by Ben Mezrich
Just an hour ago, the last remaining tourists had been happily strolling their way down the Avenue on the way to the park’s exits, but now that the park was closed, Charlie felt like he and Sam were in the middle of some sort of alien planet. Incredo Land just didn’t feel right after hours. In the first place, it was just too freaking quiet. The electronic music was gone, but even more noticeable was the lack of ambient sound. Now, Solar Avenue was like a corpse, facades instead of real live buildings, a shell without a soul.
Sam reached the window first and stretched her arms over her head. Even at full extension, she could just get her fingers over the sill. Charlie stood next to her, shaking his head.
“Shoot, that jerk could have at least given us a boost. We’re never going to get up there without some sort of ladder.”
Before he could finish the sentence, Sam’s fingers had gripped the edge of the sill, and she swung her legs up, a study of pure grace. A second later, her feet were through the open window in a perfect tuck, then the rest of her, until only her head remained in the alley. She smiled down at Charlie.
“You’re next.”
She held out both hands, leveraging her body against the inside of the windowsill. Charlie swallowed hard; obviously Sam had some gymnastics training. He felt even more uncoordinated than ever, but he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of her. He had to at least try. He reached up and put his hands on hers.
Her grip was incredibly strong for such a small girl; using his feet against the bricks while she pulled, he managed to scramble up the wall with surprising ease. Getting himself through the half-open window was a bit trickier; Sam had to move out of the way, and Charlie found himself wriggling through like a caterpillar attacking a leaf. Hands feeling the darkness in front of him, he let himself drop into the room on the other side of the window—thankfully feeling carpet against his palms, then rolling into a clumsy ball. Sam helped him back to his feet, brushing dirt from the sill off his borrowed jean jacket.
The jacket had been Magic’s; Charlie hadn’t planned on sticking around the park after dark, when the breeze, combined with the humidity in the air, turned the temperature cool enough to bring goose bumps to his skin. Truthfully, he hadn’t planned on being involved in this part of the game at all. Breaking into a building to measure a giant wheel was not his idea of using his brain to beat the system. But when Sam had volunteered, and Miranda had asked who she’d want to come along to help, and Sam had looked at Charlie, well, he hadn’t had much choice. His mind had already begun to figure out a way to sneak away from Jeremy, pretending he had to call home to go over some old science project with his dad. He had no idea why Sam had asked for him. Likewise, at first he’d been surprised that Miranda and the rest of the group had even let Sam herself volunteer. But seeing her lithe form slink away from the window and into the dark room, Charlie realized she was incredibly athletic, and from the way she’d gone through the window, she seemed to have a catlike agility.
“This isn’t going to be as hard as I thought,” Sam whispered, pointing ahead into the darkness.
At first, Charlie couldn’t see anything, but as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out shapes. They were in a storage room, with cavernous walls and a high, barely visible ceiling. There were steel shelves lining the walls to his left and right, covered in objects of all sorts of sizes and shapes, and a big glass cabinet on the other side of the room, by the interior door that led to the rest of the building. But Sam wasn’t pointing toward the shelves or the cabinet; she was pointing to a huge shape standing in an alcove, directly across from them. Even in the darkness, Charlie knew exactly what he was looking at.
At least twice Charlie’s height at its peak, at least two feet deep, draped in a heavy sheet—the thing was enormous, and made to seem even bigger because it was up on a huge motorized metal dolly with rubber-soled wheels. The frame of the dolly was all steel piping, with a high iron cage reaching up behind the sheet. Charlie had no idea how much the thing weighed, but he did know that to adequately measure the thing, there was going to be some serious climbing involved. Even to reach the monstrosity’s halfway point, one of them was going to have to monkey up the side of the dolly.
“It looks way bigger than it did on the video,” Charlie murmured as Sam crept forward toward the alcove. She seemed to be calculating something as she moved, her gaze measuring the carpet in front of her, the distance between her feet and the dolly.
And then suddenly, she leaped forward into a perfect front handspring. Her palms barely touched the floor, then she was flipping over in the air, landing softly on the edge of the dolly, her hands tight against the steel bars.
