Forty-Four

Emma

Emma shoved the SUV door open and scrambled down to the sidewalk. She could hear the buzz of voices in the distance—had they parked that close to one of the TVs? She resolutely tuned out the background noise, and avoided looking at anything beyond the building immediately in front of her.

“It’s just wrong to put all those evil carvings on this building,” she groaned. She patted the wall. “Poor Cuckoo Clock!”

“Not all the carvings are evil,” Finn said, jumping down beside her. “Look!”

He rubbed his fingers against a carving that was exactly at eye level for him, though not for Emma. She knelt down.

The carving Finn was pointing to was definitely an angel, not a demon. And it was the same kind of angel they’d seen back at their own Cuckoo Clock—and, before that, hidden under Judge Morales’s desk.

“What happens if we press this angel’s wing?” Emma asked. “Lana, Gus, do you know?”

“Don’t . . . We can’t. . . .” Gus was still inside the van, still clutching the steering wheel.

But Lana was climbing out of the SUV alongside Kona, Kafi, Chess, and Rocky. She was staring at the angel just as intently as the other kids.

“Go ahead,” Lana said, her voice almost mischievous. “Try it.”

Finn and Emma tapped the wing at the same time. The angel’s mouth opened, just like the angel’s mouth back at the other world’s Cuckoo Clock. Emma cupped her hands under the angel’s jaw.

And then, just as she expected, a coin tumbled out.

“That is so sweet!” Finn roared. “Who does that coin belong to?”

“Nobody,” Lana said. “Yet.”

Emma ran her fingers over the coin’s smooth surface. It was completely blank. She flipped it over—the other side was blank, too.

“This is a coin ready for someone to use,” she whispered reverently.

Lana nodded, her face lighting up with joy now, instead of fear.

“My school is five blocks from here,” she said. “Most days after school, I come and lean against that wall. To everyone else, it looks like I’m just checking my cell phone. But I have my backpack open on the ground. I put one hand behind my back and press that carving, and the coins spill into my backpack. . . . And then I store them under my bed until I can pass them out in secret places around the city.”

Her words bubbled out the same way Emma’s did when she was talking about math.

“So you only carried around empty coins?” Kona asked.

“No, full ones, too,” Lana said. “Sometimes I hid coins for people who weren’t brave enough to send them out yet.”

“I always thought there had to be hundreds of us secretly working together, even without knowing each other’s names or seeing each other’s faces,” Gus said behind them. Emma saw that he’d finally stepped out of the SUV. But he was still holding on to one of the doors as if he didn’t quite trust himself to walk toward them on his own. “I liked believing we were all working together, even if we couldn’t acknowledge each other publicly. But . . .”

“But where are all those other people now?” Rocky finished for him. “You and Lana managed to escape the TVs—why didn’t the others?”

“Exactly.” Gus grabbed the sideview mirror of the SUV, and started breathing hard. “That noise, that noise . . . coming from the stadium . . .”

Emma dared to glance around the corner of the building. There was indeed a large, gleaming stadium just beyond. That was not like the setup with the Cuckoo Clock back in the better world.

“We hold a lot of political rallies there,” Gus said. Even clutching the mirror, he swayed, as if he was about to fall over. “Maybe the Mayor’s back. Maybe that’s what we’re hearing. Maybe he’s already consolidated control in the other world, and it’s too late for us to do anything but hide. Maybe we’re going to get into trouble for not being at the rally with everyone else. . . .”

“No!” Lana said. “We came for the coins, and we’re not leaving without them! Help me!”

She rushed to Gus’s side. Emma and the other kids joined her, and the whole group half guided, half carried Gus toward the building. Lana brushed her fingers against another carving on the wall—Emma saw that it was a solitary lamb, looking a little lost in the midst of a lot of fierce-looking wooden lions.

But at Lana’s touch, a stairway opened in the sidewalk, leading down to a basement door.

“It’s like how our Cuckoo Clock has a basement stairway for deliveries,” Finn marveled.

Lana began guiding Gus down the stairs, but he pulled away.

“I’m better now,” he said. “I’m farther from the noise. Closer to the coins.”

Emma and all the other kids were right behind him and Lana.

