Twenty-Three

Emma

Emma felt so groggy. She couldn’t quite remember why she needed to get back to her senses immediately, but it seemed like a good idea. Maybe because someone was shaking her shoulders and calling her name: “Emma? Emma? EMMA!”

She opened her eyes and blinked away the darkness. And there was Finn staring down at her, practically nose to nose.

“How far from a closed tunnel-slide do you have to go to open a new one?” he asked. “Where’s the best place to swing the lever? Should I hit the floor again or aim for the wall?”

“Finn . . . slow . . . down,” Emma moaned, because he seemed to be talking twice as fast as usual.

Or maybe Emma’s brain was just working twice as slowly as usual.

“Hurry up and start thinking again!” Finn begged. Did he have tears in his eyes? “We’ve got to go back for Mom!”

Go . . . back? Emma had to puzzle out the meaning of both those words.

Then she remembered. Doughnuts. Mayor Mayhew in a gas mask. Broken windows. The adults and Natalie slumped to the floor. The spinning tunnel-slide.

So she and Chess and Finn were in the other world now?

Oh yeah, Emma thought. Since the lever opens a spinning room if you hit it against a wall, then it must open a spinning slide if you hit a floor. Because it’s spinning plus gravity.

“Shh.” She shot her hand up and slipped it over Finn’s mouth. Then she hissed, “It’s dangerous to make so much noise.”

“But we’re in Judge Morales’s house,” Finn whispered, despite the hand over his mouth. “She’s on our side.”

“Don’t say that out loud! Someone might hear!” Emma whispered back. “It’s a secret, remember? And she has enemies even in her own home. . . . We have to make sure it’s really safe here before we go back for anyone else.”

Dizzily, Emma sat up.

Chess was straining to prop himself up against the side of the couch, too.

“We . . . should get out of sight . . . ,” he moaned. “As soon as . . . we can . . .”

“Where . . . are we?” Kona asked dazedly. She was still lying flat on the floor, with Kafi sitting beside her, patting her cheek.

“Same house, different world,” Emma muttered.

On the other side of Kona, Rocky sat up unsteadily and began peering around.

“Same couch, same staircase, different windows, no exploding doughnut boxes or stink grenades . . . ,” he murmured. He took a deep breath and started coughing. He seemed to be at least trying to do it quietly. He grimaced, and seemed on the verge of gagging. “Ugh. I take that back. The stink grenades have been here, too.”

He bent down and peeked under the couch, as if he expected to see the same small round rubbery bundles of poison stench that had come flying in the windows at Ms. Morales’s house back in the better world.

“Stink grenades” was a pretty good name for them.

“Don’t worry,” Emma assured him. “This house wouldn’t have poison smells. The Judge and the Mayor are leaders here. The leaders use the bad smells to make ordinary people feel hopeless. The Mayor did, anyway. The leaders and their families—they don’t have to deal with anything like that themselves.”

“Oh yeah?” Rocky asked. “Then what am I smelling?”

“The leftover stink on your own clothes? Your own hair?” Emma asked. “All of us kids?”

“Maybe it’s the air inside our noses from the other world,” Kona said helpfully, sniffing deliberately. She exhaled, and tried again. “But . . . I smell it, too. It’s like they held a rat convention here, and all the rats died.”

“It’s worse over by this wall,” Rocky reported, edging away from the couch. He made a face like he was about to throw up. “Kona, you should keep your baby sister away from here.”

“Hey, is that wall broken?” Finn asked, squinting as if his eyes hadn’t fully adjusted either.

Now all the kids stared at the wall. A shadowy line ran through its cream-colored paint, then turned at a right angle about eight feet up.

“Oh, I see,” Chess muttered. “That’s a door. I bet it leads to one of the secret passageways here. Someone just left it open a crack.”

“Why would they do that?” Emma asked. “Then the passageway isn’t secret.”

Recklessly, she lurched to her feet. It felt like her legs had fallen asleep, and they were just starting to awaken. So she was lucky not to trip as she stumbled toward the crack in the wall. But her brain was fully alert now. And Rocky was right. This house reeked, too. The stench intensified the closer Emma got to the wall.

But I have to know what’s in there. . . .

Emma cupped one hand over her mouth and nose and tried to keep from gagging as she tugged on the edge of the door. A dim passageway appeared ahead, just as Emma had expected.

Emma and her brothers had spent a lot of time roaming through the secret passageways of this house on their last trip to this world, so they knew the routes well. She was not at all surprised to see the unfinished beams and drywall of the narrow passageway before her. Only the floor of the passageway seemed to have changed. Someone—the Mayor? The Judge? Some servant?—had laid down a black rubberized surface that seemed oddly bumpy.

Emma blinked, and her eyesight swung into clearer focus.

No. She’d been wrong. The actual floor of the secret passageway hadn’t changed.

It was now just covered with stink grenades.