Power Play (15 page)

Amanda looked around for Finn.

He wasn’t there.

F
INN SAW GREG LUOWSKI
down the school hallway standing at a locker, and recalled their strange encounter on the street. An agent for the Overtakers? Was it possible? Did Wayne’s Kim Possible message about friends turning their backs on you have something to do with Luowski, or only Charlene’s erratic behavior? Luowski could never be considered a friend to Finn, but did Wayne know that?

Next he spotted a woman, wearing a visitor’s sticker, down the hall. She was staring at him, her face vaguely familiar yet unknown to him. The way her gaze locked onto him he had no doubt she was there to see him. Worse, she was upset. Any kid knew that look on the face of a grown-up.

That was when he realized how a stranger could look so familiar: behind the crinkly eyes and puckered lips, Willa looked back at him.

The woman started toward him at the same time Luowski caught Finn staring. Luowski’s menacing expression seemed to say, “You want something?”

Finn looked away rather than provoke the bulldog. He didn’t need Luowski in his face.

“Finn Whitman,” the woman said, now upon him. “I’m—”

“Willa’s mom,” Finn said.

“Yes. We’ve met before but it was some time ago. I need a word with you.”

Perfect! What had he done now?

“You have a class in five minutes, so it needs to be now. Right now. That, or we can do this with your parents after school.”

His father? No way! “Next period’s my lunch period,” Finn said. “I’m okay.” Anything but his father.

“Is there someplace we can talk?”

Gulp.

Finn checked out a classroom. Then another. He held the door for her, hoping it might score some points. They entered.

She studied the classroom as if making sure they were alone.

Double gulp.

She ran her tongue into her upper teeth. When his mom did that it was to bite back her words, to keep herself from saying the first thing that came to mind.

“I don’t know where to begin,” she said. “Whatever’s going on, young man, whatever you’re up to, you had better stop it, you had better fix it right now.”

Finn’s heart beat so powerfully that it occupied his entire torso. He was having trouble breathing. He could tell she was just getting warmed up. He held back the wisecracks, wondering why they always came to mind when he found himself in trouble.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m in no mood to play games.”

She’d been crying. He understood that now. Red eyes. Fatigue.

“Say something!” she insisted.

He shrugged. She hadn’t left him many options: he had no idea what she was talking about, but had warned him not to say so.

“Willa is not in school today, in case you haven’t heard.” Her eyes had narrowed to little lasers.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“No, of course you didn’t,” she said sarcastically, making him feel like a liar. His parents did this all the time—answered their own question before giving Finn a chance to speak.

“She doesn’t go here,” he reminded her. How was he supposed to know that Willa had skipped school? Why was he suddenly responsible?

“She’s in bed. Asleep.” Willa’s mother puckered her lips as if about to cry. “Asleep, as in unable to wake up. Like Terrence Maybeck that time. You all have a name for it, I believe? Sleeping Beauty? Something like that.”

He felt like he’d been punched. “The Syndrome,” Finn croaked out. “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome.” It
had
to be something else—
anything
else. The flu? Food poisoning? The panic started in his legs as a painful chill and ruptured through the rest of him.
THE SYNDROME?
Did Willa’s mom have any idea of what she was suggesting? For Willa to be in SBS, Philby would have had to cross her over. For Philby to cross her over, he would have at least told Finn, if not all the Keepers. Philby had not told Finn. So either Philby had turned traitor—he recalled Wayne’s Kim Possible warning!—or
someone else had crossed her over
. Exactly as had happened to Charlene. Both considerations were…terrifying. Which only drove the cold all the deeper into his bones.

“Now, you listen to me, young man.”

Finn felt himself go rigid.

“The Imagineers supposedly repaired the DHI program. They met with us—the parents—and told us that this kind of thing—this crossing over, or whatever you all call it—couldn’t happen again. Wouldn’t happen again. But now it has—to
my daughter
—and I want some answers.” She sniffled back some tears. “I want Willa back. She’s always said you were the leader. I have several options: the police, the Imagineers, the hospital. Willa made me promise that if anything like this ever happened I would come to you first. So I have. She told me that the Imagineers couldn’t help Terrence, and doctors only made things worse for Dell Philby. So before I take the next step—here I am, awaiting your explanation.”

Finn could barely believe what he was hearing. What if other Keepers were in the Syndrome and he didn’t know about it? What if he was the only one
not
in the Syndrome? He hadn’t even seen Amanda this morning at school. The cold panic owned him.

“Well, young man?”

“I…ah…The thing is…” What was he supposed to say? He had more questions than she had. All he wanted to do was start texting—but he had Willa’s mom to contend with, and texting was illegal in school. He looked around, considering leaving her standing there and skipping out of school. He muttered, “Yes, it’s true they…the Imagineers…fixed the DHI server.” At least he thought they had. “But there’ve been some glitches in the past couple days. A week, maybe.” His mouth uttered the explanations but his mind was elsewhere—Wayne’s warning, the photo of the Evil Queen with Luowski and others. Did she have the kids working for her? A spell would explain Luowski’s supernatural strength.

He continued, “The Imagineers—Wayne—warned Philby that stuff was happening. If you contact them—the Imagineers—they’ll back that up. As for stopping it? If she’s really crossed over—”

“If? Are you calling me a liar, young man?”

