The Deceivers

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Okay, that will work,” Emma whispered.

  Beside her, Chess drew in a deep breath.

  “Let’s just peek out before we go anywhere,” he muttered.

  Emma nodded. With Chess and Finn pressed close behind her, she pulled the paper out, turned the doorknob again, and inched the door backward, just enough to see out.

  “Nobody’s there,” she reported.

  Chess grimaced and nodded. Emma opened the door the rest of the way and stepped out. The two boys followed her. Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she turned and pulled the door shut behind them, with the folded paper tucked in beside the lock. But maybe the paper was too mashed together this time; maybe the wooden doorframe was imperceptibly angled.

  This time the paper slipped as soon as Emma let go, sliding down at least three or four inches.

  “Oh no!” Emma exclaimed, grabbing for the doorknob again and twisting it as fast as she could.

  But she was too late. The lock clicked, and her hand slid uselessly off the knob.

  They’d just locked themselves out of Judge Morales’s office.

  Thirty-Three

  Chess

  Chess felt like he was in a nightmare. He blinked, because maybe his eyes weren’t working right; maybe it was just fear making him think they’d just lost any way to get back into the Judge’s office on their own.

  But it wasn’t only his eyes showing him the locked door; he also heard Emma’s anguished whisper: “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I thought that would work!”

  Finn was already patting Emma’s back and comforting her: “It’s okay! We’ll just find Natalie, and she’ll unlock the door for us. . . .”

  Natalie’s vanished! Chess wanted to shout at his siblings. We don’t know where she is! Maybe she’s just as lost as Mom and Ms. Morales and Joe. Maybe we’ll never find her. And we just left behind our backpacks and computers, which were our only hope of solving Mom’s code. And when Judge Morales finds our stuff, she’ll see the computers as incriminating evidence. We might have gotten Mom into worse trouble. We definitely just got ourselves into worse trouble! What if . . .

  Chess couldn’t say any of that to Emma and Finn. Not when Emma’s eyes were already swimming with unshed tears. Not when Finn was already biting his lip so hard it was surprising he hadn’t drawn blood.

  They know, he thought.

  “Let’s go get the lever back,” Emma said in a wavery voice. “Then . . .”

  “Then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Chess said, even though he was worried enough about the lever. He hunched his shoulders, a motion that reminded him that they still hurt from being tackled by the guard Mr. Mayhew had hired to watch over the Greystones’ house.

  What if this world’s version of that guy has just as many muscles? Chess wondered. How do we have any hope of getting the lever back?

  But Emma and Finn were already turning toward the basement door, and Chess scrambled to catch up. They tiptoed and shuffled and darted from doorway to doorway. And maybe their luck was changing, because the only cleaners they saw were facing the other way, intent on shaking out enormous tablecloths or polishing thick, distorting windows or dusting heavy, carved wooden chairs.

  The three kids reached the door down to the basement and slipped through it, and Chess let out a deep sigh. He shut the door behind him and sagged against it.

  “What’s the plan now?” Finn whispered.

  Emma threw back her shoulders and held her head high in a way that seemed oddly familiar.

  “We’re going to act as confident as Natalie,” Emma said.

  And for a moment, Chess could see it: Emma was impersonating Natalie right down to the way she flipped her thick, dark hair over her shoulder.

  Mostly this made Chess miss Natalie more. And worry about her.

  He wished he dared to race down the basement stairs and yell, “Natalie! Natalie! Where are you?”

  Maybe she and Disguise Lady are still down in this basement, and they were just out of range of the security cameras. Maybe she’s already told Ace Two to give the lever back. . . .

  But as Chess crept down the stairs behind Emma and Finn, he could tell: Unless the woman and Natalie were crouched down and hiding, they weren’t anywhere in the basement.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Chess squared his shoulders.

