The Deceivers Read online

  He wasn’t going to let his voice just trail off. He wasn’t going to acknowledge any danger except delays.

  “I tried your mom’s trick, and set up automatic texts that will go to my dad over the next week, if we’re gone that long,” Natalie said. “It’s all excuses until the last one. And the last one will . . . explain.”

  Chess wanted to say, Do you really think explanations help? Did we miss our mother any less, knowing why she left?

  But just then, Natalie gifted him with a dazzling smile.

  “And don’t worry about me getting anybody else in trouble,” she added. “I don’t have any friends named Megan.”

  And then she snapped on her helmet, threw her leg over the bicycle, and pushed off, leading all of them out into the early-morning darkness, toward her mother’s house.

  Thirteen

  Finn

  Finn had never been allowed to ride his bike in the dark before, and he loved it.

  Of course, he had Natalie and Emma ahead of him and Chess behind him, so he felt perfectly safe and in no danger of getting lost. He could just savor the fact that the route from Mr. Mayhew’s house to Ms. Morales’s neighborhood was downhill. The first mile or so, he barely had to pedal.

  Then there was a straightaway for a while, where they all pedaled hard.

  We’re finally going back to get Mom! Finn wanted to shout at everyone they passed—the joggers and the other cyclists and the cars inching around them, making room. The words sang in his head, working into the rhythm of his pedaling. He hadn’t felt this happy in weeks.

  They turned into Ms. Morales’s neighborhood, which was full of even bigger mansions than Mr. Mayhew’s neighborhood, and even bigger yards, too. It took Finn at least five times of saying, We’re finally going back to get Mom! to get past each house. And then Ms. Morales’s house lay right ahead and above them, just as the sun broke over the horizon.

  Natalie screeched to a halt.

  “What?” she exclaimed. “Is that—?”

  Just as abruptly as she’d stopped, she hopped back on her bike and started pedaling furiously toward her mother’s house.

  Finn pulled up beside Emma, who was still stopped and peering off after Natalie.

  “What happened?” Finn asked. “What got into her?”

  Emma squinted into the distance. She shaded her eyes with her hand to block the glare of the rising sun.

  “I think . . . ,” she began. “I think . . . Finn, why would there be a For Sale sign in Ms. Morales’s yard?”

  Fourteen

  Emma

  By the time Emma, Finn, and Chess caught up with Natalie, she’d yanked the Realtor’s sign out of her mother’s yard and stomped it down flat on the grass.

  “I hate him!” she shouted. “He didn’t even tell me! How could Dad put Mom’s house on the market—Mom’s and my house on the market—and not—not—”

  “I was wrong. That sign actually just says ‘Coming Soon,’ not ‘For Sale,’” Emma said, squinting down at the sign. “That’s not as bad, is it?”

  “And why do you think it was your dad who did this?” Chess asked. “Your parents are divorced. So wouldn’t your mom have had arrangements for someone else to—”

  “Who cares?” Natalie said, jumping up and down on the sign. “Somebody gave up on Mom ever coming back. Somebody thinks she’s dead, and Dad didn’t even have the courage to tell me what . . . what . . .”

  Natalie’s long, dark hair flew out in all directions as she jumped and screamed. The part of Emma’s mind that always analyzed things scientifically thought it was a beautiful demonstration of kinetic energy.

  The part of Emma’s brain that felt angry all the time wanted to join Natalie in stomping on the sign.

  “Natalie,” Chess said softly. “We wanted to sneak into your mom’s house without anyone seeing or hearing us.”

  Natalie ignored him.

  “Maybe you’d feel better throwing that sign into the trash?” Emma asked.

  “Good idea,” Natalie said. She lifted the sign from the ground and stomped over to punch in the garage code on the side of the house. Before the garage door was even halfway up, she ducked under it and slammed the sign down into the trash can in the garage. Then she kicked the can.

  The three Greystones dashed after her into the garage. Chess hit the control pad to shut the door from the inside, hiding all four of them.

