by Barry Lyga
“That … is … crazy,” Khalid said when Zak finished, and Moira immediately and quite seriously slapped the back of his head. Hard. Khalid yelped.
“Don’t call Zak crazy,” she remonstrated.
“I didn’t call him crazy! I called his story crazy.”
“Either way.”
“It’s okay,” Zak said quietly. “I know how it sounds. And I wouldn’t blame you guys if you didn’t believe me, but don’t tell my parents, okay?”
“We believe you,” Moira said. “Well, I do.”
“You don’t think I’m nuts?”
“Of course not,” Moira said. “How could you have opened the safe without knowing the combination? A ghost actually makes sense. And besides—the boat was right where you said it would be.”
“I just believe you ’cause I’ll always believe you,” Khalid said. And then he intoned solemnly, “Three Basketeers.” When they’d been younger, one of them—probably Khalid—had misheard the title of the famous novel and thought it was about basketball. They’d declared themselves the Three Basketeers, and merely invoking that phrase was like making a promise unto death.
It had been years since they’d described themselves so, one more piece of jetsam heaved over the side of the ship as they raced toward teendom.
Still, the sound of those words instantly sent Zak back to the overseriousness of childhood, the wallowing in personal importance. Moira nodded gravely and said, “Three Basketeers.”
“Three Basketeers,” Zak answered, completing the circuit. Done.
“Now what?” Khalid asked. He was always eager for action—oftentimes incredibly stupid action, but action nonetheless. He rubbed his hands together. “Do we need one of those, you know—” He held his hands out flat, mimed scrubbing something along a surface.
“A Ouija board?” Moira asked. She’d grabbed Zak’s chart from the end of his bed and was flipping through it. “Grow up.”
“I don’t know what to do next,” Zak confessed as Moira fiddled with her phone. “But I know it can’t be done here.”
“No kidding.” Khalid pulled a chair over and plopped down next to Zak. “But how do we get you out of here?”
“And where do we go once I’m out?”
“We get you out of here first,” Khalid argued, “and then we figure out what to do.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“Dude, we have to know where we’re going first.”
“We’re going out—that’s where we’re going.” Khalid hopped up from his chair and dashed to the window, dodging around Moira, who was studying Zak’s heart monitor intently. “I bet this window … Yeah! Check it—there’s a roof right down there.” He jabbed a finger at the glass excitedly. “I bet we could jump it, easy.”
“Jump it!” Zak’s heart sent him a warning jolt.
“Or maybe we could make a rope out of bedsheets and anchor it with your IV pole and climb down.”
“You’re nuts. I’m not doing that. Especially without a destination in mind.” He tried to sit up in bed, but Moira was suddenly looming over him, tugging gently at the wires connected to his heart monitor, then poking at the oxygen tube running into his nose.
Zak tried to brush her back. Khalid turned from the window in a huff. “Fine. What’s your suggestion, genius?”
“I think we need to find a way to contact Tommy. And it seems like he speaks to me best when I’m asleep.”
Khalid snapped his fingers and pointed. “Quick! Fall asleep!”
“Right,” Zak said drolly. “I’m just wondering: Maybe tonight when I sleep, I can try to sort of … control the dream. It’s called lucid dreaming. My dad told me about it once. Because I was having nightmares. And he said that there’s a way you can take control of your dreams and change them around.”
“So maybe you can actually talk to the voice!” Khalid said excitedly. “And figure out your next step!”
“Yeah.” Zak turned to Moira, who by now had moved to the other side of the bed and was staring at her phone. “Moira? Care to join us here on planet Earth for a minute and tell us what you—”
He broke off as Moira, with no warning, dropped to the floor. A moment later, she popped back up with a plastic sack that she tossed at Zak. It landed heavily on his gut. Inside were his clothes.
“Get dressed,” she said. “Your cardiac enzymes are back down to normal levels, your blood pressure is good, and your heart rate is fine. You’re mobile. We can get you out of here.”
