Kingdom Keepers VII (19 page)

Until the Keepers came along he was a loner, limiting his time at school and spending every other minute with his aunt in her pottery shop, Crazy Glaze. He only auditioned to be a Disney Host Interactive because his aunt needed help with building his college fund, and the winners of the audition were being offered college tuition. Now, years later, he has more than friends. He has a family. And though his natural inclinations tend toward sarcasm and cynicism, Charlene has explained to him that this is anything but natural; instead, it is a kind of defense, a wall he put up to avoid being hurt by
other people’s comments
.

Family. And in a weird way, for all his faults, Finn was the head of the family, the older-brother figure, while Wayne served as grandfather.

Maybeck drops to his knees. He doesn’t know a lot about prayer. His aunt takes him to church, but it’s mostly singing. He doesn’t believe, but he doesn’t disbelieve, either. He’s still waiting for some kind of message, one he suspects will never come. His aunt says faith is a decision. A person must decide if he or she is the end all or if there might be something bigger at work, that belonging and standing on one’s own are not incompatible ideas. He raises his eyes to the sky and pleads with whatever is out there to throw a thunderbolt or set a bush on fire, send him some signal or give him a random thought of what he’s supposed to do. “Bring Finn back!” He finds himself mumbling repeatedly. “And if you can’t do that, tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

He catches himself kneeling and jumps to his feet. Has no idea where that came from, why that, of all things, was his first reaction. He feels foolish and is glad no one saw. He’s got to get the girls to the lamp. He’s got to continue what they started. A flicker of realization flutters in his mind—
I know
what I’m supposed to do!
He takes another glance at the night sky. Says, “Nah…” And passes to the other side of the rail to meet the crying girls.

“We can’t assume the worst,” he says, having just done precisely that himself, and wondering if this is what Finn and Philby do on a daily basis. “The good news is: he’s not spread all over the place.”

He regrets phrasing it like that, realizing there are some adjustments he needs to make—fast. He marvels at this moment of insight, wondering if he knows the real Finn and Philby, if their Keeper selves might be entirely different from their normal selves.

“But—” Amanda starts.

“You don’t want to go there,” Maybeck says, cutting her off. “It serves no purpose. ‘A lazy mind assumes the worst. Optimism fuels possibility.’” He has no idea—none!—where this comes from; he must have picked it up from his aunt. She’s constantly laying out aphorisms for him, maybe hoping they’ll rub off. And they have, he supposes, because here he is, regurgitating them.

“We keep going. We follow Jess’s sketch—get to the lamp. The train was there, in her drawing. The lamp’s in the center. The lamp’s important. It’s why you crossed over in the first place. Finn—”

At the mention of Finn’s name, Amanda breaks down sobbing again.

“Okay. My mistake! No more mentioning…
him
. Okay? By any of us. We’re going to ‘fuel possibility,’ right? We’re going to make this happen. We need to get to the lamp and do whatever it is you do with a lamp like that and then get back to the—”

It dawns on him that he has no idea what to wish for. Finn was going to do the wishing. A new pair of running shoes won’t do the trick. They’d be nice, but they won’t exactly help the Keepers. Kill Maleficent? That’s been handled. What was Finn going to ask?

“You okay?” Jess asks. Except for a few snail trails left down her cheeks by digital tears, she has remained remarkably composed.

“I…yeah…the lamp,” he says.

“This way.” Jess pulls Amanda to her feet and leads them down an embankment to the edge of a manmade waterway. The canal looks as wide as the Mississippi River to the group of shrunken DHIs. She points out the waterfall on their side of the Storybook Land canal. “Through that and into the cave.”

“A shortcut!” Maybeck cries, realizing they’ve bypassed a mountain village, the Sultan’s palace, and a half dozen other obstacles. “If we can max out the v1.6, we won’t have to get wet in the waterfall.”

“Speak for yourself,” Amanda groans, sorrow weighing down her words like stones.

Jess is careful with her footing, testing both the substance of her DHI and how stable the rocks are underfoot.

The girls are hardly DHI novices, Maybeck remembers, though they lack the crossover experience of the Keepers. In any other setting, Jess’s tentativeness would be cute, but Maybeck is on edge, worried for the three of them as he’s never worried before. This leadership stuff isn’t so great, he thinks.

