The Deceivers

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  She grabbed Natalie by the arm.

  “But—” Natalie protested.

  Emma saw the struggle Natalie was having.

  Don’t blurt out that we’re here looking for our moms, Emma wanted to tell Natalie. Not yet. Not until we know for sure that we can trust this woman . . .

  Emma glanced at Disguise Lady’s hands. Was she about to show them a heart symbol, to prove she was trustworthy? Or . . . what if the woman was on their side, but just didn’t have a heart symbol with her? Would Emma need to make the first move? Not that Emma had a heart symbol with her either, because Chess hadn’t come back yet with a red marker and more paper.

  Disguise Lady only tugged on Natalie’s arm, pulling her toward the closet. Emma took a step forward, as if to help Natalie fend off the woman. Something in her jeans pocket stabbed her leg. Emma couldn’t be sure if it was the pen or her mother’s folded-up, half-transcribed letter.

  At least I’ve got paper and something to write with, Emma thought. Could I maybe draw the heart and just say it’s supposed to be red?

  “Really, I’ve got to go,” Disguise Lady said, still pulling on Natalie. “I promise you, this is for the best. For everyone.”

  She stepped into the closet. Then she froze, staring over Emma’s head. Her jaw dropped.

  Emma turned to see where the woman was looking. It was just a blank section of wall. Emma decided she could take one risk.

  “You expected to see a lever there, didn’t you?” Emma asked the woman.

  “I—” Disguise Lady began. “I can’t . . .” She shoved Natalie forward, and the older girl crashed into Emma. “Just stay hidden,” Disguise Lady said, and now it almost sounded like she was begging. “That’s the only way to stay safe for now. I’ll find . . . I’ll find out what to do next. . . .”

  Disguise Lady had her hand on the wooden panel like she was about to close it on Emma and Natalie.

  “Wait!” Emma said, wedging her knee into the opening. The panel slammed into Emma’s leg, but Emma ignored the pain. With a shaking hand, she reached back into her jeans pocket and pulled out the pen and the folded-over letter. Was this the right choice?

  We have to know if Disguise Lady is on our side or not, Emma thought.

  “Look at this first,” Emma said. “This should be red, but I don’t have a marker right now, and . . .” Her hands shook, but she managed a passable imitation of Finn’s crooked heart on the back of the letter, in a section without words. She held the folded-up letter out past the paneling, where there was enough light for the faint drawing to show up. “Do you understand?”

  For an instant, Disguise Lady seemed to freeze again.

  “I don’t have my reading glasses with me,” she muttered.

  Then she did something terrifying: She took the letter from Emma’s hand.

  “I wasn’t giving that to you,” Emma said, reaching out to grab Mom’s letter back. “I just wanted to show you—”

  “What is this?” Disguise Lady said, unfolding the letter and holding it up high. Emma couldn’t tell if she was trying to look at it more closely or if she was just keeping it out of Emma’s reach.

  “Give it back!” Emma insisted, leaping past the panel and lunging for the letter.

  “What are you doing?” Natalie said, in a whisper that would have been easy for Disguise Lady to hear, too.

  Natalie doesn’t even know, Emma thought, in a panic. She doesn’t know that’s Mom’s letter; she doesn’t know we can’t let Disguise Lady keep it. . . .

  “I’ve got to get that back!” Emma shrieked, jumping toward Disguise Lady once again.

  But this time the woman swung to the side. Emma’s shoulders jammed between the doorway and the door. Natalie shoved the wood panel completely open and joined Emma in scrambling for the letter. Emma half expected Disguise Lady to run for the stairs, but she darted back toward the furnace instead. This meant that Emma and Natalie dodged the wrong way, giving Disguise Lady even more time to peer at the letter.

  “You can’t show this to people,” Disguise Lady said. “Not in this house. It’s too dangerous. I’ve got to keep you safe. . . .”

  She bent down.

  We’ve got her cornered, Emma thought. There’s nowhere for her to go. She’s got to give that back. And maybe answer some questions, too.

  Emma took a step back, waiting. The woman had helped them before—surely she could be reasonable now.