“Like I said—through the window!” Khalid exclaimed.
“The windows don’t open,” Moira said witheringly.
“I can’t just go,” Zak said. But the weight of the bag—his clothes, his shoes—tempted him. “I’m on a heart monitor. An alarm will go off.”
“I already turned off the alarm. I Googled the manual.”
“But where do we go once we’re out of here?”
Moira stared. It was the same look she always gave them when they were all doing math homework together and Zak and Khalid just. Didn’t. Get it.
“We have to go to the subway,” she said. “Preferably close to the Freedom Tower, but it probably doesn’t matter, since you had a vision at the Canal Street stop.”
Zak and Khalid looked at each other, then looked at Moira.
“Go on,” Khalid prompted. “For the dummies in the room.”
“It’s obvious—the voice is stronger when you’re asleep, yes, but we can’t force you to sleep. So we do the next best thing. The voice and the visions are also strong when you’re underground. Probably because that gets you closer to where the ship was buried. So we have to take you down into the subway. Duh,” she finished for good measure.
“That’s amazing,” Khalid said in awe. Zak nodded in agreement as Moira began unhooking the various wires from him.
“Puh-lease.” Moira sniffed. “Anyone who’s ever read a comic book would have figured it out.”
Zak nodded slowly and said, “All right, guys. Turn around.”
“Why?” Moira asked, annoyed.
“Because in order to get dressed,” Zak said with a grin, “first I have to get naked.”
Moira’s eyebrows shot up, and her face flamed almost as red as her hair. She quickly turned away as Zak peeled back the sheet.
THIRTEEN
Unsteady on his feet for the first time in days, Zak weaved a little. Khalid and Moira persuaded him to try a few practice laps around his room before they would open the door. After three or four turns, he felt confident.
His heart seemed to throb more noticeably than usual. Was it an aftereffect of the “cardiac event”? Or was he just paying more attention to it because it had failed him?
“You getting the hang of this walking thing?” Khalid asked.
“I’m fine,” Zak lied. “Let’s go.”
He anticipated guards shouting and nurses sounding alarms as soon as he left the room, but nothing happened. No one spared a look for the three kids casually strolling down the corridor. Zak suffered a pang of terror as they rounded the first corner, wondering if he might walk into his parents or his doctor or Dr. Campbell. He hissed in a breath and forced himself not to squeeze Moira’s hand, which she insisted he hold. But the new hallway was empty, save for an orderly mopping the floor, and they pushed into a stairwell. Soon they were out on the street.
Zak tilted his face to the sun. It was late in the day, but it was summer and the sun, low in the sky, still emitted warm light. After days of air-conditioning, the humidity outside wrapped around him like a living blanket trying to smother him. He breathed through the initial surprise, focused on the heat from the sun, silently ordered his heart to behave.
“Subway’s this way,” Khalid said. Zak scarcely paid attention. He let them lead him along the sidewalks, enfolded in the damp air that smelled of car exhaust, barbecued chicken kebabs from a nearby food cart, half-melted road tar, and the tang of his own sudden
sweat. Buses belched; the sidewalks vibrated with a million footfalls; ten languages spoken at top volume assaulted his ears.
Through it, past it, beyond it, he sought the voice, Tommy, his twin. Come back, he pleaded. I didn’t know who you were. I’m sorry I let you get away. If you come back, I’ll never let you go again. Just come back.
“Here we go.…” Khalid and Moira helped him down the steps into the subway. Zak realized that he didn’t have his MetroCard, but Khalid swiped him in, and soon they stood on the platform. Zak gazed around. It was just a subway platform in Brooklyn. Nothing exciting or exceptional about it—rusted overhead steel, trash-strewn tracks, bored commuters loitering. A darting shadow in the distance that his experienced eyes knew—without even seeing it totally—to be a rat, scavenging in the wasteland of the tracks.
Where are you, Tommy? How can you still speak to me?
