There wasn’t time to explain. There wasn’t time to peek past the curtain and see if the Mayor had stopped coughing and would block them from getting away. Chess could only run as fast as he could away from the soldiers, toward the nearest wall. He smashed through the curtain, and the security guard from the other world was still standing there, stunned.
The cleaner, Ms. Morales, and—yes!—the Mayor were all on the floor, barely moving.
“Miss Natalie!” the guard cried, as if she were the one he needed to report to. “Your dad is having an allergic reaction. But I helped him and . . . look! We found your mom! I’ve been trying to call 9-1-1, but my phone won’t work—”
“This is a dead zone. You have to come with us,” Chess snapped as he ran past.
Behind him, he heard Natalie cry, “Mom! It’s Mom! Pick her up and come along! Hurry! We’re in danger!” He knew she’d make sure her mother escaped this time.
“Emma!” Chess screamed. “How far do we have to go to find a place this lever will work?”
“I don’t know!” Emma screamed back. “We never figured that out! Maybe another building, maybe another room, maybe just not in the exact same spot as before . . .”
“Just two feet,” Mom panted from beside Emma. “You have to hit a place on the wall that’s at least the length of the lever away from the last spot anyone used . . .”
Chess hadn’t even thought to ask Mom, even though she was right there with them.
“But go into that closet first, so we don’t take the whole roomful of partygoers back with us . . . ,” Mom gasped.
Chess dashed through the closet door and swung the lever. He must have hit a lucky spot: The lever settled into the wall as though it had always been there.
“It worked! It worked!” Finn crowed.
“Get everyone in, and then you can turn it!” Emma screamed.
Chess reached out and grabbed Mom’s arm—strangely, it felt like he needed to hold her up. Finn and Emma were right behind her.
“Natalie!” Chess shouted back over his shoulder. “Joe!”
“Coming!” Natalie yelled behind him.
Shoving Mom, Emma, and Finn deeper into the closet, Chess reached back for Natalie’s hand, too. But his hand only brushed dead air. He turned to look.
Natalie was right there, alongside the Ace Security guard carrying Ms. Morales, and Joe, who still held the grandmother in his arms.
But right behind them the soldiers from this world had trampled down the curtain. And behind them, an angry mob of partygoers were screaming, “Catch the traitors! Kill them all!”
Sixty-Eight
Natalie
Natalie leaned down as she ran, so she could keep an eye on the security guard carrying Mom. And she kept shouting into the microphone hidden in her dress, “Other-Natalie! We’re leaving! You come, too!” She put her hand to the seam where the electronic device should be—and all she felt were shards of plastic and metal stuck in the tape. The microphone had been smashed to bits, probably when Almost-Grandma tackled her.
Then she saw the soldiers and the mob behind her.
“Joe, hurry!” she screamed, because he was the one struggling to keep up. Almost-Grandma couldn’t weigh that much. But Joe seemed overcome by the burden of carrying her. He’d seemed so tall and strong before—maybe he’d shrunk? He might even be weaker than Natalie herself now.
“We’ll carry her together!” Natalie yelled, cradling Almost-Grandma’s torso in her arms as Joe carried her legs. Almost-Grandma’s dress was blood-soaked, and she seemed barely conscious, murmuring, “. . . love . . . I always loved you, Natalie . . . But it was so hard to show when . . . we had so much evil to fight . . . and we couldn’t tell you . . . truth . . .”
“I know, Grandma,” Natalie murmured back. Was Almost-Grandma dying? Natalie wanted to say everything she hadn’t been able to say at the end with her own grandmother. “I love you too. And . . . we’re not going to let anything happen to you, not if I have any choice. . . .”
With Joe, and just behind the Ace Security guard carrying Mom, Natalie rushed toward the closet where the Greystone kids were screaming for her.
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Stop!”
It was a soldier. A big, burly soldier who could probably pick up Natalie and Almost-Grandma with just one hand. Maybe Joe, the Ace Security guard, and Mom, too. Natalie had no hope of fighting him off—especially not with dozens of other soldiers and an angry mob behind him.
