Sixteen

Finn

“Did you press the angel wing at the Cuckoo Clock, too?” Finn asked Kona. “How did you know to do that? And how did you get another coin out of it? I pushed it six or seven times after Chess did, and nothing happened. Did someone have to like, reload it? If we went back and pushed it again this morning, would we get more coins?”

“Angel wing at the Cuckoo Clock—what?” Kona said, looking from Finn to Emma to Chess as if Finn were talking in code, and she wanted the other kids to translate.

“That’s where we found our coin,” Emma said, waving her hands impatiently. “At the Cuckoo Clock. Where’d you get yours?”

“At a rest area somewhere in Tennessee—or maybe Kentucky, I wasn’t really sure—when we were driving here,” Kona said. She lowered her voice. “Don’t tell Dad, but I put Kafi down on the floor in the bathroom and it wasn’t very clean and she started crawling away and she picked that up and I just barely managed to stop her from putting it in her mouth . . . I put it in my pocket just to get it away from her. And then, with everything else, I forgot about it until now.”

“A rest area in Kentucky or Tennessee, and the Cuckoo Clock here in our own town,” Emma murmured, slumping back against the couch. “That’s, like, too coincidental. Maybe neither of these coins are connected to the other world. Maybe we’re just clutching at straws. Looking for patterns where there aren’t any.”

Chess rubbed his hands across his face and back through his hair. Any other day, Finn would have laughed at how crazily this made his hair stand on end. And it had already looked pretty crazy.

“So we don’t have any clues except . . . we know the bad people from the other world are taunting us,” Chess said. “They’re coming back and forth any time they want and scaring us and, and . . . we’re helpless.”

Before a month ago, Chess never would have said something like that around Finn.

And Finn wasn’t going to let him get away with saying it now.

“No, no, no,” Finn said, as if he were the big brother and Chess was the little kid who didn’t understand anything. “We’re not helpless. We rescued Mom and Joe and Ms. Morales from the other world, remember? And that was when it was just us Greystone kids and Natalie working together. And, okay, Other-Natalie and Other-Natalie’s grandma and the Judge. But we’ve got all the grown-ups and the Gustano kids and Kona on our side now. And even Kafi, if you count her helping by picking up random things nobody else sees.”

“She is good at that,” Kona agreed. “As long as you catch her before she puts those things in her mouth.”

“And you did catch her, at that rest stop,” Finn said. “And we’ve still got Emma’s big brain and Chess’s bravery, and Natalie’s still good at lying and . . . Emma, why don’t you at least look at the coin Kafi found?”

“Okay, okay,” Emma grumbled.

She half-heartedly took both coins from Kona and turned them side to side in the light. And then suddenly she bolted upright. She clutched both coins in her hand and scrambled up and took off racing for the stairs.

“These are connected to the other world!” Emma exclaimed. “And I know how!”