Twenty-Seven

Chess

“Chess! Finn! Rocky!” Emma called. “The lever is completely made of coins! So I bet we can turn our coins into a lever, if the lever we have is really broken! We’re not trapped, after all!”

Chess blinked groggily as Emma and Kona came racing toward him and the other two boys. Emma was talking a mile a minute—which probably meant that her brain was spinning even faster than that. Maybe even at the speed of light.

Finn sprang up and threw his arms around Emma and Kafi.

“I knew you’d figure something out!” he shouted at Emma, as if he hadn’t just been lying flat on the floor, in misery.

“We should have had confidence in you, Emma,” Chess said, his own spirits rising, too.

“And Kona,” Emma said, with unusual modesty. “She’s the one who led to this discovery. Look!”

She held out the lever, which now had part of its outer covering torn away. Beneath that, coins were pressed together—glued, maybe? Fused somehow?

Chess could think of lots of problems with Emma’s theory. They had only ten coins between them—no, eleven, counting the one in the toe of Kafi’s sleeper—instead of the dozens that must be inside the lever, if it was entirely made of coins. Would eleven coins be enough? If not, how could they find more? And how were they supposed to connect them?

But Emma’s ideas and theories had gotten them past lots of problems on their last trips to this world. Maybe Chess should stop worrying and have faith that they could all figure out something together this time around, too.

“We didn’t want to peel away any more of the covering, because, who knows, we might still need to make this lever work,” Kona was saying. “But, look, all the coins inside have already had their codes translated—would you call it translated? The ones I can see say FIND US, HEAR US, SEE US, HELP US. . . .”

“Like the ones Natalie touched,” Chess said, holding out his handful of coins again.

Finn put his coins down on the floor and started pressing his fingers against them, one after the other.

“When I touch them, nothing happens,” he complained.

“Because those coins were meant for Natalie and Ms. Morales, not you,” Emma explained. “It’s like you got someone else’s text messages, and they were encrypted, so you can’t read them.”

“But I can still figure them out,” Finn said. He held up one of his coins. “This coin has three little symbol thingies, and then a space, then two more. So I bet it’s a SEE US coin.”

“Whoa, Finn—you figured out a code before I did!” Emma congratulated him.

“But if those messages are for other people, and it’s just random words like that, does it even matter what they say?” Rocky asked.

Chess waited for Emma to explode, Of course it matters! It’s CODE! We always need to solve the codes we find!

But just then Kafi darted forward and snatched two of the coins Finn had lined up on the floor. She immediately stuffed them into her mouth.

“Kafi, no!” Kona cried, yanking them away.

Kafi began to wail, even louder than before.

“She still has her own coin, right?” Emma asked. “So it’s not the stink grenades making her sad again, is it?”

“She’s a baby,” Kona said. “Babies cry a lot. And . . . she’s probably hungry.”

“I’m hungry, so I can understand,” Finn said, patting the little girl’s back just as heartily as Kona was.

Chess stood up.

“That’s a problem I know how to fix,” he said. “The kitchen’s right over there. I’ll go see what I can find.”

He tried not to think about how frightened he’d been on his last trip to this house, any time he’d stepped out of some hiding place. He and the others had probably been in the living room for the past half hour, and they’d totally stopped trying to be quiet. Kafi was pretty much screaming at the top of her lungs. If anybody else was in the house, they already would have found them.

And I know the Mayor’s in the other world, making trouble there, not here, he thought with an ache.

Of course, it was possible for the Mayor to come back.

That thought made Chess hesitate once he stepped out of the open area of the living room. He inched around corners, noticing that the door to the Judge’s office hung open and half off its hinges; the hallway chandelier dangled askew. What exactly had happened here? Why had this house, of all places, come under attack?

But nobody stepped out of the shadows; nobody hissed or shouted, “Who’s there? What are you doing here?”

Chess pressed his back against the last wall before the entryway to the kitchen and listened hard. He could still hear the murmur of the other kids’ voices out in the living room, along with Kafi’s snuffling, her sobs almost exhausted. But no sound came from the kitchen.

He peeked out, then whirled around the corner before he lost his nerve.

A bright light flashed ahead of him.

No, no—turn back! screamed in his head.

“—see the devastation,” a loud voice said.

Chess’s knees went weak as he realized what had happened: The large flat-screen TV sitting on the counter opposite him had just sprung to life.

Its volume must have been set incredibly high. When a loud Boom! sounded from the TV’s speakers, Chess felt it deep in his bones.

“What’s going on in there?” Finn called anxiously from the living room.

“Just a TV,” Chess called back. “I guess they had it on a timer—or, I know, maybe a motion sensor.”

Why would anyone have a TV programmed to come on anytime anyone walked into the room? Especially showing something as disturbing as a war movie?

People on the screen were running and screaming and falling down. People were bleeding and maybe even dying.

Chess reached out to turn it off. What if Kafi followed him into the kitchen and saw it? Or even Finn?

Somehow, Chess couldn’t find the power switch. He realized he wasn’t actually standing close enough to the TV. And his hand hadn’t actually reached for the TV. He’d just stretched his hand out and turned his hand over.

Then he unclenched his fist.

The coins he’d been carrying dropped straight to the floor.

“It’s a superhero movie,” he called to the others. Superhero movies always had crowd scenes of everyone running and screaming and being afraid. Then the superhero showed up and saved them all.

Chess could use a superhero showing up right about now.

“Don’t you love superhero movies?” he called again. “I do.”

Somehow it seemed important to let the others know that.

The running-and-screaming-crowd scene seemed to go on and on and on. It felt familiar somehow. Had he seen this movie before? In the brief gaps between the swirling smoke and the surging crowd on the screen, he caught glimpses of dense hedges and a tall, ramshackle wood fence covered in faded, multicolor paint. So familiar. So very, very familiar.

He knew that street. He knew those hedges and that fence. He knew the house that was beside the fence—barely more than a shape in the midst of all the smoke and screaming.

It was the house where he’d lived the first four years of his life. It was this world’s version of the house where he’d lived the past eight, misguided years of his life.

It was the house where he belonged, even now.

Because he belonged in this world.

Dimly, Chess heard shuffling behind him. Dimly, he heard coins clinking to the floor.

“That’s not a movie,” Finn said, his voice dreamy and distant. “That’s real. It’s happening right now.”

“We have to watch—”

“We have to see—”

“We have to know—”

Chess couldn’t pick out whose voice said what. But it didn’t matter. He agreed with all of them.

“Yes,” he said, his voice gone just as blank as Finn’s. “We have to.”