Kingdom Keepers V (9781423153429) (33 page)

Finn's mother let go of his hand and took hold of his left wrist with a vise grip. It wasn't just her eyes that had changed, but her entire demeanor. A meaner demeanor. Vicious. Possessive. She owned him.

“Mom…”

But his mother wasn't in there behind the woman's eyes. The crow controlled her now; she, a puppet to its whims and instructions.

He broke her grip with a wrestling move, but it felt more like a bone snapping in two. Like an artery tearing. She had never abandoned him. How could he leave her in the grip of this demonic creature beating its black wings above her?

But he did just that: turned his back on them both, fled down the hall, and slid into a just-closing elevator.

He looked up at two guests who seemed a bit horrified at finding a teenage boy on the floor of their elevator car, out of breath and drenched in sweat, tears in his eyes.

* * *

It bothered Charlene that she couldn't stop thinking about Maybeck. She had crossed over as planned and had headed off to retrieve her Wave Phone where she'd hidden it so she could receive messages from Philby for where to look for the crate.

But why Maybeck? Why was he stuck in her head? From the moment he'd caught up with them on the island and described his fight with Luowski she'd found herself worried about him. Him, of all people. The brash, cocky kid who didn't even know she existed. And yet…their teaming up at the Base had changed her opinion of him. She pushed him out of her mind and tried to focus on the job at hand.

“Hey.”

And there he was, stepping out to meet her near the lobby elevators.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Good to see you, too.”

“The question stands.”

“I thought you might…maybe you could use some backup.”

“Because I'm a girl?”

“No…I mean, yes. But not like that, not like because you can't handle it, because…I don't know. Forget it. Maybe it was a mistake.”

“Maybe it was.”

He looked at her, as confused as she'd ever seen him.

“I thought…” he said. He waved his finger between them.

“You thought what?”

“You…never mind.”

“It's thoughtful of you,” she said, trying to recover. Why did she push away the boys she actually liked? What was with that?

“We were a pretty good team at the Base.”

“We were. Are.”

“That's all,” he said. “With you crossed over. Me, not. I thought…I don't know. Forget it.”

That was the other thing: all boys had a breaking point after which they threw some kind of switch and totally lost interest. She had no way of doing that.

He turned his back on her. “See you.”

“I'm glad you're here,” she spit out.

He stopped. “For real?” Still aimed away from her.

“Totally.”

He turned toward her. If his face had been a lightbulb she'd have needed sunglasses. “It's your deal, not mine. I'm just here as backup.”

“Agreed,” she said. She pointed upstairs.

Maybeck nodded.

* * *

“Excuse me,” Philby said.

The woman had been reading in bed when Philby's hologram walked through her wall. Now she yanked up the bedsheet to cover herself, eyes wide, tongue-tied. She was not young. Far from it, he was happy to see. She'd dropped her book in her lap, the bedsheet clutched tightly like a security blanket. Slack-jawed.

“Sorry about this,” he said. He kneeled and poked his head and shoulders through the floor of her stateroom. He stood up, a full boy again. “Maintenance work. Keeping the plumbing working. Sorry to bother you.”

He disappeared through the far wall and into a narrow engineering space. He hoped she would call the front desk and report the incident, but worried she might not—old people, like Philby's grandparents, had credibility issues and did not want to appear senile. Claiming a boy ghost had spoken to her would only get her odd looks. But he was counting on the fear factor to make her report him. Security would be notified and would respond to her complaint. This in turn would leave security temporarily empty, which served his purpose well.

He ducked his hologram head through the floor. He'd established himself perfectly: he was looking (upside down) at the back of a security officer working at a desk that held a pair of computer screens, the larger of which displayed color security camera views in a quadrant format. The phone rang, and the man answered it.

“He went…where?” the man said. Then—“Oh, come on!” He paused to listen. “Yeah…okay…I'll speak with her.” Reluctantly, he pulled himself out of his chair in the midst of a deep sigh.