He stared down at the tracks. A fork lay there. Not a plastic fork dropped from a takeout bag or tossed aside after being used—that would make sense. No, this was a shiny silver fork, clean and new, sitting on the track.
For a moment he forgot why he was here. What on earth was a perfectly good fork doing on the subway tracks?
“Here,” Moira said. The platform vibrated, and the air went a-roar. Zak thought he was back on the ship, its hull shaking with each crashing wave, but the vision stubbornly refused to come.
They clambered onto the Q train to Manhattan. At this time of day, most straphangers were headed in the opposite direction, coming to Brooklyn from the city, so there was no trouble finding three consecutive empty seats. Khalid and Moira flanked Zak.
“Are you okay?” Moira asked him. She had been holding his hand off and on since they left his hospital room.
Tommy, come back. Please. I need to understand.
“He looks a little pale,” Khalid said, worried. The flickering confines of the subway car warped in the lenses of his sunglasses. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“I’m fine,” Zak said. He was close, he knew. Somehow, he could sense that he was close to understanding. Close to Tommy. Again.
“Are you sure?” Moira this time.
“Yes. Trust me.”
I’m coming, Tommy. His heart skipped a beat and he froze, but it picked up its reliable rhythm immediately. One way or another, I guess, I’m coming.
* * *
The train rattled along, making its usual stops in Brooklyn before diving under the East River to trundle toward Manhattan. The car was eerily silent as only a subway car can be. The noise of the car itself, of its hissing, squealing mechanics, became divorced from the interior, as though it belonged to another world, and the universe within purged itself of sound.
“They must have named him after my uncle,” Zak said, needing to break the silence. He felt nothing; he heard nothing. If he didn’t talk, he would go mad.
“Named who?”
“My brother. Thomas Oscar Killian. For Uncle Tomás.”
“Right,” Khalid mused. “Does that mean you’re named after someone?”
“My dad’s stepfather. Grampa Zachary.” He’d never really thought about it before, this business of naming people for people.
He’d thought his imaginary friend was his dead uncle; now he knew it was his dead twin. But how? Why? There were other dead people in his life—Grampa Zachary, for one—and he’d never received a visitation from any of them. Not until Tommy. Was being twins enough to breach the barrier between life and death?
He wanted to ask Moira. She subsisted on a steady diet of comic books, science fiction, and fantasy novels. If anyone had a theory on this, it would be Moira. But she would probably have ten theories, each one with fifteen subtheories, and if asked, she wouldn’t stop until she’d expounded on each and every one. So, maybe not.
“What’s the plan here, Moira?” Khalid asked. “We’re almost in the city.”
Zak thought he heard something just then, but maybe it was just his imagination. He’d never really heard the voice when he was trying to—it had always sneaked up on him.
“We need to go to the World Trade Center,” Moira said confidently. “If anything’s going to happen, it’ll be there.”
Khalid twisted around to look at the subway map on the wall behind him. “We should have switched to the R or the N,” he said. “We’re gonna end up too far uptown. But we can hop on the R at Canal and—”
Canal. The Canal Street stop.
“What about the E?” Moira asked. “That takes us right to the World Trade Center.”
The Canal Street stop was where he’d seen the flooding. He braced himself.
“Nah, the E doesn’t connect up until, like, Times Square. We should just get off at Canal and—”
Moira yelped. “Zak! Stop squeezing—”
But he couldn’t help it. His hand had a mind of its own, clenching Moira’s hand tightly as the subway car—
The subway car filled with water. Zak’s eyes widened, and he strained to hear—
Zak! Zak! Hurry! You have to hurry! Otherwise, it’ll be too late!
Stronger, louder than he’d ever heard before.
Tommy! Tommy, listen to me! What’s happening?
The car was awash in foaming water. Zak jumped to his feet, dragging Moira up as well, trying to keep their heads above the waterline. How could the car still be racing along while filled?
