Kingdom Keepers: The Syndrome (8 page)

“It’s not internal. We’re certain of that. They’ve just started. Little things. A piece of paper in a window display. A photograph hung where there wasn’t
one.”

“Maybe some of the retired Imagineers?”

“Well, I suppose that could be. But it wouldn’t be any fun to do if you weren’t gauging your victim’s reaction. No one is testing us about it.”

“It couldn’t be the villains, could it? They’re taken care of once and for all. Correct?”

Joe didn’t answer, which seemed strange to me. I wasn’t alone.

“Joe,” she said, “it’s
over
, correct?”

“This is Disney,” was all he said.

They moved on, passing within inches of me. I sat still, not daring to breathe. My legs tensed. I willed my figure to blend into the darkness, praying they didn’t turn around.

I stayed in my crouch. Five minutes. Ten. After fifteen minutes of silence, I stood, my calves screaming. I left by the nearest emergency exit. I’d come for one thing; I was leaving with
another.

This is Disney.

Joe Garlington wasn’t convinced the Overtakers were gone for good.

The battle we’d fought so hard to win wasn’t over.

LUOWSKI

I paced in back of the old apartment buildings near the abandoned church. I didn’t have to think about it anymore. I’d come here so many times already. Spying on
Weaver, hoping to gain information about Whitman and the Kingdom Losers.

Every time I laid an eye on Weaver I wondered what she’d done to me on that ship. I could destroy her easily. I’d been given the powers. But she was far more useful as a link to the
others.

I felt impatient. Something was up. Something was different. I forced myself to shake off the unease, but it wouldn’t leave me.

“Maintain control,” I muttered.

“But you aren’t in control, Greg…You’ve never been in control,”
whispered the cold voice of a woman.

Not just any woman.
Her!

I whipped around. And around. Nowhere. She was in my head. No, she was in the glass of the window in front of me. A pair of icy green eyes. I went as cold as that voice before staggering forward
and falling onto my knees. Maleficent. Inescapable.

I squeezed my eyes shut, expecting her snarl. She’d gone silent. It’s own kind of torture.

“I…I’m trying,” I gasped like a crazy man. “I have a plan! Tonight, I’ll crush him tonight. He will be no more. This girl will help me. I will make her help
me.”

Again: the dreaded silence.

Where the eyes had been I saw a massive boy of eighteen with red hair and alien green eyes. Me. I stood, glancing around to make sure no one else had seen me. Furious, I glared at my own eyes
and they mocked me. I felt slightly unglued. What was happening to me?

I swung out and punched the reflection with my full force. Glass shattered. Shards rained to the concrete, sounding like broken icicles.

A mother and her child hurried past on the sidewalk. The little girl tugged on her mom’s hand and pointed at me.

“Look away now, Mia. He’s…crazy!” She thought she’d whispered to her daughter, but I’d heard. She was lucky I didn’t make her pay for that comment.

I let my hatred of Whitman own me instead. Ever since freshman year, I’d despised him. He made Amanda like him without even trying. No matter how I pushed him, he didn’t give. Not
like the other kids. He always gave me the feeling he thought he was better than me. And then his superhero image with the Kingdom Losers made him a big deal all over school. I joined Maleficent
because of him—to put Finn in his place. Her YouTube was genius. Impossible to resist.

The YouTube videos had proven irresistible. Her glowing green eyes she gave to me. The promise and delivery of unexpected powers. Later, after I’d let her put her spell on me and a few
others, people had feared us. I no longer felt pain the same way. What Maleficent promised, she followed through with, unlike a million other grown-ups I knew.

I recalled her words to us, before she’d been taken by them.
“The end is near. The beginning is only a beginning.”

Whatever that meant.

The sound of a door opening caught my attention. I narrowed my eyes and backed into the shadow of the church dome. I hoped no one had heard the window shatter.

