“Hold off,” Nick said. Mulan shot him a look of confusion. “Too dangerous.”
Mulan didn’t like being told what to do, but she returned to his side. To support his claim, Nick indicated an electronic control box mounted to the concrete. Then he pointed up. “That ladder on the wall provides access to the elevator repair. There’s no escape hatch on the bottom. The bottoms of all the cars are sealed and fireproofed. The ladder will only get us as high as the bottom of the car. This box controls the two elevator cars in this shaft. The cars don’t stop here at the bottom—they unload at ground level. But they do fall this far, and they do pause before racing back up. So that’s our chance.”
“Our chance?” Kristoff questioned.
“See those pipes on the bottom of the car?” Nick said. “That’s our way up.”
“You think you can hold on, mountain man?”
“Do you two have issues, or what?” Nick asked.
“She is always on Elsa’s side,” Kristoff said dismissively. “Not one of Anna’s greatest admirers.”
“That is not true at all!” Mulan burst out. “Do I love Olaf? Yes! Sven? You must ask? As for the two girls…so much fuss! I know plenty of girls.”
“Issues,” Nick said, nodding.
Something invisible and more toxic than burning electricity hung in the air, as thick as fog. Nick sensed it, could practically taste it: it wasn’t his new character friends. No. They were not alone.
DASH STOPPED FLYNN and Dillard as they faced a long hallway.
“The kitchen is down there on the right,” Dash said. “It’s a corner room with windows that look into the hallway. If we stay low, we can slip beneath the windows and keep out of sight.”
“What about the two guards?” Dillard asked.
“Past the kitchen on the left, there’s another corridor. The two guys are down there.”
“No sign of the others? Nick’s group?”
Dash shook his head, his hair flopping. He squinted his eyes shut inside his mask. “There’s a stairway at the end, though. Hang on.” Dash zipped away, only to reappear two seconds later, not even slightly out of breath. “Another stairway at the end of this hallway, too. FYI: the movie’s just about over. If we’re going to do this, it has to be now.”
“So let’s get going,” Flynn said. “Once we get upstairs, I’ll keep our line of retreat open. It’ll be up to you and Dillard to find the girl.”
“Good plan,” said Dash.
Dillard looked a lot less certain. “How is it that you guys are so heroic and optimistic? There’s a dozen of them. Three of us. And they have such bizarre skills that we don’t even know what they are, much less how to counter them.”
“Look, in my story I get the girl,” Flynn said, “and Dash’s family beats Syndrome. It’s just the way we roll. And when Dash says ‘now,’ he means now.”
Dillard nodded, clearly shaken.
“Relax,” Dash said, trying but failing to put a friendly hand on the older boy’s glowing shoulder. “You’re a hologram and we’re…well…us. What could possibly go wrong?”
“I can think of a few things—a dozen to be exact.”
“DID YOU ARRANGE THIS?” Amanda asked. The 1955 night sky over Anaheim glowed a dull yellow, but stars peeked through in ways that didn’t happen in the present.
“What, exactly?” Finn said, returning a question with a question, something that he knew annoyed Amanda.
“You and me. This,” she said, as they walked toward a toolshed.
“Oh, that,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I might have arranged it. Okay, yeah, I did. Why does it matter?”
She smiled at him out of the corner of her eyes. “To me it does.”
“In a good or a bad way?”
“Oh, good. Very good.” The air felt cool. Finn was boiling.
“I’ve…you know, missed you,” Finn said. He cleared his throat awkwardly.
“That’s also good. You’re on a roll.”
“I can’t lie, your…ability…might be useful. So technically I’m using you.”
“Happy to be of service, though I hope we don’t need it.” Amanda gave him one more smile, and then her tone became more businesslike. “Who’s this Marty guy?”
“Friend of Wayne’s. He does the park newspaper, and he knows all sorts of stuff about what’s going on. Some of it he can print, some he can’t.”