  But the woman touched something at the bottom of the furnace. No—she touched the letter to something at the bottom of the furnace, inside a little door.

  When she stood up and turned around, the letter was on fire.

  Forty-Six

  Chess

  Chess sprang to his feet and started running as soon as he heard Emma shriek, “Give it back!” But a second later, he stumbled.

  Finn! Is it safer to grab him, or to leave him here with Other-Natalie?

  “Chess! What’s happening?” Finn moaned, blinking up at him.

  That helped Chess make up his mind—he scooped up Finn and went back to running, even as he muttered in Finn’s ear, “I don’t know, but let’s go find out. Shh. We have to be sneaky. . . .”

  Chess switched to darting from one hiding place to another. He crouched behind a couch, then behind a coffee table, then behind a row of chairs. . . . He reached a counter—the hiding spot closest to Emma, Natalie, and Disguise Lady—in time to see Emma swat at the woman’s arm as she held a flaming torch high above Emma’s head. No, it wasn’t a torch. It was flaming . . . paper?

  “Finn, stay here out of sight while I—” Chess began, easing Finn down to the floor.

  But Other-Natalie grabbed his forearm, holding him back.

  “No! It’s not safe for you to be seen, either,” she hissed. “Grandma can act kind of crazy when—”

  “Grandma?” Chess whispered. “That’s your grandma?”

  Other-Natalie winced. “Never mind,” she said.

  Finn tugged on Chess’s arm as he tried to peer around the side of the counter.

  “Is that woman hurting Emma?” he asked.

  Emma did sound like she was in pain.

  “Stop! Don’t! I mean—blow it out!” Emma screamed, leaping helplessly for the flaming paper. The woman kept it too high overhead for Emma to even come near the flames.

  “What is that?” Other-Natalie whispered.

  Only one set of papers could send Emma into such a panic, the only one set of papers they’d seen in this basement: Mom’s letter. But why hadn’t Emma kept it hidden?

  Why would this woman burn it?

  The tips of Other-Natalie’s hair tickled Chess’s arm, and it was so wrong to have her, not Natalie, beside him.

  “Never mind,” he muttered to Other-Natalie.

  Would she realize he was just quoting her?

  Across the room, Emma had stopped shrieking and was now huddled over something on the floor and moaning, “No, no, no . . .”

  It was the ashes of the paper that Disguise Lady—Other-Natalie’s grandmother—had burned only a moment earlier.

  “Is your grandmother always so cruel?” he asked Other-Natalie.

  Other-Natalie didn’t answer, but it almost seemed as if the woman did. Standing over Emma’s wailing, the woman hissed, “I’m sure this is hard to understand, but that was the kindest thing I could have done for you right now. Now, hide before somebody else comes—someone who won’t be so kind. And don’t worry. I’ll be back for you later. I’ll do everything I can to get you out of here. I would suggest cleaning up this mess, so it doesn’t alert anyone’s suspicions.”

  She pointed back toward the closet the Greystones had hidden in before. And then, with the long skirt of her orange dress rustling around her legs, she strode back to the stairs.

  Emma stayed crumpled on the floor, grabbing ashes that disintegrated at her touch. Natalie stood helplessly off to the side. As the grandmother swished past, Natalie reached out an arm, then let the arm fall uselessly to her
side. She didn’t do anything else as the grandmother mounted the stairs, stepped out into the hallway beyond, and shut the door behind her.

  Both girls seemed to be in shock.

  Chess thought maybe he was, too.

  “Emma!” Finn cried, racing toward his sister’s side as soon as the grandmother was out of sight. “Are you okay?”

  Chess took off after him, even though he couldn’t think of a thing to do for Emma. Maybe he just didn’t want to be left behind with Other-Natalie.

  Emma raised her head to peer up at both brothers. Tears trembled in her eyelashes.

  “I messed up so bad,” she said. “That woman saw Mom’s letter, and what we’d translated so far. She saw the code key! And then she destroyed it. . . .”

  “Did she have matches with her, because she was planning to burn things?” Finn asked. “Did she have a lighter?”