“Zak! Dude!” Khalid grabbed at Zak’s shoulder, trying to pull him back into his seat, but Zak kept his footing. His heart cranked. Stronger. Faster. As the water reached higher and higher, the voice screaming in Zak’s mind got louder and louder—I can’t hold on much longer, Zak! You have to hurry! You’re the only one who can save me!—yelling for him to hurry, but the water was so high now that he could barely keep his head above it, and his heart pounded like a drum solo that would never end, but drum solos always ended, and when they did, when this one did, what would happen to his—
And it was over.
As suddenly as it had come upon him, the vision was over. The water vanished in an instant, far too quickly to drain away. It was gone as if—
“As if it was never here,” Zak whispered.
“Zak?” It was Moira, her voice quiet and gentle. Khalid was standing, too, one arm around Zak’s waist.
“Dude, you’re sweating like crazy. You okay?”
He wanted to tell them that it wasn’t sweat—it was water. That somehow he’d been submerged.
Tommy? Tommy! Where are you?
Zak, I can’t keep holding on. Tommy’s voice was weakening. You have to hurr—
Gone.
“What happened?” Moira asked, extricating her hand from his now-limp one. Together, she and Khalid ushered Zak back into his seat.
“You guys didn’t see the water?” he asked. “You didn’t hear the voice?”
“Sure we heard the voice,” Khalid said.
“You did?” Zak turned to Khalid excitedly, grabbing his friend by the shoulders. “You heard Tommy?”
Khalid’s eyebrows mated in concern. “Tommy? Dude, no. The voice of the conductor.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Telling us that Canal is closed for work and we’re skipping it.”
Zak groaned and slumped back in his seat.
“You heard something?” Moira asked. “And saw something?”
“Yeah. Right while we were going through Canal Street. Under it, I mean.” What would have happened, he wondered, if they’d stopped there? What would have happened the other day if, instead of running, he’d stood his ground on the platform? Would he have drowned in a flood no one else could see?
He told them what he’d seen. And heard. Khalid took the unprecedented step of removing his sunglasses. He stuck one arm of the frame in his mouth and gnawed at it.
“Look, this is serious. What are we getting into here?”
Moira pursed her lips, thinking. “What do you want to do, Zak? It’s your brother. It’s your heart.”
There was never a qu
estion. “We keep going. We figure this out.”
FOURTEEN
They switched trains at Times Square and took the E back downtown. Zak tapped his foot rhythmically on the floor of the train, his body vibrating with urgency and energy. All he could think of was the terror in Tommy’s voice, the plea.
“You’re the only one who can save me!”
The “only one” part interested him much less than the “save me” part. What did it mean?
Was it possible to rescue Tommy … from death?
He wanted to broach the subject with Khalid and Moira but was afraid the very idea of bringing Tommy back to life would be one step too far, even for his best friends. So he sat, silent, between them and tapped his foot and tried to breathe regularly. It was more difficult than he thought breathing could or should be.
At one of the stations with Wi-Fi, both Khalid’s and Moira’s phones erupted into flurries of bleeps and ringtones as a backlog of messages came through. All from their parents.
Where are you??? Mrs. O’Grady demanded.
Zak is very sick and you have to bring him back to the hospital NOW, Mr. Shamoon insisted.
There were more of them, all in the same vein. Varying levels of plea, threat, and cajoling, with a common note of command. A moment of silence swaddled the three of them, and then Khalid said, “Three Basketeers, baby,” and switched his phone off.
Moira did the same. “Three Basketeers,” she repeated.
“Three Basketeers,” Zak added.
“Team Zak one-double-oh!” Khalid hooted.
Zak knew then that he was the luckiest guy in the world, to have two such friends. Words refused to come, so he just gripped their hands tightly and nodded.
And hoped his heart could handle what was to come. The next vision.
He knew there would be another one. In close proximity to the World Trade Center, especially underground, the visions had come reliably. He both wanted and feared them. They could reveal Tommy to him, answer all his questions, blow apart all the secrets that had begun with his parents years ago.