Thirty-One

Finn

Finn sped blindly behind Chess. He wanted to shriek, “Take that, Mayor Mayhew!” or “Nobody can catch us now!” or something else just as fun. But maybe it would be smarter to run silently.

He turned back to tell Rocky, “Look how cautious I’m being!”

So it was too late when he saw the girl whip around the corner of the house and smash into Chess. They hit so hard they fell to the ground, and Finn had no time to dodge them. He fell, too. All three of them landed in a heap.

“Sorry!” Finn cried, trying to scramble back up. “Didn’t see you!”

The girl was already shoving and kicking Finn and Chess, and struggling to get away. But they were all too tangled together.

“We didn’t mean to—” Chess began.

Emma, Rocky, and Kona and Kafi circled them instantly. Emma and Rocky began pulling Finn and Chess away from the girl.

“Stop hitting my brothers!” Emma cried.

Rocky yelled at the girl, “We’ll call the police! You’re trespassing! Get out of here!”

Kona hollered, “We’ve got guards with us!”

Finn wanted to laugh. He wanted to yell, “Go, team!” Because that’s how it felt: as if Rocky and Kona had joined the Greystone kids’ team, and they would always be on the same side.

Then he saw how the girl sat huddled in the middle of their circle, her face hidden in her hands, her shoulders trembling.

She might have even been crying.

“Uh, guys?” Finn said. “I think she’s scared of us.”

“She should be,” Rocky growled.

“It could be an act,” Kona said. “She could be a spy.”

“Don’t start feeling sorry for her yet, Finn,” Emma said. “We don’t know anything about her.” She crouched beside the girl. “Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing skulking around like that?”

The girl seemed to be trying to peek out, still without showing her face. Her tangled light brown hair was like a curtain over her eyes and nose and mouth. She had her hands over her face, too. Finn caught barely a glimpse of her pale eyelashes, caught in her hair.

“Shh,” she hissed. “Please. Don’t call anyone. Just . . . be quiet. Let me go without telling anyone, and I won’t tell anyone you’re here, either.”

“There are five of us and one of you,” Rocky said. “You’re outnumbered. You can’t bargain like that. We’re in charge.”

The girl huddled even tighter against the ground. She darted glances all around, as if looking for a way to break through their circle and escape.

“Rocky, you sound like a bully when you talk like that,” Finn complained. “Maybe she just wants us to be nice to her.”

“We’re, like, in a war zone,” Rocky said. “Nobody can be nice.”

“We’re nice to each other,” Finn reminded him.

“If she tells us who she is, then we can decide if we want to be nice,” Emma said.

The girl peeked out a little more. Now Finn could see one terrified gray eye showing between her fingers.

“Be nice by forgetting you ever saw me,” the girl said. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just here to check on . . . my friend. I’m a friend of the family. I promise!”

“Which part of the family?” Emma demanded, fiercer than ever. “Who do you support—the Mayor or the Judge?”

Emma was so good at asking questions. That was what it came down to, wasn’t it? If the girl supported Mayor Mayhew, she was on the bad side. If she supported this world’s Natalie and the Mayor’s wife, the Judge, then . . .

Then it’s only a maybe that this girl is on the good side, Finn thought sadly. Because everything was so awful in this world, Other-Natalie and the Judge had never been able to stand up and say to everyone, “I’m on the good side! Let’s get rid of all the bad leaders!” They had had to pretend they were mean and awful, too. They could be good only in secret.

Finn didn’t like maybes. He didn’t like not knowing what people were like, right away. He looked to Chess, because Chess hadn’t said anything yet.

Chess was mouthing the word “friend” again and again, like he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. He looked puzzled.

“Chess?” Finn asked.

“What if . . . ,” Chess began. “What if we know who she’s friends with? What if this girl is someone we’ve seen before? Or heard, anyway. Her voice . . . I recognize her voice.”

Now everybody else looked confused, too.

“I don’t recognize her voice,” Finn said.

Emma, Rocky, and Kona all shook their heads, agreeing with Finn. Even Kafi got into the act, imitating the older kids and turning her head side to side.

“It was from when we didn’t have enough earbuds for everybody,” Chess said. “Only for me, Natalie, and . . . Other-Natalie.”

“Oooh,” Finn whispered, just as Emma exploded, “You think she was there that night at the party?”

Chess crouched down beside the girl, too.