  Trust Finn to ask a question like that. Chess turned his head and caught a glimpse of Finn’s face and understood: It was almost like Finn was afraid the woman had superpowers somehow, and could set things on fire just by touching them.

  She did seem about that fierce. And scary.

  Emma sniffed.

  “She used . . . she used the pilot light on the furnace,” she muttered. Finn and Chess and Natalie all stared at her blankly, and she went on. “I guess it’s a gas furnace, so there’s a little flame at the bottom that’s on all the time. . . .”

  Emma would know something like that.

  “Guys, I hate to say this, but maybe Almo . . . I mean, that woman . . . maybe she was right,” Natalie said. “Maybe it is too dangerous for us here, and we should go home, while we still can. I don’t know why she’d think our lever was in the closet, but . . . Maybe we can go back and figure out more from the other world, where we’re safe, and then—”

  Chess saw her glance toward the wall by the furnace where their lever had been before the cleaner guy had torn it off the wall, carried it into the closet hiding space, and then cut off that route back to the other world, too. Chess knew the exact moment when Natalie saw the lever was missing. Her eyes widened with panic.

  “Our lever’s gone,” Finn said. “The—”

  Chess bent down and clapped his hand over Finn’s mouth because he saw Other-Natalie sidle up behind them just then.

  Emma stared back and forth between Natalie and Other-Natalie.

  “You’re . . . you’re . . . ,” she stammered.

  “The real Natalie Mayhew,” Other-Natalie said scornfully. “The real one here, anyway. Oh, yes, I know about your alternate world. And I know there was supposed to be a lever for getting back and forth down here. Why’s it gone? What happened to it?”

  None of the Greystones answered her. Natalie looked too stunned to say anything.

  “Oh, so you’re all going to be like that,” Other-Natalie muttered sarcastically. “Great.”

  If it had been Natalie speaking, Chess would have recognized the tone as a cover for pain—that was how she often sounded, talking to her dad. And that was how she’d sounded sometimes talking to her mom, before her mom vanished.

  But this isn’t Natalie, and I can’t think I understand Other-Natalie just because I understand Natalie, Chess told himself.

  “How do you know about our lever?” Finn asked.

  Other-Natalie lifted a mocking eyebrow.

  “If you don’t tell me things, I don’t tell you things,” she said.

  Chess could still hear the pain in her voice.

  Is she . . . lonely? he wondered. Doesn’t she have lots of friends, like our Natalie does?

  But he caught the way Other-Natalie darted a glance at Natalie, and Natalie flushed.

  Did Natalie tell Other-Natalie about the lever? Does Natalie trust Other-Natalie?

  Emma sniffed again, a sad punctuation to this weird conversation where more was being left unsaid than said.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Even if we had access to, um, any lever right now, we couldn’t go back yet. Not without, you know. Getting the backpacks and, um, other things we left in the Judge’s office . . .”

  She means our computers, Chess thought, his heart sinking. The only place we have Mom’s letter anymore.

  “All that’s gone,” Natalie muttered. “When I went back with, well, this Natalie’s parents and her horrible grandmother, everything was missing.”

  “Nooo,” Emma gasped.

  Finn patted her shoulder comfortingly. Chess reached out as if he planned to do the same, but he let his hand fall into dead air. He couldn’t provide any comfort. Not now.

  We all messed up, he wanted to tell Emma. We all messed up so bad. . . .

  But Other-Natalie smiled. It was so strange how the same arrangement of features that could look so beautiful on Natalie just looked smug and annoying—frightening, even—on Other-Natalie.

  “I know where your things are,” Other-Natalie said. Was there a hint of triumph in her voice? “I moved them, because they weren’t safe in Mom’s office. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  “Why should we trust you?” Emma asked, and in spite of everything, Chess felt a little surge of pride that she was brave enough to ask that question.

  Other-Natalie’s smile only broadened.

  “Do you have any other choice?” she asked.