Philby extracted his head from the room to avoid being seen. He counted to ten and peeked through again. The room was empty. Here, then, was a chance to practice the benefits of 2.0: the added control over the physical space. Typically, a floor, attraction, or a sidewalk held a DHI, as the projection was set to do just that. When crossing through walls, technically a Keeper was in DHI shadow. Using 2.0, a DHI could “force” transitions—moving one's image from projector to projector, like a cell phone tower handing off a signal. Philby did so now. He closed his eyes and reminded himself that, as pure light, he could go wherever he wanted to go, that there were no boundaries. He jumped up a few inches, still squinting, and fell through the floor, landing surprisingly hard—and surprisingly loudly—on the floor of the security office below. He recovered quickly and scrambled under a desk just as the door flung open.

“Hello? Anyone here? Everything all right?”

An officer's pressed and starched white uniform, from the knees down, appeared. Whoever it was turned and left the office.

Philby was inside.

* * *

Taking directions from Philby over her Wave Phone, Charlene moved deeper into the guts of the ship. She'd left Maybeck outside the Crew Members Only door, near the forward end of the starboard companionway.

“Do you see the corridor to your right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That's where they took the crate. But I can't see all of it.”

“It's long. All gray paint. A crew area for sure.”

“Doors?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Three on the left and one at the very end. None on the right.”

“There are numbers by them. Read them back to me.”

Walking the corridor, Charlene read off the three numbers in a whisper.

“Okay. Consulting a floor plan here…” he said. “Did you know they have iPAQs—handhelds—that can control most of the ship's functions and all of the security devices?”

“You know, I don't care, Philby. Not only don't I care, but you're distracting me and things are just a little tense down here. Not to mention hot. I mean, where's the air-conditioning for the crew?”

“That's what I'm talking about: the iPAQs can control the air-cond—”

“Will you
shut up
?” She spoke too loudly for the narrow corridor, scaring herself with her own voice.

“I'm going to borrow one,” he said against the background sound of a keyboard clicking.

“I really
do…not…care
…”

“You will.”

“Oh my gosh! Enough!”

“Try the door at the end of the corridor,” he said. “On the floor plans that door connects backstage to the theater. The doors on the left are emergency doors to the auditorium itself. I'm definitely going with backstage.”

“Actually, it's me going with it,” Charlene said.

“You'll have to leave the phone. It won't go through the wall with your hologram.”

“I could try it.”

“Trust me. I was stopped by a hair.”

“What?”

“I'll tell you another time. Leave the phone somewhere you can find it later.”

“So when I'm in there, I'm on my own?”

“Afraid so.”

“Are you going to give me some clues?”

“Stand by. Checking the floor plan.”

“You don't have to sound like a robot.”

“Pardon me for living. Look who's nervous.”

“I am nervous,” Charlene said. “I don't particularly love creepy places. So help me out here.”

“The hallway you'll enter angles left—”

“Left,” she said, checking her hands. Charlene had a little trouble with left and right.

“It looks like there are some storage areas or offices off it. All very small.”

“And?”

“It leads past a stairway, up and down and out into an area that's off the stage.”

“Stage left,” she said.

“Whatever. The stage is ginormous, but it looks like curtains hide most of it from the audience. No way to tell from here what's back there.”

“That's encouraging.”

“There's another level below, down those stairs you'll pass. I've got some safety cams down there as well as onstage. Maybe I can control the lights if I can figure out the iPAQ.”

Enough with the iPAQ! she wanted to say.

“Okay,” she said.

“You set?”

“I'll put my phone behind a fire extinguisher.”

“Perfect.”

“So I guess this is it for now.”

“I'll be watching you at least some of the places. You're not alone.”

Then why do I feel so alone? she wanted to say. But she'd volunteered for the assignment. She couldn't complain now.

She tucked the phone behind the fire extinguisher, summoned her courage, and walked through the door. She opened her eyes once through to the other side.

