Thirty-Four

Finn

“Emma, you’re amazing!” Finn cried. “I didn’t even think of doing that! I’m so glad you’re a genius!”

He watched the broken shards of glass trickle down from under the tattered quilt. He grinned wider and wider with every bit of glass he heard hitting the floor.

“You even had great batting stance,” Kona congratulated her.

“I wish you’d told us you were planning to do that,” Rocky said. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack, watching you walk over there. If you’d turned on that TV, I—I . . .”

“We all would have watched it,” Chess finished for him. “We all would have been trapped.”

Emma stared down at the lever in her hands. She didn’t look as triumphant as Finn thought she should. She was sweating and gasping for air, as if she’d narrowly escaped falling off a cliff.

Well, she kind of did, Finn thought. We all did.

“I . . . really wasn’t sure what I was planning to do,” Emma said, grimacing. “It could have gone either way, until that last minute when I felt Chess’s hand on my shoulder. But then I hoped . . . Why didn’t the lever open a tunnel to the other world? Why didn’t it work, even here?”

“Was that what you were trying to do?” Finn asked. “You really are a genius, if you could think about swinging the lever and making a tunnel and all that, even when the TV was calling to you.”

Emma slammed the lever against the wall directly below the TV.

Nothing happened.

She dropped the lever.

“Just when I had hope again!” she moaned.

Lana slid her hands under the lever and scooped it up as gingerly as if she were handling priceless jewels.

Or, maybe . . . eggs.

Seeds.

Something that could turn into something else.

“You thought this was going to open a route to the other world?” she asked. “Is this actually one of the coin-levers?” She turned it over and over in her hands. “Oooh . . . So this is what the coins look like when they’ve succeeded together. And united.”

“‘Succeeded’?” Finn repeated, pouncing on the word as if it were another coin to be discovered. “What does that mean? The lever didn’t succeed, or else we’d be on our way back to the other world right now.”

“I mean, the coins in here all must have reached the right person in the other world,” Lana said. “See how they all have messages like SEE US and FIND US and HEAR US instead of just a bunch of code? That must mean the messages have been delivered. And listened to. I’ve only heard whisperings about this, but people say if someone has enough coins delivered to them, they can bind them together to open doorways that anyone could travel through, between the worlds. Not just one double reaching another.”

“We’ve seen that work before with this lever!” Finn assured her, picking up the one Emma had dropped. “It brought us here! It can take us back, as soon as we find the right place to use it! And then you could come with us to the better world, and you’ll really be safe there. And . . .”

He remembered suddenly that the other world wasn’t so safe now either. Not with Mayor Mayhew attacking.

Not with Mom and Natalie and the others frozen in place by all the stink grenades.

“No,” Lana said, shaking her head sadly. “Not if that lever stopped working for you. Not if you say Mayor Mayhew went to the other world. He’s probably setting up mind-control TVs in the other world, too. That would stop the coins from being able to travel between the worlds. Or from letting anybody travel. No matter how many coins or levers they have.”

“But that’s just your theory, right?” Emma asked. “You don’t know for sure that any of that’s true, do you?”

It was like she was begging for there still to be a way out.

And a way to defeat Mayor Mayhew and every other horrible person who wanted the TVs and the stink grenades to win.

“I know the coins can’t travel between the worlds anymore,” Lana said. She sounded like she was announcing that somebody had died. Somebody she loved. “They stopped working at nine thirty-eight this morning. And if the coins stopped working, so would levers.”

Finn hadn’t looked at a clock or a watch even once since he’d gotten up that morning. But it couldn’t have been 9:38 a.m. yet when all the coins had rained down inside Natalie’s house. And it was probably still earlier than 9:38 when Chess opened the tunnel-slide in the floor.

But it could have been after 9:38 a.m. when Rocky swung the lever at the wall in Other-Natalie’s house, and it didn’t work.

“There’s stuff you aren’t telling us,” Emma said. “Where were you at nine thirty-eight this morning? What were you doing? How did you find out any of this? What are your sources? What research have you done?”

Emma was such a scientist. She always wanted all the facts.

Lana sat down heavily on her bed.

“It’s not that I don’t want to answer you,” she assured them. “I’m just . . . not used to trusting anyone except Natalie. There’s no one else I’ve ever been totally honest with.”

Emma shot a glance at Finn, as if she were just begging him to help.

But what was Finn supposed to say?

“Pretty,” Kafi said, straining out of her sister’s arms as if she wanted to pick up one of the shards of glass on the floor and—knowing her—probably put it in her mouth.

“Here,” Finn volunteered. “Let’s move the bed over and let Kafi crawl around between the bed and—” He’d started scooting the bed away from the wall. He was kind of proud that he could do that even with Lana sitting on the bed. But he stopped when the bottom of the bed ripped off the tops of a row of cardboard boxes hidden beneath it. “Whoa. Is this where you have your whole world’s supply of those coins?”

The coins were spilling out of the boxes by the hundreds. Possibly even by the thousands.

“Nooo,” Lana moaned. “I just have . . . a few. And you shouldn’t have seen that. You can’t tell anyone they’re here. Especially not my parents. They’d turn me in. You can’t . . .”