“This Pinocchio thing,” Amanda prompted.
“Right. That’s from him. An oversize Audio-Animatronic. Nose grows. The whole bit.” Finn made a point of staring at the workshop shed across from them. It looked like a single-car garage that had been plopped down absentmindedly.
“But we happen to know that a physical Pinocchio never shows up in an attraction for thirty years. So…?”
“Think how many zillions of things Disney started or dreamed about but were never finished, Amanda. Especially back then. Now. The fifties and sixties. I’ll bet Walt had a million ideas. His team, too. And some of them really never were finished, and some were put on the back burner for thirty, forty, fifty years. But it was Pinocchio going up in flames in Jess’s dream, so we can’t not follow it up.”
“How could Pinocchio ever be an Overtaker?” Amanda asked. She sounded sad.
“No one’s an Overtaker yet. That’s what we’re here to prevent. Don’t forget: you and Joe were the ones who told us to stay and stop Amery Hollingsworth.”
“Junior. Yeah. Are you mad about that? You sound mad.” Amanda twisted her hair nervously.
“I’m just saying: we already took care of getting the ink to Walt’s special pen.” Finn didn’t mean to sound so defensive. “The pen is going to be in One Man’s Dream so that we’ll be able to find it there in sixty years, as stupid as that sounds. We’ve accomplished what we came to do.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid. Not when you know what’s coming a long time from now. Jess and I made you all stick around,” Amanda said, leaning back a little, as if trying to see the effect her words had on Finn.
“No one made us do anything. You gave us information and we’re here. End of story.”
“But you’re mad,” she said.
“No, I’m worried.”
“You’re always worried.”
“Well, that’s true,” Finn admitted. “But this time it’s…personal. It’s about us: you, me, and the Keepers.”
Amanda stopped speaking and took Finn’s hand, and he wondered what genius allowed him to feel like a human being after closing hours, because this wouldn’t have been the same as a hologram. His hand felt warm, which meant hers was not warm, which meant that she’d kept her cool and he had lost his, and he felt conflicted about that.
But more than anything, he didn’t want to let go of her hand. He felt connected to her, and dare he even think it: whole. It wasn’t about wanting to kiss her or hug her or any of that stuff, it was about connecting on a level the two of them rarely reached.
He thought about how long he and Amanda had known each other now. How much they’d shared, how close they’d grown. He thought about the color of her hair and her eyes and how he could see them even with his eyes closed. He thought about what a good person she was, how she’d come through so much and yet carried herself like her life had been charmed. He thought he didn’t just like her, he admired her. He thought she mattered.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Philby, and Willa, too, has this random idea, a theory I guess you’d call it, about what happens if we stop Hollingsworth.”
“If? There’s no question about that. We have to stop him. Think of Dillard, of Wayne, of the fires, all the destruction.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s exactly the thing. Their theory goes that if we stop Hollingsworth, and if what he’s doing is creating the Overtakers, then they never happen. And if they never happen, Wayne never needs to stop them, and if Wayne never needs to stop them, then maybe he never leads th
e DHI Project. So maybe we—the five of us—are never recruited as models for park guides. Maybe we never meet at all. That includes—”
“Me and you,” Amanda said breathlessly. Her mouth hung open in astonishment. She stared at Finn as if the theory was his fault.
“You haven’t thought about that?”
“No,” she admitted. “Not like that. Not in those terms. I guess I figured…I thought…” She looked pale. Sick, maybe. “You know, fate, or whatever.”
“Fairy tale,” he said.
“What?”
“We all get hung up on the fairy-tale ending, right? That things always work out. But Philby, Willa? They say no matter how you tweak the past, if you even can tweak the past, that the present will work itself out anyway. It’ll just find another way to accomplish the same present.”
“You mean fate.” Amanda’s eyes were so bright in the dark.
“Like that, but not exactly,” Finn said. “I mean, the other side of the argument says that if you mess with the past, if you even visit the past, the present can’t possibly be the same upon your return. By going into the past, you change the present forever. Period. Every human deed has an impact.”