“We’re talking about the night of the political fund-raiser at this very house a week ago,” he told the girl. His voice sounded as gentle as if he were talking to Finn. “The night that . . . people got shot. You probably thought you were there with your friend Natalie. But really . . .”

“It was the Natalie from the other world,” the girl whispered. She let her hands slip down, almost uncovering her face. She gazed side to side, paying special attention to Chess, Emma, and Finn. “Some of you were there with that Natalie, too.”

Finn began tugging on Chess’s arm.

“I know who she is now!” he cried. “She helped Natalie escape!”

“Lana,” Chess said. “You’re Lana.”

The night of the horrible party, this girl had been in a navy blue dress—but then, everybody there had worn navy blue or orange, and all the decorations were the same colors. Those were the colors of the political party that ran this world. The one that all the evil leaders belonged to.

Just thinking about those colors together made Finn feel sick to his stomach.

But now Lana was wearing dark jeans and a dark green, long-sleeved T-shirt that could almost have served as camo. Maybe she’d picked that outfit to blend in around the trees and bushes down by the guard wall. But out here in the open, the clothes made Lana stand out.

Finn waited for Lana to sit up and reveal her whole face and cry, “You’re right! You figured out everything! We’re all on the same side!”

But she kept her shoulders hunched and jerked her head back and forth, as if still looking for an escape route.

“We won’t hurt you,” Finn crooned, the same way he would have spoken to an injured baby bird found fallen from its nest. “We know you were a good friend to Natalie. She told us. Now that we know who you are and you know who we are, we can trust each other.”

Lana laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound.

“Trust?” she repeated mockingly. “Trust? I’m not even sure I can trust Natalie anymore, and she’s my best friend!”

Ouch.

“She’s nice,” Finn said. “We know.”

Then he remembered that none of them knew where this world’s Natalie was.

He remembered how the house behind them was destroyed, and how it held TVs that had made even the Greystone kids, Kona, and Rocky think that terrible things were true.

What if that had happened to Other-Natalie, too?

What if the TVs had made her do terrible things?

There was so much Finn didn’t know.

He didn’t even know for sure that Other-Natalie had survived the night of the party. Maybe Lana was mad at Chess, Emma, and Finn, because they hadn’t rescued Other-Natalie, too.

Maybe she should be.

Or maybe she should be mad because they hadn’t rescued her.

“Is your friend Natalie okay?” Finn asked, as a start toward making peace. “I mean . . . not hurt? Healthy?”

“Is anyone healthy in this world?” Lana muttered.

“Hey,” Rocky said, peering around as nervously as Lana. “It’s really stupid to stand here talking out in the open, where anyone can see us.”

“Right,” Lana said. She shoved Emma and Chess away and started to stand up. “Finally someone’s talking sense. You let me go on my way, I’ll let you go on yours—none of us talk to anybody, and nobody will be any wiser.”

“And now you’re right,” Emma said, gently putting her hand on Lana’s shoulder. She sounded almost as sad as if she’d been around stink grenades again. “If we do that, it’s true: nobody will be wiser. And we all need to be wiser. We need to trust each other. We need to share information.”

“That’ll never happen,” Lana snarled.

Finn started patting her on the back, because she really seemed like she needed someone to be nice to her. Lana jerked away from both Finn and Emma. It was like she thought they were going to hit her.

But the movement threw her off-kilter—she completely fell over.

And . . . something fell out of the back of her shirt.

Coins.

Finn, Emma, Chess, Rocky, and Kona all reached for the coins, and Lana shrieked, “Stop! No! You can’t have those! Don’t even look at them!”

She scrambled to pick them up, even grabbing them out of the other kids’ hands. She didn’t seem like a defenseless baby bird anymore—she was more like a tiger, hissing and snarling.

But Finn saw how she cradled her coins, how she hugged them close.

Maybe . . . , he thought.

He peeled back the masking tape circling his right wrist and thrust his wrist directly under Lana’s nose.

“We’re not trying to steal your coins!” he cried. “We just want to see. Because we have coins, too. We match! We fit together! We’re on the same team!”

Lana froze, staring at the coins.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She sagged back down to the ground, all the fight gone out of her. “Are you right, too? About us fitting together?” She looked up, straight at Finn’s face. Her hair slid back, and he could see all of her face, too: her terrified gray eyes, her wrinkled-up nose, her worried mouth. And then, something like hope spread over her face.

“I want you to be right,” she whispered. “I want us to be on the same team.”