“Wow!” Charlie gasped. “You’re like a superhero.”
It was a pretty dumb thing to say, but Sam just laughed. She hauled herself up along the bar, then reached out, grabbing a section of the heavy sheet, and gave it a yank. The sheet slid halfway down, revealing the top part of the great wheel. As Charlie moved closer, he could see the outline of Maddy the Turkey Hawk in one section, and a piece of the Frog.
“Actually, I always wanted to be a superhero,” Sam whispered as she traced one of the wheel’s sections with a finger. “I’ve been a gymnast, going on about five years now. Started when I was eight. I was originally enrolled in ballet dance class, but I hated it. I begged my mom to let me do gymnastics instead.”
Charlie reached the base of the dolly. He thought about trying to climb up next to her, but decided getting through the window had taxed his abilities enough. Instead, he reached into his pocket and retrieved the heavy-duty tape measure that Miranda had given him for the job.
“My mom was against it at first,” Sam continued, her expression invisible in the darkness. “She thought that little girls should take dance. But I convinced her that gymnastics would help with my math homework; I was already kind of obsessed with the science and math behind the moves. How many steps it would take to get to the vault. What was the proper force and angle necessary to jump off a springboard and stick a front handspring. The rotational kinetics of the parallel bars.”
Charlie felt himself growing more and more impressed by her as she reached down and took the tape measure from him. She really was a geek like him, even if her overall package had nothing geeky about it.
“I even wrote a paper about it,” she added. “When we moved from New York and I had to transfer schools, my mom sent the paper along with my admission package. I think that’s partly how I got into Nagassack as a seventh grader. They’re pretty picky for late arrivals, you know.”
Charlie nodded, and then something struck him.
“That’s probably how Miranda found you. Your essay.”
“Yeah, I figured that out a while back too. When Finn and Magic first approached me to join the team. I’d just transferred in from New York, and Miranda had made it seem like she was interested in me because she was from the City as well, and she knew how hard it could be to adjust to the suburbs, but I knew it was more than that.”
Charlie watched as Sam slowly extended herself out to reach the far edge of the wheel with one hand.
“So it was Finn and Magic with you, too,” he said.
“Yeah, well, mostly Finn. He has a special relationship with Miranda. I think she’s friends with his family. They kind of grew up together. At least that’s what I’ve gathered.”
That was something new. Finn had never mentioned that he’d known Miranda beyond the Carnival Killers. Charlie had assumed that he had been recruited because of his school record as well.
“What do you think of her? Miranda?”
Sam shrugged in the darkness.
“She’s pretty amazing. And intense. But I admire her a lot. She’s smart, and she’s also beautiful, and she doesn’t seem to be scared of anything. She’s kind of a role model for me. She can be a little scary, but I think her heart is in the right place.”
Charlie pressed his lips together. They had just climbed through a window into a d
ark warehouse room to secretly measure a wheel. He wasn’t sure he agreed with Sam’s thinking.
“The money, the fifty thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, It’s a whole lot of money. I guess we were all surprised by that. Miranda as much as any of us. Last year it was a few hundred dollars, which went to charity.”
That’s exactly what Miranda had said, when the group had gathered by the monorail, right after Charlie had won the contest. The money was a big surprise; just as the man on the steps had said, nobody could have known that there would be such a huge prize. Miranda had promised that she’d find a good charity to put the money toward, since her school program wouldn’t be able to accept a donation that large. It was crazy and shocking, but they would do something good with it, she’d insisted, that was what mattered.
“I don’t think it changes anything,” Sam whispered. “Every one of us got into this because we love math and numbers. For me, it was gymnastics. For Finn, maybe swimming. You were the last piece in the puzzle. So whatever Miranda really thinks, no matter what her real reasons, I think the important thing is that she got us together. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”
With a sudden motion, she flicked the end of the tape measure toward Charlie with her fingers. The tape spat out like a lizard’s tongue and Charlie just managed to catch it before it smacked into his chest.
Sam grinned at him through the darkness, then extended her body out across the dolly, stretching her long, lean arms toward the far edge of the wheel. . . .