“Oh, come on!” Finn said, suddenly annoyed. He was half-crazed with a mind that couldn’t stop thinking about a million things at once. Why wouldn’t she just go away? “Listen: the same thing happened to Charlene two nights ago. We have
no idea
what’s going on.” That came out wrong. “We got Charlene back. We can get Willa back. But this is not
us
. Okay?”

She crossed her arms defiantly. “If you think I am going to stand idly by while my daughter is in a coma, you are
gravely mistaken
.”

He’d seen his own mother this way. Unpredictable, terror-ridden. Poor Willa! he thought. Stuck in some Park, not knowing how she’d gotten there. Did the Overtakers have her? Why? What did they want?

Just go away, would you?
he felt like shouting.

“I will cross over tonight and find her. I’ll bring her back. Promise.” He was promising something he couldn’t necessarily deliver, and he thought they both knew it.
The police?
That had been mentioned as her first option.

He thought about Wanda being arrested, and now it made so much sense: if the Overtakers wanted to eliminate the competition, where would they start? With Wayne. With Wayne’s daughter. And then, one by one, the Keepers.

He thought about the photo—the green-eyed students with the Evil Queen.

He felt a shiver down to his toes. They
were
under attack. He’d said that to her, but only now did he fully grasp his own words. It was all-out war, and the Keepers were late to the party.

He needed to settle down, to project confidence. Instead, he felt paranoid. Terrified. Spooked. But he had to keep her from complaining to the police, or even to the Imagineers. The Syndrome was nothing to mess with—not even the Imagineers understood it the way the Keepers did.

He tried to explain: “If you go to the Imagineers, the first thing they’ll do is shut down the DHI servers in each Park. That’s why she told you to come to me first. If the servers are shut down she’s done.”
Was that what the OTs wanted?
he wondered.
To take the Keepers out of the picture by getting the entire DHI system shut down?
“She’s in the Syndrome. She wanted you to come to me so that we’d go get her. Let me do that. PLEASE! It’s what she wants to happen.”

“Do not tell me what my daughter wants,” she said, though he could see her processing everything he’d told her. She appraised him with a searching, skeptical eye. She said, “You have one night. Understand? After that, it’s the police, the Imagineers, and the doctors.”

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

“
One night
. And I’ll tell you something: this is going to be the longest night of my life.”

Tears ran down her cheeks. Her lips trembled. She looked so afraid.

“For what it’s worth, she’s gonna be okay.”

The woman sobbed.

“Go to lunch,” she said, in her motherly way.

Lunch
? Finn thought. “Right,” he said, knowing he would head straight to his locker and start sending texts.

* * *

Wlla=SBS Return her asap

Phones weren’t allowed in class, but you could use them outside once school was dismissed. The workaround for the students was to keep their phones on vibrate in their lockers, where they would check them between classes without being seen. For the ten minutes between classes, the hallways were now less crowded. Instead of mass confusion, a hundred kids had their faces planted inside their lockers as they sent and received texts. Bullies and jocks would take plastic rulers and run down the hallway slapping bottoms, an unpleasant but tolerated punishment for the right to communicate. If a teacher approached, the phone was replaced by a textbook, and the locker was closed. It was almost impossible for them to bust a kid.

When Philby read Finn’s text, he believed it a mistake, or worse, a prank sent by one of the green-eyes. He’d double checked the number: it was Finn.

Willa couldn’t be stuck in the Syndrome because, like Charlene, he’d never crossed her over. More to the point: he’d been monitoring the server’s bandwidth. He had an alarm set. There had been no alarm last night—therefore, Willa had not crossed into the Parks as her hologram. But then he remembered finding Elvis asleep on his laptop. Late for the bus, he’d pushed Elvis off and had shut the laptop’s lid, scooped it off his desk, and stuffed it into his backpack without a second thought.

He felt sick to his stomach. When he’d reopened the laptop at school had the DHI monitoring program been open? He couldn’t remember. He was the last line of defense against the Overtakers. Had he messed up? Had he failed Willa, of all people?

He raced down the hall to Hugo’s locker, his head ready to explode.
Willa?

“I’ve gotta borrow your laptop,” he said. He wasn’t asking.

“No, you don’t,” Hugo said. “I need it for science.” Hugo didn’t even look like Hugo. Something was different about him. But everything looked different: The school hallway seemed about two feet wide. Philby’s world was all backward.

“I’ll trade you. You can use mine,” he offered. “You have a data card. I don’t. I need Internet access. I can’t be on the school server. Please!”

“What’s up?”

“Keepers stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Later. I gotta do this now. I’ve got a class. Please.”

Hugo exchanged laptops.

Philby hurried into the boys’ room, locked himself in a stall, and set up Hugo’s computer on his lap while sitting on a toilet seat. He used Hugo’s wireless data card to connect to the Internet, entered the URL for the back door into the DHI server, and typed his log-in password.

He navigated to the page where he could manually cause a Return—the same set of instructions that were used for the fob when inside the Parks—and typed from memory Willa’s twenty-six-character ID string.

The window flashed. He’d lost the handshake.

He double-checked the data card connection—all was good—and reentered the URL, ready to start over. He reached the log-on page and reentered his password.

INCORRECT PASSWORD: ACCESS DENIED

Believing he must have typed too fast, he tried again.

INCORRECT PASSWORD: ACCESS DENIED

Now he had real problems: a third failure in a row would mean he’d be blocked from trying to enter a password for twenty-four hours. Willa didn’t have twenty-four hours. Wondering if it might be a problem with Hugo’s data card, Philby decided that the only thing to do was to get to the DHI server in person and make an attempt at the password from there.