The Deceivers

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

See, Chess? Emma wanted to argue. We’re doing this safely. We’re going to approach this logically, and that’s how we’ll succeed.

  “I have a new laptop I take to school and an old one I keep as backup, just in case, so maybe the other Natalie does, too,” Natalie said. Then she frowned. “Except Dad surprised me with the new computer the day the divorce went through, and I think it was kind of a . . . bribe . . . related to the divorce. So maybe this world’s Natalie doesn’t have a spare.”

  “How about we just go find out?” Finn asked, smiling so sweetly that there was no way he’d hurt Natalie’s feelings.

  Emma rushed toward the stairs, her brothers following a few steps behind her. At the top of the stairs, Chess drew Emma and Finn back and told Natalie, “Why don’t you go ahead of us and close the curtains and blinds so no one sees us from outside? Just to be careful.”

  “Don’t worry—that won’t be a problem,” Natalie said. She pressed her lips together, the corners of her mouth tugging in opposite directions. “You’ll see.”

  Emma stepped out into the kitchen of Ms. Morales’s house—no, Judge Morales’s house, which maybe Emma should start thinking of as the Morales-Mayhew house instead. To Emma’s relief, the kitchen was not all navy blue and orange like the basement; the granite counters seemed extra shiny, but otherwise everything looked familiar. Finn darted past Emma into the dining room.

  “What?” he exclaimed. “Natalie—what happened to all your neighbors?”

  Emma joined him at the dining room window.

  The version of Ms. Morales’s house that Emma knew sat at the top of a hill with a large yard, but it had been surrounded by other equally large mansions. This house stood alone and seemed to have sprawled across the equivalent of several other lots. Maybe it had expanded and gobbled up the other houses. Beyond the last wing of the house, the yard sloped downward into a bunch of trees nestled against something solid and gray—a stone wall?

  “Oh, wait, I see one other roof,” Finn said, standing on tiptoes and craning his neck.

  “That’s a guard tower,” Natalie said grimly behind them. “I think. Mom—I mean, Other-Mom, the Judge—she asked how Megan’s mom was allowed past the guards, and I had to pretend I knew what she was talking about.”

  “Natalie, your house is like a compound now,” Emma said. “Or like the White House, where it’s really, really protected. . . .”

  “This world’s version of your house had a fence, too,” Natalie reminded her.

  It wasn’t the same. In the Greystones’ neighborhood in this world, all the houses were cut off from one another by tall hedges and ugly, battered wooden fences. Just picturing that in her mind’s eye made Emma feel afraid. It made her feel like she was smelling the stink that infested this world’s version of her family’s neighborhood all over again.

  Here, the imposing wall mostly hidden by trees seemed to say, The people who live in this house matter more than anyone else. That’s why they can’t have neighbors; that’s why they need guards to protect them.

  “How did you convince the Judge you knew what you were talking about, Natalie?” Chess asked, coming up behind the others. “And were you just acting when you threw up, or are you really sick?”

  Emma caught a look that passed between Chess and Natalie. If Emma had to analyze it, she would have said Natalie liked Chess asking about her. She liked that he was worried about her.

  But Natalie also winced and rolled her eyes.

  “I think it was just nerves,” she admitted. “But then, making myself retch again and again was a good way to avoid answering Mom’s questions. Er, the Judge’s questions.” She twisted her mouth, running her tongue over her teeth, then wrinkling her nose. “Ugh. Do you think it’d be wrong to use Other-Natalie’s toothbrush?”

  “What if it’s poisoned?” Finn asked.

  “It won’t be poisoned,” Natalie said confidently. “That’s just Mom being paranoid. I mean, the Judge.” But she didn’t turn and walk toward the stairs. “You’ll . . . you’ll all come upstairs with me, right?”

  Is Natalie chickening out now, too? Emma wondered. Is she as frightened as Chess? And . . . me?

  “If there’s a chance we’ll find a usable laptop, of course we’re going upstairs,” Emma said.

  But all four of them tiptoed rather than running to the next flight of stairs, and then up to the second floor.