As Jess hesitates before the waterfall, Maybeck’s unease demands he look behind them. His heart sinks as he spies a pack of dogs cresting a hill from the direction of the Alpine Village. Big, angry dogs, running extremely fast. It takes him a fraction of a second to realize that the dogs are scaled to his size, not monster dogs of the real world, but dogs that live in Storybook Land. And not dogs at all: wolves. Big, black wolves.

A shot rings out. A gunshot. Amanda and Jess spin to take in what Maybeck’s witnessing: a miniature man in lederhosen and knee socks brandishing a musket. He stands on the ridge, reloading his single-shot musket. A wolf has fallen behind the pack, hit by the bullet. The animal rolls and the pack turns instantly, retreating to feed on the fallen animal.

“Go!” Maybeck says, pushing Amanda in the back and shoving her into Jess, who is forced through the waterfall. Amanda is next.

The clatter of an approaching train rises. It has lapped the circuit and is approaching again.

Maybeck can’t keep his eyes off the pack. It devours the fallen wolf in seconds. Musket Man has the gun raised up to his shoulder. Maybeck sees a puff of smoke; hears the dull report a fraction of a second later because of the distance. Something tells him to drop; he falls like a marionette with its strings cut. A chip flies out of the rock behind him: Musket Man is aiming at
him
. He’s not on their side. Maybeck scrambles backward as Musket Man stands the gun up on the stock to reload. The wolves are far faster than anything Maybeck has seen. They’re nearly upon him. He’s not going to make it.

The sound of the train grows louder, deafening Maybeck. The train passes. A blur of color tumbles from his right. It’s like a wheel or a rock or a…person doing somersaults.

“Finn!” Maybeck screams at the top of his lungs.

The girls jump back through the waterfall, nearly stepping on Maybeck’s head.

“No!” he says to them, grabbing Amanda by the ankle.
“Go!”

So much for his leadership qualities. Neither girl moves—they’re transfixed by the sight of the approaching wolves.

A tumbling Finn somersaults directly across the path of the wolves, distracting them. The pack turns toward him.

Amanda drops to her knees in tears.

Musket Man pulls a long rod back out from his gun and hoists the weapon to his shoulder.

Finn reaches the edge of the canal, the lead wolf nearly upon him. He stands up. “Come and get it!” he says, opening his arms invitingly. He steps back and falls.

Maybeck scoops Amanda up under the arms and drags her forcibly toward the waterfall as a shot rings out. A musket ball penetrates the dirt where Amanda was kneeling.

Finn hangs from the ledge by his fingers. He taunts the lead wolf. “Tasty young boy!”

The lead wolf loses control on the slick concrete. Trying to slow, he instead slides off the ledge and into the water; the other wolves follow their leader. Paddling wildly, the wolves are carried off by the current.

Finn’s ability to maintain his DHI state makes pulling himself up nearly effortless. He hurries through the waterfall and into the dark cave.

Maybeck and the girls rush forward to meet him. When all the hugging and gushing settle down, Finn explains that he managed to fully control his DHI. His hologram never moved; it was absorbed by the locomotive as he maintained his clarity of purpose. As the first tingles of compromise teased his fingertips, “I jumped up and grabbed some piece of the undercarriage. In seconds I was too far away, so I spent a lap inching to the outside of the train car. When we got here, I swung off, spotted the wolves, and…well, I improvised.”

More group thanks and Amanda’s tears fill the next minute. Through the waterfall, Maybeck sees the Musket Man charging down the hill.

“This guy must think we’re bandits or something. He seems determined to shoot us.”

“Let’s go!” Finn shouts, his voice echoing through the canal tunnel. “This way?” He points up a set of narrow stairs cut into the tunnel wall.

“Yes,” Jess says. “This way.”

She takes the lead. Finn follows. Close on his heels is Amanda; she and Finn are awkwardly holding hands. Maybeck is last, marveling at how effortlessly Jess takes control, how Finn doesn’t challenge her, how tempted he was to assert himself and claim the lead for himself. How all of this is so confusing. Maybeck wants another turn, another chance as ringleader, is sorry he relinquished it so soon. Opportunity is so temporal, he thinks.

A shot rings out.

“Pick it up,” Maybeck says. “Move! I think I’ve been shot.”