A shadow came closer, stretched and thin. A girl. Weaver, I could tell by her silhouette; I had followed her so many times. Too many times. I knew she was my ticket to the Losers, that she was
all I had, but the voice and the eyes in the glass and my bloody hand told me it was time to do something, not just follow.

I jumped out. She screamed, but I cupped her mouth and heaved her against the brick wall of the church.

“Where is he?” I demanded, pressing her harder against the apartment wall.

“I don’t know.”

“You’d better.” I grabbed her bare elbow as she tried to swing at me. I suddenly felt—empty. Drained. I released her. She tried to escape but I threw her to the wall.

I heard a thud. Her head on the brick.

She sagged slowly to the burned grass and folded down into a heap.

“Get up!”

She wasn’t moving.

“I said: Get up!” I kicked her. Hard enough she’d remember it.

She didn’t move.

“No one’s going to save you now, Weaver. No one’s going to save Whitman either! You hear me?”

I didn’t think she did. I was beginning to freak.

“Hey! What are you doing there?” A short, slender girl approached with a boy on her arm. They started running toward me.

I took off. People didn’t take kindly to boys hurting girls, even for the right reason.

They’d didn’t know Greg Luowski, the boy with the green eyes. They didn’t know me.

AMANDA

“I can come in with you, if you like?” Wanda spoke from behind the wheel of her car. We were back at the Whitman’s house. My third visit in three days.

“You’ve helped so much already. Jelly says we should keep Finn hydrated. Wet sponges in his mouth. She says when Terry was in SBS he even drank from a straw once or twice despite
being totally out…” I trailed off, fingering invisible figures onto the faux-suede car interior. My stupid eyes released tears at the same time, making my feelings impossible to hide.

“Hang in there. We know this is bigger than Finn. We can assume by the fact they aren’t answering that it involves them all. We’re doing the right thing. One at a time.”
Wanda pulled me toward her, battling the seat belt. We did an awkward hug, me with my head on her shoulder.

“I’m so scared for him,” I said. “For them all! It’s been days!”

“Go on. Talk to her. I’ll wait here. I’m right here.”

“Thank you!” I gathered the plastic bag from the car floor. I was off.

Knowingly repeating a mistake is one definition of insanity and was not something I felt comfortable doing. Maybe it was because of my different (think: lost) childhood, my
being forced to grow up so quickly, but I’d also learned mistakes were a useful, even necessary, part of figuring things out. Approaching the Whitmans’ front door for the third time was
no cakewalk for me.

It was up to me to negotiate a truce with the Whitmans.

I had stopped trusting
all
adults a long time ago. Wayne and Wanda weren’t exactly exceptions, but I trusted them more than I would admit.

Finn’s parents were
not
exceptions. For me, knocking on this door was asking for trouble. The question wasn’t
if
, but
how much
.

“Please, Amanda!” Mrs. Whitman greeted me with a look of disdain. “We’ve had enough.”

“He might drink from a straw if you offer it. Gatorade is best.” I handed her the bag. It contained two bottles of red Gatorade and a box of flex-straws. “He needs a damp
sponge, water; you run it around his lips and over his tongue every hour. It’s best if you put bright bulbs in all the lamps of his room, maybe bring in extras and leave them on at all times.
It helps stimulate rapid eye movement.”

Tears sprang to Mrs. Whitman’s eyes. She showed me inside.

I whispered to Mrs. Whitman in order to keep Mr. Whitman from overhearing. “Which floor?” Finn had moved to the ground level the year before, but I didn’t want to seem
presumptuous to know that.

“Upstairs.”

“Your daughter?”

“She’s terribly upset. Her room is also upstairs.”

“She needs to leave the house tonight. Can you have her stay with a friend?”

Mrs. Whitman turned sharply. “What’s that mean?”

“I think you know. I think it happened before.”

“That beast of a boy, force-feeding…” She half sat, half collapsed onto the living room couch. She sank her head into her hands, her back shaking with the force of her sobs. Maybe
she’d been waiting to get that out, because she continued for several long minutes.

“Why is this happening to us?” She lifted her head.

