still.
“I don’t like this,” Philby said, struggling to sit down in a seat. He helped Finn turn around and planted him in the seat next to him.
The test car was moving much too fast. Faster than it was engineered for. Through one turn. Around another to the left. Another to the right. The tires screeched through the next turn to the left and louder still to the right. More turns, the car rocking up onto its partially melted tires. A truck came at them head-on and nearly hit them—a projection that Finn had forgotten about. The car should have slowed then, but it did not. It was moving far too quickly for them to jump.
It whipped through a few scenes that should have been taken at a leisurely pace and headed for the barrier test at far too high a speed. The barrier was timed to lift out of the way of the oncoming car at the last second—one of the ride’s many thrills—but the timing was set up for a much slower speed. The car arrived before the barrier lifted. It rammed the barrier head-on, punched a hole through it, and broke out into the night air outside—onto the oval track and the fastest, most dangerous part of the ride.
33
CHARLENE STRUGGLED TO maintain consciousness as Mission: Space flew out of control. The center screen, which was supposed to simulate a view out the space capsule, showed them landing on Mars, balancing on a precipice above a thousand foot fall, and then…
Falling over the edge.
The sensation inside the capsule was of both falling and weightlessness, a nauseating combination that left Maybeck making unpleasant noises next to her.
Oh, please don’t, Charlene found herself thinking. If he puked inside the pod it was going to reek, and she would likely follow.
They crashed at the bottom in a roar of metal and rock and she wondered if she hadn’t been half-DHI at that moment what effect it would have had on her body. She assumed she would have passed out. But she remained awake and hyperalert, charged with adrenaline.
The screen had gone dark upon impact. It now sputtered static and came back to life.
A man’s face filled the screen: an old man.
Wayne.
“If you’re seeing this, you have survived an arduous journey and Jessica has managed to see what I’d hoped she’d see, and that means I am speaking to one or more of the Kingdom Keepers, and only to the Kingdom Keepers. It also means that something has happened to me, either of a temporary or permanent nature, and that necessitates diligence on your part, and likely requires a great deal of you in the hours to come. It’s probably dark in the capsule, so let me take care of that.”
The lights came on. The effect was eerie—as if he were right there with them.
“That should do it,” he said. “If you want to take notes, you’ll find paper and a pen beneath the center seat.”
Charlene found them and prepared to write.
“I don’t believe this,” Maybeck said. “I thought I’d seen everything.”
“Hush!” she said.
“The Overtakers are planning something of a scale we’ve not seen before,” Wayne continued. His eyes tracked to his right. He was afraid of being discovered. “It will come on the heels of a deception of the worst kind. Beware your friends and know your enemies. I trust you have found the carousel and that Philby knew what to do or you wouldn’t be here.”
He was being vague, perhaps in the fear that despite his efforts the Overtakers might discover his message. Charlene scribbled down as much as she could of what he was saying.
“Remember: we stand under it to get out of the rain but it lives above our brain.” He glanced furtively to his right again.
“I haven’t got long.” He smiled, wincing. “None of us do. The solution is in Norway. Finn must know that. Trust it. By all means, he must use it. Now and later. He—you all—will need more help. What I’m talking about: it is mightier than the sword.…At some point you will meet my daughter, I presume, if you haven’t already. I didn’t name her by chance, you know? Do you know? If you don’t now, you will before long.”
The image fizzled and went black. But just before he disappeared into a curtain of static, Wayne’s gaze shifted to his right and froze as terror filled his kind face and Charlene felt a horrible hollow in the pit of her stomach.
“That’s all?” Maybeck said.
“I wrote it down,” Charlene told him.
“Why is he always so…Wayne?”
“Because he is,” Charlene said. “He knows what they’re capable of. He’s careful because of that.”
“Yeah, but I mean, I seriously doubt any Overtaker could have survived what we just went through. He planned it brilliantly: being DHIs we don’t have the same mass, so there isn’t the same gravitational pull as on a normal person. A Cast Member or character would have tossed their cookies and passed out. He could put us through something no one else could make it through. So why not spill the beans once we get through all that?”
“Because that video is on a computer server somewhere. Maybe only a DHI could see it here, but what if it was discovered and viewed another way?”
Maybeck nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that.” A rare moment of humility. The spinning must have gotten to him, she thought.
“We need to tell the others,” she said. She tried the phone. With the pod’s door closed she had no reception.
“Which begs the question,” Maybeck said. “Now that we’re both in here, who is going to open the door?”
The screen spit static.
The door to the pod opened.
* * *
The catwalk led nowhere. Willa and Jess had walked only a few feet when the metal mesh bridge arrived at a dead end. Behind them loomed the closed door to the projection booth.
“There!” Jess said, pointing.
Through the small window that allowed the projector’s beam to reach the screen they could see a man’s head moving around.
Willa said, “Wayne wanted us to find that maintenance diary. We’re done here.” She glanced down. It was such a long way to the floor. “How are you with climbing?”
“As in?”
“There’s a ladder right here. It probably goes down to another catwalk. Maybe we can find our way down.”
“Probably? The best we can do is probably?”
“It’s better than being caught.”
Jess said, “Okay, I’ll go first.”
Jess forced herself not to look down. She placed her feet on each rung, careful to make sure she made conta
ct. The rungs were no more than a thin piece of steel, and slippery with a glossy gray paint.
“He’s coming!” Willa hissed down to Jess. “The door!”
Jess looked up through the mesh of the catwalk and saw the doorknob turning. She hurried down, moving dangerously fast. If she fell…
Willa climbed down quickly, and found that her ankles were suddenly in Jess’s face. Jess leaned back to avoid Willa’s shoes and nearly lost her grip. At last the toes of Jess’s shoes touched the catwalk below. Willa, moving too quickly, lost control. She slipped and fell the remaining few feet, crashing down onto the catwalk.
“Who’s there?” the man called out.
Looking down Willa saw at least four levels of catwalk, each connected to the next by ladders. The catwalks provided access to various levels of machinery, for repair and maintenance, creating a three-dimensional bridge system, a maze of narrow walkways that branched out or terminated in dead ends. Level 3, where the girls now stood, accessed the upper reaches of Soarin’s swings, the bench seating that lifted forty feet off the floor to provide the sensation of hang gliding.
Behind them, the New York flight was replaying, causing the light in the room to shift and change color, now a brilliant blue, now nearly pitch-black. The effect created a strobelike flicker so that one moment Jess couldn’t see Willa, and then a second later she got a clear look. It was a confusing and difficult environment to move around in without losing your balance or going over the rail.
Jess heard the clanking of the man above them running to the end of the Level 4 catwalk, and knew that once there, if he looked down he would see them.
Jess stumbled and lunged to the right.
Her arm disappeared.
She stopped and thrust her left arm forward: it vanished.
Now she hurried forward and tapped Willa on the back, not wanting to speak. Jess showed her how both hands disappeared when she put them beneath the two-foot-thick pipe that was the top hinge of the Soarin’ swings. Thick black rubber hydraulic tubing hung beneath the hinge arm, held there by wire strapping.
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