“Mom’s letter she sent through the mail,” he said. “The paper copy of her code.”
For a second, Finn wondered if he should have admitted that he’d tucked Mom’s letter into his pocket last night when everyone else was packing up computers and food. At the time, it had seemed silly to bring the letter—maybe even dangerous—so he hadn’t said anything about it. But it was a piece of Mom, a connection. He couldn’t leave it behind.
And now, even in the flashlight’s dim glow, he could see Emma’s eyes light up. She threw her arms around Finn, hugging him and the letter as tight as possible.
“Finn, you’re the best!” she cried. “I bet you just saved us—and Mom and Joe and Ms. Morales, too!”
Forty-One
Emma
Emma unfolded the letter, flattening it against the concrete floor of the small hidden room behind the closet. It felt almost sacred to touch the same paper Mom had touched, on the last day she’d spent in the safer world.
Focus, Emma told herself. Just solve this as fast as you can.
She was only dimly aware of Finn and Chess crouching beside her, helpfully directing flashlight beams at the garbled mix of letters and numbers on the paper. Emma put her finger on the exact spot in the letter where she’d stopped deciphering Mom’s code before.
“Okay, it’s ‘If you got this far . . . ,’ then . . .” She glanced up. “This would be a lot easier if we had a pencil or a pen, and I wouldn’t have to keep everything in my head. Finn, you don’t have one of those tucked away, too, do you? Or Chess—?”
Finn turned his empty jeans pockets inside out, as if to prove he didn’t have some pencil even he had forgotten. Chess settled for patting his pockets, then turned toward the sliding panel.
“There’s got to be one somewhere in the basement,” he whispered. “I’ll go get it.”
“No, Chess, that’s not—” Emma began. But she couldn’t decide if it was too much of a risk or not.
“I’ve been worthless all along—let me be brave just this once,” Chess muttered.
Chess, worthless? How could he think that? Somebody should tell him that wasn’t true.
But Emma couldn’t even watch as he squeezed out through the sliding panel. She peered back down at Mom’s code, letting it distract her.
Only a moment passed before Chess was back and shoving a fat, fancy pen into Emma’s hand. It had lettering on the side that said We stand together against our enemies—almost the same motto as on the poster in Other-Natalie’s room.
Emma wished she hadn’t seen that.
“I wanted to find pencils or pens for all of us, and extra paper, too, but I thought it was more important to get back fast,” Chess muttered.
Emma decided to pretend not to notice that he was sweating, and huffing and puffing as though he’d run a mile, not just taken a few steps.
Or, as if he’d been really, really scared.
“Okay, here’s the key I figured out,” Emma said, writing twenty-six letters across the top of Mom’s letter: USE IN A SPOT THAT EXISTS IN BOTH.
“What?” Finn said. “The words from the lever? That’s the key? But you forgot the word ‘worlds’ at the end. . . .”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “And that’s what tipped me off. Why was ‘worlds’ in parentheses? I thought it was weird last night, but I was too distracted then. Parentheses means something is optional, and why would ‘worlds’ be optional in that sentence? Only if that sentence has another purpose.”
Did she need to confess how scared she’d been? Did she need to confess that she’d started counting the letters in the phrase “use in a spot that exists in both” only to keep herself her from freaking out?
She glanced at Chess, still red-faced and sweaty. She should let him know she’d been frightened, too.
“I needed something to think about to keep from being scared,” she said. “So I was lucky. It was the right theory to test. Finally.”
“But that isn’t a good key, is it?” Chess asked. He pointed at all the duplicated letters. “There are, what, five Ts? Four Ss, three Is . . .”
“Yeah, you told us the perfect key for a code would have twenty-six different letters!” Finn added, sounding indignant. “So you don’t get confused about which letter to use where!”
“Right, but that’s where the numbers come in,” Emma said. “I thought they were separate, but look . . .”
Quickly, she added the alphabet under the key. Then she added numbers, so the full key was:
“Oh,” Chess said.