Then someone slapped him. A girl’s voice rang out: “Soldiers should know their place!”
Natalie twisted her gaze farther back: Other-Natalie’s non-best-friend Lana was standing there pulling a hand back from the soldier’s face. She put both hands on her hips. “That’s Natalie Mayhew! You can’t disrespect the daughter of Judge Morales and Mayor Mayhew like that!”
Lana winked at Natalie. And that was all the time Natalie needed to cram into the closet alongside Joe and Almost-Grandma and the security guard carrying Mom. She would have liked a moment to whisper, “Thank you”; she would have liked a chance to tell Other-Natalie that Lana might be best friend material after all. But Chess was already yanking the lever sideways.
The whole closet began to spin.
Oh, right—we’re opening a new tunnel, instead of going back into one left from before. So we’ll spin a lot, instead of having to run and run. . . .
Natalie couldn’t tell if any of the soldiers or partygoers followed her through the door. Was that even possible while the tunnel spun? But she could see Chess, Emma, and Finn huddled with their mother through all the whirling; even as she held on to Almost-Grandma, she reached out and took Mom’s hand, too.
And then the spinning stopped, and Natalie had to blink her way back to seeing clearly again.
Her hearing must have come back too, because someone was shouting directly in her ear as she sagged out of the closet, “Natalie! Natalie! What’s going on? Why are you here, instead of at school? And . . . wait—Natalie! You found your mom?”
It was Dad. She knew it was her dad, rather than Mayor Mayhew, because there was no cruelty in his gaze, only confusion—and love and relief.
And he wasn’t wearing a tuxedo.
She didn’t know if Mom’s neighbors had called him or if it’d been the security guard. She was just glad he was there. “Chess, Emma, Finn—you found your mom, too?” Dad called.
None of the Greystones answered, but Chess scrambled up, jerked the lever to the right, then ripped it completely away from the wall. Instantly the haze around them vanished. The other world—with its soldiers, partygoers, soaring glass ceiling, marble floors, and scapegoat cages—was gone, totally sealed off from the ordinary basement of Mom’s house.
For a second, Natalie’s heart ached, thinking about Other-Natalie being left behind. Natalie hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.
But Dad was still asking questions as everyone else spilled out of the closet too.
“Wait, Natalie—is that blood on your dress? And who are these people you’re holding on to?”
Joe moved away and began to explain weakly, “It’s a long story. . . .”
Natalie rolled to the side because she was afraid of crushing Almost-Grandma beneath her.
Dad’s face turned pale, and he clearly stopped listening to Joe.
“Natalie! That woman looks so much like your grandmother. . . . And there’s so much blood. . . . Just like . . . like . . .”
“Dad, I can explain everything, but we need help first,” Natalie said firmly. She turned to the security guard her dad had hired. “Call 9-1-1. I’m sure it will work now.”
Dazedly, the guard pulled out his phone and began hitting the numbers. He had to ease Mom down to the floor to do that. But as she slipped down, her eyelids fluttered.
“Roger?” Mom moaned. “Is that you? I never thought I’d be so happy to hear your voice again. . . .”
Dad scrambled over and gave Mom a big hug,
lifting her off the floor.
“I thought you were dead!” he groaned. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
Natalie blinked again watching her parents embrace, just as she’d watched Other-Natalie’s parents embrace back in the other world. No—it wasn’t like that at all. This hug was real. It didn’t mean her parents were getting back together. It didn’t mean either of them had changed enough that they would fit together as a married couple again. But this was still them caring about each other—and her. This was having Mom back; this was Natalie knowing exactly where she belonged.
She dived in to join the hug.
Finn tapped her on the shoulder.
“We did it, didn’t we?” he crowed. “We rescued our moms and Joe! All the danger’s over!”
Natalie saw Chess behind Finn, still clutching the lever even as he hugged Emma and his mother. She saw how pale and gaunt Mrs. Greystone looked, how nervously Joe watched the Ace Security guard and kept glancing back at the closet. She saw Almost-Grandma lying still on the carpet, still bleeding on her orange dress.
