Twenty-Two

Finn

“Oh, cool!” Finn screamed, even as he tumbled forward. “You opened a slide this time, not a tunnel!”

The hole that had suddenly opened right in the floor beside—and then around—Finn and Chess and Emma was like something out of an amusement park. Finn could see shadowy twists and turns, and he imagined that there might even be loop-de-loops ahead. Of course he couldn’t see all the way to the end of the slide, but he had a pretty good idea where he would land.

“Come on, everyone!” Finn shouted over his shoulder as he spun around, speeding toward curves and corkscrews. “Get away from the bad guys!”

He decided he didn’t want to look completely back toward the front door; he was leaving anyway, so why scare himself by seeing how close the men in gas masks had gotten?

“But won’t this take us to the other world?” someone screamed behind him. “Exactly where we don’t want to go?”

That was Rocky, tumbling alongside Finn and the other Greystones. Rocky was clutching little Kafi and looked a hundred times more terrified than the little girl. She looked completely unruffled. The yellow bows tied in her hair weren’t even crooked.

“Right, but we’ll be in Judge Morales’s house in the other world, and she’s on our side,” Finn countered. “It’s okay!”

He somersaulted out of Chess’s arms, grabbing for Emma and Rocky as he turned head over heels beyond them.

“But maybe we should think through this . . . first,” Emma was saying even as she tumbled around and around with Finn.

It was too late. They were both—no, wait; all three, all four, all five—slipping and sliding and twisting and banking off the turns of the slide that had suddenly appeared beneath their feet. The slide was spinning, too, so it felt like a combination slide and amusement park ride. Kafi seemed to be shrieking with glee, and all five of them were so jumbled together that Finn couldn’t figure out whether it was Rocky’s elbow or Chess’s that had lodged itself in his ear. He couldn’t tell whether it was Emma’s knee or Kafi’s that kept bumping against his leg.

“Kafi!” he heard someone yell behind him, and he realized it was Kona’s voice. “Don’t worry! I’m coming after you!”

And then there was a foot—Kona’s?—that kept tapping on his head whenever Finn slowed down in the twisty curves of the slide.

Then, as if it came from a million miles away, he heard a man’s gruff voice calling out, “Here’s where they escaped! Do we follow them, or just take their lever?”

Finn shrieked. Twisting a lever could shut a tunnel; surely it would shut a tunnel-slide, too. And if the people from the other world took the lever away completely, then . . . then . . .

It didn’t seem like it would be safe to still be in a tunnel-slide when that happened.

And it would mean the Greystones and Rocky and Kona and Kafi had lost the lever.

They couldn’t lose the lever. They’d be trapped.

Still shrieking, Finn hit the floor, landing in a heap with the other kids. He didn’t want to think about how he could fall straight down through the floor and land on the exact same floor in the other world—thinking too much about how the worlds connected always made his head hurt. Emma moaned on one side of him, Chess on the other, as if both of their heads hurt, too. Rocky, Kona, and Kafi were a little farther away, but only Kafi sat up immediately.

Kafi was just a baby. Rocky and Kona didn’t know as much as the Greystones did about levers. And Emma and Chess always had a harder time recovering from traveling between the worlds than Finn did.

So maybe everything depended on Finn?

He groped around on the floor, and—yes! There was the lever. Or, at least, this world’s version of the lever, the mirror image of the one they’d left behind on the floor at Natalie’s house. Finn wrapped his hands around the lever the same way a really little kid would clutch a blankie. But in his mind, Finn replayed another moment with this lever—a time when Chess had tried to hold on to the lever while someone in the opposite world ripped the corresponding lever away . . . and the lever had vanished from between Chess’s fingers.

Finn couldn’t let that happen again. He couldn’t let his family be left without this lever.

Straining every muscle, Finn yanked the lever straight up from the floor and hugged it close to his chest.

Instantly, the tunnel-slide at his feet vanished completely.

“Mom? Chess? Finn? Natalie?” Emma moaned beside him.

Only then did Finn realize: They’d left Mom and Natalie behind. And Ms. Morales, Joe, and all of the Gustanos except Rocky. The others had been in the foyer, not the living room, when the floor opened up. So they’d been trapped with all the men in gas masks smashing into the house and throwing stink bombs.

And Finn himself had just taken away the lever that would have allowed Mom and the others to escape.