  Natalie was the first to reach the doorway that corresponded to her room in her own world.

  “Oh,” she said, sounding surprised.

  Emma stepped up behind her.

  When the three Greystones had stayed with Natalie and Ms. Morales—Real–Ms. Morales—in the better world, Emma had been so focused on getting her mother back that she’d barely glanced at Natalie’s room. But this room looked virtually the same as Emma remembered: clothes strewn across the floor, pictures of Natalie and her friends tacked up on the wall, a puffy white comforter slipping off the unmade bed. The only big difference here was . . .

  “That,” Chess said, pointing toward a vast poster hanging over the bed. “That’s . . .”

  “Scary,” Finn filled in.

  The poster showed a large group of kids in navy blue and orange, holding lit candles and staring grimly out at the camera. Solemn lettering at the top of the poster announced, “When we stand together, no one can oppose us.”

  In the picture, Natalie stood in the middle of the front row of grim-looking kids. Her expression was the sternest, the most forbidding.

  No, it’s Other-Natalie, Emma told herself. She just looks like our Natalie.

  “Maybe this is a sports thing,” Natalie said weakly. “Like . . . team-building. I want to go out for lacrosse next year. Maybe I—I mean, Other-Natalie—maybe she’s already on the team here, and they changed the school colors, and . . .”

  Natalie was trying so hard to make it seem like Other-Natalie wasn’t involved in the evil of this world.

  Emma held back a shiver and tried to stay analytical. Blue and orange were just colors, after all. The kids in the picture were just teenagers. So why was that poster so creepy? Why did it make her, Finn, and Chess huddle together without even thinking? What was the difference between those kids on the poster wanting to stand together, and the Greystones’ personal motto (thanks to Mom) of “We’ll always have each other”?

  It’s the word “oppose,” Emma decided. Having us Greystones stick together doesn’t mean we won’t be nice to other people, too. But that poster, that sentence . . . it’s like they’re saying anyone who doesn’t stand with them is an enemy.

  Emma knew barely anything about this world, but it was clear: Those kids would consider Mom an enemy.

  That meant the Greystone kids would be those kids’ enemies, too.

  And Natalie? Emma wondered. What about our Natalie?

  Natalie took four steps across the bedroom floor, scrambled up to stand on the bed, and yanked on the top two corners of the poster. They sagged. Natalie let go, and the top half of the poster plunged down, hiding the bottom half.

  “Natalie,” Chess said softly. “This world’s Natalie wouldn’t—”

  “I don’t care,” Natalie said. “If anyone here sees this, let them think the poster just fell on its own. Or—half fell.”

  “Let’s get Mom and Ms. Morales and Joe and get out of here before anyone sees that,” Finn said.

  “Right,” Natalie said.

  She jumped down from the bed and went over to open a desk drawer.

  “Bingo,” Natalie said, pulling out a laptop. “Other-Natalie even keeps it in the same place I do.”

  Emma’s hands tingled with impatience.

  “Give that to me, and I can—” she began.

  “Emma,” Chess said. “Natalie’s the fastest at finding stuff online.”

  Emma held up her hands as if surrendering.

  “I know! I know!” she said. “But, Natalie—hurry!”

  Natalie nodded, already plopping onto the bed and opening t
he laptop. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Chess put his arms around Emma and Finn and drew them close as all three kids hovered by Natalie.

  “Okay, it connected to the internet automatically, so I don’t have to guess any passwords,” Natalie reported.

  “Looking up Susanna Morales in this world is just going to lead to the Judge, and we don’t know Joe’s last name, so you should start your search by looking for our mom,” Emma suggested.

  Natalie cocked an eyebrow at Emma.

  “Emma, I’m on it,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it will just take a moment before . . .”

  She jerked her head back and scowled at the screen.

  “What?” Emma asked. “What just happened?”

  Natalie didn’t answer. She leaned closer to the laptop and typed faster. Emma stepped to the side and craned her neck, trying to see the screen, but Natalie’s long hair slipped forward, blocking Emma’s view.

  “Natalie?” Finn whispered.

