The Deceivers

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Finn saw Chess dart his eyes toward Other-Natalie, then down at Finn, as if Chess didn’t think the big kids should talk about this in front of him. Finn wanted to prove he could take it. Even though he wasn’t sure he could.

  “So it’s like at Mom’s trial, which your mom was in charge of. Everyone treated my mom like she was one of these skategoats—scraped goat? Scrap goats? You know what I mean,” Finn said. His voice shook only a little. “People yelled mean things at her. She was handcuffed in a chair. That’s almost as bad as a cage!”

  “I didn’t see that—Mom never lets me go watch trials with what she calls the riffraff, but . . . I guess you’re right,” Other-Natalie said. She bit down on her lip so hard this time that Finn was surprised her teeth didn’t go straight through. “I never thought of it, but that is almost the same thing.”

  “That’s not justice,” Chess said. He seemed to be breathing hard, as if he’d been running, not sitting still. “People are supposed to be treated as innocent until they’re proven guilty. They should be allowed to defend themselves. They shouldn’t be falsely accused. They should be allowed to tell the truth! They shouldn’t be sent to prison and then just used as entertainment for people to mock when they aren’t even guilty. When they were just trying to make your world a better place!”

  Finn stared up at Chess. That was maybe the most Finn had ever heard Chess say all at once in his entire life.

  “Your mom’s a judge,” Emma said to Other-Natalie. “Your dad’s the mayor, and he’s running for governor. Maybe even president someday. They’re in the government! Can’t they stop this?”

  Other-Natalie wouldn’t look at Emma. She let her hair fall forward over her face like Natalie used to do all the time. She seemed to be staring down at a bare spot on the floor.

  “You don’t understand,” Other-Natalie whispered. “My parents like the world working this way. It helps them stay in power. My mother’s the one who started having scapegoats at political rallies!”

  Finn couldn’t help himself: He pulled in a giant sniff, the kind that was supposed to hold back both snot and sobs, but never worked right. And this sniff was even more worthless than usual. In spite of his efforts, a tidal wave of tears filled his eyes, and he turned to bury his face against Chess’s arm.

  “Oh no,” Natalie said, as fierce as ever. She slung an arm around Finn’s shoulder, hugging him close. “This is still good news. Even with what Other-Natalie just told us. That makes this even better!”

  “How—how do you figure that?” Chess asked.

  One-handedly, Natalie started typing again.

  “Because whoever’s in charge of those two prisons is going to get an email in a few minutes from ‘Judge Morales,’” she said. “And that email is going to demand that Kate Greystone and Joe Deweese be brought to the Morales-Mayhew house to be ‘scapegoats’ for the political fund-raiser being held here tonight,” she said. “And then—”

  “And then before anyone can do anything mean to them, we’re going to kidnap them and take them back to our world!” Finn finished for her. He threw his arms around her shoulders, the snot, sobs, and tears forgotten. “Natalie, you’re a genius!”

  Fifty

  Emma

  Natalie’s . . . not thinking clearly, Emma thought. Neither is Finn.

  There were so many holes in their plan, even Emma couldn’t count them all. But her brain started cataloguing them anyway.

  Has Natalie forgotten our lever’s gone and we don’t have any way to get back to the other world? And anyway, how do Natalie and Finn think we’re going to get Mom and Joe out of cages in front of five hundred people? Don’t they remember how we failed just trying to get Mom out of a chair at the trial? And then there’s Mom’s code . . .

  Emma’s gaze drifted back to the laptop she still held in her own arms. While the Natalies were looking for Mom, Ms. Morales, and Joe in the secret websites on the Judge’s computer, Emma had focused on speeding ahead on her own mother’s code.

  I get another chance. There’s got to be something here that’ll help us, that’ll make it so we really can rescue everybody. . . . I won’t quit until I’ve translated it all!

  But Mom’s message was getting stranger and stranger. Emma had started feeling like her brain was divided, one part going forward with the decoding, the other part talking back to Mom.