20
IT WAS TEN MINUTES past eleven in the evening, and waves of soft violin music drifted out through the crack under the locked door, cresting softly against the faux wooden walls of the narrow hallway. When Charlie closed his eyes, he could almost see the layers of air vibrating outward and washing over him in great, bulbous, concentric circles, the near atomic molecules vibrating back and forth as they clambered through his ears, varying the air pressure against his eardrums, reverberating against his microscopic skin cells at wonderfully specific frequencies: 440 Hz, a beautiful, searing A, sliding all the way down to 220 Hz, another A an octave lower—and then, almost to nothingness, and back again, rising, rising, rising. Charlie’s mother had always told him that the violin was the most perfect of instruments, because it always told the truth. Charlie had never really understood what she’d meant by the comment. Standing there in the hallway, waiting for Miranda to open the door, he thought maybe his mother was right; he couldn’t imagine what it would sound like to hear a violin tell a lie.
Another moment passed, the violin the only sound in his ears. He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty hallway; the rest of the resort had gone quiet as a tomb. Eleven p.m. wasn’t that late in much of the world, but in Incredo Land, it was certainly the middle of the night. People went down early because they couldn’t wait for the next day to begin. Tonight, Charlie didn’t want to go to sleep for precisely the opposite reason—he wanted to put off the next day for as long as he could.
He hadn’t intended to stop by Miranda’s room to give her the measurements from the wheel; after all, she didn’t need the precise numbers, she already knew how Charlie’s equation worked. But when he’d returned to his own room to find Jeremy fast asleep in one of the double beds, and three missed calls from his parents on his dad’s iPhone, he’d felt awash in guilt about all the white lies he’d told, to his parents, his friends, and especially to himself. Sneaking into a warehouse to measure the wheel with Sam had been thrilling, but it had also been wrong, and no amount of rationalization would make it right.
He’d come to the conclusion that he needed to tell Miranda what he was thinking. If anyone could help him through his concerns, it was her. Sam was fascinating and brilliant, but she was totally invested in what they were doing, and obviously looked to Miranda as a guiding force. Finn and Magic didn’t seem to have any qualms with any of it, and Charlie doubted they even cared about the bigger picture. Finn had quit the swim team on the morning of the biggest and most important meet of the school year. It was obvious he had developed his own personal sense of right and wrong.
But Miranda was nearly an adult, and she was their leader. So Charlie wanted to hear it one more time from her. Before it was just him, alone, facing the wheel.
He set his jaw, reached out, and knocked on the door for a third time. But again, there was nothing but the soft tug of the violin strings. He could see a sliver of yellow light beneath the door, but no motion inside, no shadows or footsteps. Either Miranda was a heavy sleeper, or she wasn’t home.
Charlie considered heading back to his room. He was sure he could get into his bed without waking Jeremy, but he doubted he’d be able to fall asleep. Too many things were battling within in his head.
Looking at the locked door, listening to the dutifully honest tone of the violin, he came to another, sudden decision.
• • •
There weren’t many adults who could resist a crying twelve-year-old, and the poor, harried woman behind the front desk was no exception. She was middle-aged, a little overweight, with a frayed bun of dyed-blond hair on her head and glasses hanging from a cord around her neck. By the time Charlie got the decibels up to a low wail, she was primed to give in to just about anything Charlie could have asked for. In fact, she looked like she was about to start crying herself, but that might have had more to do with being two hours into an overnight shift behind a desk with an empty faux jungle of a lobby splayed out in front of her. There were only so many times you could withstand listening to alien jungle noises pumped through speakers disguised as totem poles and tiki torches, while tourists wearing Velcro fanny packs took photos of the combination waterfall/gift shop, before you lost your mind.
“I just don’t know how I lost my key,” Charlie bleated, rubbing his eyes hard enough to cause real tears. “And if I knock on the door and wake the baby, my mom’s gonna kill me. I was only supposed to step out for a second to get ice from the ice machine, but then I wanted to go see how the volcano by the pool was lit up at night, and then I lost track of the time.”
