The Deceivers Read online

  From the stricken looks on Chess’s and Emma’s faces, Finn could tell they hadn’t thought of that problem.

  “We’ll do research fast,” Emma said, scooting up to the couch and dipping her head down over the computer with Mom’s secret code.

  It could have been funny, how Chess plopped down on the other end of the couch and Natalie dropped into the desk chair and both of them hunched over the two laptops nearest them at the exact same time as Emma. In another mood, Finn would have laughed and shouted, The three of you look like robots! Or synchronized swimmers! Only—not swimming! Is synchronized computer-hacking a thing?

  Instead, Finn slumped his shoulders and shuffled toward the closet on the other side of the room. It, too, had a fancy carved door. Maybe the Judge had filing cabinets in that closet. Maybe Finn would open a drawer and see his mother’s name right away and . . .

  And then I’d hand off everything to the big kids, he thought. Because that way, he’d get to help rescue Mom without having to look at anything else describing her as a criminal.

  It was kind of like how, back in the better world, he’d helped the other kids by playing pitch-and-catch with Mr. Mayhew while they did all the work.

  But Finn had had fun with Mr. Mayhew. There was nothing scary about pitch-and-catch.

  What was Mr. Mayhew doing now? Could the Greystones and Natalie—and Mom and Ms. Morales and Joe—make it back before he even knew they were gone?

  Thinking about Mr. Mayhew carried Finn all the way over to the closet. He took a deep breath, pulled open the door, and . . .

  The closet held nothing but shelves of office supplies: boxes of pens, unopened packs of paper. . . . Or, no—there were also stacks of flyers that were smaller versions of the signs that said ELECT SUSANNA MORALES JUDGE.

  Finn really did not want to keep looking at Ms. Morales’s face when it wasn’t the real Ms. Morales.

  Halfheartedly, he ran his thumb along the edge of the papers, just to make sure that something more interesting wasn’t hidden beneath them. But all the flyers seemed the same. There weren’t even any ELECT ROGER MAYHEW flyers mixed in.

  He turned around. As fancy as it was, the Judge’s office was still boring. The laptop was the only thing on the desk; the end table beside the office couch contained nothing but a lamp. Finn bet that when the Judge was a little girl, she kept her bedroom neat and tidy and boring, too.

  Finn remembered that sometimes when Mom made him clean his room, he shoved everything under the bed and pulled the comforter down to hide the fun stuff, and then his room looked neat and tidy and boring, too.

  Where does the Judge hide things she doesn’t want anyone to see? Finn wondered. What if there were all sorts of things like the ELECT ROGER MAYHEW sign, hidden beneath something else?

  Finn walked back to the Judge’s desk. He opened all the drawers but only saw more boring stuff like staplers and computer adapters and cords.

  “Natalie, can you move over, so I can get under the desk again?” Finn asked.

  “Oh, um, sure . . . ,” Natalie murmured, as if she’d barely heard him. She coiled up her legs in the office chair and slid the computer from the desk into her lap without even glancing up. Then she shoved the chair away from the desk.

  Finn crawled back into the cubbyhole beneath the desk, where all three Greystones had hidden just a few minutes ago. Finn wasn’t trying to hide now but to, well, seek. He’d had the idea that maybe there was some secret door concealed behind the drawers, or an extra drawer tucked away behind a secret panel.

  Maybe the Judge has something like the Bat Cave hidden under her office, and I just have to find the latch to open it. . . .

  The last night Finn had spent with Mom at home, before she vanished into the alternate world, she’d watched The Lego Batman Movie with Finn and the others.

  It really wasn’t good for Finn to think about that right now.

  He tilted his head back, because he’d learned that was a good way to keep himself from crying. Even if he failed, at least the tears wouldn’t run down his cheeks, but sideways, into his hair, mostly out of sight.

  Then he forgot about crying and tilted his head even farther back, so he was looking straight up, toward the bottom of the top part of the desk. The Judge had the same kind of ornate carving on the underside of her desk as she had on her doors.

