Kingdom Keepers V

by Ridley Pearson

  They both knew the truth. No matter how Amanda tried to comfort him, such a thing wasn’t possible.

  He was alone. Willingly or not, his own family had joined the other side.

  Finn spent the night with Dillard Cole, his closest friend outside the Keepers.

  Before he finally fell asleep, he tried to make sense of his mother’s green eyes. He cried at the thought of what his mother must be going through while under some spell. Seeing his mom as his enemy took some getting used to. He seethed with anger—hatred—for the Overtakers and everything they represented. How dare they drag his mother into this (even if Finn had done so in the first place)? How dare they compromise her? He wondered where she was. Still sitting in the car? Parked outside their home? In bed sleeping? One thing was for sure: it would take Finn’s father about a month to realize the color of his wife’s eyes had changed––he seemed oblivious to those things.

  As he drifted off to sleep, he saw a vision of his mother waiting outside Dillard’s house like a predator awaiting its prey. A mother, her son.

  He awoke with a start at five a.m. from a bad dream. He snuck back out Dillard’s window. His mother wasn’t there. He crept up the street. A dog barked loudly from within one house, causing Finn to jump. He took off running. His once peaceful neighborhood felt like a dangerous place now. Even the smallest of sounds sent ripples of terror through him. Finally arriving at the McVeys’ house, across the street from his own, he kneeled in the dim shadow of a bush and studied his home. He waited a full five minutes for any kind of movement inside. The horizon was dull with dawn, the overhead clouds beginning to warm with color. The air chilly. The grass wet.

  He found the hidden key, let himself into the garage, and a moment later he led his BMX quietly up the drive, climbed on, and pedaled off.

  * * *

  Amanda was drawn to the window. She would later tell Jess it had just been blind luck that she’d spotted Finn across the street from Mrs. Nash’s, but that wasn’t entirely true. Something had compelled her to peer behind the blind that always hung over the bedroom window. She couldn’t describe exactly what it was, but it was undeniable. A force of some kind. Like gravity pulling her. To him.

  There had been a time when she’d thought he was cute. Then came interesting. Then, intriguing. Beguiling. Now it was something compelling. Forceful. Chemical. The evolution of her feelings might have told her something except that she’d never experienced them before. The caterpillar doesn’t know it’s going to be a butterfly; it just happens.

  She couldn’t forget about the kiss. The power it had instilled in her to hold back the wave. How could such a thing happen? She’d been totally out of energy at that point; on the verge of giving up. And then his kiss, and all her power returned. And more. Maybe it had been the shadow of the kiss that had drawn her to the window.

  Jess joined her.

  “That’s strange,” Jess said.

  “Yes.”

  “Has he ever done that? Waited there like that?”

  “No,” Amanda answered.

  “You think something’s wrong?”

  She told her about Mrs. Whitman’s eyes and Finn’s inability to return home.

  “What’s he going to do if he can’t go home?”

  “The cruise,” Amanda answered. “The inaugural. They leave today. The five of them.”

  “So he’s here to say good-bye?” Jess said.

  “How should I know?”

  “I thought they go with their parents?”

  “Yes. Supposedly. Knowing Finn, he’ll find a way around that.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “Wayne can.”

  Jess nodded.

  “Are you going out there?” Jess asked. “You could tell him about…you know.”

  “I’m not going to tell him. That’s the point of a guardian angel. And I’m not going out there until we all leave for school. Are you kidding me? Mrs. Nash would kill me.”

  “But he looks so…I don’t know…empty.”

  “He does, doesn’t he?” Amanda said, sounding sad.

  “We should smuggle him some food.”

  “We need to get on the ship with them,” Amanda said.

  “That’s ridiculous! As if! Mrs. Nash would—”

  “Never know.”

  “It’s a two-week cruise! How are we supposed to disappear for two weeks and…” But Jess caught herself. “Seriously?” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “We’ll be super tired,” Jess said. “Besides…we already took care of this.”

  “But they don’t know her. She doesn’t know them.”

  “So the OTs can’t possibly make a connection. It’s perfect.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Think about it! We can sleep during the day.”

  Jess nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve thought this through, haven’t you?” She hesitated and looked back out the window. “It’s not just saving the parks anymore, is it? For you, I mean.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “When did you know?” Jess asked.

  “I’m not sure about anything.”

  “I think it’s very cool, the two of you.”

  “There is no ‘the two of us.’”

  “You sure?” Jess said.

  Amanda blushed. “I told you! I’m not sure of anything.”

  She couldn’t leave Mrs. Nash’s early without raising suspicion. Getting showered and eating breakfast (two Nash requirements) seemed to take forever. Finally it came time for the girls to head to their school buses. Amanda met Finn on the sidewalk.

  “Hey,” she said. “Rough night at your friend’s?”

  “Did you get in trouble?” he asked.

  “No. Jess covered for me.”

  “We leave today.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Fifteen days. But who’s counting?”

  “Wayne warned us—”

  “I was there, remember?”