  Natalie didn’t answer him either. She seemed to be in her own little world, just her and the computer. Emma felt like she’d zipped back to the first time she’d met Natalie, when Natalie did nothing but hunch over her cell phone and text.

  Then suddenly Natalie’s head dropped even farther forward, her forehead coming to rest on the rim of the laptop. Now she was neither typing nor looking at the screen.

  “Natalie, what’s going on?” Chess asked. His grip tightened on Emma’s shoulder. “You’re scaring us.”

  Natalie groaned and lifted her head. She spun the laptop around so the Greystones could see four words glowing on an otherwise blank screen: “Search term not found.”

  “I can’t find anything about your mom,” Natalie wailed. “It’s like she doesn’t even exist!”

  Twenty-One

  Chess

  Chess went numb. Distantly, he could hear Emma and Finn suggesting possibilities Natalie might not have thought of: “Did you try . . .” He blanked out on registering their ideas, but he heard Natalie’s repeated responses: “Yes, I already tried that. . . .” “Yes, that, too. . . .”

  He stumbled away from the other kids, toward the backpack he’d brought from the other world, lugged up from the basement, and then dropped on the floor when they’d first come into Natalie’s room. He rifled through it, pulling out a stiff sheet of paper folded into fourths. He carried it over to Natalie without unfolding it. Because that would hurt.

  Even thinking about this paper was painful.

  “Here,” he said gruffly, sliding the paper into Natalie’s hand. “Do an image search.”

  Natalie unfolded the paper, and Emma and Finn recoiled along with Chess.

  This was the sign Chess had ripped off a pole the last time they’d been in this world. Under the words “CRIMINAL CAUGHT!” it held a scary, odd picture of Mom, and announced that she was an enemy of the people.

  The sign also ordered everyone to go to her public trial and sentencing—the horrifying sham trial where the Greystones and Natalie had tried and failed to rescue her.

  How could anyone think a trial would be fair if everyone knew from the beginning that it included a sentencing?

  But at that trial, their mother had begged them to run away and rescue the three Gustano kids instead of her. So the Greystones never heard the verdict; they never heard her sentence.

  Was there any way for Chess not to feel guilty looking at this sign or thinking about that trial?

  “I—I didn’t know you kept that,” Emma gasped.

  Chess shrugged, because what could he say? He didn’t want to admit how many times, in his room back at Mr. Mayhew’s house, he’d secretly unfolded this sign and stared at Mom’s picture, even though it only made him feel worse.

  “What if . . . what if it was dangerous bringing that back here?” Natalie asked.

  Chess shrugged again, almost recklessly, which wasn’t like him.

  “I bet Other–Ms. Morales—the Judge, who’s definitely not your mom—I bet she has a whole stack of signs like this somewhere in this house,” he said, his voice cruel and cutting, which was even less like him.

  “I know she’s not my mom,” Natalie said. She pointed at the poster sagging down from the wall. “I don’t want to be that Natalie. Okay? I just . . . If you had divorced parents, you’d understand.”

  “Yeah, well, our dad’s dead, remember?” Emma asked. “So we do know what it’s like to wish things were different. We understand the . . . temptation.”

  Chess gazed at his sister in surprise. Her voice was gentle, her expression soft. Emma wasn’t usually the peacemaker, the compassionate one. That was his role.

  Was it possible that Emma missed their dad, too, even though she’d been so young when he died that she didn’t actually remember him?

  Was there anything today that wouldn’t make Chess feel sad?

  Yeah—finding Mom, he thought.

  “Can you do an image search, Natalie?” Finn asked.

  “Sure,” Natalie said, shaking back her hair as if she could shake off the whole conversation. She reached for the phone in her back pocket. “I just have to take a picture and then . . .” She positioned the phone above the poster, then lowered it. “Oh, right. I keep forgetting. My phone won’t automatically connect to the internet here.” She bit her lip and squinted off into the distance. Then she tucked both the sign and the laptop under her arm and hopped up from the bed. “Come on. Let’s go use the scanner in Mom’s office. That’ll be fastest.”

