Fifteen

Chess

“He’s taunting us,” Chess said.

“We’ve got to tell him he can’t do that!” Finn stomped his feet. “Let’s go! Who’s going to drive? Mom? Joe? We’ll make him get away from our house. And—I know! The real police should arrest him for breaking our light!”

Chess watched Joe’s gaze slide away from the laptop and toward the blind-covered windows framing the front door of Ms. Morales’s house.

“No,” Joe murmured. “We can’t. By the time we’d get there, he’d be back in the other world. And . . .”

And doesn’t Joe think we still have an advantage in this world? Chess wondered.

“What was he trying to do?” Emma asked. “Did he really think Mrs. Gustano and her kids would go with him, even into the other world again? Didn’t he think we would catch on?”

Joe closed his eyes, as if that helped him think. He let out a deep sigh.

“Either he was gambling that Mrs. Gustano was still so naive and desperate that she would fall for his ploy or . . . they’re all just rubbing it in our faces, how easy it is for them to slip back and forth between the worlds,” he murmured.

Chess darted his gaze toward Mom. Even now she had the bat case with the lever inside hanging from her shoulder. She still had on the yoga pants and T-shirt she’d slept in. Her feet were bare. And she hadn’t taken the time to pull her hair back into her usual ponytail, so the dark strands hung down into her face.

But she had the lever. So, really, any of them could go back to the other world any time they wanted, too.

Except, the way the other world works, unless we were really, really careful, we’d probably be caught right away and taken to prison. Maybe we’d also be experimented on like the Gustanos were, exposed to horrible smells that made us feel even more hopeless than ever. . . .

Chess’s stomach churned.

From overhead, he heard a thin cry revving up, growing more and more angry.

“Kafi’s awake, Dad,” Kona said. “You got food for her when you bought the diapers, right?”

“Yeah, sure, but . . . where’s the kitchen in this house?” Joe mumbled. “Natalie put Kafi’s food in the fridge for me last night and . . . well, I think she did that. I was busy with the surveillance equipment, and . . .”

“Dad, you really aren’t very good at multitasking, are you?” Kona teased.

“Never claimed to be!” Joe muttered. He took off sprinting for the stairs as Kafi’s cries turned into wails.

And then it was just Kona, Chess, Emma, and Finn clustered around the useless laptops and iPad. Chess glanced toward Natalie, but she was with Mom and Ms. Morales, all of them comforting the Gustanos.

Later, Chess thought. We’ve got time. I’ll tell her everything Kona told me, and she’ll fill me in on everything she heard before Kona gave me the earbud last night.

Beside him, Kona plopped down onto the couch.

“Are things always this exciting around here?” she asked.

“They weren’t until about a month ago,” Finn said. “That’s when we found out about the other world.”

“Guess I’m about a month behind you,” Kona said with a shrug. “I didn’t find out until we were an hour away from—what was that restaurant called? The Cuckoo Clock? Until then, I thought the only thing different about this weekend was that Dad was going to take me to my gymnastics meet alone, because Mom had to work.”

“But you were so calm about everything,” Chess marveled. “You didn’t even seem upset.”

“I’ve moved seven times in the past eleven years,” Kona said. “I’ve lived everywhere from Hawaii to Maine to . . . well, we got to Atlanta just before Kafi was born. Adaptable is my middle name.”

“Really?” Finn breathed.

“She’s joking,” Emma told him. “Nobody’s middle name would be ‘Adaptable.’”

“You moved because of your dad, right?” Chess said. “Because he was the one handling all the secret records for people from the other world like my mom, and so he was the most visible person and . . . he had to keep moving to hide.”

Kona gaped at him, her gaze locked on his. Chess would have said that it would have been the most awkward and uncomfortable thing ever, to gaze into anyone’s eyes like that besides Mom or Emma or Finn. Or, lately, Natalie’s. But it felt okay for Kona to stare at him like that, and for Chess to stare back.

“Dad didn’t tell me that, but . . . you’re right,” Kona whispered. “I’m sure you’re right. So . . . if we fixed everything in the other world, then my family could just stay in one place for once? That’d be great! I’d do anything for that!”

“Kona, it’s not that easy,” Chess moaned.

“Wait, what?” Emma said, looking back and forth between Kona and Chess. “Did I miss something?”

“Kona and I kind of eavesdropped on the grown-ups last night,” Chess said.

“I thought the grown-ups trusted us now,” Finn said forlornly. “I thought they were telling us everything.”

“Well, we’re keeping secrets, too,” Emma said. She pulled a coin from her shorts pocket—the coin that had rolled out into Chess’s hand when he’d touched the carved angel at the Cuckoo Clock the day before. “We should show this to Mom and Joe, and then I bet they’ll want us to all work together to figure out the code. I’m sure it’s connected to the other world somehow. I don’t want this to be like last time, where I’m trying to solve some code while we’re running toward danger. And when we don’t know who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.”

This stung a little, because the last time they’d had an unsolved code and had to make a decision anyway, Chess had guessed the answer completely wrong.

“You’ve got a coin with code on it?” Kona asked. Her voice came out a little oddly. “Can I see?”

Emma handed her the coin. But Kona didn’t dip her head down to study it. Instead, she dug her other hand into her own shorts pocket. Then she lifted both hands toward the light that was coming in around the edges of the blinds.

“If your coin has code, then . . . is this code, too?” Kona asked.

She was holding up a second coin beside the first.

And it, too, was covered with mysterious symbols.