Maybe Finn asked more questions, but Emma let Chess answer after that. Having the key written out meant that she could work so much faster, since she didn’t have to count letters in her head. In no time at all, she’d translated the first two and a half sentences: “If you got this far, you know about the lever. And if you know about the lever, you are bound to face the temptation to use it. But you shouldn’t do that until . . .”
Oh, Mom, Emma thought, her heart throbbing. Don’t you know we used the lever the instant we found it, before we understood anything?
But of course Mom couldn’t have known that, writing this letter. When she’d written this, Chess, Emma, and Finn had been safely asleep in their beds back home, totally ignorant of levers, secret rooms, secret codes, or alternate worlds. Back then, they hadn’t even known Natalie.
“I wish I could skip ahead,” Emma muttered. “I think the next few sentences are just going to be stuff we already know, from being in this world. But I don’t want to go too far ahead and miss something important.”
“You skip ahead,” Chess said. “Finn and I’ll work on the sentences in order, and we’ll borrow the pen and write it down every time we have a long phrase.”
“But I can’t—” Finn started to complain.
“You can if we work together,” Chess said, patting Finn’s shoulder.
Oh, Chess, you are so not worthless, Emma thought.
But she was already back in the code. She lost track of time, attacking a sentence here and there, and passing the pen back and forth with Chess. She barely listened as her brothers worked out parts of the code she’d skipped: “A here, N there, then D, okay, that’s ‘and’ . . .”
She tried a sentence in the next paragraph down, but it seemed to be about politicians and lies.
We know about those already, Emma thought, remembering how much of her mother’s trial had been fake.
Another paragraph talked about the network of journalists Mom had worked with who were trying to preserve and reveal the truth. They believed people had to know the truth to make good decisions about their leaders. But the letter didn’t reveal any names of the people in the network because, Mom wrote, “There is still too much of a chance that this letter will fall into the wrong hands, and I can’t risk destroying an ally. There are too few of us even now.”
Instead, Mom told how the allies might identify themselves to the kids: “I left something behind that you kids will recognize, and you will know that it’s out of place. You will know where it comes from, too, and who first created it. That is the symbol an ally would show you to prove they can be trusted.”
Oh, Mom, Emma thought sadly. Why didn’t you put that in the first part of your letter, that we decoded before we went to your trial? That would have saved us so much trouble and worry!
She knew Mom was talking about the crooked heart Finn had once drawn on Mom’s phone case. Emma had found a copy of that heart image in Mom’s desk drawer, even though Mom normally kept nothing personal in her desk. And then, at Mom’s trial, the mysterious man they knew only as Joe had shown them a smaller copy of the same image.
That heart image was the only way they’d known to trust Joe.
If we’d known about the heart signal from the start, we would have trusted Joe sooner. Then we might have gotten to Mom sooner; we might have managed to rescue her at her trial and not have had to come back. . . . We would have been so fast, we wouldn’t have lost Ms. Morales, either
. . . .
Emma needed to stop thinking about their last trip and focus on now. And this paragraph was just more information that she, Chess, Finn, and Natalie already knew. She skipped down another paragraph.
B is W, N is E. . . .
This time, Emma was only partway into translating the sentence before she gasped. And then she threw her arms around her brothers and called out, “This is it! This is exactly what we need!”
“You know where to find Mom, and how to rescue her?” Finn asked breathlessly.
“Well, no, but—it’s a first step, anyway! Our first helpful clue since we got here!” Emma hugged her brothers even tighter.
“What’d you figure out?” Chess asked, and for once he sounded as hopeful and excited as Finn.
Emma pointed to the line of crooked printing she’d added above her mother’s coded words. Then, realizing Chess and Finn probably couldn’t read her hasty scrawl, she read it to them: “‘We have an ally inside the Morales-Mayhew household who can help you.’ Chess, Finn, that’s here. Someone in this house is on our side!”
Forty-Two
Chess
“But who is it?” Chess asked. “Doesn’t Mom say? What good is it to know that if we don’t know a name?”
It felt cruel to say this when Emma was practically jumping up and down beside him, and Finn was grinning ear-to-ear. It felt as mean as kicking a kitten or pulling a puppy dog’s tail.