  Why would anyone put such a fancy carving under a desk, where nobody would see it?

  “Natalie?” Finn said, because he wanted to ask if the real Ms. Morales had anything like that in her house back in the better world.

  “Mmm?” Natalie said without looking up.

  Finn could tell: Now she wasn’t paying any attention to him at all.

  He ran his hand over the wood carving. Maybe he was wrong—maybe this carving wasn’t like the one on the door. It was a little hard to see in the shadows under the desk, but the carvings here seemed to be of angels and lambs and flowers instead of demons and wolves and thorns.

  Finn’s finger caught on a bump on one of the angels’ wings. No, it wasn’t a bump—it was a button.

  Finn pushed the button.

  And then a man’s voice came out of nowhere, as if a speaker had crackled to life right over his head, giving Finn the power to eavesdrop on a conversation somewhere else in the house. Maybe even somewhere else in the world.

  And what the voice said was: “What’s this lever doing here?”

  Twenty-Six

  Emma

  “What? Who’s there?” Emma jolted to alertness, yanked away from the jumble of letters and numbers in Mom’s coded message. The laptop braced against her knees slid to the side as she peered around for a place to hide. Or run. She scooped the laptop into her arms and scrambled to her feet, hoping Chess, Finn, and Natalie were ready to run, too.

  Or maybe she hoped they’d already found safety, away from that deep male voice whose source she still couldn’t locate, even though she glanced all around. Natalie was still in a chair by the desk, and Chess was at the other end of the couch from Emma. But Finn . . .

  Oh, Finn, Emma thought, her heart pounding.

  Finn poked his head out from beneath the desk.

  “Shh, Emma,” he hissed. “I think I found an intercom! Be quiet!”

  If it was an intercom, whoever was on the other end would have heard Finn say her name.

  Natalie slid down to the floor beside Finn. She reached under the desk—maybe she was searching for an off switch. Emma jumped up and rushed toward Finn and Natalie. She realized Chess had scrambled up right beside her.

  And then, before Emma and Chess even reached the desk, an image appeared on the blank wall across from them. It was a scene in a location Emma recognized: a man and a woman standing in front of the lever the kids had left behind in the Morales-Mayhew basement.

  Only then did the words Emma had heard fully register: What’s this lever doing here?

  “Don’t touch it!” Emma pleaded. She instantly felt foolish, because hadn’t she just wanted Finn to be quiet?

  The man and the woman in the scene projected onto the wall didn’t seem to hear Emma. They didn’t seem to have heard Finn either. They just stared at the lever, their backs turned to whatever camera was recording them.

  Then the woman chuckled deep in her throat, almost like a growl.

  “What do you bet Mayor Mayhew heard that all the other mayors in the country have fake levers in their houses, and so he had to have one, too?” she asked.

  “As long as it doesn’t interfere with our goals, Mayhew could put a lever on his head, and I wouldn’t care,” the man said bitterly.

  “Yeah, a lever on his head would flip open the top of his skull and reveal that he doesn’t have a brain,” the woman said.

  “A lever on his chest would open his rib cage and reveal that he doesn’t have a heart,” the man countered.

  The woman started to laugh, then pursed her lips.

  “Enough,” she said. “We can’t be heard speaking like this.
We can’t endanger our mission.”

  She glanced around as if it had just occurred to her that someone else might be listening. Then she picked up an industrial-looking vacuum cleaner from the floor behind her. Emma hadn’t noticed it before.

  “They’re more cleaners,” Natalie burst out. “They’re wearing the same uniforms as the woman I talked to.”

  Emma had been so focused on the conversation, she hadn’t paid attention to the fact that both the man and the woman were wearing baggy brown uniforms that covered their whole bodies except for their hands and feet and heads. Apart from the uniforms, the only distinguishing features Emma could see were that the woman’s hair was red and straggly, barely skimming her shoulders, and the man’s was black and clipped short. And the man was much taller than the woman.

  “So why are they talking about a mission?” Chess asked quietly. “And their mission being endangered?”

