by Jody Feldman
“That’s it?”
Elijah nodded. “How do you suppose we avoid the Foes?”
“No telling till we go in.”
Zane ducked through an undersized doorway in the wall to a concrete floor flanked by trees and bushes. It was like someone’s large patio, but without the furniture. The trees and bushes continued at the patio’s width to a forested dead end, almost half a football field away.
Zane rushed the seven yards to the end of the concrete, and the solid patio beneath his feet dropped off beyond that. A set of metal railroad-type rails may have started inset into the patio, but they were seemingly suspended in midair over the valley below, then stretched as far as all the greenery. About every six feet, vertical rods topped with circular, flat caps rose above the hand railing that paralleled the tracks all the way to a forest at the end. The rods on the right side, though, extended three feet taller than the ones on the left.
“From here to there,” Elijah said. “How far do you think that is, Zane?”
“Forty yards. That’s gotta be our bridge, but we need something to walk on or”—Zane strode to where the rails started—“or we fall about eight feet into—Is that a real river?”
No answer. Elijah was rooting around in the bushes. He pulled out a couple of wooden boards about one foot long and four feet wide, with deep sets of grooves running along both of their short sides. “Our footing, I presume.”
“Keep pulling them out. I’ll check.” Zane ran them over and fit their grooves perfectly over the rails, laying their path from here to there. He trotted back to Elijah. “The boards are our footing. Pull ’em all out first and—”
Clio and Gil somehow flew down from the treetops on the left and landed at the start of the bridge. Clio grabbed the second plank off the rails and handed it to Gil, who flew back up through the trees. She winked. “Your Foes have arrived.” Then she, too, lifted up and away.
Elijah pulled out another board from the bushes. “What was that?”
“Weirdness.” Zane looked over Elijah’s shoulder. “Read me the message again.”
“‘Overview: Build a bridge from here to there. Then return from there to here. Soon the message will be clear. You must: use small-medium-large boards for your footing. Also, you—”
“That’s it!”
“What’s it?”
Zane pointed to the middle of the card: egral-muidem-llams. “We need to do it in that order; otherwise, we get board-stealing Foes.”
“And we don’t know how to get them back.”
“We will.”
Elijah laid another board onto the haphazard pile he had going.
“Tell you what,” Zane said, diving into the bushes. “Start stacking them near the bridge. I can pull out more at a time.” He shrugged off the scratching branches and sailed the boards out, each time with an “Incoming!” warning. He didn’t want to kill the guy. When he’d tossed all he could find, he emerged from the branches, then carried five boards over to Elijah’s three piles. “What’s what out here?”
“We have a small, a medium, and a large pile. I put the heaviest ones closest to the bridge so we wouldn’t have to carry them as far.”
“Good thinking.”
“I extrapolated that idea from your telling me to stack them close.”
“Save the compliments for later and keep stacking. I’ll get the rest.”
By the time they’d sorted all the boards, counting the one already on the rails, there were eighteen large ones, eighteen medium, but only seventeen small.
“How do we get the last one back, Zane?”
“We’ll figure it out. Right now, let’s build a bridge and hope they don’t steal more.” Zane loaded a set of three boards—small, medium, and large—onto Elijah’s arms.
Elijah didn’t say anything, but he was struggling under the bulk. Zane grabbed six, plus took one off Elijah’s hands. In a flash, they’d placed those nine pieces of bridge without a Foe in sight.
They were working like a machine, Zane taking six boards to whatever Elijah could handle. They stopped, laid the pieces in place, then took a couple seconds to breath. Repeat, repeat, repeat until Elijah dropped his next set of boards and stood there, his arms rising, then lowering, then rising at his sides. “They feel like they’re floating.”
Zane had to laugh, but they needed to get back on it. He started jogging to the patio at a slow enough pace for Elijah. “Just eight more boards to bring over. I’ll manage them. You search the bushes for the stolen one.” Zane raced ahead.
Clio was dancing on the patio with the stolen board.
Zane bolted toward her, but at the last second, she sailed it across the patio to Gil.
Elijah pulled up. “Please! Not keep-away!”
“Apparently,” said Zane. “I don’t have time, and I know you can handle it, buddy.”
“But I’m short—”
“No, you’re smart. You’ll get it. They’ll always give you what you need.” Zane raced onto the bridge and glanced back before he set down the remaining eight.
Elijah was jumping at the board Gil waggled above his head. Worse case, Zane would come back after he’d placed these boards, and they’d outwit their Foes together. But Zane had laid down only five when Elijah returned victorious.
“How’d you do it?”
“I thought I’d need to slay a dragon, but then I asked the price of getting it back.”
“Which was?”
“Answer why they stole it from us, the small-medium-large sequence.”
“Good job, buddy. I’d still be there trying to—what’d you say?—slay the dragon?”
“Metaphor.”
“Right.” Zane covered the last bit of rails with the large board. “Now what?” He looked at Elijah.
Elijah looked right back at him with a blank stare that turned into a lightbulb moment. “The card said, ‘Then return from there to here. Soon the message will be clear.’