“Well, no, I don’t . . .” Emma paused to decode another line. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Mom’s all about protecting ‘allies,’ because she’s afraid this letter could fall into the wrong hands. But she also talks about the heart symbol Joe showed us. What if we showed that symbol to people we think we might be able to trust? We don’t have one with us, but if Finn drew one, then—”
“I just need a red marker,” Finn said. “And paper. Once we have that, I can draw as many hearts as we need!”
Sometimes Finn and Emma broke Chess’s heart. Didn’t they see how the fear had practically killed him, when he’d just tiptoed out to grab a pen? Weren’t they thinking about guards and danger and spy cameras, like he was? Even if they could find a red marker and paper, they couldn’t risk roaming around the Morales-Mayhew house showing anyone crookedly drawn hearts.
Now, if we still had Natalie with us, there might be some hope. . . .
Natalie.
Chess was pretty sure that the panic coursing through his body was mostly because he was so worried about Natalie. Where was she? What was happening to her? Was she in danger? Was there anything Chess could do for her?
He hoped she understood that if he could think of any way to help, he’d be doing it.
Chess felt like he might explode with all the worry and questions. He didn’t think he could stand sitting in this closet a second longer.
“I’ll go look for a marker and paper,” he muttered to Finn and Emma, even though he thought that was a pointless plan, and he was terrified of stepping outside the closet again. He had to do something, and decoding information they already knew just made him feel worse.
“Chess, be careful,” Emma whispered. She pressed her hands against her cheeks, and even in the dim, eerie glow from the flashlights, he could see that she was scared, too.
Maybe she did know how dangerous their hope was. Maybe only Finn was still too innocent to see that.
Chess eased the wooden panel open, stepped through, and then slid it back into place, protecting Emma and Finn. Cautiously, he opened the closet door a crack.
The vast room before him was still silent and empty and dim. Rather than just darting for the nearest coffee table, as he had before, this time he forced himself to stare all the way to the end of the room. And—were his eyes tricking him? It seemed to go on endlessly now, dissolving into a lit-up maze of orange-and-blue banners in a glass-ceilinged space far beyond.
What? This isn’t a basement anymore! It’s a . . .
“Shrine” was the word that came to mind. It was a shrine to whatever those orange-and-blue banners stood for—the same orange-and-blue banners that had been everywhere leading to his mother’s trial.
Banners can’t hurt you, Chess told himself. He inched out of the closet and, again, shut the door behind him. Now he was almost mad at himself—mad that he felt so hopeless, mad that he was such a coward, mad that he hadn’t managed to protect everyone from the very beginning, mad that he’d let Natalie rush away on her own when there was so much danger. . . .
He went back to the nearest coffee table and yanked out the drawer where he’d found the pen before. No markers, no paper. He already knew that. Angrily, he shoved the drawer back and stood up again.
And then there was a sound at the other side of the room: someone trying to stifle a gasp, maybe.
Chess dived back down, hiding behind the coffee table. No—that wasn’t enough. He scrambled backward so he was better hidden, crouched beside a navy blue couch. His heart pounded so loudly he could barely hear the whisper from across the room: “Chess?”
It was Natalie’s voice.
Chess sprang back up, peeking over the edge of the couch, and there was Natalie, peeking out from behind a desk at the other side of the room.
She didn’t see where he’d gone. She was gazing around, probably looking for Emma and Finn, too. For a moment, Chess could only watch her. She shook her hair back from her face, and it rippled and glistened like it had the first time Chess had ever talked to her, when he’d sounded like a fool.
Even that memory didn’t seem so horrifying now, because Natalie was back, and that was like the sun being back, like hope returning, like everything that had seemed impossible a moment ago seeming possible once again.
Because Natalie was alone, not with anyone from this horrible world. She’d escaped, and somehow she’d known to come down to the basement to look for Chess, Emma, and Finn. And now they would be able to find the ally in this house and rescue their mothers and Joe.
