Twenty-Nine

Emma

The minute the TV died, Emma’s brain woke up.

She blinked, recognizing the Morales-Mayhew kitchen again, recognizing her own thoughts again, remembering her own goals: Rescue Mom and the others. Figure out the coins. Make it so Mayor Mayhew and the other evil people of this world never hurt anyone again.

Then she saw why the TV had gone dark: Kafi had pulled the plug.

The little girl sat on the floor by the electrical outlet. In one hand, she held the TV cord. In the other, she held some of the coins the other kids had dropped.

And she was about to put both the cord and the coins into her mouth.

“Kafi, no!” Kona shrieked, dashing toward her little sister.

Emma was a little closer. She ran alongside Kona. So did Chess, Finn, and Rocky. It was like all five kids were racing to save the little girl. But Kona reached her sister first.

“Spit it out!” Kona screamed, pulling a coin from Kafi’s mouth and two others from her hand. “You’ll choke!”

Emma swiped the electrical cord out of the little girl’s other hand. It whipped toward the floor.

Kafi began to scream.

“Here, chew on this instead,” Finn suggested, pulling a box of granola bars from a cabinet and unwrapping one quickly. He shoved it into Kafi’s clutch.

Chess and Rocky picked up the other dropped coins, so Kafi couldn’t reach any of them.

Kona hugged Kafi close and bounced her up and down. Kafi’s sobs subsided as she began gumming the granola bar.

“I can’t take my eye off you for a minute, can I?” Kona moaned, her face buried against Kafi’s curls. “I didn’t even want to watch that TV. I just . . . couldn’t stop.”

Now that Kafi’s safe, we should plug the TV back in, Emma thought, reaching for the cord again.

Where had that thought come from?

“Here. This is the one you were carrying,” Chess said, slipping a coin into Emma’s hand. “Take an extra one, too.”

Emma stared at the two coins Chess had given her. Her mind felt totally back to normal now—totally hers.

“I—I—how could I have dropped that?” Emma asked. “How could I have dug it out of my pocket and thrown it to the ground and . . .”

“The TV made you do it,” Rocky said. He looked like he wanted to punch someone. Or maybe something—like the TV. “It controlled us just like the stink grenades did.”

“Only worse,” Finn said. He leaned against Rocky the same way he often leaned against Chess.

He’s still scared, Emma thought.

So was she.

She looked down at the TV cord again. She could resist the urge now to plug it back in, but why did it still call to her? The silver prongs of the plug gleamed temptingly in the sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window.

Wait a minute, Emma thought. Sunlight?

She raced to the window, leaning across the counter to peer up at the sky.

“Everything was a lie!” she announced. “There’s no battle going on in this world! At least, not where the TV was showing it. The TV made it look like it was right in our neighborhood—the bad-world version of our neighborhood, I mean. And if there was that much smoke and fighting going on there, we would definitely be able to see it from this window!”

The others crowded around her. Outside the window, the yard sloped gently down to a row of trees. A stone wall with guard towers every ten feet or so lay nestled in the trees.

Above the line of trees, the sky was a crystalline blue, with puffy white clouds. It was, in fact, the clearest sky they’d ever seen in this world.

There was no smoke. No smoke at all.

“The TV tricked us!” Finn protested.

“But we believed it,” Rocky said.

“And we couldn’t stop watching,” Chess added. “Here.”

Emma saw that he’d found a roll of masking tape in one of the kitchen drawers, and he’d used it to tape two of the coins tightly around his wrist. He was offering to do the same for her.

“That’s really smart, Chess,” Emma said admiringly. She held out her arm and he began taping coins to her wrist, too.

“It’s like the first step toward having another lever,” Kona joked. Kafi clapped her granola-sticky hands, as if she approved, too. Kona bit her lip. “Wait a minute—what if that’s how people figured out to build the lever? Because they were trying to fight off the power of the stink grenades or the TV?”

“The coins worked a lot better against the stink grenades than they did with the TV,” Rocky said, frowning as he unwrapped a granola bar of his own. “And the lever was useless.”

“Oh no—our lever!” Emma cried, realizing that all of them had just abandoned it in the living room when they’d heard the TV. She jerked her wrist away from Chess even though he’d barely gotten the first strip of tape in place around her coins. She dashed into the living room, careening against the walls. She scooped up the lever, and began racing back toward the others.

But in her haste, she took a corner too fast and knocked into the door of Judge Morales’s office. Even half off its hinges, the door scraped back and smashed into the wall.

And then a TV announcer voice came from the office: “Stay tuned for live updates about all the ways your leaders are keeping you safe during the evil attack from the other world. . . .”

“Hey, guys! There’s another TV in the office—I guess it was set to be motion-activated, too,” Emma called. “And, really, we should find out what it’s saying. . . .”

She began to pick at the tape on her wrist, the tape holding her coins in place. The lever slipped down in her grasp. But she was still in enough control of her own brain to hear the other kids shouting from the kitchen, “Emma, no!” “Stay away from there!” “Don’t go into that office!”

That was Chess, Kona, and Rocky.

Then she also heard Finn yell, “Emma! We’ll come and rescue you!”

He would, she thought, even as the TV announcer in the office still called out to her, “The danger is not past. We repeat, the danger is not past. You cannot trust anyone. You have to watch out for yourself, just as your leaders are selflessly watching out for you. . . .”

No, Emma thought, and it felt like she was wrenching her own brain away from the TV’s lure. I can trust Finn. And Chess and Kona and Rocky. And even Kafi. They will try to rescue me, and that will just lead to them being trapped, too. I have to rescue myself.

Emma noticed her own fingers were still picking at the tape around her wrist.

No, she thought again. It’s not just that I have to rescue myself. I have to get away from that TV in the office to keep the other kids safe.

Emma’s fingers stilled. And then she wrapped them completely around her own wrist.

Holding the coins in place.

Painstakingly, groaning with the effort, she turned away from the office with its loud TV and began inching back toward the kitchen.

Not just for my own sake, she thought with each step. For Finn. For Chess. For Kona. For Kafi. For Rocky. For Finn . . .

Finally, sweating profusely, her muscles aching, Emma rounded the corner into the kitchen. Her gaze fell on her brothers and Rocky, Kona, and Kafi. Oddly, it looked like they’d been taping their wrists together, linking as many of their coins as possible.

The part of her brain that could still distantly hear the TV in the office told her, What? They weren’t going to rescue you. They were joining together to abandon you.

But Emma knew the truth: They would always help her.

She knew something else, too.

“We’ve got to get out of this house,” she said. “Now.”