“It’s okay, kid, I’ll make an exception just this time—”
“And I’ve been trying my hardest to be good all week long, and my baby brother just cries all the time—”
“Look, kid, here’s a duplicate key! Everything’s gonna be just fine!”
Charlie sniffed, taking the electronic keycard from her, then grabbed the empty ice bucket he’d taken from a janitor’s closet to use as a totally unnecessary prop, and headed back toward the lobby exit.
“Thanks, lady, you saved my life,” he choked out over his shoulder. But the woman had already gone back to the trashy celebrity magazine she kept hidden behind the front desk. Charlie’s hysterics were just another unfortunate memory, and she had six more hours to go on her shift.
Key in hand, Charlie’s sobs morphed into a grin; not only had he learned how to beat carnival games, but he’d picked up some Oscar-worthy skills along the way.
• • •
Miranda’s door came unlocked with a supple mechanical click, and Charlie cast one final glance behind himself to make sure the hallway was still empty before using both hands to carefully nudge the door open just enough for him to slide inside. He knew what he was doing was wrong; sneaking into someone else’s hotel room was a step beyond little white lies to his parents and friends. But he didn’t see any other way to figure out what was going on.
The hotel room was similar to the one he and Jeremy shared: two double beds covered in vaguely jungle-floral prints, a set of glass doors leading out to a small patio, a few pieces of wicker furniture, a potted plant by the door, a flat-screen TV. But Miranda’s room also had a sort of kitchenette, which consisted of a low counter supporting a coffeepot, a small cubic stainless-steel microwave, and a compact minibar. The minibar door had been left partially ajar, and Charlie could see that a fair number of its contents were already missing. Then he noticed the three empty minia
ture bottles standing like a tiny platoon of AWOL transparent soldiers behind the microwave, and a shiver of nervousness moved through him.
He didn’t know where Miranda had gone, but from the state of the room, he doubted she’d be gone long. Not just the minibar and the empty bottles—on a second glance across the room, he saw that her suede jacket was hanging on the back of a chair parked by the TV table, and she’d left a stack of papers sitting on the small desk by the doors to the patio. She was probably nearby, maybe meeting with Finn or the others, or taking a quick dip in the pool. Which meant he was going to have to act fast.
He was about to head straight for the stack of papers to see if they would shed any more light on Miranda when something else caught his attention. A flash of smooth black leather on the floor beside one of the beds. A little bigger than a paperback book, with a shiny chrome clasp and a designer’s scroll across one side. Miranda’s purse. It must have bounced off her bed when she’d tossed it there and now it was right in front of Charlie, like a gleaming invitation.
As bad as sneaking into Miranda’s hotel room was, going into her purse seemed even worse; if there was one thing Charlie had learned about women from his mother, it was that a lady’s purse was completely off limits. But Charlie didn’t see any other choice. He was ten hours away from spinning the wheel, and he needed to know more about the woman behind it all.
As the violin music blended with the sound of the blood rushing through his ears, he quickly crossed the room to the purse and bent down on both knees. It took him a second to figure out the clasp, and then he was inside, leafing through her possessions. Makeup, a little plastic mirror, a key chain, a few slips of paper with numbers written on them. And a little leather card holder, folded tightly closed. Charlie flipped it open and counted through six credit cards, all of them gold, with Miranda’s name stenciled on each. That seemed like a heck of a lot of credit cards for an eighteen-year-old teaching student, but then, maybe she was from a rich family. She’d been able to front them each two hundred dollars and pay for their trips; maybe the money had come from one of these cards. He was about to shut the card holder and continue sifting through the purse, when a picture of Miranda caught his eye. It was a school ID card; she looked just as perfect under glossy plastic as she did in real life, those pitch-black bangs like a dagger over her icicle eyes. Charlie glanced past the picture and noticed a lot of red and gray writing—and then he paused, blinking hard. He suddenly realized that the card wasn’t a Northeastern ID at all; above Miranda’s picture it said Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His eyes narrowed, and he continued reading her ID. Beneath her photo were the words DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, followed by a student ID number.