Finn sat down on the bed beside Lana. He touched the coins taped to his wrist against the coins that he now saw she had in pouches in the back of her shirt.

“You’re friends with this world’s Natalie, and we’re friends with the other world’s Natalie,” he said. “Really, we Greystones are even friends with both Natalies. And you have coins; we have coins. You want to fight the TVs; we want to fight the TVs. I bet you want to fight the stink grenades just like we do, too. We are on the same team.”

Lana leaned against Finn’s shoulder, as if she’d been longing for someone to lean on for ages. After a moment—almost as if they’d all silently agreed—Chess, Emma, Kona, and Rocky sat down on the floor in a half circle by the bed. Kona plopped Kafi down in the center of the half circle, where she could crawl or totter back and forth between the kids.

They all sat waiting on Lana.

Finally, Lana whispered, “There are ways to control people. The government controls people.”

“We knew that already,” Rocky said with a skeptical snort.

“Look, it’s not like they teach us this in school,” Lana said. “Some of this is just what I’ve found out from eavesdropping. And from spying on officials at rallies and fund-raisers I went to. From spying on my own parents and their friends. Most people think I’m just the not-too-smart, not-too-pretty daughter of—”

“You’re pretty!” Finn said quickly. “And I bet you’re smart, too. It’s just that I can’t tell that by looking at you, and knowing it right away.”

Lana gave him a smile that made him think she was both very pretty and very smart. And very nice, too.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t want people to notice me. I was just kind of there. Around.”

“I’m the kind of kid who’s just ‘around,’ too,” Chess said quietly. “At school, the other kids don’t really see me.”

“We see you!” Finn and Emma shouted practically at the same time. Then Finn added, “And Natalie sees you now, too.”

Chess seemed to be trying not to smile too widely, just at the thought of Natalie.

“Anyhow,” Emma said, turning back to Lana.

“Right,” Lana said. “Some of this happened before I was even born. First, a group of scientists invented a foul-smelling chemical that affected people’s brains, and they offered it to the military as a weapon.”

“That’s illegal,” Kona said confidently. “We studied that in school. Chemical warfare was outlawed after World War One.”

“In your world, maybe,” Lana said. Then she winced. “Or maybe it was outlawed in mine, too, years ago, but people ignored that law. It’s not something I ever learned about.”

“How does the smell work?” Emma asked. “I guess it must trick people’s brains into thinking they should be terrified and sad. And that they should give up. Is it pheromones? Does it affect the hippocampus or the thalamus or—”

“You think you’re going to figure it out scientifically?” Rocky asked incredulously. “And then, what, come up with an antidote?”

“Don’t be mean!” Finn told him.

Emma put her hand on Finn’s knee, like she needed to calm him down.

“Somebody might be able to come up with the antidote,” Emma said. “I’m not saying I know enough about chemistry, but if we could get a really smart, really brave chemist to come from the good world, then—”

“The smell doesn’t matter that much now,” Lana said. “Because the leaders moved on. The smells were just the first step. Like, I don’t know, bicycles with training wheels. And now the leaders are using the equivalent of rocket ships.”

“You mean the TVs people can’t stop watching,” Kona said.

“Yes,” Lana said.

Finn reached over the opposite edge of the bed and grabbed a handful of coins.

“But your side—our side—we have these to fight back with,” he said, letting the coins sift down through his fingers. “Right? You have all these coins under your bed, and your parents don’t know, and that’s how you can resist the TVs and they can’t. How do you have all these coins? Where did they all come from?”

Was this what it felt like to be Emma—to always have more questions to wonder about?

Lana kept her lips pressed tightly together.

Finn patted her knee the same way Emma had patted his.

“Our mother—Emma’s and Finn’s and mine—she told us about the beginnings of the coins,” Chess said. “Or the first coin, anyway. When our family lived in this world, eight years ago, our mom sent a coin to her double in the other world. And her double was Rocky’s mom.”

Lana raised an eyebrow, looking back and forth between Rocky and the three Greystone kids.

“And we know Natalie and her mom got coins from their doubles in this world,” Kona went on, taking up the story from Chess. “Lana, did you help the Natalie here send those?”

Lana shook her head.

“No, but I was the one who told Natalie about the coins,” she said. “A week ago. After the party where Natalie could have been killed. Natalie wanted to do something. Something big. She said she was sick of everybody lying all the time, everyone having to pretend that everything’s great. When, actually, everybody is scared all the time in this world. Nobody is allowed to think for themselves or make any decisions on their own—did you know that there’s only one political party for anyone to belong to? We hold elections, but they’re just for show. Fake. There’s only ever one candidate for anyone to vote for, for any office. The government can arrest anyone they want, and just make up a reason. And the ‘criminals’ can’t even defend themselves. If they even get a trial, it’s just, like, make-believe. Propaganda, to make people hate the criminal. Who might not have done anything wrong at all.”

“We saw that happen!” Finn exclaimed. “They put our mom on trial, and they made it look like she was lying, and admitting she was guilty!”