Without a word, they started sprinting. When they reached the patio, there was nothing but a pad of paper and a couple pens on the floor. Zane flipped through the pad, but the pages were blank. He stuffed it and a pen into his pocket, just in case. “We missed something.”
Elijah nodded. “We need to go back.”
They sprinted back to the far end of the bridge.
“Now what?” said Elijah.
“Look around, I guess.” Zane lifted the three boards closest to them in case he’d missed some message underneath.
Meanwhile, Elijah stooped to inspect the underside of the handrail. He shook his head.
“Nothing here either,” said Zane. He ran his hand up one of the tall vertical rods that connected the bottom rail with the handrail, then rose about level with his head. It was smooth all along, until his fingers reached toward the flat top.
Zane stood on his tiptoes. “There’s writing up here! There’s a W and something else that isn’t a letter. I need to be like half an inch taller.”
“How do they expect me to see up there?”
“They don’t,” said Zane. “There has to be another way. A ladder or . . .” He didn’t have an “or.” He looked up. Looked around.
Elijah was at the other handrail, the side with the shorter vertical rods. “No writing here, but wait.” He ringed one of those rods with his thumb and forefinger and slipped it off the top.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to compare the circumferences of the rods on this side to the rods on the other side. There has to be a reason why the ones here are shorter and the ones over there are taller. Maybe these telescope up some way or those telescope down.” Then he moved across the bridge to a taller rod, but didn’t come close to reaching the top.
“I can do that.” Zane gauged the circumference of the short pole, then reached up to slide the ring his fingers made down the tall pole. “Definitely smaller up top, and—”
Elijah had started running his fingers up the rod. “There!” He pulled on a
small clip, and the tall rod telescoped down into itself. The cap at the top read:
“.W
One by one, they telescoped the poles down. Each one brought them closer to the patio, and each had three letters or letters and punctuation marks on its cap. Elijah wrote as Zane called them out.
“.W ORR OBN ACE WTA HTL LAT UBE VAH EWS NIA RBE HTE SUY LNO TON DLU OHS EW”
“They’re reversed again,” said Zane. “We just need to figure out where to break up the letters into words that mean something.”
“I already did that,” Elijah said.
“Of course you did.”
“But where do we give our answer?” asked Elijah.
Zane pointed to the patio. “What’s that?”
They raced over. Half hidden in the bushes was a small table with a GollyReader. Its screen said, EVEN FOES CAN BECOME FRIENDS. There was also an answer box.
“Tell me what to type,” Zane said.
“Forward or reverse?”
“The way normal people would understand.”
“Okay. First, quotation mark. Then I’ll just read the sentence. Let me know what you want me to repeat.”
“Go!”
“We should not only use the brains we have but all that we can borrow.”
Zane typed then held it out to Elijah. “This is for you. Hit Enter if you think it’s right.”
Elijah added the period and the quotation mark at the end, then hit Enter.
They got five words in return. QUOTE FROM PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON
Chimes sounded. The small door opened.
Chapter 32
Zane ducked back through the small door, into the area where the moving room had dropped them off. It now had four chairs and a table, but no other opening.
“Isn’t this a firetrap?” said Elijah.
Zane peeked his head back out to the patio. “Guess not. And we could always jump into the river. Did we decide if that was real water or not?”
“It’s real,” said Gil. He and Clio were suddenly standing behind them.
“Where did you come from?” asked Elijah.
Gil snapped his fingers. “It’s magic.”
“No, really.”
“I parachuted in from way above there.” Clio pointed to the ceiling. “And Gil rose from the floor.”
“They’re not gonna tell us, Elijah. And it’s not what you really want to know, is it?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Don’t you want to know if you’re still in this?” Zane said.
“I’m still in.”
“That’s confidence,” said Gil. “How do you know?”
“Several factors. First, Zane didn’t try to chase you when you stole our board, so I didn’t either. One pair or another probably did. Maybe even climbed a tree.”
“Which would have been more fun for us,” said Clio.
Gil smiled. “At least we got to steal one board from you.”
“That was fun.” Clio nodded at Elijah to go on.
“Second, only Berk and Ryder could have gotten the boards down the bridge faster than Zane did practically alone. Third, I deciphered the reverse writing instantly. Then there was Zane, who kept me on track the whole time.”
“Besides,” said Zane, “if we were last, you wouldn’t be stalling for time now, right?”
They didn’t answer. They didn’t even change expression. The only thing that gave it away was Clio’s eyes. They danced.
“You’re good, little dude,” said Zane. “You’re still in this.”
Clio looked at Gil. Gil looked at Clio. They shook their heads. “We honestly don’t know how everything stands.”
“Maybe not everything,” Zane said, “but enough. So what’s next?”
Gil sat. “We wait.”
They all sat, mostly quiet. Zane downed a bottle of water, happy for Elijah but gearing up to be a mere cheerleader for his one-man team.
A beep-beep came from the closed end of the room, then the wall slid open.
“You decent in there?” Bill leaned out of his golf cart and laughed. “Hop on.”
