Kingdom Keepers III(118)

Philby slipped out the Nextel, made sure it was in silent mode, and wrote a text, targeting the phone’s “KKS” group.

philitup: need fantasmic shut down 4 5 min….

He hit SEND. The text would be sent to the four other Kingdom Keepers.

Philby kept his eye on the key chain. He was going to have to sneak across on hands and knees and come up from behind and grab them—he didn’t see any other way to do it. He would wait for a particularly busy part of the show. The mist projectors would be coming up soon; the stage would go dark as characters hurried out into place. That seemed a perfect time to go for it.

A message arrived.

MYBEST: need ur cell

philitup: no way…locked in da booth

MYBEST: Jess is a stagehand…needs 2 b able 2 rech us all…

FINN: she can hav mine…ill leav it bhind da 2nd levl firehose…

MYBEST: k

WILLATREE: phil…i can mess up da boats is that good???

philitup: fantasmic…lol get it?

WILLATREE: no…phil…realy…r u kiddin?? stay 2 da teki stuff…stand by

Beyond the window of the booth, the stage went dark. Philby watched the flat-panel display and saw the approach of a confusion of colorful bubbles crowding nearly every line of the music and effects readouts. Whatever scene was next, it was big and busy.

This was to be his chance.

He crouched down, keeping his eye pressed to the crack beside the locker door. His body tensed with the first onstage explosion, which was quickly followed by another.

Philby crawled around the door and directly behind the engineer’s seat and eased his hand toward the keys.

But the engineer’s head swung in his direction, and Philby yanked back his hand. He was but the thickness of a chair away from the man. Had he been human instead of DHI the man might have felt the heat from his body, or smelled him, or sensed him some other way. Instead, Philby held his breath as the man’s chair pivoted to within an inch of contact. Then it swung back to the left, and the man’s head with it.

Philby reached up, clutched the keys slowly and tightly to keep them from making noise, and slipped them off the console. He crept back to behind the locker door and carefully studied them. The engineer had too many keys to keep track of—he had marked them all with color tabs and had written on each tab. Philby worked through them, making sure not to allow them to jangle.

F CNTL

He kept a finger separating this key from the others and continued through the rest.

MSTR

Philby marked this key’s place as well. None of the ten or twelve others were marked with anything that he found interesting. Only these two. Maybe if things worked out perfectly he might get them back onto the ring unnoticed.

Feeling jittery to be working so close to the engineer, and knowing that Willa could pull off her boats maneuver at any moment, he worked furiously to remove the keys from the ring. It was a ring that required the desired key to be worked two full turns around a circle. Philby had to pull a piece of the ring away, as if he were trying to pry open a stubborn spring. He got the first key off, trying to memorize what order the keys were in; then the second. He pocketed both, putting one in each front pocket to keep them from clanking together.

There was no waiting. He didn’t have any choice but to crawl back out behind the chair and return the key chain. He did so with as little feeling of dread and anxiety as he could muster—he wanted to be prepared to attempt to go all-clear if it came to that: if the engineer came after him, he would walk through the wall if possible.

“What the—?” the engineer said loudly into the small room.

For a moment Philby convinced himself he’d been seen. But then he realized the man was reacting to something outside the window, not inside the booth.

Philby darted back behind the locker door.

“Come on!” the man complained. “We’re like one minute to break.” He spoke into his headset, having a nasty conversation about the incompetence of the people managing the boats.

Willa had come through.

The technician looked at the clock as the minute hand moved to exactly five minutes before the hour. The technician tugged off the headset and grabbed his keys. He headed to the door, then hesitated a second as he glanced back toward the console.

Philby wondered if the technician had seen him, or his glow, or somehow felt his presence. The man stepped outside and pulled the door shut with authority.

It would be at least a five-minute break—the union     technicians on the Kingdom Keepers DHI soundstage had taken regular five-minute breaks. Philby allowed himself an undisturbed five minutes. He slipped into the chair and hunkered down low.

He’d been watching the flat-panel display for quite a while, observing what effect each line controlled. Now his fingers found the mouse and he went about clicking and extending events the same way he worked a video editor or music composition software—changing both the order and length of specific events. By doing so he was changing the show, and, he hoped, stacking the deck and buying Finn a dealer’s odds.