Sixty

Emma

The entire stadium erupted into shrieks and gasps. And boos.

The entire stadium—even the guards and police and soldiers—were booing the Mayor.

“We won!” Finn cried. “They don’t like the Mayor anymore!”

“That’s just how the crowd feels right now,” Emma said. “Feelings can change. The crowd needs proof. Facts. Evidence.”

Emma saw both Mr. Mayhew and the Mayor plunge their hands into their pockets at the same time. Both men hunched into identically defensive stances.

They’re both carrying coins they’re trying to protect, she thought. Mr. Mayhew has the ones the Mayor sent. The Mayor probably has ones he’s recorded but not sent anywhere.

If only Emma could force either of the men to let the entire stadium hear their coins.

I’m still not going to be able to overpower the Mayor, she thought. I’m still just a ten-year-old, and he’s stronger and more in control.

But what if she could trick him?

Suddenly she knew how to do it.

With trembling fingers, she picked off the coin taped to her own wrist. It was the undeciphered one she and Chess and Finn had found by pressing the angel wing back at the Cuckoo Clock. She still didn’t understand who it belonged to, and she didn’t want to let it go. But it was the only thing she could think of to use against the Mayor.

“Is this one of yours?” she asked, trying to sound innocent even as she flipped the coin toward the Mayor.

Panicked, the Mayor pulled his hands out of his pockets to catch Emma’s coin.

At the same time, two coins fell from his own pocket. The Mayor scrambled so desperately to catch them that he missed reaching Emma’s coin, too.

Emma darted quickly to his side. She snatched up all three coins.

“Those are mine!” the Mayor screamed. “Give them back!” He suddenly seemed to realize what he’d said, and jerked his attention straight out to the crowd. “I mean . . .”

“Of course I’ll give them back,” Emma said, smiling sweetly. She pocketed her own coin, but held out the other two. She pretended to trip in her eagerness to do the Mayor’s bidding.

That meant that the top coin brushed the Mayor’s thumb twice in a row.

Just like when Gus activated his own coins for us to hear, Emma thought. Oh, please, let me be right about how this works. . . .

The Mayor’s voice came rolling out of the coin: “I get so tired of telling lies all the time. Just once, I would like to confess everything I am guilty of. . . .”

Quickly, the Mayor pressed the coin again, silencing it.

The entire stadium went starkly quiet.

It would have been fun to gloat, “Aha! I outsmarted you! I proved that you’ve been lying all along! And that you’re guilty! And, look, I’m still only a ten-year-old girl. How stupid do you feel now?”

But Emma just leaned toward the microphone between the Mayor and Mr. Mayhew, and said, “So, confess. Tell everyone what you’ve been lying about all along.”

“Oh no—I promise you, I only ever lied for good reasons,” the Mayor said frantically, his eyes darting back and forth between Mr. Mayhew and the crowd. “My people, the citizens of this great city—any time I lied, it was always for your own good. And it’s only ever been white lies, only in support of the government. Only to keep everyone safe.”

“Safe?” Natalie sneered, stepping forward as well. “How can you call it ‘safe’ when you yourself arranged to have gunmen at the political fund-raiser at your house a week ago? Were you trying to kill your mother-in-law, your wife, and your daughter?”

“No, no—I didn’t want anyone to die!” the Mayor said, gazing around, as if he expected Mr. Mayhew or the crowd to back him up. “What you’re describing, that was just . . . political theater! I was just trying to hold on to power! Because the people need me as a leader!”

The crowd’s silence felt different now. Emma saw people putting arms around each other’s shoulders. Many of the pairs clinging to one another seemed identical. Emma squinted at them in amazement, and looked back and forth between the crowd full of doubles and the pair of Natalies, the pair of Lanas, the pairs of Ms. Morales and the Judge, and Gus and Mr. Gustano.

“The coins brought those doubles back,” Finn whispered in her ear. “When the doubles got a full set—at least one of every kind of coin, I mean—the coins became, like, magic lever-wands. Emma, you would have loved seeing that!”

“I bet it was science, not magic,” Emma whispered back. “Somehow.”

Then she noticed that it wasn’t just the doubled pairs hugging each other, out in the crowd. All the doubles were moving into clumps of four or six or eight, ten or twelve or twenty.

People were uniting all over the place, bracing themselves for what the Mayor might say next.

“But you did arrange for my grandmother to be killed, didn’t you?” Natalie asked, staring fiercely at the Mayor. “In the other world.”