Clio sat next to Bill and told Zane and Elijah to take the backseat. Gil stood on the rear bumper and grabbed onto the cart’s roof.
“Here we go,” said Bill.
Zane expected to have a raw, behind-the-scenes look—concrete floors, steel beams, electrical boxes—but the cart zoomed through a finished series of hallways and stopped in one of the light-column rooms.
Bill faced them. “We’re just pausing to time this right. Soon all four carts will converge on a platform. You’ll get out and line up, Gil and Clio will disappear again, and we’ll give you the results.”
Clio turned. “Elijah already knows those.”
“What do you know?” Bill said.
“To start, I’m safe for now.”
“What else?” Bill said. “What order did the teams finish?”
“I can’t say definitively, but I’m either first or just barely second over Becky. She’s fast and clever. Third, Hanna. She and Leore might have been faster with their answer, but this challenge was equally about muscle and speed. Then I believe Berk was last. He and Ryder probably got slammed by their Foes.” Elijah looked up at Bill. “How’d I do?”
“Let’s go find out.” He spun the car one-eighty, and they backtracked through the halls, through their waiting area, then over their patio, and across the bridge they’d built. Now, though, they could see three other carts on three other bridges all converging on a large center platform with eight black circles.
“Where did the trees and bushes go?” asked Elijah.
“Our little secret.” Bill stopped their cart, as the others had, at the platform’s edge. “Find your circle and stand on it.”
The one with Zane’s name was third from the end. If that meant something, it wasn’t obvious. He wasn’t next to Elijah, but Hanna was next to Leore. Becky and Josh were separated, but Ryder stood next to Berk in the center.
Berk just wouldn’t close his mouth. “Did I get the right answer? Did I win? Why won’t you talk to me? Why do I have to stand inside a stupid circle?”
“It looks good on TV,” Bill finally said.
“If I watch TV, will I finally learn if I won?”
“You might find out sooner if you zip it.”
Thank goodness Bill said something or Zane might’ve tackled the voice out of Berk.
Carol paced in front of them from one end to the other, then turned slowly. If Zane were still in this, he’d want her to speak already. She finally stopped in the middle. “Team Silver,” said Carol, “I’m not sure that I mentioned this, but your winnings for staying here and helping the Gold Team? That’s in addition to the three thousand dollars you already won.”
“At least six thousand dollars?” said Ryder.
“You got it!” Carol said.
Bill stood next to Carol. “As for Team Gold,” he said, “your base amount was six thousand dollars, the amount you’ll receive if you came in last just now.”
“No bonus?” said Berk.
Bill ignored that. “I’m sorry to say good-bye to . . .”
Almost before Zane could look, the circle next to him opened, and Becky dropped through the floor. The circle closed before they could finish gasping.
“Don’t be alarmed,” said Carol. “She’s laughing. She landed in a padded space that funneled her for one last ride in the Rainbow Maze and will be joined by . . . Bon voyage, Ryder!”
His circle opened, and Ryder was gone.
At least Zane would go out with a bang. He wished they’d eject him already. He didn’t need to hear Berk keep repeating, “Victory is within sight! Victory will be mine!”
“Not unless you calm down,” said Bill.
Berk did. For a second. “I’m in the final three!”
Carol got in his face, and then he calmed down. “Now, Leore,” she said, “don’t look so worried. Whether or not you drop through the floor is your choice. But, Tea
m Silver, you realize this is the point when, as Berk announced, we are down to three people. So raise your hand if you want to take the ride through the Rainbow Maze.”
Zane’s hand shot up. So did Josh’s. Leore’s hand was resting on her hair as if she was trying to decide whether to scratch her head or raise her arm.
Carol gave her the warmest smile. “It’s fun. I promise.”
Leore nodded. And with that, she dropped.
Then Josh.
Zane took a deep breath and steeled himself against the fall.
It didn’t come. And it didn’t come. And it still didn’t come.
“His trap door stuck?” At least Berk finally asked a good question.
“No,” Carol said. The way she and Bill were smiling at him, they were up to something.
“In fact,” said Bill, “we’re gonna keep him around for a bit because here’s what else you don’t know. For being the Friend on the first-place team—”
“You did it, Elijah!” Zane couldn’t help himself. “Sorry, Bill. Go ahead.”
Bill laughed. “On top of the ten-thousand-dollar bonus, Zane, you are—
Horns sounded. Lights flashed. His circle became a tornado of confetti.
“You are,” Bill continued, “back in the competition.”
Zane wished someone were there to measure his vertical leap. Elijah’s too. The kid was jumping in circles, his arms thrust in the air. “Zane’s still in!”
“So that’s the good news,” said Bill.
“The bad news is I’ve still gotta beat three people to become the champion,” said Berk.
“Not true,” Carol said. “There are only two more elimination rounds left, which also means we say good-bye to the third-place finisher on Team Gold.”
And Berk’s floor dropped.
Zane couldn’t help himself. Neither, apparently, could Elijah or Hanna.
“He’s gone!” she said.