  Seriously, Mom? she thought, reaching the end of a particularly long phrase. You made me decode that whole sentence about “making sustainable our very most earnest hopes and dreams and goals” when you could have just said, I don’t know, “keep our hope going”? Why’d you take more than fifty letters to say what you could have said in sixteen?

  “Making sustainable our very most earnest hopes . . .”—that didn’t even sound like Mom. Even if Mom thought she was writing the message for versions of Chess, Emma, and Finn who were years older—maybe even adults—this was crazy. It wasn’t smart to use a lot of extra words in a code, because it created unnecessary work. And Mom was smart.

  Then Emma came across the word “annihilate.”

  “Destroy,” Mom. What’s wrong with “destroy”? Why are you doing this, making me decode all these extra letters and words?

  Suddenly Emma got chills. Mom wouldn’t have done that without a reason. Mom was smart, and she loved Chess, Emma, and Finn, and she would have wanted this coded letter to help them, not just make them frustrated and mad.

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh . . .

  The chills ran up and down Emma’s spine and turned into what felt like fireworks in her brain.

  Mom had had a good reason for the weird, extra words, and Emma knew what it was. At least, she was pretty sure she knew. It had to be.

  All the weird words embedded in the decoded message—“sustainable,” “annihilate,” maybe even “earnest,” too—were a code of their own.

  There were two secret codes embedded in this message.

  At least two. Maybe even more?

  And what if one of the extra codes tells us who to trust in the Morales-Mayhew house? What if this is what saves us, after all?

  Emma raised her head, ready to shout out her idea to the other kids. But then she stopped herself. She’d messed up so badly before, showing the heart to Disguise Lady.

  This time, she was going to figure everything out and be sure before she said anything.

  It was all up to her.

  Fifty-One

  Chess

  What if Other-Natalie’s dad is the one Mom trusts in this house? Chess wondered.

  If the Judge was the one who’d come up with the idea of mocking prisoners as “scapegoats” at political events, he knew she couldn’t be the one to help them. And Other-Natalie’s grandmother had already proved she was a horrible person.

  So didn’t that leave the Mayor just by process of elimination? Other-Natalie had been a little kid when Mom left the alternate world in the first place, so it wouldn’t be her. And it probably wasn’t a security guard or a cleaner or anyone else who just worked at the house, because with the Judge being so mean, Mom couldn’t have been sure that any of them would stay in his or her job.

  It was on the tip of Chess’s tongue to tell Natalie, Emma, and Finn what he’d figured out and see what they thought. But what if he was wrong, and led them completely astray?

  Other-Natalie’s phone began ringing, and she scrambled to silence it.

  “No, Dad, I do not want to talk to you right now,” she muttered, muting it completely. “Leave a message.”

  “I could . . . ,” Chess began. But he didn’t say it loudly enough for the others to hear. Was he really going to volunteer to call the Mayor back, to talk to him on Other-Natalie’s behalf?

  He wouldn’t be able to figure out over the phone whether it was safe to trust the Mayor. He needed to see the man in person. And then the Mayor would show the same heart symbol Joe had used, or maybe Chess would be brave enough to show the symbol himself. . . .

  I have to be the one to tr
y that, Chess thought. I can’t let anyone else take that risk.

  What if everything depended on Chess—and Chess was too much of a coward to do anything?

  Fifty-Two

  Natalie

  Natalie’s fingers flew across the keyboard. Had the Judge sent other emails where Natalie could find names of people who arranged for prisoners to be scapegoats at political rallies? Were there even emails Natalie could use as a model for how the Judge would ask for certain prisoners?

  “Just search for the term ‘scapegoat,’ in Mom’s saved email,” Other-Natalie breathed in Natalie’s ear.

  Natalie had already clicked the magnifying glass icon; she’d already begun typing s-c-a . . .

  Finn hung over her shoulder, watching emails flood across the screen.

  “People . . . people started throwing things at some of the prisoners who were scapegoats at other parties?” Finn asked, pointing toward a line in one of the emails. “Even hurting them?”

