Fifty-One

Emma

We messed up, Emma thought.

Numbly, she watched the lever turning on the wall in front of Kona.

“Should I grab it?” Kona cried. “Break it off the wall before somebody comes through?”

“But we worked so hard to find a place where that would work!” Emma protested. “If you break it off the wall, it won’t work in that spot ever again. . . .”

She ran over beside Kona, as if she could protect the other girl. She grabbed Kona by the shoulders and pulled her back. They were still a dozen steps away from the door, but the two of them could cover that distance in a sprint if they had to.

Couldn’t they?

The carved angel wing, the angel, and the entire wall around the angel began to shimmy. And then an entire section of the wall seemed to dissolve.

I’m always disoriented and dizzy when I change worlds, Emma thought. Whoever’s coming through here will be, too. So we’ll have the advantage. We can wait and see who it is.

But didn’t it seem like, each time she crossed, Emma felt less disoriented? What if the person coming through now was an enemy who crossed between the worlds all the time, and had stopped being troubled at all by the crossing?

The wall appeared almost see-through now. Emma had never stood back and watched a doorway opening between the worlds before. She’d always been part of the spinning, the burrowing—the lever working its magic. She’d always been the one arriving, not the one waiting for an arrival. So it stunned her how much she could see into the other world, though it was all as hazy as a dream.

Or a nightmare.

She saw guards. She saw people sitting at tables and screaming, screaming, screaming as they spun.

And she saw a large TV screen high over everyone’s heads.

Our Cuckoo Clock restaurant never had TV screens, Emma thought. Who changed that—the Mayor? Are there stink grenades there, too? All sorts of mind-control weapons?

She wanted to weep for the other world. The world that had always been the better one.

“Would it be . . . safer . . . outside?” Kona gasped beside her.

Emma was already running toward the door. She and Kona moved like a four-legged creature, both of them propelled by the same fear.

And then, as they burst out the door, Emma couldn’t help looking back. She had to know. She had to find out exactly what they were running from.

A man stood just behind them, one step back from the doorway. He didn’t look dizzy. He didn’t look affected by the spinning he’d stepped through. He flashed a slow, lazy smile.

“Hello, Emma. Hello, Kona,” he said. “Thanks for helping me.”

His tanned face, his neon yellow shirt, his overconfident smile—everything about him was wrong, wrong, wrong. Because this man had the same features as someone Emma liked: Natalie’s dad, Mr. Mayhew.

But this wasn’t Natalie’s dad.

This was the Mayor.

And he wasn’t throwing stink grenades this time. He wasn’t wearing a gas mask or screaming commands.

He wasn’t doing any of that. . . .

Because he thought he’d already won.