  “Natalie, nobody would have changed anything in your mom’s office, right?” Emma asked. “It’s still soundproof, isn’t it?”

  “How would I know?” Natalie growled. “Nobody tells me anything!”

  “Let’s go check,” Emma said.

  She and Natalie raced toward Ms. Morales’s office. Emma shut the door behind them, pausing only to tell Chess and Finn, “You two stay outside. Knock on the door if you hear anything.” Then Emma turned to Natalie and told her, “Scream as loud as you want. Say bad words if you have to.”

  “AHHHH!” Natalie shrieked.

  Emma put her hands over her ears to keep from being deafened. But she could still hear Natalie shouting: “Nobody should give up on my mom! She can take care of herself! She’s fine! She’s still alive! And we’re going to rescue her! It’s not going to be like Grandma. . . .”

  Natalie suddenly went silent.

  “Wait, what?” Emma asked, taking the hands off her ears. “‘Like Grandma’—what does that mean? You’ve never told us about any grandma.”

  Natalie’s face quivered.

  “She died,” Natalie said. “A year ago. She was my favorite person in the whole world, and . . . I don’t talk about it. I can’t talk about it, not when Mom’s missing, and Dad . . . and Mom . . . I hate how people say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and it doesn’t mean anything. . . .”

  Emma knew what that was like.

  “You can keep screaming if you want,” she offered.

  Natalie screeched even louder than the first time. Emma joined in, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Natalie’s so right! Nobody else is going to die!”

  Ms. Morales was a Realtor herself, and she had half a dozen signs with her face on them stacked behind her enormous desk.

  “That woman is still alive!” Emma shouted, pointing at the signs. “My mom is still alive, too! They’re both fine! So’s Joe!”

  Natalie and Emma stopped screaming at the exact same time. Natalie blinked in the unexpected quiet.

  “Emma . . . that really helped,” she said, sounding surprised. “How did you know? Is there some scientific study you read somewhere, about how screaming can make you feel better?”

  “Nope,” Emma said. “It’s just what I would want to do, if I were you. It’s . . . what I’ve wanted to do for the past two weeks.”

  Natalie had an expression of wonder on her face.

  “Emma, I think we’re a lot alike,” she said. “Who knew?”

  Emma gritted her teeth. She liked Natalie a lot more than she had when she first met her, and she was pretty sure Natalie liked her, too. Emma kind of wanted to say, I am sorry about your grandma dying, even if it makes you mad to hear that. She wanted to say, You can talk to me about her if you want. Or maybe, You know you can tell Finn and Chess, too.

  But there were other things Emma needed to talk about right now.

  “Natalie,” Emma began. “When we go over into the other world, you can’t . . . you can’t freak out again. No matter how mad you get. We need you. You’re the best at lying, and you’re the only one who can look like you belong there. So . . . oh, my gosh. I think I’ve heard too many of your dad’s sports shows. I was about to say, ‘You’ve got to keep your head in the game.’”

  Natalie let out a sad sound that might have been a laugh.

  “I know,” Natalie said. “I do need to keep my head in the game.”

  “Okay,” Emma said. She put her hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

  “Yeah,” Natalie said. “Let’s go save our moms!”

  Fifteen

  Chess
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  Chess had no idea what Emma and Natalie talked about in Ms. Morales’s office, but when they came out, they were both calm and resolute.

  “Basement,” Emma said, turning with almost military precision toward the door that led to the basement stairs. “That’s where we try this. Because that’s where we’re least likely to run into anybody on the other side.”

  “Makes sense,” Natalie agreed.

  And then Chess couldn’t say how much he hated basements now, how much they made him feel trapped.

  All four kids trooped down the stairs. Ms. Morales’s basement was immense and practically empty, with an expanse of cream-colored carpet that looked like no one ever walked on it.

  Natalie gulped.

  “This . . . used to be Dad’s man cave,” she mumbled. “It was, like, sports fan kingdom. When he moved out, he took all the furniture. Mom didn’t do anything but replace the carpet and have the walls repainted.”

