Forty-Nine

Emma

Emma couldn’t run as fast as Kona. Her breathing grew ragged and her steps faltered as they surged past the abandoned SUV.

“You should . . . go on without me,” Emma panted. “I’m really only good at codes and things I can use my brain for, and you’re good at that and sports, so . . .”

“Emma, are you kidding me? We both need each other to get to that building,” Kona said, gesturing toward the alternate world’s Cuckoo Clock building, far ahead of them across a vacant parking lot. She slowed down a little. “It’s the evil screen making you think you’re not as good as me, right? Because what it’s trying to tell me is, ‘You can’t really be good at both things at once. You’re going to have to choose, smarts or sports. And, really, you’re not that good at either. . . .’”

Emma tilted back her head as she ran and screamed at the sky, “Kona’s good at everything! At heart things, too! Like being a big sister! Look how many times she’s saved Kafi from swallowing a coin!”

Kona laughed, and for a moment, it almost felt like they were just two girls running as fast as they could together, just for fun.

Two friends.

“It is about the heart, isn’t it?” Emma asked. “That’s what we have that the other side doesn’t have. That’s how we’re going to win.”

Maybe she wasn’t as bad of an athlete as she’d thought. She was keeping up with Kona now. But she couldn’t get quite enough air in her lungs to both run and explain her idea to Kona.

Emma had relied so much on codes and brainpower on all her other trips to this world. But this trip had involved figuring out people, with all their secrets and fears and hopes and dreams and lies and truths.

And that had required both brainpower and . . . was there something called heartpower?

Did I just invent a new word? Emma wondered.

Maybe a simpler name already existed for what she was thinking about.

Love, Emma thought. It’s love. Kona loves Kafi and her dad. I love Chess and Finn and Mom. Rocky loves his parents and brother and sister. . . .

Somehow, thinking that carried her straight to the alternate world’s Cuckoo Clock building.

“We should go inside, right?” Kona asked. “So we don’t turn the whole parking lot into a spinning slide or tunnel?”

Emma loved that Kona had caught on to the lever rules so quickly.

“Sure,” Emma said.

They used the code Lana had taught them—3-5-4, for “air, water, fire”—on the nearest door. It creaked open, revealing a room that looked even more like the restaurant back home. There were tables and chairs, but they were covered in thick layers of dust, as if they hadn’t been used in decades. The far wall even contained the same carved creatures that made up the official restaurant cuckoo clock back home. The clock was just missing its hands.

“Look—there’s an angel here, too,” Kona said, walking toward the wall. “I’ll stand here and swing the lever at the angel wing as soon as you give me the signal.”

Emma stepped back into the sunlight. She held up the coin and flashed it twice slowly, once quickly, and then three more times at a slow pace. She knew all the others back on the catwalk above the screen would understand: “GO!”

She let herself stare directly toward the top of the screen, which was barely visible over the seating area of the stadium. She saw a cascade of shiny gold and bronze.

“Now!” she hollered back to Kona. “Swing the lever at the wall!”

She heard the crack of the lever hitting the wall, then a second sound that she could have sworn was the wall growing around the lever, welcoming it in.

“Emma! It worked! The lever latched on this time!” Kona cried. “We just outsmarted the Mayor and all the other bad guys!”

Suddenly Emma remembered that she should have made sure the others knew Morse code for “IT WORKED! COME JOIN US AND LET’S GET OUT OF HERE!”

But then she heard Kona say fearfully behind her, “Emma? Emma? Is it supposed to be moving by itself now?”

Emma turned in time to see the lever seeming to rotate on its own—as if someone in the other world was trying to open the tunnel.

“Emma!” Kona cried again. “Who would be doing that? People on our side? Or our enemies?”

And Emma could only whisper: “I don’t know.”