“That was just . . . an accident!” the Mayor said. “We were figuring out links between the doubles in this world and that one. We didn’t mean for it to happen like that! She was . . . collateral damage! Because we knew the other world was going to attack us—guards, soldiers—tell them!”

Mr. Mayhew, Other-Natalie, and both versions of Ms. Morales rushed forward to hug Natalie. But in the stadium beyond, a mumbling flowed through the crowd. Emma heard the same words rise up again and again: “Which guard . . .” “Which soldier . . .” “Who will tell the truth?”

And then a solitary voice spoke up, from a row Emma couldn’t see: “The other world didn’t attack us. We attacked them.”

And then another voice that sounded almost exactly the same came after it: “I can guarantee she’s telling the truth. I’m her double.”

That’s what the doubles are here to do, Emma thought. “Help us tell our stories.” Because they’re the ones who know the truth.

Emma turned to Mr. Mayhew.

“Can you vouch for the Mayor?” she asked. “Is anything he’s told us true?”

“I can say . . . it’s what he wants to believe,” Mr. Mayhew said. “I can say . . . he’s told so many lies, it gets harder and harder for him to know what’s true and what isn’t.”

“You’re going to bring up the kidnapping of the Gustano children next, aren’t you?” the Mayor asked. “That was justified! It was just a slight mistake that we got the wrong kids. . . .”

“How dare you!” Mr. Gustano exploded. “How can you make that seem like an inconsequential thing—as if my children weren’t harmed, my family wasn’t harmed. . . .”

“You think it would have been all right to kidnap Finn and Chess and me?” Emma asked incredulously.

“Because your mother was such a threat to this world,” the Mayor said. “She encouraged such insubordination, she spread so many lies. . . .”

“She just wanted people to be allowed to tell the truth!” Finn cried. “It sounds like you wanted to be able to tell the truth, too, when you made all those coins and sent them to Mr. Mayhew.”

“No, no, I just made them because . . . because . . .” The Mayor winced and clenched his fists. Then he opened his eyes wide and waved his arms as if he could make all the accusations disappear. “As a test! Yes, that’s it—I only pretended to sound lonely. Only pretended I had any regrets. And I didn’t send out any coins until today. That was just a . . . test, too. My coins didn’t threaten the government. I never sent enough to change anything.”

Except, he did, Emma thought. Even if he only sent one or two, that was enough for Mr. Mayhew to know some of his story.

Chess stumbled forward. As soon as she saw his face, Emma knew what he was going to ask.

“What about our father?” His voice came out clotted with agony. “Did you kill Andrew Greystone? Did you order his death? His and Gina’s . . . Gina the physicist . . . Gina . . .”

“Chiukov,” Gus said quietly from behind them. “Gina Chiukov.”

The Mayor glanced around frantically, like he was looking for someone else to speak for him. His eyes lit on Mr. Mayhew’s face.

“You tell them!” he appealed to Mr. Mayhew. “You understand, if you’re like me. I’m not good—I mean, we’re not good—at standing up to people. We don’t like making hard decisions. Everything I did, I was just following orders. Doing what the people higher up in the party told me to do! The governor. The president. The people who were really in charge!”

“You—you—” Chess choked on his own words. He swung his arms like he wanted to hit the Mayor.

Emma and Finn rushed over and clung to Chess, anchoring him in place. It felt like Emma and Finn were taking care of Chess for once, not the other way around.

“So you did kill our dad and Gina?” Emma asked. Her voice came out sounding just as strangled as Chess’s. “And Natalie’s grandmother? You’re guilty of all three of those murders?”

“No!” the Mayor exploded. His eyes darted about, as if he was trying to find a friendly expression to gaze at, someone to explain for him once again. But Mr. Mayhew stood as silent and stony-faced as everyone else in the stadium. Nobody moved. The Mayor wiped a trembling hand across his forehead and went on. “The rest of it—yes, I did those things. I made those mistakes. But I never killed anyone on purpose. I never intentionally ordered any deaths. That was the line in the sand that I promised myself I would never cross.”

“You just made people wish they were dead,” Lana said from behind her camera.

The Mayor grimaced, but he didn’t deny it. He went back to staring directly at Chess, Emma, and Finn.

“You have to believe me,” he begged. “Andrew Greystone was my friend. I liked him. I trusted him. I knew he—and your mom—would always tell the truth. And that was so rare, even eight years ago. I knew other people hated that about him—about them. But I was so low-level in the party back then, I didn’t know about the plot to kill him. Or Gina Chiukov. And that’s the absolute truth.”