  “Why does the Judge have some crazy system set up to spy on people in her own basement?” Finn asked. “Does she know people go around saying mean things about Fake–Mr. Mayhew? Does she want to be able to fire people who say mean things?”

  “Finn, remember, Mr. Mayhew—our Mr. Mayhew—he had a video security system at his house, where we could see who was at the front door through our computers,” Emma said. “Maybe it’s just one of those things that, um, rich people have, that we never did.”

  If Natalie hadn’t been standing right there, Emma would have gone on: You know, because rich people have things they worry about thieves stealing. Us Greystones, we never had anything anyone would want to steal, so we didn’t have to worry about it.

  But she didn’t want Natalie to think Emma was insulting her.

  “Emma, my dad didn’t get that security system until Mom disappeared,” Natalie said. “Because . . . I don’t know. I guess not knowing what happened to Mom made him worry that something could happen to . . . me.”

  Natalie’s face quivered. Just as Emma could watch the sky and understand what it meant when dark storm clouds rolled in, she could watch Natalie now and see the stew of the older girl’s emotions: She’s still mad at her dad, but she misses him, too, and she feels guilty for not telling him the truth, but she wants to protect him, and . . .

  Analyzing every cheek twitch and jaw clench of Natalie’s expressions was so much easier than figuring out what “mission” the cleaners meant or why the Judge spied on her workers.

  “They can’t see or hear us, right?” Finn asked, scrambling out from behind the desk and going over to touch the image on the wall.

  The cleaners in the basement seemed entirely focused on dusting and vacuuming now. Emma noticed, though, that the camera angle followed them from behind, rather than staying in one place.

  So it’s a portable camera unit, maybe motion-activated like the lights in the school bathroom. . . . Something struck her that stopped her dispassionate analysis.

  Wait—if there’s security footage of what’s happening in the basement now, then . . . is there security footage from half an hour ago? Emma wondered. From when Chess, Finn, Natalie, and I arrived from the better world? How long do we have before the Judge or someone else sees it? Is this room the only place the security footage can be accessed? Or . . .

  “The Judge wouldn’t have things set up so she could be spied on,” Natalie sniffed, answering Finn. “So I think we’re safe in here. But why would she watch the basement? Are there security cameras in other places in the house, too?”

  Natalie dived down under the desk where Finn had been. A second later, the scene on the wall changed. Now Emma could see Mr. Mayhew in a vast office with lots of leather chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows that showed skyscrapers behind him.

  “She spies on your dad when he’s at work?” Finn gasped. “Er . . . Other–Mr. Mayhew . . .”

  Natalie had just poked her head out from under the desk. She grimaced and reached her hand toward the bottom of the desk once more.

  The scene on the wall changed again, and now it looked completely familiar: It was Other-Natalie’s bedroom, with the poster sagging from the wall, the clothing scattered across the floor, and the desk drawer hanging open where Natalie had pulled out the laptop.

  “The Judge spies on her daughter, too?” Natalie gasped. “In her bedroom? Even my mom wouldn’t do that!”

  “We already knew Judge Morales was a horrible person,” Chess said quietly.

  “But what’s she spying on people for?” Emma asked.

  In the scene on the wall, the bedroom door opened. A woman in the same kind of brown uniform as the cleaners in the basement entered the room and bent down to dust the woodwork.

  “That’s the cleaner I talked to!” Natalie said. “I told her not to go in there!” She started to bolt away from the desk, toward the door. “I’m going to order her to leave!”

  “And how would you tell her that you knew she was there?” Chess asked.

  “I—I—” Natalie gasped. Still, she stopped moving toward the door.

  In the scene on the wall, the cleaner threw a quick glance over her shoulder.

  She’s being . . . furtive, Emma thought, remembering a word from the vocabulary list her teacher had handed out just the week before at school.

  It made sense that this cleaner didn’t want to get caught, if she was going into Other-Natalie’s room when she wasn’t supposed to. But hadn’t the cleaners in the basement moved and talked in the same way, just as furtively?