  “Okay,” Chess said.

  “I’m just telling you,” Natalie said. “In case what we see on the other side is . . . different.”

  “Let’s just focus on getting to the other side for now, all right?” Emma asked.

  “Let’s go! I’m ready!” Finn jumped up and down, tugging on Chess’s arm.

  “I’ve got the lever,” Chess said, because he had the biggest backpack, the only one that the lever could fit into. He took the backpack from his shoulders and pulled out the lever, still wrapped in Finn’s shirt from the day before.

  Were we stupid, that we didn’t work harder at checking for fingerprints? Chess wondered. Or was Emma right, that we really need to solve all of Mom’s coded message before we go back?

  Chess was so sick of second-guessing everything. He handed the lever to Emma.

  “Lever, wall,” Emma said, as if she needed to remind herself. She took five steps back, moving under the stairs, behind the furnace. “Let’s try this back here. So we’ll be hidden if, you know, the basement’s laid out the same way in the other world.”

  Chess, Natalie, and Finn clustered around Emma. Emma swung the lever out and then forward, like it was a bat and she was determined to hit a home run.

  The lever made a strange thud colliding against the wall. It didn’t sound like metal banging against plaster and wood; it sounded more like stone on stone. And then, somehow, the lever seemed to become part of the wall; it looked like it had been built that way.

  “That . . . that . . . ,” Natalie stammered.

  “That isn’t how it worked before, back at Mr. Mayhew’s house,” Finn said. “Emma, you did it!”

  “Not until we turn the lever,” Emma said.

  Chess looked from Finn to Emma to Natalie. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was Natalie who was related to the younger kids, instead of him. Not because their features were so similar—though, with all three having dark hair and dark eyes, they were close enough. No, what made Finn, Emma, and Natalie look so much alike was their expressions: They all carried the same mix of awe and hope and excitement in their eyes and written across their faces. Finn and Natalie put their hands on the lever beside Emma’s; all of them wanted to open a tunnel to the other world together.

  Chess didn’t reach out a hand to join them. The thought repeating in his head was, And we know how to shut off any tunnel to the other world now, too. If it’s too scary, if there’s too much danger, I’ll have to be the one who yanks the lever straight off from the wall, breaking off the connection. I can do that, if I have to. I can keep everyone safe.

  Finn, Emma, and Natalie shoved the lever forward. Chess felt the room around him begin to spin, and all he could do was shut his eyes.

  Sixteen

  Finn

  “It’s working!” Finn shrieked. “Emma was right!”

  But the words were ripped from his mouth by the crazy spinning. He couldn’t even hear himself, let alone anyone answering. Finn’s body pitched to the right and then to the left. He tried to picture himself like a surfer riding the waves. But the image that came into his head was of him, Chess, Emma, and Natalie slamming around the enormous basement like dice in a cup.

  “We survived . . . the spinning . . . before,” he shouted, in case any of the others felt panicky, too.

  Maybe his mind blanked out between the words; maybe whole minutes passed between one word and the next. This, too, was a feeling he remembered from crossing into the other world before, from his own basement. Both times he’d hit a moment when he couldn’t think. Or see or hear or feel or . . .

  Maybe what actually happened was that he stopped existing for an instant?

  Finn’s brain must be working again, if he could think that. He kept spinning.

  And then, suddenly, everything was still.

  Finn blinked, his eyes adjusting to . . . well, not darkness, exactly, but dimness. That was different. Hadn’t the lights glowed bright as day in Ms. Morales’s basement, even though the sun was barely up outdoors?

  Woozily, Finn sat up. Chess, Emma, and Natalie were just shadowy shapes on the floor beside him. He reached over and shook Emma by the shoulders.

  “Get up!” he whispered. “We made it! I think we did, anyway!”

  Emma groaned. Chess staggered to his feet. Beyond Chess, a tunnel stretched off into the distance from an odd, dark hole in the wall.

  “It’s like . . . how it worked at your house,” Natalie whispered, raising her head, too. “The spinning makes the tunnel, and then the tunnel stays open as long as we’re here. So we can go back. Anytime we want.”