  “Yeah, but look, my mom said that wasn’t allowed,” Other-Natalie said, reaching past Natalie to bring the whole message onto the screen.

  Natalie’s eyes zeroed in on one sentence in the Judge’s scolding email: “When the scapegoats are hit by peach pits, apple cores, pebbles, or even more dangerous material, that limits the amount of time any of them can spend on display, and their cautionary effect is diminished.” So the Judge didn’t care about the prisoners being hurt; she just wanted to display them as long as possible. Natalie skimmed ahead—the Judge spent the rest of the email fretting about damage to party hosts’ homes.

  Evil, evil, evil woman, Natalie thought.

  Finn nestled his head closer against her arm; she saw his lips moving, as if he was trying to sound out the long, bureaucratic words to himself. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t make it through “cautionary” or “diminished,” but she clicked out of the email anyway.

  “Hey!” Other-Natalie complained. “I wasn’t done showing—”

  “Let me send these emails, then the computer’s all yours,” Natalie mumbled.

  Quickly, hoping she was too fast for Finn to follow much of anything, Natalie copied and pasted other email from the Judge’s files. In minutes, she had emails ready to send to the heads of both Einber and Handor prisons.

  “You’ll help me with this, right?” she muttered to Other-Natalie. Her head swam with all the logistics she hadn’t figured out yet—all the logistics she couldn’t figure out, because she didn’t know enough about this world. Natalie turned her head and peered straight into Other-Natalie’s eye, and the feeling that she was looking into a mirror came back. Of course Other-Natalie would help. In spite of the world she lived in, Other-Natalie was a good person, just like Natalie was a good person.

  In that moment, Natalie felt as certain of Other-Natalie’s intentions as she was of her own.

  Natalie hit Send.

  “Okay,” she said, tilting the laptop toward Other-Natalie. “Your turn. You scan again for anything you can find about my mom, and then let’s finish arranging things for Mrs. Greystone and Joe.”

  “You’re sure my mom and Joe will be okay?” Finn asked, his voice creaking with worry.

  “Of course!” Natalie said, with more confidence than she actually felt. She held the computer with just one hand and put the other arm around Finn, pulling him close. “You’ve got two Natalie Mayhews working on this—what could go wrong?”

  Just as she lifted the laptop toward Other-Natalie, she heard the little ding that meant a new email had arrived. A second ding followed quickly. Natalie lowered the laptop slightly to see the new messages. Both had identical subject lines: “Confirming prisoners slated for scapegoating display and elimination.”

  Wait—elimination? Panic coursed through Natalie. Does elimination mean . . . death? If we don’t manage to rescue Mrs. Greystone and Joe tonight, they won’t just go back to prison? They’ll be . . . killed?

  Natalie stared up accusingly at Other-Natalie—how could the other girl have left out that detail? But Other-Natalie was staring at the screen with a horrified expression that probably looked just like the one on Natalie’s face.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” Natalie said, even as Other-Natalie said the same thing.

  Natalie pulled the computer back toward her own lap, but at the same time she shot a glance toward Finn, hoping she could get him to look away. She couldn’t bear to let him see the mess they’d almost made of things. She opened her mouth to say, “Oh, hey, don’t you want to go help Emma with whatever she’s working on?” or “Can you go make sure Chess is okay?”—she hadn’t really decided what she could say.

  But while Natalie was looking away and pulling down on the computer, Other-Natalie pulled the laptop up toward her. The more Other-Natalie lifted up, the harder Natalie tried to tug down.

  The laptop slipped out of both of their grasps and went crashing to the floor.

  Fifty-Three

  Finn

  “Did it break?” Finn asked, leaning forward with Natalie and Other-Natalie to gaze at the upside-down laptop on the floor before them.

  Natalie snatched it up and turned it over. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the screen, which had gone totally black.

  “I’m sure it just . . . needs a minute to reboot,” she said in a wavery voice that didn’t sound sure at all. She stabbed her finger at the button on the side. On, off. On, off. On.

