Thirty-Five

Emma

“Finn, you’re a genius,” Emma cried. She stood up and threw her arms around her brother’s shoulders.

“No, no, no,” Finn said, playfully shoving her away. “You’re the smart one.”

“Well, we can both be smart,” Emma said. Finn seemed willing to compromise: He let Emma keep one arm draped around his shoulders. And he let Emma keep talking about how smart he was. “You being smart doesn’t make me any less smart. And this time you were the one to remember this fact: Scientific discoveries usually aren’t good or evil just by themselves. Science is neutral. It’s what people do with their knowledge that matters.”

Finn’s eyes grew big.

“Emma,” he said. “I didn’t know any of that!”

“But you knew that if the bad guys can use the TV, we can use it, too,” Kona said. “Only, we’ll use it for good reasons, not bad.”

“That’s a nice theory,” Lana said grudgingly. “It’s just impossible.”

“It is possible,” Emma insisted. “Lana, if your dad worked at the TV station, then he has a key, right?”

“If nothing else, we could sneak in and turn off the power at his TV station,” Chess said thoughtfully. “The . . . what would it be called? The transmitter?”

“But wouldn’t there be lots of TV stations?” Rocky asked. “So if we turn off one station, the others would just keep controlling people? I keep thinking about all the TV interviews my mom and dad did when my sister and brother and I were kidnapped—there were so many stations who sent reporters to their news conferences. And people from online news services and radio stations and newspapers and magazines . . .”

“Really?” Lana said. It was like she was hearing of a situation too strange to even be a myth. “That’s another difference between the worlds. We do only have one TV network. Only one channel. All the others were outlawed. Just like political parties were outlawed, except for the one the leaders are in.”

“Unh! Unh!” Kafi pushed against Emma’s leg.

“That’s it,” Kona said, snatching up her sister and spinning her around. Kafi still struggled in her sister’s arms. “We have about a minute before Kafi starts screaming to get out of here.”

“Then we escape to the TV station and let Kafi escape that way, too,” Emma said.

Rocky and Chess both frowned, but they started to stand up. Kona put Kafi into a “You’re an airplane now” pose over her head and “flew” her toward the door. Emma and Finn followed.

“You think it’s that easy?” Lana asked. “You’ll just . . . go?”

“We’re hoping you’ll come, too, to help us,” Finn said, with a particularly charming smile that showed his dimples.

“I don’t . . . I’m not . . . ,” Lana began. But then she stood up, too. “You think we should walk?”

“I think maybe that one woman downstairs could drive us,” Emma said. “The one who kind of scolded your dad.”

“You mean Irmine?” Lana asked. “With the gray hair and the lavender streak?”

“We could ask her,” Emma said.

Everyone traipsed toward the stairs. At the top, Emma was thinking, Maybe I should swing the lever at all the TVs in this house. But by the time she got to the bottom, she could barely keep herself from going over and ripping down the purple-flowered blanket that hid the TV from view. She felt herself longing to turn it on and watch.

That would just be acting like a scientist, she told herself. Go look at the TV so you can study what it makes you think and do. . . .

She caught herself turning toward the TV room. Just being this close to the TV, even without looking at it, was enough to make her think differently. And it was trying to trick her into believing those were her normal thoughts.

“Here,” Lana said behind Emma. She pressed a little cloth bag into Emma’s hands. Emma could feel the outline of coins inside the bag. “Wear this as a necklace, or tie it around your waist, under your clothes. Just in case.”

“To protect me even more against the TVs and smells?” Emma asked. “Or do you mean, in case it becomes possible to send them into the other world again?”

“Both?” Lana said with a weak smile.

“Why not?” Emma agreed. She slid the looped drawstrings of the bag around her neck. Now the little collection of coins hung at the same level as her heart.

Lana moved on to offering bags of coins to the other kids as well. Kona didn’t let Kafi have one, because she would have tried to eat it. But everyone else took one.

It was strange how much better Emma felt to have the little bag of coins, along with the ones taped around her wrist. But maybe it just helped to know that Lana cared. Either way, the pull of the TV seemed to recede. Emma trusted herself to walk over to the maid—Irmine?—and ask, “If we untied you, would you drive us somewhere?”

“Honey, if you untied me, I would go straight to that TV,” Irmine replied, struggling against the ropes to point longingly into the side room. “That’s all I can think about.”

“What if one of us broke the TV?” Finn asked. “What if we broke every TV in this house?”

Emma was glad Finn had thought of that, too. And that he could still think about it, even so close to a TV.

“I can’t lie to you,” Irmine said. “I’d be running to the TV in the next-door neighbor’s house as fast as I could. I’d be a track star, getting over there.”

“We could break all those TVs, too,” Finn said.

“We can’t break every TV in town,” Lana said.

“Or in the whole country,” Rocky added. “Or is it in this whole world?”

“You don’t have to break any TVs!” Lana’s dad gasped. He was clutching his heart as if just talking about breaking TVs made him feel like he’d been stabbed in the chest. “Untie me, and I’ll drive you anywhere you want!”

But his eyes kept darting toward the TV room.

“Dad, I don’t know if you mean to or not, but you’re lying to us,” Lana said.

“Then I’ll drive you!” Lana’s mom volunteered. “Untie me instead!”

The other adults took up the cry: “No, me!” “I’ll help! Pick me!” “Lana! I’m your family’s chauffeur! I should drive you!”

“Oh, brother,” Finn muttered, backing away. Emma saw that he’d pulled his coin bag from under his shirt and was clutching it so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

“What if we gave the adults some coins?” Emma asked Lana. Emma tiptoed closer to Irmine and waved her own bag of coins before Irmine’s eyes. It probably looked like she was a magician trying to hypnotize Irmine.

Isn’t that kind of what the coins and the TV do? Emma wondered. Isn’t it a lot like hypnosis?

“Child, I do like money,” Irmine said, watching the bag of coins sway before her. Then she snapped her gaze back to Emma’s face. “But you could toss me into a whole swimming pool of coins and dollar bills—even one-hundred-dollar bills!—and I’d trade it all in a heartbeat for getting back to that TV.”

“We can’t trust any of these adults,” Lana said. She looked like she was about to cry. “We’ll have to walk. It’ll take forever. And I’m not sure how safe we’ll be. . . .”

“Lana, baby, you are giving up too soon,” Irmine said. “I can’t trust myself to drive you. You’re right not to trust any of us adults. But there is something you know how to drive. . . .”

“Irmine, I’m thirteen!” Lana protested. “I’ve never driven a car! I’d wreck it! I’d hurt people!”

Irmine put a hand on Lana’s arm.

“What if I told you I know where the keys are to your daddy’s golf cart?”