Amanda rises to the occasion, overcoming her grief and joy at Finn’s return to take a stand and challenge the Musket Man. As she drops out of their line, squatting, Finn turns. “Go on!” she cries. “Let me do this!”

Finn hesitates. Maybeck reaches him and pushes him up the stairs, getting him running again.

Amanda stays behind, her knees not entirely stable beneath her, her eyes blurred by drying tears. She has regained some of the strength she lost with the earlier push, but by no means all—the process always leaves her drained for a while. She’s counting in part on the trail of water shed by their DHIs, which has left the stairs slick and precarious. She’s also counting on surprising Musket Man and catching him in midstride, and counting on whatever force it is beyond the hologram projectors that make this all possible, that make it happen. Something bigger and unexplainable. She summons it, the way she assumes all Fairlies do.

The top of Musket Man’s Bavarian hat appears. The guy must have been a caretaker or innkeeper in Alice’s village. What’s he doing here? Amanda holds her breath, pulls in her arms, and shoves. Musket Man is struck by an invisible force, skids across the slick stair tread and, dropping his musket, flies off and falls into the canal. Amanda races up the stairs. Her last image of the man is of him swimming for shore.

He’s the evil Bavarian Energizer Bunny: he just won’t quit.

* * *

The stairs rise steeply. It’s too dark inside the long, cavelike stairway to see Musket Man fall, but the splash is heavy enough to signal that it’s not Amanda’s DHI going down. In the lead, Jess carries the burden of possible failure in her every step. Philby and the Keepers have gone to great lengths to follow her simple sketch of a magic lantern with its spout facing to the right. What if her dream was a mirror image? Or what if she was simply having an “Aladdin dream”—imagining herself as a character in the movie? It wouldn’t be the first time. There’s no way she’s full DHI: her thighs are killing her. They must have climbed several hundred steps by now. Whoever built this stairway made it more of a ladder. Endless. Straight up.

“Terry!” she calls back, his name echoing throughout the cave. “Are you okay?”

“Define ‘okay,’” Maybeck responds. And she grins. Jess knows better than to make waves—and she doesn’t want to challenge Charlene—but she’s recently come to like Terry in ways that go beyond casual friendship, ways she doesn’t fully understand and is afraid of. She and Amanda are with the Keepers for a reason. She must not allow
anything
to get in the way of that; Amanda’s open feelings for Finn already pose a challenge for their mission.

“Your leg?” she calls back.

“I believe I am now a
hole-y
man, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“We can stop,” Finn says.

Finn always seems to think of others, Jess thinks. It comes so naturally to him. She and Amanda have discussed how, of all the Keepers, Finn seems different—not better, but like a different species, as if Wayne had planned for him all along, and the Keepers would not exist without him.

She has so many questions yet to answer. As the world of the Keepers seems to be building to a make-it-or-break-it moment, Jess knows their survival is at stake, their lives. Something horrible is coming. Her dreams show her flickers of it: flames, chaos, ruin. Death. There are sketches she has not dared show even Amanda.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Jess sees it: the brass lamp sitting on a pedestal where the stairs terminate.

Finn and Maybeck arrive. Maybeck’s calf is bleeding real blood, meaning he is not now, nor will be, pure projection any time soon. Finn drops to one knee to examine Maybeck’s wound.

Maybeck says, “It’s a through-and-through.”

“Meaning?” Jess asks.

“The bullet didn’t lodge,” Finn says. “In one side and out the other.”

“No bones were hit,” Maybeck says. “I can walk.”

“That’s your DHI speaking. It will be worse when you return. We don’t experience pain as fully when we are crossed over. You know that!” Finn studies the wound more closely. “It caught the edge of your leg. The wound is two inches deep. We can’t mess around here. It needs tending.”

“You’re the designated worrier, Finn. It’s barely bleeding at all. Rub the lamp. We’ll deal with me soon enough.”

One of the big problems with the boy Keepers is their heroism, Jess thinks. What makes them great is also their weakness. Maybeck would sooner bleed to death than admit he needs help.

Amanda reaches them panting, out of breath. “I…he went in the water…but I think I only delayed him.”

Only now does she notice Maybeck’s wound. For a moment, there is much discussion. Then Jess says, “Enough!” silencing them. She’s so worried that she has brought them all here for nothing, that she is responsible for Maybeck’s wound, for the risks they’ve taken.