“I kind of like that, actually,” Amanda said. “The last part.”
“It doesn’t work out so well for us, though, Amanda. You, me, Jess, the Keepers. If we’ve changed the present by getting onto that carousel, and if we fix things now so the Overtakers never exist, then we’ll never meet, we’ll never work together, know each other.”
“I get it. But if it’s fate, it’s fate.” She sounded al-most happy about the idea.
“You want it to be fate? You trust the fairy-tale ending? When have you ever seen a fairy-tale ending in your life?”
“Are you kidding? I see them every day! I’m looking at one!”
She was looking right at him.
“This isn’t an ending,” Finn complained. “It’s just beginning!”
“See?” Amanda’s voice quavered. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
She stretched forward and kissed him gently. So gently he wasn’t sure they had even kissed. But there was a faint taste of strawberry or something sweeter on his lips, and he knew he hadn’t put it there.
“This may never happen,” he whispered.
“Interesting, because it’s happening right this second.” She leaned forward again and kissed him on the cheek. He awkwardly tried to aim for her lips again, but bumped her with his nose and she stepped back, laughing. “I’m not laughing at you,” she said quickly, “but with you.”
They were still holding hands, Finn realized, and she was squeezing his, which probably meant something but he didn’t know what. He was stuck revisiting his clumsiness, how he’d whiplashed her with his nose.
“I am so lost,” he said, almost apologetically.
“It makes you unbearably adorable.”
“Is that so?” Suddenly he felt slightly more confident.
“That is most definitely so,” Amanda said.
Reaching the shed, they used Wayne’s master key to let themselves in. Finn shut the door quietly, but quickly. With no windows on any wall, he switched on the light, and he and Amanda drank in the organized chaos of the space.
Worktables were built along three of the four walls, reminding them both of Wayne’s shop. A central workstation formed a kind of kitchen island in the room. Odd-looking tools and parts lay strewn about; glass jars filled with nuts and bolts, screws, and washers lined the back of each table.
But it was the three nearly life-size Pinocchio mannequins that held their attention. Never mind the electric fan the size of Big Ben in the far corner.
“That’s creepy,” Amanda whispered. The mannequins had been modified with power tools, the limbs cut at the joints. Wires protruded from the middle mannequin and ran every which way; he’d not only been cut apart and reassembled, but the arms, waist, and legs carried long scratch marks, as if a lion had attacked.
In all three of the life-size puppets, the faces had been carefully dissected, leaving a hole where the nose should have been, empty eye sockets, lines at the sides of the jaw, and drilled holes where eyebrows would eventually be fitted. The dead stares served as reminders of the graveyard.
Finn continued to look around the shop.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Amanda asked in a hushed whisper.
“One of those animation cels, maybe, like Jess dreamed about. Something that doesn’t belong. All this stuff is so ancient looking,” Finn cautioned, “that none of it looks like it belongs. Face it, 1955 was prehistoric.”
“There’s so much stuff,” Amanda said, turning over papers, digging through mechanical parts. “I’m not sure I’d know it if I saw it.”
“I hear you.”
They stood on opposite sides of the small shack, rummaging through the contents of the workbenches, metal wire milk crates, and toolboxes. Finn found a pile of designs covered in scribbles, spilled coffee blobs and oil stains.
“What if we plugged him in and turned him on?” Amanda asked abruptly.
Finn spun around and stared at the three mannequins. “What would that tell us?” he asked.
“No clue. Just an idea.”
“Interesting.”
“Stupid, I suppose.”
“Not necessarily,” Finn said. “There’s a speaker attached.” He pointed to a workbench on the left. “So they’re making him speak. That might tell us something. He might tell us something.”
Amanda nodded eagerly. “Let’s find out.”