And Natalie heard Emma tell Finn the truth.
“We really did rescue our moms and Joe,” Emma whispered. “And all the danger really should be over . . . for us. But only if we never go back.”
Epilogue
Finn, Emma, Chess, and Natalie, One Week Later
Finn clutched his mother’s hand as they walked toward the hospital door.
“I didn’t like it when you had to stay in the hospital and be away from us even longer,” he complained.
“Neither did I,” Mom agreed, mussing his hair. For a moment, Finn thought she was going to grab him into her arms and swing him around like she used to when he was a really little kid. For a moment, that was what Finn wanted. But he’d been grown-up enough to rescue her—he really didn’t need her hugging him constantly.
“They just had to make sure Mom and Joe weren’t malnourished,” Chess said reassuringly. “There’s no danger that the hospital will make her stay today.”
“Oh, right,” Finn said.
It was great how Chess could understand what Finn was afraid of even before he’d figured it out himself.
Finn grabbed Chess’s hand. He noticed that Emma took Mom’s hand, too, as all four of them walked together into the huge, glass-enclosed lobby of the hospital.
Emma poked her head out to call over to Chess, “Are you going to be embarrassed if Natalie sees you like this now? Holding hands with your entire family?”
“Nope,” Chess said.
Mom gazed back and forth between Chess and Emma, a baffled look on her face.
“Is this something else I missed while I was away?” she asked.
“Chess might as well be a teenager now,” Finn explained. “He’s in love.”
“Finn, Emma, you really shouldn’t tease—” Mom began.
“It’s okay,” Chess said, as calm as ever. “After what we’ve been through, do you think a little teasing is going to bother me?”
The elevator was open when they reached it, and they all got in. Finn pushed the button for the top floor. When they stepped out a few minutes later, Mom stopped at a wide window that looked out on the entire town.
Emma was mostly just glad not to see any blue or orange banners hanging from any of the buildings off in the distance. But Mom’s thoughts seemed to be elsewhere as she peered down at the city hall.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have brought the three of you for this visit today,” Mom murmured. “Maybe I should have just handled this on my own. . . .”
“Mom, we know what the other world’s like,” Chess said quietly.
“And we know Other-Natalie’s grandma better than you do!” Finn argued.
“Just don’t hand her any paper.” Emma tried to make her words sound like a joke, but nobody laughed.
They went down the hall and turned the corner into a room that Natalie and her mom had turned into the friendliest-looking hospital room ever. Vases of flowers covered every table, and they’d added comfortable pillows and color-coordinated quilts and afghans to every chair.
And no item in the entire room was navy blue or orange.
“Kate!” Ms. Morales cried, springing up from one of the chairs to hug Mom.
“Susanna, I’m so sorry for bringing your family into this whole mess,” Mom said. “I—”
“Stop,” Ms. Morales said firmly. “I’m fully recovered, Roger is being nicer to me than he was even when we were supposedly happily married, and Natalie . . . well, look. It’s almost like Natalie has her grandmother back again.”
Natalie was curled up by Other-Natalie’s grandma on the hospital bed, hugging her close.
“This girl has barely left my side the past week—she’s driving me crazy,” Almost-Grandma complained. But everyone could see she didn’t mean it.
“And our family was already involved,” Natalie said. “We just didn’t know it.”
Mom tilted her head and squinted, a habit Emma didn’t remember her having before.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mom said. “You’ll have to explain.”
“You mean, just because everyone in your family and Other-Natalie’s family were genetic doubles?” Emma asked Almost-Grandma.
“But not doubles otherwise,” Finn said, with a shiver. “Our Natalie’s dad is a nice guy, and Other-Natalie’s dad was awful.”
Chess shot a glance toward Finn, but then he said what he was thinking, anyway.
“Did Mayor Mayhew want the Judge to die?” Chess asked.
Almost-Grandma frowned and stared down at the gauzy bandages on both her legs. She was still healing from being shot protecting the Judge and Natalie.
All the Greystone kids had already heard Natalie’s description of how Almost-Grandma had seen a man with a gun out in the crowd the afternoon of the party, and then thrown herself in front of the gunshots, so she was the only one injured.