  Emma’s right, he thought. We have to act as confident as Natalie. We’ll tell that cleaner that’s our lever, and he had no business taking it off the wall . . . or, no, we tell him it belongs to Natalie, and Natalie’s parents, and he has to give it back or we’ll report him for theft. . . .

  Chess forced his chin up. He tried to clear his brain of everything he was afraid of. He was concentrating so hard on making himself look confident that he walked right into Emma and Finn when they stopped in front of him.

  “What’s wrong?” he started to ask. But it was apparent as Emma poked her head behind the furnace and as Finn gazed back toward the stairs.

  The cleaner who’d taken their lever from the wall had completely disappeared.

  Thirty-Four

  Finn

  “Did he use the lever and go back to the other world?” Finn asked.

  “Not after yanking it off the wall,” Emma said dazedly. “Remember? That keeps it from working again. At least it keeps it from working again in this room. Or this house. Or, well, we really don’t know how far out the damage spreads. . . .”

  Emma’s gaze went vague and unseeing. Finn loved watching Emma’s face at times like this. Her eyes narrowed and then grew wide; her lips bunched up and then spread out in a grin. Her eyebrows darted up and down, like gears that drove her brain to work faster and faster.

  “The cleaner’s still in this basement somewhere,” Emma announced, peering all around the vast orange-and-blue room.

  “What?” Chess said. “How do you figure that?”

  “There wasn’t time for him to run up the stairs and leave through that door without us seeing him,” Emma said, pointing behind her.

  “But there’s that sliding door over there—” Chess pointed to the side.

  “If he’d run over there and rushed out that door, he would have had to brush past those sheer drapes, and they would still be swaying back and forth,” Emma said. “The same goes for that weird velvet curtain at the back of the room.”

  Finn had no doubt that Emma was right. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d done some complicated math calculation in her head and figured out exactly how many seconds would have had to pass before the drapes would stop swaying, if the cleaner had used that door.

  “So is the cleaner scared of us, that he hid when we came downstairs?” Finn asked. He turned toward the vast, open section of the room and called in his sternest voice, “We’re not playing hide-and-seek! This isn’t the time for that! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  “Shh,” Chess said. “What if the cleaners upstairs hear you?”

  “Well, some of them were playing hide-and-seek, too,” Finn said, “and it looked like they didn’t even know that closets aren’t good places to hide. . . .”

  Finn glanced around. Back by the furnace, there was a door under the stairs that could easily have been a closet. Was it just Finn’s imagination, or had the wooden door vibrated ever so slightly when Finn first glimpsed it? Was that like how Emma said the drapes by the sliding door would have swayed if the cleaner had run that way?

  Finn took two steps and whipped open the door.

  “Found—” he began.

  But he’d found nothing but a nearly empty space with a bucket, a mop, and ugly wood paneling.

  Maybe the whole closet was just flimsy—the wood paneling inside the closet seemed to sway slightly, too, as if it had just been moved. Was it still vibrating from the way Chess, Emma, and Finn had come thundering down the stairs overhead just a moment ago? Or just from Finn whipping open the closet door?

  Finn had never before wondered about why a wall would shake, or ho
w long that shaking could last. That kind of thinking fit in Emma’s brain, not his.

  But the wood paneling made Finn think of an animal breathing in and out; he even felt a little puff of air against his cheek.

  There shouldn’t be air coming out of a closet. It was a closed space. Wasn’t it?

  Finn reached for the wood paneling. He felt around the edges.

  “Finn, what are you doing?” Chess asked behind him.

  “I just thought . . . ,” Finn began.

  And then his finger hit something in the corner of the closet. Maybe it was just a rough place in the wood, but it made Finn think of the button hidden in the carved angel’s wing under Judge Morales’s desk. Or, no, maybe it was more like the button hidden between the bookcase and the wall back in the basement of Finn, Emma, and Chess’s house.

  Something clicked, and Finn tried to shove in on the paneling. Nothing happened, so he tried to pull it out.