Finn crossed the shop, traced some cords from the back of the wired boy. They led to a box, which connected to a tape recorder and a small amplifier and speaker. “This box must move the motors in his jaw. Philby would get all this, I’ll bet.”
“And these?” Amanda held up a bundle of wires as thick as her forearm.
“Movement. Motion, I imagine,” Finn said. “Nothing in his legs. It’s all head and arms.”
Finn switched on the tape recorder, the small box with the wires, and the amplifier. “That’s all of them, I think.” He hesitated, his hand on a silver lever on the top of the tape recorder.
“Did you turn down the volume?” Amanda asked.
“Good point.” Finn did, wondering anew where a girl like Amanda had come from, how she could possibly like someone like him. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be, I suppose.”
Finn moved the lever.
A PROJECTOR SWITCHED ON, beaming an image of the animation-Pinocchio onto the standing mannequin. Finn and Amanda both startled back.
“Not cat scratches,” Finn said after he caught his breath.
“What’s that?”
“I thought those lines on his waist, his neck, looked like cat scratches. But I think it’s more like the work of a chisel.” Finn frowned, stepping closer to the mannequin. “This guy’s been carved to fit the projected Pinocchio perfectly. That is so Disney, to make him so true to the movie.”
“No kidding.” Amanda was also closely examining the fit of the projection to the mannequin. “What a ton of work someone went to. It’s exact, down to an eighth of an inch.”
“Are you my conscience?” said the four-foot-high mannequin suddenly, his jaw moving, the tape recorder playing.
“Oh, that is weird,” said Amanda. “That looks so—”
“Real,” said Finn. “Yeah. It’s nuts.”
“I’d rather be smart than an actor,” said the boy mannequin with the missing nose.
“That’s from the movie! That’s when he doesn’t want to be a puppet any longer,” said Finn.
“Finn! That’s it!” Amanda said.
But the eyeless boy interrupted.
“He’s my conscience. He tells me what’s right and wrong.”
“What’s ‘it’?” Finn asked, but the tape kept running, and the mannequin kept speaking.
“You’re right! He doesn’t want to be a puppet any longer. Did you hear wh
at he just said?” she asked. Quoting Pinocchio, she said, “‘He tells me what’s—’”
“I’m real. I’m a real boy!”
“I don’t like it,” Finn said. “When does anything Disney think it’s real?”
“Finn! It makes so much sense!”
“It doesn’t to me!”
“A fire! That’s it! A great big fire; lots of smoke!” The mannequin’s head moved side to side and his right arm raised. For a moment it appeared he might start walking. Both Finn and Amanda stepped back.
“I…don’t…like…this!” Finn hissed, more urgently now.
“It all fits!” Amanda repeated. “He’s quoting movie lines. He wants change. He wants to be real. He wants a fire. Well, Jess dreamed of a cel burning. The projector could cause that. A person could cause that.”
“Quick, some wood! We’ll make him sneeze!”
Finn hadn’t noticed the other wires until that moment. Sometimes things just happened that way. His attention fixed so intensely on one thing that he failed to notice others. It had been hard enough to decipher the connections between the sawed-up mannequin, tape recorder, and amplifier. With the workshop as cluttered as it was, what was another bundle of wires?
“Problem,” he said, as a string of clicks and hums filled the far corner of the room. The same corner of the room that held the enormous fan.
“Finn, in the story, Pinocchio makes the whale—”
“Sneeze…”
The fan blades looked like they’d been salvaged from an airboat. With a diameter of eight feet, that sort of fan was capable of propelling an eight-thousand-pound boat across a swamp at over twenty-five miles per hour. However, in this case the fan was powered by an electric motor, not gasoline, and it was bolted to a concrete floor. Pieces of information came back to Finn in a rush: the motor had been purchased from a movie special effects company and could generate hurricane- force winds of over fifty miles per hour—or roughly the equivalent of a whale sneezing. It was intended to be the big moment of the Pinocchio attraction.
Kingdom Keepers the Return Book 3 Page 14