  “I thought we could Skype, maybe. There’s Internet on the ship.”

  “Sure.” Mrs. Nash’s house had two computers on the first floor shared by eleven girls. They were dinosaurs, but one had been rigged with a camera and worked with Skype. You had to sign up on a clipboard to get fifteen minutes on the machine. Girls traded chores for extra Skype time, turning the minutes into a commodity. Amanda knew it was highly unlikely her minutes would ever link up with Finn’s cruise schedule, but she wasn’t about to be negative.

  “And maybe…I mean if Jess dreams anything out of the ordinary…”

  “I’ll email you.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You okay? About your mom, I mean.” She wanted to give him a hug. He looked frail. She didn’t have a mother, had never known her parents, but she could nonetheless imagine how seeing his mother with green eyes must have shaken him up.

  “I guess.” Finn looked back at her like a lost puppy. “Don’t miss the bus.”

  “I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “It’s a spell of some kind. The kids in school with the green eyes? Also a spell.”

  “It explains a ton of stuff.” She counted on her fingers as she elaborated. “That maybe joining the OTs wasn’t voluntary like we thought; that the stuff they do isn’t really them doing it all; that there’s somebody running around doing this to people, including to your mother.”

  “Maleficent,” Finn hissed. “I hate her. I’m going to kill her for this.”

  “Be careful she doesn’t use that as a weapon against you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, clearly angry.

  “How do we know what she had planned for your mother? What if it’s nothing more than to scare you, to freak you out, to tick you off?”

  “Then she succeeded.”

  “That’s my point.” She could hear him breathing hard. “Finn?” She’d never seen him quite like this.

  “How do we change h
er back? What if—?”

  “I know where you’re going with this, but you can’t think like that. We’ve done things that seemed impossible before.”

  “We haven’t cast spells! Not that I remember!”

  “Don’t be mad at me! I didn’t do this.”

  “You led them there!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How do you know you didn’t lead the OTs to the park?” he asked accusingly.

  “Because I didn’t.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “I can’t believe you’d even think that! I was not followed. I was insanely careful about that. If anything, it was you and your mother. It’s your family car, Finn. You think the OTs don’t know what car your mother drives?”

  “I think everything was all right until I heard you back there following me. Why’d you do that, anyway? Why didn’t you tell me you were in the park?”

  “Because of the rescue dummies.”

  “You saw them, I suppose?”

  “Yes. I saw them. I stayed back.”

  “So…if you saw them, why didn’t you warn me?”

  “How was I supposed to do that? Shout at you? Fire a flare? Scream?”

  Finn leaned into the handlebars. “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t believe you’d think that,” she mumbled. “I was trying to help you.”

  “And how’d that work out?”

  She stood up straight, her eyes stinging. “I think you’re tired.”

  “Tired of being tricked. Tired of being lied to.”

  “You can’t possibly mean that.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “We were nearly killed!” she reminded.

  “I was there,” he said.

  “I saved you! Us!”

  He rocked against the handlebars. “I…know,” he said. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  “You think that I faked all that?” She had trouble speaking between her heavy breaths. “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  She marched off, the tears starting to fall, her belly feeling like he’d punched her. Please don’t follow me! she willed.

  But there he was, pedaling idly at her side.

  “Go away!” Her choked voice betrayed her. She wanted to run.

  “Amanda.”

  “Don’t!”

  “I’m leaving,” he reminded. “Today.”

  “Then leave. Go. Go!”

  He applied the brakes and stopped. She continued forward. The most difficult steps of her life.

  “Amanda?” he called out.

  She wanted so badly to turn around and throw herself into him, to put the past few minutes behind and start all over, but her feet wouldn’t stop walking. She thought that this was where real life diverged from the way it happened in movies. Real life didn’t always work out. The sad truth was—and she knew this—that she didn’t know enough about boys and the way she felt about Finn to know what to do.

  No matter how much her life felt like fiction at times, it was anything but. She’d been abandoned. She’d been found. She’d run away and been found again. Up and down. In and out. The last two years with the Keepers had been so totally unreal—so wonderfully welcome—that they couldn’t have been made up. Now she and Finn were breaking up when they hadn’t officially been going together in the first place. How was she supposed to make sense of any of this?

  She tried to turn to look back at him. Her brain wouldn’t allow it. Foolish stubbornness on her part, or did he deserve it? They’d been through a rough night together. That’s all it was, she told herself.

  “That’s all it is,” she repeated aloud, drawing curious looks as she approached the bus stop.

  On an unseasonably cold spring night, a small basement window at ground level popped open, filling the girl’s nostrils with salt air. The house was not actually a house at all, but a former army barracks. This was the only window in the complex rigged to avoid sounding the alarm. Months earlier, a magnet that mated with a wired sensor had been carefully removed from the window frame and secretly taped to its wired counterpart. Normally, if the window were opened, the magnetic field between the two magnets would be broken and the alarm would sound. Rigged as it was, the magnetic connection remained intact. The window could be opened and closed at will.

