Twenty-Four

Chess

“Get down! Someone will see you!” Chess hissed at Emma. He lunged toward her to pull her down to the floor and safety. But his muscles were still a little shaky from changing worlds, and he started to fall past her.

Emma caught him, and pulled him up beside her.

“No, Chess—look,” she breathed, spinning him around to face out into the living room. “I don’t think anyone else is here.”

Chess blinked. The house did have an eerie, abandoned feel to it. The front door of the house was hanging wide open, creaking back and forth with the breeze. Chess tilted his head back to look at the upper level of the entryway windows—the extra level, which Ms. Morales’s house didn’t have back in the better world. Those windows were all broken, and tattered drapes and valances fluttered in and out.

“This house was attacked, too,” Rocky said grimly, pulling himself up alongside them. “Maybe it was attacked first. And then . . . and then . . . the way these attacks work . . . was everyone just taken away? Kidnapped?”

Chess remembered the words from the first coin Natalie had received: We’re all in danger now. I need your help. You need mine. He remembered how, the last time the Greystone kids had been in this house, there’d been a behind-the-scenes battle raging between the good Judge and the evil Mayor. The Judge had seemed to win that battle. But now . . .

The Mayor’s out running around, attacking the better world, Chess thought. The Judge is nowhere in sight. That’s not a good sign.

“This must be what the coin from Other-Natalie was warning us about,” he said, wincing. “Both of the attacks. Here and there. Except . . . we didn’t help Other-Natalie and her mom. We got distracted playing with the coins.”

Chess felt his face flush. Just thinking about the coins back at Ms. Morales’s house made him dizzy. When the coins were drifting down, when Natalie placed them so carefully in his hands . . . how could he have felt anything but wonder and awe? How could he have done anything but peer into her face and smile?

Chess looked down at the coins he still held clutched in his left hand. He’d managed to hold on to most of the Natalie coins, even though he’d dropped the Ms. Morales ones.

“The coins made us all giddy,” Kona said. “That does not seem like a good system for sending messages.”

“Hmm,” Emma said. She began digging in her pocket. She pulled out the coin she’d brought from the other world and handed it to Chess.

“Wait a minute—no, just thirty seconds—then give that back to me,” she told him, letting go.

Then she dived into the pile of stink grenades in the secret passageway.

Instantly she began weeping and wailing.

It was a horrible sound, as if Emma’s heart was completely broken, and she believed everyone she loved was dead, and she knew her life would never contain so much as a glimmer of happiness ever again. She flailed her legs and clutched her face in her hands.

Chess couldn’t take it.

“No, Emma, please! Stop that!” Chess pleaded. “Get away from there! Everything will be okay, I promise. I—” Desperately, he shoved the coin back into Emma’s hand, even though he hadn’t timed anything.

Emma popped back up. Her eyes still glistened with unshed tears, but the overwhelming distress was gone. The corner of her lips trembled, as if she was trying to smile again.

Finn gave both Chess and Emma a big hug, as if they’d both just escaped an attack all over again.

“What are you guys doing?” Rocky complained. “We don’t have time for playing with the stink grenades any more than we did with the coins. Not when my mom and brother and sister are still in danger.”

He looked around, as if he expected Kona to say, “Or my dad.” But Kona had a gleam in her eye that almost matched Emma’s.

“She’s figuring out the coins,” Kona said. “The coins and the stink grenades and the different worlds and . . . and us. Right, Emma?”

Emma rewarded Kona with a full-on grin. It wasn’t exactly like watching Natalie and her double, Other-Natalie, have a moment of mind-meld. It wasn’t even like watching Mom and Mrs. Gustano together. But Emma and Kona were definitely on the same wavelength.

“I don’t know what else they can do, but around the stink grenades, the coins are, like, immunity,” Emma said. “Protection. A ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”

Rocky dug in his pocket and brought out the PLEASE LISTEN coin he’d been carrying. He looked like he was considering dropping it to test Emma’s theory, but didn’t quite dare.

“I’m holding this coin in my hand, and that stink still makes me feel awful,” he said. “It’s still like I’ve got this voice in my head saying, ‘You may never see your family again. They might be suffering right now, and you’re not doing anything about it.’”

“Right,” Emma said. “‘You may never see them. . . . They might be suffering. . . .’ If you put that coin down, the smell would make you think, ‘I know for sure I’ll never see my family again. I know for sure they’re suffering, and there’s nothing I can do. I hate myself. I hate everything. There’s no hope.’”

Rocky closed his fingers around the coin in his hand and shoved his hand back in his pocket. He kept his hand there, holding on to the coin.

Chess clutched the coins in his own hand even tighter, too.

“Did you notice that every single one of us who escaped from the Mayor’s attack had coins?” Emma asked.

Chess looked around. Kona patted the coin she’d placed in her own pocket. Finn clenched his hand around his coins so hard his knuckles turned white.

“Not Kafi,” Kona reported, checking the little girl’s hands and clothing. “Oh, wait . . . Kafi, how did you manage to get one stuck in the toe of your sleeper?” She unzipped the girl’s sleeper and pulled out a coin. Instantly, Kafi screwed up her face and began to wail. Kona put the coin back. “Okay, okay, Kafi—I’ll leave it there!”

Kona rezipped the sleeper. Kafi stopped crying, snuggled against her big sister, and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

“I think we need to get as far away as we can from the smell, so we can think straight,” Chess said, pulling Finn and Emma along with him, away from the secret passageway.

As soon as they were out of the way, Rocky shoved the door completely shut. Then he gave the door an extra kick.

“That felt good,” he announced.

Finn grabbed the lever again as all the kids moved into the open area of the living room.

“We go back, we use the coins like shields, we hand out coins to Mom and Natalie and everyone else. . . . It’s a plan!” Finn said, practically dancing now. He was definitely cheering up, almost back to his usual self.

Chess looked down again at the coins in his hand. Away from the secret passageway full of stink grenades, it felt safe now to unclench his fist, to hold the coins loosely. He noticed that Natalie’s touch had transformed whatever code had been there originally, so he could read the words on all the coins now: HEAR US, SEE US, HELP US. . . . The last message repeated twice.

Why didn’t we hear Other-Natalie’s voice through these coins, when they transformed? Chess wondered. He remembered Mom saying to press the coins twice—maybe Natalie just hadn’t done that.

Or maybe Other-Natalie’s voice had spoken, and Natalie and Chess had missed hearing it in all the chaos.

Then Chess realized something else. He held only four coins; Finn, he’d seen, had three. Everyone else had only one. So if they all kept one for themselves, that left only five to give to Mom, Natalie, Joe, and the three left-behind Gustanos.

Five coins, six people, Chess thought.

He was away from the awful smell, and he still didn’t feel very cheerful. But maybe this was his natural self: wondering, worried, stymied. . . .

“Somebody else take all my coins,” Chess said, holding out his hand. “I’ll hold on to Emma or Finn, and maybe their coin will work for me, too. So we can hand out my four coins and the two extra ones Finn has, then—”

“Chess, that doesn’t seem fair,” Emma said. “We don’t want to risk losing you. Let’s work on this—we’ve got a lot more to figure out.”

“Oh, come on,” Rocky groaned. “We’re going to keep talking and talking about this, and the rest of my family is still in danger, and . . .”

He looked around frantically, as if being farther from the stink grenades had freed him to move decisively again.

Then he grabbed the lever from Finn’s grasp and swung it at the nearest wall.