Six

Chess

“There,” Emma said, pointing at a carved angel on the clock’s face, just slightly to the right of the numeral 5. “What does that remind you of?”

Chess instantly felt dizzy, thrown back into frightening memories. He left it to Finn to whisper a reply: “Judge Morales’s desk.”

Judge Morales was the other-world version of their friend Natalie’s mom. For most of the time the Greystone kids and Natalie had spent in the other world, they’d been terrified of the Judge; they’d believed she was one of the most evil people in that horrible place.

They’d believed she was their mother’s worst enemy.

Only in their last, desperate moments in the other world had they found out that the Judge was like a double agent—only pretending to be evil, while secretly working behind the scenes to rescue people.

And one of the Judge’s behind-the-scenes secrets was that she could sit at her desk in her home office and spy on people in lots of other locations. The little buttons for calling up those spied-upon scenes were hidden in carvings on the underside of her desk—carvings of angels and lambs, not the scary-looking demons and wolves that seemed to dominate all the other carvings the Greystones and Natalie had seen in the other world.

And the angels carved into the underside of the Judge’s desk in the other world had been exactly like this angel carved into the face of the giant clock.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” Chess whispered to Emma. “Except, I guess, that the wood carver who made the Judge’s desk in the other world has a double in this world who carved this clock.”

“No, look closer,” Emma insisted. “This angel is carved in a different style than the entire rest of the clock. Look how the cuts are made, how the angel is smiling. . . . It’s like this is art. Not . . .”

Not cartoonish carvings in a restaurant for little kids’ birthday parties, Chess thought.

“So what happens if you press this angel’s wing?” Finn asked, reaching out.

“Be careful!” Chess grabbed his brother’s hand away, because this seemed dangerous. Pressing the angel’s wing in the other world had been a good thing, but the worlds were mirrored—practically mirror-image opposites. So would it be a mistake to press this carved angel wing?

Emma glanced back over her shoulder, as if checking to make sure that Mom and the Gustanos hadn’t noticed that the three Greystone kids had stopped before reaching the bathrooms. Or maybe Emma was checking to make sure that no one else was watching them either.

“Chess—we really should try it,” she murmured. “Just in case.”

“Okay, okay,” Chess agreed. “But let me do it.”

What if some knife suddenly dropped out of the clock’s face and cut him? What if this turned out to be another way to open a tunnel into the other world? What if it made the clock collapse on top of them? Or . . .

Chess shuddered, and told himself to stop being so paranoid. He pressed his finger hard against the angel’s wing.

At first, nothing happened. But then the angel’s jaw dropped, and a small, round metal token slipped out.

A coin.

Chess caught it in his hand.

“What is it? Let me see!” Finn cried.

Chess unclenched his hand and held out his palm to the other two. The coin glistened, nestled against his lifeline. It wasn’t money—or, at least, not any kind Chess had seen before. The coin’s brassy color made it hard to read the letters along its edge.

No, that wasn’t the only reason the coin was so hard to read.

“It’s code!” Emma breathed reverently. “More code!”