  The girls of Barracks 14, ranging in age from eight to eighteen, used this window to come and go without being noticed. Sometimes departures facilitated food runs or attempts to contact family. Sometimes it was to try to find a boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes, like tonight, it was for something much more risky.

  The girl climbing out, Mattie Weaver, was embarking on a quest that might, with any luck, take her away from this place forever. If caught, she wasn’t sure of the consequences. She was only sure of one thing: that when a friend calls needing a favor, and that favor can be accomplished without physically hurting someone, it’s a friend’s duty to respond. It was part of the code of Barracks 14. Just as she assumed it was at the half dozen other barracks on the abandoned military base—although she rarely, if ever, got the chance to talk to any of those kids.

  She crawled out and pulled the half-window carefully shut behind her. Tera Bergstrom had promised to close the window by morning. The window was valuable to everyone in 14. Mattie couldn’t go wrecking it for others by doing anything stupid.

  She lay in the damp grass for an impossibly long time, chilled to the bone by the time she dared raise to her knees.

  She stood and ran. Building to building.

  The gate would be guarded, but if her information was accurate there was a place to crawl under the fence by Building 7.

  She moved in that direction as carefully as she’d ever moved.

  In the glow of warm sunshine, a magnificent vessel rose fifteen stories from the water’s blue surface, towering over the four-acre cruise terminal. A combination of rich black, vivid red, and royal blues, the ship glistened and sparkled like an unwrapped gift.

  Inside the terminal, the pulse of excitement rippled through the thousands of Disney enthusiasts, young and old, who were waiting to board. Reporters and film crews worked through the massive crowd interviewing and photographing those lucky enough to be on the Disney Dream’s Panama Canal passage. The Dream was to be the first commercial cruise ship to pass through the upgraded Panama Canal.

  “So tell us what it’s like,” a Spanish-speaking reporter asked a young couple who appeared surprised by the television camera shoved in their faces.

  “Incredible!” the man answered in Spanish.

  “What makes this trip so special, other than it’s Disney?” the reporter asked.

  “We are to be on the first ship to cross through the new locks of the Panama Canal,” the man answered. “The very first ship. Such an honor! It is history we are making.”

  “Did you know the Disney Dream was chosen out of seventy vessels that were submitted to be the first through the new canal?”

  “No, but it does not surprise me the Dream was chosen. This is good. The family. Everything Disney stands for.”

  “Was it difficult to get tickets?” the reporter asked.

  “Are you kidding? It was a lottery. This is the only way. I heard over ten thousand people applied.”

  “Fifteen thousand, yes. And you were among those chosen. How does that make you feel?”

  “We are blessed,” the young woman said. “We feel very blessed.”

  The reporter thanked them and started to move on. The man being interviewed asked for and took a photo of his wife with the reporter. Others pushed forward trying to get on TV.

  Smartly dressed Cast Members passed through the crowd offering bottled water and thanking the waiting passengers for their patience as preparations were made for boarding. At the entrance to the gangway, hundreds were cordoned off behind crowd tape, cheering for the parade of Disney celebrities and VIPs currently boarding as cameras flashed and names were
called out. Among them were Disney Channel stars, film actors, Radio Disney hosts, pop stars, and five teenagers known as Disney Hosts Interactive.

  Finn, Maybeck, Philby, Charlene, and Willa waved to their fans and smiled for the cameras. Among the many highlights of the inaugural passage was the introduction of the shipboard Kingdom Keeper Quest, a scavenger hunt that had been wildly successful in the Magic Kingdom and was being unveiled aboard the Dream for the first time. The only major concern for the Keepers was that the Quest included Cast Members playing the parts of Overtakers. For the first time, Maleficent, Emperor Zurg, the Evil Queen, Cruella, and Chernabog would all be represented on board. The villains followed the Keepers as part of the grand entrance. The crowd jeered and booed them. Maleficent stuck her tongue out and everyone laughed.

  Everyone but the Keepers.

  “Hey, isn’t that—?” Willa said, nudging Finn and pointing to the VIP waiting area.

  Finn rose on his toes, but couldn’t see anyone familiar. The villains continued forward, forcing the Keepers to present their key cards at the electronic readers at the final check-in.

  “What? Who?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” Willa said.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s just…it looked like your mother to me.”

  Finn jumped high, trying to get a look, but the angle was wrong. He saw nothing but the adoring crowd held back by the tape. His mother was supposed to accompany him; every Keeper was required to be in the company of a parent or guardian. Wayne was supposed to have rigged the system so that Finn would have a connecting stateroom to Philby and his mother. Supposedly his mother would soon discover she was electronically blocked from boarding. Wayne was to erase her from the ship’s manifest. “If it is,” Finn said, “she’s in for a surprise.”

  He wanted to see her, to get close enough to see if her eyes were still green. If the spell had passed, she would be a useful ally for the next two weeks. He held his card near the reader. The machine beeped and a red light flashed.

  The Cast Member maintained a smile as he studied a computer screen, a practiced performance. He tried Finn’s key card himself. It flashed red. The man worked the keyboard.