  Why?

  And why did Emma feel there was something almost familiar about the man and the woman in the basement?

  “You don’t really care what the cleaner does to the other Natalie’s room, do you?” Emma asked Natalie. “Could you show us the basement again, please? I want to check something.”

  Natalie pursed her lips, but she reached under the desk once more, and the scene on the wall changed back to the cleaners vacuuming and dusting in the sea of navy blue and orange in the basement. The man had advanced to a coffee table stacked with blue-and-orange coasters. He polished the top of each stack, looked around, and then went on, clearly only pretending to clean the rest of the table.

  “Hey—he’s cheating! Cutting corners—that’s what Mom calls it when I clean my room like that,” Finn said. “Maybe that’s why the Judge watches. To make sure her employees do a good job.”

  Emma didn’t care about the man’s cleaning skills.

  “Can’t we see their faces directly, not just from the side or the back?” Emma groaned.

  “I don’t think— Oh!” Natalie sounded surprised. “I can direct the camera. The top of this button is like a trackpad. . . .”

  The view shifted. Now Emma could see the two cleaners head-on: The man had a chiseled face and a thick, muscular neck above his baggy uniform. Beside him, the woman’s limp red hair slid back to reveal a wrinkled face.

  Emma gasped.

  “I know who that man is!” she exclaimed. “No, wait—we know them both!”

  Twenty-Seven

  Chess

  “That man . . . he’s the man who tackled us . . . the, the security guard.” Chess could barely get his words out.

  “Emma, Chess, you’re right!” Natalie exclaimed. “That cleaner does look like the security guard my dad hired to watch your house!”

  Just seeing the man made Chess feel like he’d been tackled again. Or, like he was about to be tackled.

  “But it’s not him, right?” Finn piped up. “He’s just this world’s version of that guard. Not ‘Ace Private Security’ guy, but . . . Ace Two.”

  Finn sounded proud to figure that out on his own. And he’d even given the cleaner a name.

  “Uh, right, Finn,” Chess said, trying to hide a gulp. “Ace Two. But, Emma, what do you mean, saying we know both those cleaners? Even the woman? I don’t recognize her. Who is she?”

  Natalie’s eyes grew wide, but she didn’t say anything. Before Chess could figure out what that meant, he heard Finn say hesitantly, “Mayb
e I know?”

  Emma locked eyes with Finn, and Chess felt oddly left out.

  “At Mom’s trial, right?” Emma asked Finn. “The old lady who helped you and then disappeared into the crowd? It is the same woman, isn’t it?”

  Could this get any worse? Chess didn’t want to think about the trial any more than he had to.

  “You said you barely saw that woman.” Chess knew he sounded like he was accusing Finn and Emma of lying. But he couldn’t help it. “She stayed in the shadows, and Natalie and I were so far away then, we’re no help. But, Emma, you told us you and Finn really only saw that she was wearing a navy blue cap. So were a lot of people at the trial. This woman has such odd red hair—wouldn’t you have noticed that?”

  “Don’t you think that’s a wig?” Emma asked. “Or dyed? The woman who helped us—she might wear all kinds of disguises. Maybe she even makes her face look more or less wrinkled. But Finn, just watch how the woman moves.”

  Chess watched too, as the elderly cleaner hoisted the vacuum with ease, moving across the carpet with brisk energy. Finn whistled.

  “Disguise Lady is fast,” he said. “It is the same woman!”

  Maybe it was just the power of suggestion—or the younger kids’ certainty persuading him—but Chess could imagine this being the same woman who’d hidden Finn at Mom’s trial.

  “This isn’t just a coincidence,” Emma said. Her dark eyes glowed; her cheeks had turned an excited pink. She was practically beaming. “That woman being in Judge Morales’s basement after she rescued Finn at Mom’s trial—a trial Judge Morales was running—that means something. We just have to figure out what.”

  Yeah, because we were doing so well figuring out the mysteries we already have, Chess thought.

  Why did the same details that thrilled Emma make him feel even more discouraged?