“Sometimes it is,” she said. “Sometimes things are really obvious and really simple.”
“You think?” he said. Was that the traitor speaking? he wondered. “You call scaling a wall while being invisible simple? Do you know how much a person relies on looking down and seeing his or her foot take a toehold, or see her fingers grab a rock? It’s like climbing blind. It’s incredibly hard. That’s why Charlene went first,” he said. “She’s half-monkey.”
Amanda looked hurt. Finn wasn’t sure what he’d said to cause that.
“I wouldn’t let her hear you say that,” Amanda said. “She likes you, you know?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She just does.”
“And you know this because?”
“Girls know this stuff, Finn, and we talk about it. And we text about it. And we IM about it. It’s what girls do. You guys do sports and Xbox. We figure out who likes who.”
“Ah….”
“She’s beautiful. You have to admit that. Pretty enough to be on TV or in the movies. And she’s a jock. What’s not to like?”
“I guess.”
“You ought to give it a shot.”
Finn felt the center of his chest turn to stone. Why was Amanda trying to do this?
“Maybe I will,” he said.
“Maybe you should.”
Why was she bringing this up now? Why was she pushing him?
“But I thought…” he said.
“What?”
“About us. Never mind. It’s nothing.”
“You thought what? That we’re something or we’re nothing?”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I guess that’s right. Nothing I guess.” He felt his world implode and didn’t understand any of it. He thought that he and Amanda—after all the hand touching—had something going. He thought they were more than just friends. His heart wouldn’t stand still when he was around her; he got all jumpy and found himself hearing her voice among all the others. He wanted to catch her looking at him. Wanted to see that she was listening when he spoke.
And now this.
“There,” Amanda said.
A blue nylon strap had dropped down from the second backstage level above them. Finn followed it with his eyes and saw it tied to one of the steel stanchions supporting the railing.
“I’m supposed to go first,” he said, “and Charlene and I will pull you up.”
“Whatever.”
He reached out and took her hand in his, but she shook him off and let go. He reached a second time and grabbed hold; the warmth of her arm surprised him. He tried to make eye contact with her, but her eyes were dark and hard and cold. She wouldn’t look at him.
They stepped into the DHI projection shadow and, as they did, he let go of her hand.
He walked. Looking down, he saw some leaves scoot to the side and decided that it had to be her feet shuffling through them. She was right there with him.
He wanted to speak, but didn’t.
He found the nylon strap and tied the sword to its end and then climbed the strap like a rope at a ropes course. He wrapped the dangling strap around his leg and shinnied up, taking several minutes and a lot of energy to reach the second level. If Charlene was there, he couldn’t tell. He neither heard nor saw her.
But the blue strap moved, and Finn turned and put his hands to it. He felt Charlene tug once: she was telling Amanda it was safe for her to tie herself to the strap.
Finn held to the strap, waiting for something to happen; Amanda would give them a single tug when she was tied on and ready to be lifted.
Finn counted to thirty. To sixty. He felt Charlene tug the strap for a second time. He knew immediately that the only weight on the end of that strap was the sword. He could see it stand up and dance a few inches off the ground.
The frustration of his invisibility and silence built up so much that he just wanted to scream.
He heard the scuffle of feet and went rigid. Glancing over his shoulder Finn saw a stagehand and another guy—who appeared to be a rigger, judging by the tools he was carrying. The men were coming right at Finn and Charlene. The Keepers were holding the strap, a loop of which lay over the railing and was gathered on the platform. Finn knew that the way the strap hung there had to appear unnatural, because it wasn’t really hanging there: they were holding it.
Finn held his breath.
The stagehand and the rigger walked right past.
Finn moved slowly and tracked them until they, too, disappeared down a staircase.
Amanda wasn’t tied to the strap. If she was down there, she wasn’t playing along.
A deception of the worst kind. Beware your friends and know your enemies.
Charlene began hauling up the sword. She took her time to prevent it from clanking against the concrete and drawing attention.
Finn recalled Amanda breaking away from him. He felt a shiver. He thought back to a conversation they’d had while waiting for Charlene to climb.
You’re going to try to find the Cast Member, he’d reminded her.
“The one playing Maleficent,” she’d said. “I know my job.”
“You’re mad at me.”
“I think I could be of more help than as a messenger.”
“Your…powers. I know. But it’s too dangerous.”
“And that’s ridiculous.”
“If we can get the Cast Member playing Maleficent to talk to the show’s stage manager—”
“While the real Maleficent is out there on stage,” Amanda had said, “then maybe the stage manager sees the problem—sees he has two Maleficents, and then maybe he believes what’s actually going on is going on. We went over it all, Finn. I get it.”
“I’m worried about you, that’s all.” He had blurted it out. It sounded awkward now that he recalled it.
“I can help you if you’ll only let me. Don’t forget Everest Expedition.”
Amanda had saved Finn’s life inside Everest. He had thanked her, and they’d never discussed it since. Now she apparently wanted the chance to play the same role, but the risk to her was too great. Finn had the sword. It seemed likely that only the sword could defeat Maleficent and Chernabog. A gust of wind wasn’t going to change things.