“But you benefited from his death,” a voice rang out from behind them. “You used it.”

It was the Judge. The Judge was weighing in now, too.

Does that mean she thinks our side is winning? Emma wondered.

But the crowd in the stadium started to boo the Judge, too.

“Don’t do that!” Finn shouted into the microphone. “She’s secretly good! She was just pretending to be a bad guy so she could smuggle endangered people out without anyone knowing!”

“If I had any doubts about revealing my secret, I guess it’s out now,” the Judge said with a wry smile at Finn.

One of the guards near the front of the crowd shouted, “It’s true! I worked with her!” And then others shouted that as well. The crowd might have even worked their shouts into another chant, but the Judge motioned for silence.

“I made mistakes, too,” she admitted. “What if I’d spoken up right away back then, instead of waiting until it was too dangerous to speak out publicly? It was so much easier to see the mistakes my husband made. The mistakes that turned into horrific crimes.” She drilled her gaze into him. “People respected you back then. You had a choice. You could have called for an investigation into Andrew Greystone’s death. People would have listened. You could have helped Kate Greystone reveal the rot and corruption at the top of the party. You could have helped put the right people in prison. But you chose to lie and cover up other people’s crimes. And then your own career began to rise. . . .”

“I didn’t have a choice!” the Mayor cried. “I didn’t!”

“You did,” Mr. Mayhew said, stepping up beside the Judge. “You had a choice. You were just too afraid to see it. And you still have choices now.”

It’s almost like Mr. Mayhew is the Mayor’s conscience, Emma thought. Because he understands him so well, because they’re so much alike . . .

The Mayor collapsed to the stage. He was weeping.

“I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m sorry!”

Chess’s face stayed rock-hard and angry.

“That doesn’t fix—” Chess began. Emma couldn’t tell if Chess was going to say “everything” or “anything.”

But there was a stirring at the edge of the stadium just then, the crowd shifting around the same entryway Mr. Mayhew and the guards had come through. And then the crowd divided, people stepping aside for a small group of newcomers.

It was Mom. Mom and Joe and Mrs. Gustano and Other-Emma and Other-Finn.

At first they moved furtively, as if they were ready to dash off and hide if they needed to. But then, as the crowd parted for them, they began to walk more confidently, their backs straight, their posture proud.

“Kate Greystone! Joe Deweese! Kate! Joe! Kate! Joe!” the crowd began to chant. And then, throughout the stadium, the doubles who had come from the other world held up their coin-wands. The sunlight gleamed off one fused stack of coins after another—it looked as if everyone was holding up a torch to honor Mom and Joe and everything they’d done.

And maybe to honor Gina Chiukov and Dad, too.

As soon as they got to the stage, Mom and Joe took off running: Mom to embrace Chess, Emma, and Finn; Joe to wrap his arms around Kona. He pulled Kafi from Chess’s arms and hugged her, too. And Kate Gustano and her two youngest kids were only a few steps behind, rushing toward Rocky and Mr. Gustano.

The crowd’s chant turned into “Thank! You! Thank! You!”

The guards and the soldiers and the police officers were chanting, too. They were showing their true loyalties, just as much as all the people who’d been arrested, just as much as the doubles who’d come from the other world to help.

And everyone was siding with Mom and Joe and truth, not with the Mayor, who’d wanted to control both worlds with his lies.

Laughing, Mom leaned toward the microphone.

“We don’t need thanks,” she said.

Emma scanned her mother’s face, and for the first time in weeks—maybe the first time in Emma’s life—Mom looked completely overjoyed and delighted, without the slightest hint of fear. And then Emma understood that she had nothing left to fear either. Between Mom’s expression, the crowd’s chanting, and the coin-wands still gleaming in the sunlight, Emma felt like she’d solved the easiest-ever code, read the least-hidden message, discovered the most apparent truth.

“None of us need any thanks,” Emma said, leaning into the microphone beside her mother. “We’ve got each other again, now. We’re safe, and you are, too. We know the truth. Nobody’s lying to us anymore.”

And then Finn leaned toward the microphone, too. He was Finn; how could he not want the last word? But Chess leaned with him.

In that instant, Emma realized what Chess had been about to say a moment earlier: That doesn’t fix the past. It didn’t. But everything they’d done had cleared the way for a better future. Chess—and everyone else—could move on. They’d fixed as much as they could.

For both worlds.

And so all four of the Greystones said the same thing, all of them together: “Now we’ve got everything we need.”