The corridor was narrow and more confined than she'd expected. The lighting wasn't great, either. The carpet was indoor-outdoor stuff that felt spongy and therefore a little weird underfoot. Charlene practiced 2.0 moves repeatedly, as had become her habit—reaching out to physically touch, then reaching out again and intentionally remaining projected light. This practice had become second nature, and she went down the
hall doing the moves absentmindedly—running her fingers along the wall, running her fingers into the wall's metal, so that her fingernails and first knuckle were missing.

Her mind was supposed to be on locating the crate and determining its contents. Instead, she was thinking how smart Philby had been to tell her to change into the Cast Member costume of shorts and polo shirt before going to sleep. Where Finn was a boy with the big ideas, Philby was the one with the picky little suggestions that turned into practical solutions. Why had no one brought up Philby's slipping away from the four of them? Why had she kissed Finn? It was going to ruin everything. Who was she supposed to talk to about it?

She spotted a security camera on the wall up ahead. She waved into it and gave a thumbs-up, hoping he might be smiling back at her from wherever he was watching. But then things grew darker as she passed the stairway he'd described. Darker still as she stepped into the wings of stage left. Then her head split in two.

In her left ear, the sound of panting.

In her right, voices.

From the overhead stage lights came a burst of red light. Then blackness. A warning from Philby? she wondered. Or someone fooling with the lights? Trusting Philby, she made herself solid, stepped into one of the side curtains, and twisted inside it as if wrapping herself in a towel, leaving enough of a crack to see out.

Two people in a hurry—girls, not women, she thought—appeared downstage, disappearing behind other curtains. A moment later, the panting grew louder, and two awkward-looking dogs followed on their heels, also disappearing back there. Not dogs, she realized: hyenas.

Avoiding the hyenas, she headed for the stairs, following the voices. Men's voices bubbled up from down there. The presence of the hyenas made her believe she was on the right track. They'd been used on Deck 4 as patrol dogs. Here, they had to be guarding the mystery crate. Why their apparent handlers had been running from them, she didn't know. It had not looked like playing, but pursuit. Like so many other questions that arose from being a Keeper, she couldn't explain what she'd seen and didn't have time to think about it. Survival depended on having her full senses at her disposal; she could ill afford distraction.

The metal stairs were as steep as a ladder, with a handrail for balance. She arrived to the bottom landing careful to keep herself in full hologram, expertly in control of her emotions, using 2.0's enhancements to push back the potential effects of her fear.

Like Finn and Willa, Charlene had perfected her ability to compartmentalize her anxiety, so that now, as she entered a dark and narrow companionway, she remained analytical and calm. A lighted doorway ahead on her left proved the source of the voices.

She peered around the edge into a surprisingly large area, its walls and ceiling crawling with pipes and wires. It looked like a room in her school's basement, a place only janitors went. There were Day-Glo orange caution triangles on the walls and yellow hash marks on the floor designating safety areas. It was not just pipes and wires on the ceiling, but rubber tubes—hydraulics. And now she realized the heavy, gated platform at the far end was an elevator of some kind. They were below the main stage; it and three smaller lifts serviced trapdoors in the stage overhead. Large props and actors could come and go through the floor during a show. This in turn explained all the safety warnings.

There on the center lift stood the wooden crate like an obelisk around which several workmen were gathered. They appeared neither concerned nor excited; if anything, they teetered on the edge of boredom. It occurred to Charlene that either they didn't know what was in there, or whatever was in there was not that big a deal.

She summoned her courage, took a deep breath, and entered the room.

“Everything go okay here?” she asked one of the men in the blue coveralls.

The man leaned back on the inverted plastic tub he used for a stool and waved his hand. “Not a problem.” He was Indonesian or Indian with a thick, singsongy voice. “Our straps are not of the proper length. We could double them up, but the commodore said it is not regulation. There may be some in galley storage. If not, we are to use regular lines. Not a problem.”