  Forty-Seven

  Natalie

  “Other-Natalie’s on our side,” Natalie whispered to Chess as the four kids threaded their way across the basement. Or, Natalie couldn’t really think of it as a basement anymore, now that it opened out into both a glass-ceilinged addition and a dark, open pit. Right now, the space seemed caught in transition, with the floor at the other end of the room partially retracted, and some of the blue-and-orange furniture partially rolled back into the walls. Natalie couldn’t quite make herself see either what the room had been or what it was becoming, but she was pretty sure someone was bound to come down here soon to finish the changes.

  She kept her gaze on Chess and tried harder to explain about Other-Natalie.

  “Remember that scary poster in her room? The one I wanted to tear down? She ripped it to bits,” Natalie said. “She—”

  “If you trust her, I trust her,” Chess said, with such loyalty that Natalie almost gasped.

  I am right about Other-Natalie—aren’t I?

  Or was Chess just pretending to be so trusting, because Other-Natalie could hear him, too?

  Natalie couldn’t quite figure out how to see Chess right now, either.

  Emma bobbed up between them.

  “What was that poster in your room about?” she called ahead to Other-Natalie. Her voice rang out too loudly in the odd room. “Who were those other kids?”

  “The children of our country’s leaders,” Other-Natalie said, without looking back. “The ones who will be leaders themselves. Their pictures will be on these walls in thirty years.” She pointed toward elaborately framed portraits Natalie hadn’t noticed before. All of them showed cold-eyed adults in stiff, regal poses. Natalie recognized no one but the Judge and the Mayor.

  “What if someone like me wanted to be a leader?” Finn piped up. “Someone whose parents haven’t been in charge?”

  “That’s not how it works here,” Other-Natalie said, biting off the words. She reached an open, blank section of the wall. “Now, turn around. I don’t want you to see how I open this door.”

  “What door?” Finn asked. “Please let us see! We won’t tell anyone! Who would we tell?”

  Natalie held her breath. How could anyone resist Finn?

  Other-Natalie sagged against the wall.

  “I’m . . . not used to trusting anyone,” she muttered. “It’s always been . . . too dangerous. . . .”

  But she didn’t repeat her command for them not to watch. She touched some sort of release on the nearest picture frame, and a small panel on the wall slid away, revealing a numbered keypad. Other-Natalie quickly hit a series of numbers Natalie couldn’t follow, and then a door-sized opening appea
red.

  “Oh, cool,” Finn raved as the wall rolled away. “It’s another secret room!”

  “Mostly just secret stairs, here,” Other-Natalie corrected, pointing into the dim space that had opened up behind the moving wall. Only the bottom steps of yet another spiral staircase showed in the distance.

  Finn rushed into the darkness and then, more hesitantly, Chess, Emma, and Natalie followed. Natalie’s eyes adjusted even as Other-Natalie shut the door behind them. After the grandness of the transformed basement, everything in this space seemed bland and forgettable: white walls, dark tile floor, bare metal stairs. But the Greystones gazed around in awe.

  “Natalie, does your mom’s house have secret passages and stairways like this, too?” Emma asked in a whisper.

  “Not as far as I know,” Natalie muttered. Then she added: “And I would know. I’m certain my mom’s house doesn’t have anything like this.”

  “Wait—just your mom’s house?” Other-Natalie asked. “Don’t you live with your mom and dad both, like I do?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Your dad’s not dead, is he?”

  “No, only divorced,” Natalie said, with an attempt at a carefree shrug.

  “Oh,” Other-Natalie said. She seemed to be struggling to absorb this information. “I thought your parents would be just like my parents, but . . . Isn’t your mom pulling strings to make sure your dad’s on a path to the presidency?”

  “Presidency?” Finn asked, then looked proud that he’d managed to say all the syllables. “You mean, like, president? Mr. Mayhew’s not doing that! He sells—”

  “I thought your dad was just running for governor, not president,” Natalie interrupted, because she couldn’t stand to have anyone talk about her real dad right now.

  “One step at a time,” Other-Natalie said, as if she were quoting someone. She rolled her eyes. “If Mom wants him to be president someday, he’ll be president.”

  Had Other-Natalie ever seen how the Judge and the Mayor treated each other in private? Did she know how much her own parents hated each other?

  I’m not going to be the one who tells her, Natalie thought.