I took her literally. A mistake. “There’s some evidence that the boy, Greg Luowski, is under a spell again.”

She glared at me. An affront. It felt like she’d punched me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I do not need all the voodoo-hoodoo you kids are so obsessed with.”

“I understand.”

“No. You have no idea.
None
.” She took a moment. Gathered herself. “Amanda, I’m sorry. That was unfair and uncalled for on my part. I apologize. I know you
care.”

“Very much,” I said.

“But at your age…never mind.”

“All I want…
all I want
, is to help Finn. To help him get better. To protect him. To keep him out of the hospital.”

Her eyes brimmed with more tears. “That won’t be good for him, will it?”

“If your husband could talk to Philby’s mother, his parents, I think he might believe them more than me.”

“I’m not sure he’ll do that.”

“He has to!”

“That’s a matter of opinion, young lady. He’s Finn’s father. You can’t understand the agony of sitting, waiting. It gets worse, too. There are…unspeakable things.
But you need to earn my trust if you hope to be included in any of that. Believe me, we are terrified of what’s happening.”

“A sponge. A glass. Maybe some ice?”

“I have to talk to my husband first. He’s not going to like this.”

“I would offer to leave, but you need me. I can help you. I have…well, I’m strong. I know I don’t look it, but I’m very strong. Greg Luowski is afraid of me, and
he’s not expecting me to be here. That’s our advantage.”

“You make it sound like a battle, Amanda.”

“If there was time, I’d try to sugarcoat it,” I said. “But there isn’t, and this
is
a battle. Or it will be. And it’s coming tonight.”

I climbed the stairs timidly. Finn was up there. Vulnerable. Half dead. Stuck in a limbo that no one, not even the Imagineers, fully understood. There was no science to explain
the transfer of consciousness. I couldn’t scare Mrs. Whitman with talk of such things, but I wore the knowledge like a stone around my neck.

“He’s not happy about this,” Mrs. Whitman said. She didn’t mean Finn.

“But I can stay?”

“I wasn’t about to tell him about that boy. And we can’t call the police until he actually does something. Do you have proof of any of this? Anything at all?”

“No. I could be wrong, but I’m not. If that makes any sense.”

“Not to me, it doesn’t.”

“No. I didn’t expect it would.”

She swung open the door. I’d seen this upstairs bedroom before—there had been meetings here. We would huddle around his computer or talk strategy, sometimes for hours. Always with
the door open, always with Mrs. Whitman bringing snacks and making conversation. So I knew what to expect. I knew what I’d see.

And still I fell to the floor, bawling. Nothing had prepared me for seeing Finn in SBS. I felt like a baby. An idiot. A fool. But I couldn’t stop sobbing. Mrs. Whitman placed her hand on
my back, and I cried all the harder. No one ever gave me sympathy like that. Jess could console me, and did, but she was my age, my friend. Having an adult like Wanda or Mrs. Whitman actually care
devastated me.

Taking big, shuddering breaths, I pulled myself together and drew closer.

Finn looked peaceful, but too still. I knew him; he was always filled with energy and determination. Always moving, he epitomized the deep thinking, overly aware leader he’d proven himself
to be. Wayne had molded him, starting with a quiet, introverted boy who had a love of Disney, a little sister he adored, and parents from whom he felt himself growing away. We’d talked for
hours about all this—and more. I knew him in ways Mrs. Whitman never would, and she knew him as only a mother could.

It explained why, when I looked over at her, she was crying, too. Then we both started laughing nervously, self-consciously. Two people cherishing the same boy, made sad by his present
state.

We worked as a team after that, Mrs. Whitman’s animosity washed away by our shared tears. My inbred suspicion of adults melted away, too. While Mrs. Whitman dabbed Finn’s lips and
tried to provoke the sleeping boy to open his mouth, I held a face towel below his chin, collecting the runoff. At first, our effort was a failure. The water cascading down Finn’s chin made
him look pitiful, infantile. I closed my eyes, unable to watch.