But she’d bled so much that it had looked like the Judge and Natalie were hurt, too.
The longer Almost-Grandma went without answering, the more the Greystone kids wondered if they’d ever hear her side of the story. But then she lifted her head.
“I can only tell you what my daughter and I guessed and heard,” Almost-Grandma said. “I don’t think the Mayor would have minded if my daughter died. But he mostly just wanted to take away her power, while gaining more for himself.”
“That’s not very nice!” Finn protested.
“I don’t see how hiring someone to shoot the Judge makes the Mayor more powerful,” Emma complained. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It shouldn’t make sense,” Almost-Grandma agreed. “But the twisted way we thought inside that house, inside that world . . . Everyone was so busy lying and deceiving, we lost logic along with truth. My daughter and I had spies among my son-in-law’s loyalists, just as he had spies who’d infiltrated our circles. We knew he’d hired a gunman, but Susanna and I thought changing the party time would foil that plan. We also knew my son-in-law had captured this world’s Susanna. We believed he was going to bring her in as a double to replace his own wife. He planned to mostly keep this world’s Susanna sedated, and if she asked questions, she would just seem crazy. He figured she would lose her job as a judge, she would be totally discredited. . . . After that happened, maybe he would have brought the real Judge Morales back and made her suffer through being out of power, while he had total control. Or maybe he would have kept this world’s Susanna and my world’s Susanna both imprisoned and miserable.”
Natalie reached back and grabbed her mother’s hand as though she never intended to let go.
Emma bit her lip.
“You and the Judge were always on the same side, right?” she asked. “I asked Mom why she didn’t say in her letter that we could trust both of you, why it didn’t say, ‘Just Tell Susanna or Estrella the Truth’—Estrella’s your first name, right? That would have been so much easier. But Mom said that answer should come fr
om you.”
Almost-Grandma winced, and Mom put her hand gently on Emma’s shoulder.
“Emma, really, maybe we should talk about that some other time. . . .”
“No, Kate, the girl asks a fair question,” Almost-Grandma said. “Truth is not always comfortable.” Her eyes bored into Emma’s. “When . . . when my world first became a tangled web of deceptions, Susanna was already a judge. And I was so proud of her, so impressed by what she’d achieved. I told her not to sacrifice herself. I told her to do whatever she had to, to stay in power and keep her status. That was what I believed eight years ago, the last time your mother saw me. She had good reason not to trust me then. It took me a while to see that I was wrong. Or to see that both Susanna and I had to work against the others in power, the ones who wanted to keep ordinary people ignorant and afraid. By then, the only way we could do that was behind the scenes, in secret.”
“But you wanted the Mayor to become governor? Even president?” Finn asked. “Why didn’t the Judge just take over by herself?”
“Because governors, presidents—they’re always in the public eye,” Almost-Grandma said. “Susanna needs access to those offices, to get the information she needs to force the government to change. But the way my world works, she’ll never succeed if she tries to do that out in the open. She needs to be in the background, and to work privately with other people who wouldn’t trust her if she were governor or president. People like . . . your mother.”
Now it was Finn who grabbed his mother’s hand and held on tight.
“So you and the Judge had to pretend all the time, in your world,” Chess said. “But you knew Natalie and Emma didn’t belong there. Why were you so mean to them? Why were you mean to Other-Natalie?”
Almost-Grandma peered at each of the Greystone kids, one after the other. “I’ve already apologized to Natalie here, but I wanted to apologize to the three of you as well. You came to my attention just as my daughter and I learned of her husband’s plans, and we were desperately trying to stop him. We’d already been betrayed. There wasn’t time to explain; I wasn’t even sure there was time to avoid the impending disaster. I used the only tactic I knew well: fear. I thought if I kept the four of you—and my granddaughter—out of the way, and too frightened to come out of hiding, I could keep you safe until my daughter and I stymied her husband’s plot.” Then she grinned, almost merrily. “Little did we know we needed you to stop him!”
The Deceivers Page 25