“Natalie,” Chess said, and her name felt like the most beautiful word in the world on his tongue. He began rushing toward her. He kind of wished he was Finn’s age, because if he were, he could just run over and hug her.
Finn could do that; Chess couldn’t. But he still kept dashing toward her, calling her name. She flinched slightly at the sound of his voice, and that made him worry.
“Natalie?” he said. “Are you all right? Is everything okay? Did—”
Her eyes met his, and Chess stumbled. Because in that moment, Chess saw: Natalie wasn’t all right. Everything wasn’t okay.
Chess, Emma, Finn, and Natalie were in even more danger than he’d thought.
Because this wasn’t Natalie.
Forty-Three
Natalie, a Few Minutes Earlier
When they figure out I’m not Other-Natalie, I’ll have to . . . I’ll . . .
All the way up the stairs, Natalie’s brain kept sputtering out the same useless thought, breaking off, and starting over. There didn’t seem to be any way to fix this. She felt like a prisoner being escorted to her jail cell as the Judge walked ahead of her, leading the way toward her office, and Almost-Grandma in her regal orange gown brought up the rear, as if making sure that Natalie wouldn’t escape.
At least the Mayor’s not walking beside me like a third jailer, Natalie thought.
Instead, he kept moving out in front of her, as if he were trying to catch up with the Judge. But she kept walking faster and faster.
The Judge reached the door of her office and a key glinted in her hand, as if she’d had it out and ready all along.
Just like Mom, Natalie thought sadly. Always prepared . . .
The Judge turned the key in the lock, but she didn’t instantly shove the door all the way open the way Natalie expected.
“What’s this?” the Judge asked, bending down and picking up a folded-up paper that fell out of the door. Had it been there before, and Natalie just hadn’t noticed?
The Judge unfolded the paper. It was
a flyer announcing the Judge’s reelection campaign, surely something the Judge had seen many times. But the Judge kept her head bent over the paper for a long time, as if she needed to study it carefully.
Or . . . as if she’s looking for a secret message or a secret code, Natalie thought. Is she looking for traces of invisible ink or patterns of letters almost inconspicuously blacked out or . . . ?
Natalie decided she’d spent too much time with Emma, and too much time listening to Emma’s descriptions of hidden messages left in innocuous places.
But the Judge seemed to shoot a significant glance at Almost-Grandma before refolding the paper and tucking it into her pants pocket.
Then she pushed the door of her office open all the way.
“I can explain,” Natalie burst out, deciding to go on the offensive and start talking before the adults saw Other-Natalie, who would undoubtedly be right there in the office, in plain sight.
“Explain what?” the Judge asked, stepping into the office.
Natalie brushed past the Judge, barely believing her eyes. But it was true: Except for the Judge and Natalie, the office was empty. Natalie tiptoed past the desk and got a second surprise: All the backpacks and extra computers were gone, too.
“Explain . . . why I went downstairs, even though I was sick and . . . and could have exposed other people to my germs.” Natalie tried to cover her blunder. “I didn’t want to make anyone else sick, but I felt better, and—”
“Oh, who cares about guards or cleaners?” The Mayor waved his hand impatiently.
He and Almost-Grandma had stepped into the office now too, and Almost-Grandma closed the door behind them. The Mayor peered back at the door as if he were the one longing for escape now.
“Why did you summon me here?” he asked.
“Oh, have a seat, dear,” the Judge said, gesturing toward the couch.
There was that pet name again—“dear”—but it sounded as wrong coming from the Judge as it had coming from the Mayor. Natalie had a sudden memory of the last time she’d heard her own mother tell her father “I love you.” She’d been in the car with Mom and Dad and Grandma on the way home from her fifth-grade school play—Mom and Dad in the front, Grandma and Natalie in the back. She’d heard Mom say, “Of course I love you, Roger,” but her tone was more like I can barely stand to be in the same car as you. Then Grandma had said, “Could you turn the radio up? Natalie, isn’t this your favorite song?” And even though it wasn’t Natalie’s favorite song, she nodded anyway. More than anything else, she hadn’t wanted to hear Mom and Dad fighting.
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