  “But if we leave it open, anyone can go through,” Chess said. “In either direction. Anytime.”

  He groped around on the wall. His hand caught on something. He bent his knees and shoved.

  There was a lever here, too. And Chess was turning the lever in the opposite direction.

  The tunnel vanished.

  “Chess!” Finn exclaimed. “How did you know that would work? Was there a second lever at the other end of the tunnel in our basement?”

  “There must have been, but I didn’t know enough to look for it,” Chess said grimly.

  “Mirror . . . image,” Emma croaked, still sprawled flat on the floor. “I guess the . . . lever . . . duplicates itself . . . in each world. . . .”

  “Oh, like a door has a doorknob on both sides,” Finn said. “That makes sense.” It was a rare day when he could explain things faster than Emma.

  “Are you sure it will open back up now?” Natalie asked.

  “I—” Chess began. His face flushed.

  Finn rushed over to the wall and pushed the lever to the right. The wall started to melt away, showing just a glimpse of the open tunnel again. Quickly, Finn yanked the lever back to the left, and the wall turned completely solid once more.

  “Yes!” Finn practically crowed. He shimmied his shoulders in something like a victory dance. “We’ve got it all figured out now!” He went back to Emma and tugged on her arm. “Did you see that?”

  “Need . . . a minute,” Emma muttered. “I think . . . I’m the one who has the most trouble . . . adjusting.”

  Finn giggled.

  “Then maybe I’m best,” he bragged. “I sat up first!” He leaned down close to her ear. “But don’t worry. You’ll always be best at math. And science. And lots of other things. Chess, Natalie, and me, we’ll just look around while you recover.”

  His ears felt normal again—they weren’t ringing anymore—and he could feel how deeply silent this basement was. It made him feel safe. Nobody could have seen them arrive.

  Finn wanted to congratulate Emma for that, too. But first he wanted to see his surroundings, and no matter how much his eyes adjusted, they’d never work well without more light.

  “Is the light switch over by the stairs?” Finn asked Natalie.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. The older kids were all so groggy.

  Finn tiptoed out from behind the furnace, heading toward the stairs. The basement had to be empt
y; nobody would sit in such darkness. Only the slightest glow came through the small windows that ringed the top of the room. Finn hit the light switch.

  “Natalie!” he cried as the lights sprang to life in such a sudden glow that for a moment, Finn could only see shapes. “This room is full of furniture now! Full to bursting with furniture!”

  Then Finn’s eyes adjusted. Now he could see colors as well as shapes.

  And every object in the room—pillars, curtains, couches, wall hangings, carpet, even a refrigerator—were either navy blue or orange. The entire basement was like a tribute to orange and blue, a celebration of those colors, a denial that any other colors had a right to exist.

  Finn had only ever been in one place that looked anything like this basement: the Public Hall where his mother had been trapped for her trial.

  “Natalie!” he cried. “Is your basement another place where they punish innocent people?”

  Seventeen

  Emma

  Emma heard the terror in her little brother’s voice.

  She was still blinking back her discomfort with the trip through the tunnel, but every blink made her notice something new around her that was navy blue or orange, or both intertwined: the coasters arrayed across a coffee table, the inlaid stone around a section that seemed to have been turned into a jacuzzi, the flags that hung around every pillar.

  “Finn! It’s just sports stuff!” Emma hissed. “I guess somehow, in this world, this is still Mr. Mayhew’s man cave. Natalie, you tell him. Tell him which team your dad loves, where the colors are orange and blue! Or maybe it’s your mom who’s the sports fan here?”

  “The teams my dad likes—and my mom, too—are the Cavs, the Blue Jackets, the Buckeyes, and the Browns,” Natalie said dazedly. “None of their colors are orange and blue.”

  “But maybe their team colors are different here?” Emma heard how she sounded like she was begging Natalie to agree. “Or maybe your mom likes a different team here? Or maybe it’s you in this world who’s the big sports fan?”