The dangling varsity players were in a trance. They did not move or seem to see. They just sat with folded arms and legs crossed, staring into space.
Drgnan Pghlik counted. “That’s not all of them, is it?” he asked Katie.
“No,” said Katie. “We caught their Number Four in Dover. And Number Six is frozen upstairs in the dining room.” She scanned their faces. “And Number One is missing.”
“See!” said Drgnan. “There is their coach!”
Katie looked across the chasm. There on the other side of the cavern was Coach, leaning against the wall, grinning, and drinking, as he would say, “a brewski.” He stood next to a large lever attached to some sort of machine.
“What’s that machine?” Katie asked Drgnan.
“It is a lever that controls the chains that hold people over the flame-pits. The chains are on a track in the ceiling. The lever, yes? It draws the chains over to that side of the chasm so that people can step off and the holy do not dangle forever.”
Katie inspected the room carefully. She looked up at the hanging jocks, at the mechanical track that held them in place, and at Coach, sitting by the engine that would move them. She saw that a bridge, also made of chains, ran across the fissure, right under the five meditating mob kids.
“I have an idea,” she said. “We can trap those five.”
Drgnan squinted. “What does my clever sister mean?”
“If we break that machine or pull out a gear or something, then the five players will be stuck there, you know, at our mercy. They won’t be able to escape.”
“Ah!” Drgnan exclaimed with pleasure. “Indeed! The lever on this machine unscrews!”
“Okay,” said Katie. “If you can take on Coach, I can take care of the lever.”
Drgnan smiled. “It is an excellent plan,” he said. “So we cross the bridge.”
Katie inspected the glinting bridge. It swayed with gusts of blue that drifted up from the mystical flames beneath.
Katie’s palms were sweating. She wasn’t sure how excellent a plan it was, suddenly.
She and Drgnan started to creep across the cavern floor.
They were almost at the chain bridge beneath the dandled, zombie-eyed boys—when Coach saw them.
“Hey! Hey!” Coach belted. “You! Keep away from my boys! They’re winners, and you’re a bad influence!”
The coach ran forward and pulled his pistol out of his tracksuit.
Katie and Drgnan dropped to the floor behind an outcropping. Flights of bullets rattled against the stalagmites, the stalactites, the schist.
Katie whispered to Drgnan, “Okay. How are we going to do this?”
“Saint Lrtzmrk writes that when the falcon lands in the lagoon, then the frog seeks its dinner elsewhere,” said Drgnan.
“You don’t have the faintest idea, do you?”
“No, my sister. None whatsoever.”
Katie peeked up over her outcropping—at the pit, at their adversary, at the five boys dreaming in the radiance of the sacred flames below them.
More bullets flew by.
And then Katie realized: Some of those bullets were coming from behind them.
She turned and grunted in surprise.
#1 stood in the door behind them, firing at their backs.
They were trapped.