  “Does it slide?” Emma said practically in his ear, and that was the first moment that Finn realized she was right behind him, too, watching intently.

  Emma reached out and tugged on the paneling, even digging her fingernails into the narrow wood seam.

  The wood paneling separated at the corner of the wall and slid a foot and a half to the right.

  “Finn!” Emma exclaimed. “You found another hidden room! And . . . this one is enormous!”

  Thirty-Five

  Emma

  Emma couldn’t see all the way into the space behind the closet—that’s how big it was. She thought maybe she saw a bobbing light in the darkness—far, far off in the distance. Could it possibly have been a mile away? Two miles away?

  This isn’t just a room, she thought. It’s a tunnel. Like the one we had under our house, when the lever made it possible to go between the worlds there . . .

  The light winked out.

  “What? No!” Emma moaned. “I want to see!”

  Chess pressed something into her hand. A flashlight.

  “There’s a whole shelf of them up there,” he whispered, pointing over Emma’s head.

  Emma switched her flashlight on. Chess must have grabbed lights for himself and Finn as well, because soon there were three beams crisscrossing before her. All three kids shone their lights toward the endless space behind the paneling. But in just that instant, everything about the space changed. Now it was small and confined; Emma could see another wall only a few feet behind the paneling.

  She waved her flashlight around, and so did Chess and Finn. The three beams of light danced across a solid wall.

  And then all three beams came to rest on a lever on the wall, off to the side—a lever seeming to move by itself.

  “Are there . . . ghosts?” Finn asked.

  For just an instant, Emma was ready to accept that explanation. Then her brain came up with a more logical idea.

  “No, this must be what it looks like from the other side when someone closes the tunnel between one world and the other,” she breathed, in awe. “Remember how Chess turned the lever right after we came to this world, so we weren’t just leaving a tunnel open? That cleaner, Ace Two—he just moved the lever from where we left it, in plain sight, to this hiding spot where the wrong people won’t see it. So it’s like he helped us! And he proved that once you yank a lever off a wall, it still can work in the same house, just not in the exact same spot. How close can you get, I wonder? Should we—”

  “What if Ace Two keeps moving it? To someplace we can’t find it?” Chess asked, reaching for the lever. He tucked his flashlight under his chin and wrapped both hands firmly around the metal lever. “This is our lever, and when we get Mom and Ms. Morales and Joe back, we need to know where it is!”

  “You’re right,” Emma said. “But can we—”

  She wanted to keep figuring out how the lever and the tunnel worked; she wanted to test ideas on Chess and Finn about tracking down Ace Two and getting him to explain everything. But before she could speak another word, she saw Chess’s arms slide down.

  Oh, he just pulled the whole lever off the wall, she thought. That was probably smart, though what’s the cleaner going to think when he’s stuck on the other side, and the lever just disappears?

  Then Emma realized: Chess’s hands were empty. His arms hadn’t jerked down because he’d pulled the lever off the wall. They’d fallen because the lever in his hands had suddenly vanished.

  “W-What? Where . . . ?” Chess stammered. “Where’d it go?”

  Emma had everything figured out. But she kept hoping she was wrong.

  What if . . . no. But maybe if . . . no, not that either . . .

  “I don’t understand!” Finn wailed. “What happened to the lever?”

  “Oh, Finn,” Emma moaned. “Oh, Chess. I think . . . I think the cleaner just pulled the lever off the wall at the other end of the tunnel. In the other world. And that’s what made the lever disappear here. He took it to the one place we can’t follow him!”

  Thirty-Six

  Chess

  We’re trapped, Chess thought. Stuck in this horrible world forever.

  This was so much worse than being locked out of Judge Morales’s office. Chess realized that ever since they’d stepped through the tunnel in the first place, he’d kept an image of the lever in the back of his mind like a safeguard, a protection. A talisman. He’d thought that no matter what else happened, as long as they stayed near the lever, they could always go back to the other world.