“Multiply that by a hundred,” Lana said bitterly. “By a thousand. By ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. I don’t even know how many people have been punished like that, just because some official doesn’t like them. There’s so much I don’t know, because no one’s allowed to tell the truth.”

“Our parents told the truth,” Chess said quietly. “Even when they knew it could lead to their deaths, they still kept trying. They still kept gathering and sharing the truth.”

Finn felt a surge of pride. He wanted to brag, That’s my mom and dad, too! You should hear how brave they were! How brave my mom still is, and how hard she’s kept trying!

But then Emma said, just as quietly, “And then our dad was killed. Eight years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Lana whispered.

“Others died, too,” Kona said. She hugged Kafi close for an instant, before gulping and going on. “Like the physicist who figured out how to make the first coins. And Natalie’s grandmother in the other world.”

“Did you and Natalie know you were risking death?” Rocky asked. “For . . . coins?”

He didn’t sound like he was making fun of Lana, or trying to bully her. It was more like he just couldn’t understand.

“The coins seemed like the only way to change anything,” Lana said. She began to pick at the threads of her comforter. It was lumpy—maybe it had coins sewn into its stuffing. “I was just at the lowest level of the people working with the coins.”

“You joined the rebels,” Kona said, sounding awestruck. “The resistance. The freedom fighters!”

Lana looked terrified again.

“We never called ourselves any of that,” she said. “We didn’t dare to. We just said . . . we were helpers. Or, we thought of ourselves that way. We mostly didn’t dare to talk to anyone else working with us. It wasn’t safe. I would just get notes, hidden under a rock by my family’s fence: Pick up coins stored here. Move them over to there. Store them until it’s safe to send them out again. And sometimes I used coins to record my own messages, and sent them out when I felt really brave. After I talked Natalie into helping, too, she was also recording messages and transporting coins. And I know she was planning to send hers into the other world. She must have done that today. With the ones that were my own, I could just drop them and they would disappear, and I would know they’d gone to my double.”

“But why?” Emma asked. “What good did any of that do?”

“FIND US, SEE US, HEAR US—that all sounds pointless!” Rocky agreed. “I guess there’s HELP US, too, but . . . how does that help? What’s it all for?”

“I don’t know,” Lana whispered, her voice so soft now that Finn had to hold his breath, because even drawing air into his lungs might be too loud for him to still hear Lana. “Not entirely. But we all thought our doubles could rescue us. We thought they would come here and take care of us. Make all our decisions for us, maybe.”

“That’s what you want?” Finn asked. “I like making my own decisions. Like if Mom says, ‘Do you want spaghetti or tacos for dinner?’ sometimes I want Italian, and sometimes I want Mexican. It can depend. And she knows I like being able to choose.”

“But my people have made such bad choices. . . .” Lana was still whispering. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away. “Never mind. None of this matters now. The coins stopped working. Your lever doesn’t work, either. The TVs are telling everybody in my world how to think and what decisions to make. We no longer have any choices. And now Mayor Mayhew’s in the other world making sure no one has choices there, either.”

Everybody else was squinting at Lana. They all looked like they were about to cry. Even Kafi, and there was no way she understood what the big kids were talking about.

Finn hoped his face didn’t look like crying. Because he wasn’t going to do that.

“But the coins do still protect us from the TVs,” he said. “They still work a little.”

“So what?” Lana asked, with a helpless shrug. “At some point, one of us is going to give in. And then we will be trapped, and the coins will be like Rocky said. Pointless.”

It’s not fair that the bad guys have two weapons, and we only have one, Finn thought.

Finn glanced at the TV across the room. Even broken, it seemed too scary to think about.

So he thought about the game rock-paper-scissors instead.

This is like if Rock and Scissors ganged up on Paper! he thought, getting mad all over again at Mayor Mayhew and all the other leaders of this awful world. Only, for us, it’s like the game is smells-coins-TVs, and Smells and TVs are on the same side! Coins don’t have a chance!

But maybe Finn wasn’t thinking about things right. In rock-paper-scissors, you chose what you were, you won or you lost, and then you could be something different in the next round.

You got to choose a different “weapon” every time.

What if . . . What if . . .

Because he didn’t want to look at the TV, Finn looked down at Kafi, cuddling against her sister’s knees. Maybe his thoughts were as crazy as her saying “Pretty” when she saw the pile of broken glass under the TV.

But she was right: Some of the broken glass did kind of gleam in the sunlight coming in through the window. If you didn’t know the TV was evil—and broken—it did look pretty.

Most of the time Finn didn’t care if things were pretty or ugly. He was a lot more concerned if things were fun or not. Oh, and if food tasted good.

But if something ugly and broken could look pretty, then . . . then could something bad be used for good? he wondered.

Could the TVs be used by the people on the good-coins side, not the bad-smells side?

“What if we go on TV?” he asked. “What if we go on TV and tell the leaders they have to let levers and coins work again, and they have to be nice to people in both worlds, and, and they should only give people good choices? The coins and the TVs both deliver messages. So if we can use the coins for good things, why can’t we use the TV for good messages, too?”