Ten

Finn

“Like guinea pigs, you mean?” Finn asked helpfully, because everybody else seemed frozen, shocked into silence.

“The police assured me nobody hurt my children,” Mrs. Gustano said, in a voice that could have turned boiling water into ice cubes. “Rocky, Emma, Finn—you all told me you were fine the whole time you were away. Not in pain, anyway. You were just really, really scared, and—”

“Scared,” Emma repeated, as though the word itself was something she could put on a glass slide and slip under a microscope. Emma got like that sometimes. She was probably going to be a scientist when she grew up; she would probably discover everything there was to know.

“Of course they were scared,” Chess said. “They’d been kidnapped, and they didn’t know where they were or how to escape. We were terrified the whole time we were in the other world, and we at least sort of knew what was going on. And we were rescuing them. We had some . . .”

“Power,” Rocky finished for him. “Control.”

Emma brushed Rocky’s fingers with hers. Finn couldn’t quite tell if she was trying to high-five him or shake his hand. Either way, it looked like she was welcoming him onto a team.

“You understand,” she marveled.

Joe’s frown only deepened.

“Do you Gustano kids remember any unusual smells?” he asked.

“Fire,” Other-Emma said, gazing thoughtfully toward the ceiling, as if that helped her answer. “But not like fire-in-a-fireplace, where it makes you feel cozy and glad to be indoors. More like burning tires, burning garbage—a smell that made us want to gag.”

“Rotten burning garbage,” Other-Finn added. “And maybe dead rats, too. Dead rats and dead mice and spiders and snakes . . .”

“Yeah!” Finn said. “I know just the smell you’re talking about. Yuck!”

“We all smelled that when we were in the Public Hall for Mom’s trial,” Emma said. “Everybody there was forced to, I don’t know, marinate in those horrible odors. And it made everyone terrified and angry. But you already knew that, Joe. We talked about it, and you agreed with my theory that the people in charge of the trial were using those smells to control people. Because the leaders of the other world, they don’t want anyone thinking for themselves. Or making any decisions for themselves.”

“The more we breathed in that bad air, the more we felt weak and helpless and scared,” Finn told the Gustanos. “Did you feel that way, too?”

“It’s hard to feel more of something you’re already drowning in,” Other-Emma muttered.

“I meant, what do you remember from before you got to the Public Hall?” Joe asked, still studying the Gustanos. He had the same glint in his eye that Emma always got when she talked about scientific experiments—the glint that meant, My brain is working really hard right now. “From the time you were kidnapped until they brought you into the Public Hall. Did you smell anything unusual then?”

“Cotton candy,” Other-Finn said. “But, like, cotton candy that was left in the heat too long and started to burn.”

“The same kind of deodorizer they use at school when someone throws up,” Other-Emma said.

“You mean, the stuff that never works right?” Finn asked. “The stuff that just makes the throw-up smell worse?”

“Exactly,” Other-Emma said.

“Gym shoes,” Rocky said. “You know how, when you get a new pair, at first they smell really good, just because they’re new?”

“And then you sweat all over them, and they are nasty,” Other-Emma finished for him. “And Mom makes you leave them outside on the porch so they don’t stink up the whole house.”

“Can you blame me?” Mrs. Gustano asked, and for a minute, it felt like they could all be happy if they just stuck to talking about stinky gym shoes and nothing else.

But of course they had lots of other things they had to talk about.

“So you’re saying the whole time you were with the kidnappers, you smelled all sorts of odors that were good and bad mixed together,” Emma said. “Or—good things ruined, and bad things that can’t be fixed no matter how much someone tries to mask the odor.”

“And those smells were supposed to be science?” Other- Finn asked.

“We’ve intercepted messages, and now we’ve decoded them,” Joe said. “From the government in the bad world. They told the kidnappers to test the Gustano kids’ reactions to all sorts of these smells. The Gustano kids in particular, because . . .”

He was back to staring at Mom, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear what he was about to say.

Maybe he’d even started talking in code that only Mom could understand.

Finn wanted to jump up into Mom’s lap and put his face in front of Mom’s, blocking hers. Maybe that way Joe would go back to talking to everyone at once.

But just then Joe jerked to attention and put his hand up to his ear.

“What’s that you say? Slow down!” he hissed.

Joe wasn’t talking to Mom anymore. Finn didn’t know as much about electronic gizmos as Emma did, but even he could tell: Joe had to be wearing a tiny earpiece and probably an even smaller microphone hidden somewhere in his clothes. And that’s what he was talking into now.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Has the perimeter been breached?” Joe seemed to stagger backward. “Are you under attack? Are you in danger?”

Finn couldn’t hear an answer. He couldn’t tell if Joe heard one, either.

But even as he said the word “danger,” Joe jumped through the open window.

And then he took off running across the parking lot.