“Do you know the code to open that?” Lana asked, pointing to a padlock on the heavy steel door at the bottom.

“Three-five-four,” Gus said. “Do you know what that stands for? The number of letters in ‘air,’ ‘water,’ and ‘fire.’ Because we’re reclaiming them. The natural elements of the world do not belong to our leaders!”

Emma noticed that Lana had punched the numbers in even before Gus spoke them.

Ooooh, Emma thought. She’s just trying to distract him, trying to get him to focus on something good. Something besides the noise from the stadium.

The lock clicked open, and Lana pulled the door back.

She must have hit a light switch, too, because suddenly everything ahead of Emma glowed.

They were standing in front of mounds of coins—towers of them. It made Emma think of cartoons where people yelled, “I’m rich! I’m rich!” as they rolled around on stacks of dollar bills or gold.

But these coins aren’t money, Emma thought. They don’t buy anything.

Or did they?

Didn’t Gus and Lana act like the coins could buy some sort of rescue for their world?

But that’s not “buying,” Emma thought. That’s caring. Wanting to help. Trying to find other people who can help.

“Are these blank, too?” Chess asked, leaning down to pick up a handful of the coins.

Emma leaned close to look.

“No, there’s code on all of them,” she reported.

“Right,” Gus said. “These are all coins belonging to people who haven’t sent them to the other world yet. Maybe they just weren’t ready. Maybe they’re too afraid of being caught, and they wanted someone else to take care of it for them.”

“But all you had to do to send your coins to the other world was drop them on the ground!” Emma protested. “People are afraid of that?”

“The coins didn’t always work until recently,” Gus answered. A shadow crossed his face. “People remember that. Sometimes it led to people being caught.”

“They’ll work for what we want,” Finn said confidently. “How do we carry them?”

“Buckets,” Lana said, pointing to the far side of the room, where stacks of buckets awaited.

The kids and Gus ended up forming a bucket brigade: making a line with each of them standing a few feet apart from the middle of the basement all the way up the stairs and out to the SUV. Emma was at the end, filling the bucket and handing it back to Gus before he handed it on to Finn. Chess and Rocky positioned themselves at the other end of the line, so they were the only ones who had to hear the noise from the stadium.

But this is going really fast, so we’ll be out of here and back to the TV station in no time, Emma thought. They won’t be in danger out there for long.

The buckets were heavy, but it started feeling like they were playing a game. The only way Kona found to keep Kafi from trying to eat the coins was by putting her in a bucket and passing her back and forth in between the buckets of coins. Kafi loved that, and squealed and giggled. Finn started pretending he could guess the stories embedded in all the coins, and in his telling, all the stories were hilarious.

“These belong to someone who invented pickle ice cream!” Finn cried, passing a bucket on to Kona. “It’s really big here—that’s one of the things that’s better about this world!”

“We don’t have pickle ice cream,” Lana protested.

But she laughed as hard as anyone at his tales. Even Gus cracked a smile once or twice.

Finally Chess called down the stairs that they’d packed as many coin buckets as possible into the SUV, and if they put even one more in, there wouldn’t be room for people.

“When we get back, I can talk on the TV camera before we start throwing the coins around,” Finn said as everyone headed back to the SUV. “I can tell a few jokes, make this whole world laugh—that’ll help!”

“Of course it will,” Emma agreed.

But all of them stopped laughing when they got to the top of the stairs. The booming voices from the stadium were louder now. Emma had to scramble quickly into the SUV to avoid listening.

“Quick, everybody—get in and shut the doors!” she called. She barely missed knocking over a bucket of coins at her feet. “Then we’ll be around the coins, we won’t have to hear any of that noise from the stadium. . . .”

It felt like everyone was moving in slow motion now. But then the last door slammed. Gus took off before the last person in—Lana—even had time to put on her seat belt.

“That’s right!” Kona cried. “Get us out of here!”

Gus squealed the tires. He ran a stoplight.

And then suddenly he turned toward the giant, noisy stadium, not back toward the TV station.

“Gus, what are you doing?” Emma shrieked. “This isn’t the plan!”

“I can’t help it,” Gus wailed back to her. “I don’t have a choice!”

And then he slammed on the brakes, flung open his door, and took off running toward the stadium.