  “We should have ripped it off the wall ourselves,” Chess muttered. “We should have kept it with us so no one else could steal it. . . .”

  “But we thought it might not work in this house again, if we did that,” Emma said, almost like she was apologizing. “We didn’t figure out the rules before we started using it. . . .”

  “We just wanted to get Mom and go home!” Finn moaned. “That’s all I want now!”

  Chess clenched and unclenched his fingers, still feeling the ridge where he’d clutched the lever only a moment before. He’d been holding on so tightly it didn’t seem fair that the lever could have just vanished. It seemed more likely that he would have cut his hands on the sharp edges, or that he would have imprinted the letters from the message “USE IN A SPOT THAT EXISTS IN BOTH (WORLDS)” onto his fingers.

  Wait a minute—sharp edges? he thought. Were the edges sharp before?

  He took the flashlight in his right hand and shined it onto the palm of his left hand. He had two angry red lines across his hand—one down by the thumb, and the other between the joints of his fingers. The lever hadn’t left marks like that before, even when he’d held it just as tightly. How could it have left such marks now? Hadn’t the edges always been smooth and rounded?

  “What if . . . ,” Chess began. He swallowed hard and tried again. “What if that wasn’t our lever?”

  Emma and Finn stared up at him, matching puzzlement in their eyes. Then Emma’s eyes grew wide, and she let out a gasp.

  “You think there’s more than one lever?” she asked. “Well, of course there’s more than one lever, because we know the bad guys didn’t come through the tunnel at our house when they kidnapped the Gustano kids. . . . Do you think this lever was in this hiding space in this closet all along? Do you think it was the bad guys’ lever? How many levers do you think there are? And—”

  Chess held up his hands defensively, because once she got going, Emma could ask lots of questions. And he didn’t have any answers. But she suddenly stopped mid-sentence and slumped over.

  “What’s wrong?” Finn asked.

  Emma frowned and shook her head.

  “Even if that wasn’t our lever on this wall, that cleaner guy just escaped to the other world and made it so we can’t follow him,” she said. “And he must have taken our lever with him—either way, we can’t get our lever back.”

  Don’t go on, Chess thought, putting his arms protectively around his little brother. Don’t tell Finn how bad things are.

  He o
pened his mouth and tried to think of something hopeful to say. For Finn.

  But just then, he heard footsteps on the stairs above them. He reached back and yanked the closet door shut behind them.

  “Where are they?” The voice came from overhead. “You say they were last reported down there?”

  Finn gave a little jump.

  “Mr. Mayhew!” he whispered, as if that was good news.

  “Other–Mr. Mayhew,” Emma corrected. “The Mayor.”

  Chess shoved both Emma and Finn forward, toward the space behind the wood paneling. Then he reached back and pulled the paneling closed behind them, so it would look like nothing but a solid wall again if anyone opened the closet door.

  “Flashlights off!” he hissed, switching off his own.

  Emma was almost as quick, and Finn was only a split second behind her.

  The darkness that engulfed them was unbearable. Wouldn’t the Mayor know about this secret hiding place in his own house, anyhow?

  Chess pressed his ear against the back of the paneling, listening intently.

  “My wife and I have always screened every single one of our employees thoroughly,” the Mayor was saying. “We hire the best security forces in the country. How is it possible that anyone slipped through our defenses? How could there be spies among our cleaners?”

  Finn tugged on Chess’s arm.

  “They’re not looking for us!” he rejoiced in a whisper. “They don’t know we’re here! They’re just worried about the cleaners!”

  “Shh,” Chess warned him. “Don’t let them hear. . . .”

  “Sir, your enemies are crafty.” This was another man’s voice, one Chess didn’t recognize. “But I assure you, it’s because of your superior security force that we were able to discover the infiltration. They’ve only been setting up their network—we detected their presence before they had a chance to carry out any other plans. This is effective security in action.”