Fifty-Three

Chess

Chess was stunned speechless.

The second version of Lana—Other-Lana?—held out her hand. A stack of coins lay across her palm as if they’d been fused together to form something more like a magic wand.

Or . . . a lever? Chess wondered.

“Thank you for trusting me with your story,” the new girl said softly to Lana. “I know life has been hard for you, and it took a lot of courage to speak out. I listened to every one of the coins you sent me, starting a few years ago. But I didn’t know there was anything I could do until the last coins arrived today.”

“I . . . I was always afraid to send out the last ones,” Lana mumbled. “I was afraid . . . things could get worse.”

“How did you get here?” Finn asked. He reached out and touched Other-Lana’s arm as if he couldn’t quite believe she was real.

“The last coin came, and I just knew what I had to do,” Other-Lana replied, her eyes twinkling a little mischievously. “The coins locked into place together and . . . maybe this wasn’t necessary, exactly, but this is what I did. I held the linked-together coins over my heart and I said out loud, ‘Yes. I’ll help you, Lana-in-the-other-world.’ And . . . here I am.”

“The coins are bridges between the worlds,” Lana said. Her eyes glowed, fixed on her double’s. “I understand completely now. She and I, we’re like anchors on either side of the bridge.”

But that’s not how our lever works, Chess wanted to protest.

And then suddenly he understood, too. He remembered what Gus had explained, about how he’d made the Greystones’ lever from all the coins his friend Gina had left behind after she died. Her coin set had been completed in a different way. And so her stories had lived on after she was gone.

And Dad’s story lives on, Chess thought, his heart beating faster. In Mom and Finn and Emma. And me.

The coin-levers/bridges just needed something in common in both worlds. The coins that Lana and Other-Lana shared were anchored in people who were doubled in both worlds. The lever that Chess and his siblings had always used needed to be anchored in places that were doubled.

Maybe there were dozens of ways the coins could be used that nobody had ever investigated yet, because everything had been kept so secret.

What do you know, Chess thought. My brain can work like Emma’s sometimes. When I stop thinking that it can’t.

“Okay, this is a sweet, touching family reunion,” Rocky said. “Or . . . pseudo-family reunion. Whatever. But how are you supposed to help? What can you do that this world’s Lana hasn’t already tried to do herself?”

“We’ll listen to each other’s stories,” Other-Lana said firmly. “She’ll tell me all of hers. I’ll tell her mine.”

“What good is that supposed to do?” Rocky asked. He sounded like he’d been listening to the TVs again. With the arm that wasn’t holding Kafi, he gestured toward the crowd in the stadium. “Don’t you see all those hypnotized, brainwashed people out there? Don’t you know we’re dealing with a crazy dictator who wants to control what everybody thinks?”

“I don’t know, Rocky,” Chess started to object. “Think about how scared Gus was when we were around him. Don’t you think it would help for him to talk to someone who wasn’t scared all the time, but was like him otherwise? His double?”

“He means your dad!” Finn crowed. “Don’t you think it would help Gus to talk to your dad?”

“My . . . dad,” Rocky repeated. His jaw dropped. He leaned far out over the railing. Then he thrust Kafi into Chess’s arms and took off running for the stairs. “Dad! Dad! Dad!”

Kafi tilted her head, gazing at Chess. “Wo-ky go?” she asked. “Wo-ky happy?”

Chess held Kafi tight, but leaned out over the railing, too. From this vantage point, he could see the entire stadium—and somehow, since the last time he’d looked out, the crowd seemed to have doubled. People were jammed in tight now, but nobody seemed upset about the close quarters. People were hugging each other, high-fiving each other, putting comforting arms around one another’s shoulders.

Everywhere Chess looked, people seemed to be in pairs.

Duplicated.

“Lana!” Finn cried behind him. “You’re not the only one whose double came! It looks like everyone in this stadium has a double helping them now!”