Amanda had said, Don’t worry about me so much.
It wasn’t that simple, and he wished he could have told her why.
Finn was distracted from his reverie by the arrival of the end of the strap, delivering the sword at last. Finn untied the knot and tucked the sword away in a corner to hide it. He couldn’t go walking around the stage area with a sword stuck through his belt. He’d have to come back for it.
Amanda was down there somewhere. Gone. Only the warmth of her remained, searing the tips of his fingers where he’d held onto her.
Finn looked high up into the void of the gray-blue dawn sky, a knot in his chest, confusion in his thoughts, remorse in his heart. He felt utterly alone.
* * *
Philby spotted a possible answer to his needs. The engineer kept glancing at the clock and then at a key chain thick with keys.
The show’s control booth was too important—since it gave access to the control for all the pyrotechnical devices—to be left unlocked. No, it had to be under lock and key, and only a few people would possess such keys, would be given that kind of access. This man and how many others? Certainly not your average Security guard. It would have to be someone much higher up—the head of Security for sure, and a few other key technical personnel.
There! He glanced at the clock again. Philby’s curiosity was satisfied as a voice over a speaker announced: “Break in five minutes. Prepare the stage please.”
All Philby had to do was get the guy outside the booth without his keys. Philby saw a solution to his two problems: the first, getting the keys away from the man, or removing the booth’s key from the key chain, would have to be handled quickly; the second, stopping the show, would happen in just under five minutes, with the break.
Philby slipped out the Nextel, made sure it was in silent mode, and wrote a text, targeting the phone’s “KKS” group.
philitup: need fantasmic shut down 4 5 min….
He hit SEND. The text would be sent to the four other Kingdom Keepers.
Philby kept his eye on the key chain. He was going to have to sneak across on hands and knees and come up from behind and grab them—he didn’t see any other way to do it. He would wait for a particularly busy part of the show. The mist projectors would be coming up soon; the stage would go dark as characters hurried out into place. That seemed a perfect time to go for it.
A message arrived.
MYBEST: need ur cell
philitup: no way…locked in da booth
MYBEST: Jess is a stagehand…needs 2 b able 2 rech us all…
FINN: she can hav mine…ill leav it bhind da 2nd levl firehose…
MYBEST: k
WILLATREE: phil…i can mess up da boats is that good???
philitup: fantasmic…lol get it?
WILLATREE: no…phil…realy…r u kiddin?? stay 2 da teki stuff…stand by
Beyond the window of the booth, the stage went dark. Philby watched the flat-panel display and saw the approach of a confusion of colorful bubbles crowding nearly every line of the music and effects readouts. Whatever scene was next, it was big and busy.
This was to be his chance.
He crouched down, keeping his eye pressed to the crack beside the locker door. His body tensed with the first onstage explosion, which was quickly followed by another.
Philby crawled around the door and directly behind the engineer’s seat and eased his hand toward the keys.
But the engineer’s head swung in his direction, and Philby yanked back his hand. He was but the thickness of a chair away from the man. Had he been human instead of DHI the man might have felt the heat from his body, or smelled him, or sensed him some other way. Instead, Philby held his breath as the man’s chair pivoted to within an inch of contact. Then it swung back to the left, and the man’s head with it.
Philby reached up, clutched the keys slowly and tightly to keep them from making noise, and slipped them off the console. He crept back to behind the locker door and carefully studied them. The engineer had too many keys to keep track of—he had marked them all with color tabs and had written on each tab. Philby worked through them, making sure not to allow them to jangle.
F CNTL
He kept a finger separating this key from the others and continued through the rest.
MSTR
Philby marked this key’s place as well. None of the ten or twelve others were marked with anything that he found interesting. Only these two. Maybe if things worked out perfectly he might get them back onto the ring unnoticed.
Feeling jittery to be working so close to the engineer, and knowing that Willa could pull off her boats maneuver at any moment, he worked furiously to remove the keys from the ring. It was a ring that required the desired key to be worked two full turns around a circle. Philby had to pull a piece of the ring away, as if he were trying to pry open a stubborn spring. He got the first key off, trying to memorize what order the keys were in; then the second. He pocketed both, putting one in each front pocket to keep them from clanking together.
There was no waiting. He didn’t have any choice but to crawl back out behind the chair and return the key chain. He did so with as little feeling of dread and anxiety as he could muster—he wanted to be prepared to attempt to go all-clear if it came to that: if the engineer came after him, he would walk through the wall if possible.
“What the—?” the engineer said loudly into the small room.
For a moment Philby convinced himself he’d been seen. But then he realized the man was reacting to something outside the window, not inside the booth.
Philby darted back behind the locker door.
“Come on!” the man complained. “We’re like one minute to break.” He spoke into his headset, having a nasty conversation about the incompetence of the people managing the boats.
Willa had come through.