  The blank screen didn’t change.

  “But it didn’t break until after you sent the emails, right?” Finn asked. “So Mom and Joe will be here tonight, won’t they? So we can rescue them?”

  “Right . . . ,” Natalie said. Her tone made it sound more like she was saying, “No! We just lost your mom and Joe! We’ll never be able to save them!”

  Oh, because she thinks the computer is totally broken, and now she can’t find her own mom to get her back, Finn realized.

  He raised an arm to pat her shoulder comfortingly; he tried to decide what to say that might help. He settled on, “You didn’t mean to break it, so nobody should get mad. And I bet the Judge has other laptops somewhere that Other-Natalie can find.” He leaned close and whispered, “You’ve seen this house. These people are really rich. Of course they have lots of computers!”

  “This . . . this was the only one that held all my mom’s secret connections,” Other-Natalie said. Her face, like Natalie’s, was too pale. Neither of them looked like themselves right now. “It was the only one we could use to pretend to be her and send email. . . .”

  “Well, then . . .” Finn really didn’t know what to say to that. He swallowed hard. The walls of the tiny secret hallway seemed to squeeze closer together around him.

  Suddenly Other-Natalie jumped up and pulled her phone from her back pocket again. Soundlessly, it lit up and vibrated in her hand.

  “No, Mom, I don’t want to talk to you, either,” she snarled, stabbing her finger at the screen.

  The phone went still for only a moment before it began quivering again.

  “Now it’s Grandma,” Other-Natalie complained, hitting the Ignore icon once more. “Leave me alone!”

  “Maybe . . . maybe you should find out what they’re all trying to tell you?” Chess suggested faintly.

  “We don’t even have a grandma,” Finn said. “And our dad’s dead.”

  Finn wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but Other-Natalie’s face seemed to turn even more sickly looking.

  “Right,” she muttered. “I’ll listen to the voicemail.” She tilted her head and put her phone to her ear. “Blah, blah, blah, yeah, this was nothing. Just Dad saying he’s so glad I’m feeling better and I’ll be able to join everyone celebrating his political achievements at the party. Now for Mom . . .” She listened again, and snorted. “Figures. Mom says it’s regrettable I’m still feeling sick, but of course everyone at the party will understand why I can’t be there. . . .”

  “Don’t they always say opposite things?” Natalie asked. “So you get c
aught in the middle?”

  Other-Natalie lowered her phone.

  “Um, not about public appearances,” she said, squinting like she was totally confused. “Usually they agree on what they call ‘the face we present to the public.’ . . .”

  The phone lit up again and began shaking in Other-Natalie’s hand.

  “Okay, okay!” Other-Natalie answered it. “Grandma?” She was quiet for a minute, listening. “Yeah, Mom already called to say I should stay in my room during the . . . Wait, what? But that’s not . . . Grandma, explain. You can’t just . . .” She dropped the phone and slumped against the wall. “She hung up on me.” Now Other-Natalie looked like she might throw up. She looked like she might fall over.

  “What else did she say?” Natalie demanded. “What happened?”

  Other-Natalie winced. She clutched the wall.

  “She said . . . there was a threat,” she muttered. “Reports that . . . my parents’ opponents might attack the party tonight.”

  “So they canceled it?” Finn wailed. “But that’s how we were going to get Mom! That’s how we were going to get Joe!”

  Other-Natalie blinked. Now she looked like she was about to cry.

  “They didn’t cancel it,” she said. “They changed the time. It starts in an hour.”

  Fifty-Four

  Emma

  “That’s not enough time!” Emma moaned.

  Nobody answered. The others all looked like a bomb had gone off in their midst. Chess held on to Finn, but it was hard to tell who was propping up whom. Other-Natalie clutched her head, and . . . actually, Natalie was doing the exact same thing.

  They all looked defeated.

  Emma looked back at the list she’d been making of all the strange words from Mom’s coded message: Annihilate. Sustainable. Earnest. Hope . . .