  She was out the door before Chess, Emma, and Finn could remind her that the office in this house didn’t belong to her mom—and there was no guarantee that it contained a scanner. They just shouldered their backpacks again and trailed along behind her.

  Once they were downstairs, they found Natalie standing before an imposing wood door full of ornate carvings—totally different from Real–Ms. Morales’s office door. The wooden animals and birds and leaves (and were those faces? Screaming faces?) reminded Chess a little too much of the stone carvings at the Public Hall where his mother’s trial had been held. So it took Chess a moment to realize that Natalie was twisting her hand uselessly on the doorknob, back and forth.

  The door was locked.

  “Seriously?” Natalie muttered. “She locks the door when she knows I’m home alone?”

  “And when the house is surrounded by guard towers?” Finn added.

  “Maybe this Ms. Morales would hide a key the same place your mom would,” Emma suggested. “Do you know . . .”

  Natalie dashed toward the kitchen and came back a moment later with a shiny key in her hand.

  “Yep,” she said. “Same flour-jar hiding spot, same ribbon on the key, same . . . How can they be so much the same and so different, all at once?”

  Natalie seemed to be trying to speak jauntily, but she kept her head down and didn’t look directly at anyone.

  Natalie won’t look at us because . . . she’s trying not to cry? Chess thought.

  He had seen and heard recordings of Kate Gustano, the alternate version of his own mother, when she was begging for the release of her kidnapped children. That had been horrible enough. Wouldn’t it be worse for Natalie, to have met the Judge and seen so many similarities to her own mom—and yet know that the Judge was a terrible person?

  Natalie unlocked the office door and shoved it open.

  Emma’s jaw dropped. Finn’s eyes grew huge.

  “I think this Ms. Morales likes pictures of herself even more than the real one does!” Finn exclaimed.

  Chess switched from watching the other kids to peering into the office.

  Natalie’s real mom was a Realtor, so her office back in the better world had held several real estate signs with her picture.

  But this office held even more signs stacked against the walls—and all of them contained huge pictures of the Judge. Chess was tall for a sixth grader, but if he stood by one of these signs, his head wouldn’t have even come to the bottom of the Judge’s nose. C
hess thought Real–Ms. Morales was pretty; he could see where Natalie got her long, curly, dark hair and her sparkling brown eyes and her high cheekbones and . . .

  Probably not the best time to start thinking about how pretty Natalie is, Chess told himself.

  He forced himself to focus on the Judge signs again. In these pictures, the Judge wasn’t just pretty. She looked like a movie star or an actress or a singer—someone who seemed too beautiful to be real.

  Natalie made a sound that came out as a strangled snort.

  “That’s how happy Mom always looked before . . . before she and Dad started fighting and . . .” She gulped. “I can’t look.”

  She turned and bent over a printer to lift the lid and slap the horrible picture of Chess’s mom onto the glass of the scanner.

  Finn tugged on Chess’s arm.

  “Why do those signs say VOTE SUSANNA MORALES FOR JUDGE?” he asked. “I thought Other–Ms. Morales already was a judge.”

  “She’s running for reelection, I guess,” Chess said. “That’s how government works. People elect public officials, and then every so often people have the chance to vote again, so they can decide if they like the way the officials are doing their jobs, or if they think someone else would be better. . . .”

  “If I lived here, I’d vote against her,” Finn said. He stuck his tongue out at the giant picture. “Because she was mean to our mom.” Then he glanced toward Natalie. “Sorry, Natalie. I’d vote for your real mom. She’s nice.”

  Natalie didn’t answer. She’d moved from scanning the picture of the Greystones’ mom to hunching over the laptop again. Emma was right at her elbow.

  “Is anything coming up?” Chess asked, circling the huge desk in the center of the office to peer down at the laptop with the two girls.

  “Nothing useful,” Natalie said. “Not yet.”

  Chess saw that the screen was filled with image matches—but every single one showed only a sign on a pole in the background of some other scene.

  “Try refreshing it,” Finn said, jostling against Chess’s elbow. “Maybe it just wasn’t thinking hard enough the first time.”