The technician looked at the clock as the minute hand moved to exactly five minutes before the hour. The technician tugged off the headset and grabbed his keys. He headed to the door, then hesitated a second as he glanced back toward the console.
Philby wondered if the technician had seen him, or his glow, or somehow felt his presence. The man stepped outside and pulled the door shut with authority.
It would be at least a five-minute break—the union technicians on the Kingdom Keepers DHI soundstage had taken regular five-minute breaks. Philby allowed himself an undisturbed five minutes. He slipped into the chair and hunkered down low.
He’d been watching the flat-panel display for quite a while, observing what effect each line controlled. Now his fingers found the mouse and he went about clicking and extending events the same way he worked a video editor or music composition software—changing both the order and length of specific events. By doing so he was changing the show, and, he hoped, stacking the deck and buying Finn a dealer’s odds.
With any luck, even with the engineer back in the chair, Maleficent wouldn’t know what hit her.
* * *
Finn left his phone—an invisible phone, but one he could feel—tucked in behind the firehose, feeling suddenly lost without it. Perhaps it was his invisibility doing this to him. But he suspected something else.
He would take visual cues—if they were given—from Charlene if possible, and would also keep an eye out for Jess playing a stagehand. Maleficent’s entrance wasn’t too far off. He had to get in position.
Amanda would be down on the dressing-room level; he had no idea where Willa was, but from her text he suspected she was responsible for the break in the technical rehearsal that had just occurred. Philby was inside the control booth, leaving Maybeck’s identity and whereabouts unknown to Finn, though again from the text he knew that Maybeck was in the area.
In situations like this time played tricks on him. Clocks sped up. Reaction time slowed down. Soon it would all reach a fevered pitch, a boiling point, with him in the center of the cauldron.
“You okay?” Charlene asked. They’d found their way out of the DHI projection shadow, visible now, and had tucked themselves into the entrance of a darkened—and Finn hoped, unused—hallway. The stage was a labyrinth of these hallways and staircases, all of them interconnected in a way it would take days to memorize. Some led to the wings of the stage itself while others returned Cast Members to subterranean dressing rooms, and still others to the platforms beneath trapdoors or up high into what from the audience appeared to be a towering mountain. Some of these areas were lit and some were not, suggesting which ones were being used during the technical rehearsal.
“Been better,” Finn said.
“She’s okay,” Charlene said, answering a question that Finn hadn’t asked. “There’s a reason for her not getting onto the rope, and it isn’t the reason you think.”
And it isn’t the reason you think. Charlene was the reason Amanda hadn’t gotten onto the rope. Finn felt certain of it.
“She probably saw those two coming toward us and took off. Who knows what that looked like from down there.”
Charlene put her hand on his shoulder and rubbed the tightness away. He wanted to ask her to stop, but didn’t. He wanted to ask her about what Amanda had said, but didn’t know how.
She was about to put herself at as much risk as he was. They were attempting to tackle forces with powers far greater than their own. There was little to no chance they could prevail on their own.
“This is only going to work if we time it right,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. How could she do that?
How could she know him so well?
“Just what I was thinking.”
“So I’d wish you luck, but that would mean I thought you need it, and I don’t. I don’t think any of this is about luck or chance or fate. You know? De
stiny maybe. I think somehow we are supposed to be here right now. The five of us. The seven of us. Not because Wayne wants it, or we want it. But just because.”
“Because,” he echoed.
“Yeah. Think about where each of us was before we tried out to be the Disney Hosts. Does that even feel like you? Like the same person? Not me. I can tell you that. It’s all so totally different. I was like this yahoo cheerleader, right? I don’t know that girl. Not now.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Right?”
“Yes. It’s all different.”
“We are where we’re supposed to be.”
“You sound like my mother,” he said. “She’s always laying that stuff on me.”
“I’m freaking,” she said. “And when I freak I talk too much. All I meant to say is that if anything happens—”
“Do not say it.”
“But—”
“No! Do not go there.” He felt his hands shaking.
Over the speakers, he heard the mirror speaking to the Evil Queen.
“…in Mickey’s imagination, beauty and love will always survive.”
“Beauty and love! Did you hear that?” Charlene asked.
“I…yeah.” Beauty and love. They seemed to define Charlene.
It was time to return for the sword. Maleficent would be on the stage soon.
“That’s our cue,” Charlene said.
“Right.”
“Okay then,” she added.
“Okay.”
43
GLADIS PHILBY, wearing a Hawaiian housedress over her nightgown, stood sobbing in the hallway outside her son’s bedroom as paramedics with the ambulance service moved her comatose son from his bed to the wheeled stretcher that would move him to the vehicle.
As they lifted him, not a muscle responded. He looked…she couldn’t bring herself to think it. But that was the way he looked, and there was no holding back the tears.
Her husband came out of the room. “Okay, they’ve got him ready to move. They’ve started an IV. They’ve got monitors on him. They’ll be in touch with doctors from the back of the ambulance and may give him something on the way. I signed a release allowing them to treat him. If it’s…you know….”
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