Kingdom Keepers III(119)

With any luck, even with the engineer back in the chair, Maleficent wouldn’t know what hit her.

* * *

Finn left his phone—an invisible phone, but one he could feel—tucked in behind the firehose, feeling suddenly lost without it. Perhaps it was his invisibility doing this to him. But he suspected something else.

He would take visual cues—if they were given—from Charlene if possible, and would also keep an eye out for Jess playing a stagehand. Maleficent’s entrance wasn’t too far off. He had to get in position.

Amanda would be down on the dressing-room level; he had no idea where Willa was, but from her text he suspected she was responsible for the break in the technical rehearsal that had just occurred. Philby was inside the control booth, leaving Maybeck’s identity and whereabouts unknown to Finn, though again from the text he knew that Maybeck was in the area.

In situations like this time played tricks on him. Clocks sped up. Reaction time slowed down. Soon it would all reach a fevered pitch, a boiling point, with him in the center of the cauldron.

“You okay?” Charlene asked. They’d found their way out of the DHI projection shadow, visible now, and had tucked themselves into the entrance of a darkened—and Finn hoped, unused—hallway. The stage was a labyrinth of these hallways and staircases, all of them interconnected in a way it would take days to memorize. Some led to the wings of the stage itself while others returned Cast Members to subterranean dressing rooms, and still others to the platforms beneath trapdoors or up high into what from the audience appeared to be a towering mountain. Some of these areas were lit and some were not, suggesting which ones were being used during the technical rehearsal.

“Been better,” Finn said.

“She’s okay,” Charlene said, answering a question that Finn hadn’t asked. “There’s a reason for her not getting onto the rope, and it isn’t the reason you think.”

And it isn’t the reason you think. Charlene was the reason Amanda hadn’t gotten onto the rope. Finn felt certain of it.

“She probably saw those two coming toward us and took off. Who knows what that looked like from down there.”

Charlene put her hand on his shoulder and rubbed the tightness away. He wanted to ask her to stop, but didn’t. He wanted to ask her about what Amanda had said, but didn’t know how.

She was about to put herself at as much risk as he was. They were attempting to tackle forces with powers far greater than their own. There was little to no chance they could prevail on their own.

“This is only going to work if we time it right,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. How could she do that?

How could she know him so well?

“Just what I was thinking.”

“So I’d wish you luck, but that would mean I thought you need it, and I don’t. I don’t think any of this is about luck or chance or fate. You know? Destiny maybe. I think somehow we are supposed to be here right now. The five of us. The seven of us. Not because Wayne wants it, or we want it. But just because.”

“Because,” he echoed.

“Yeah. Think about where each of us was before we tried out to be the Disney Hosts. Does that even feel like you? Like the same person? Not me. I can tell you that. It’s all so totally different. I was like this yahoo cheerleader, right? I don’t know that girl. Not now.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Right?”

“Yes. It’s all different.”

“We are where we’re supposed to be.”

“You sound like my mother,” he said. “She’s always laying that stuff on me.”

“I’m freaking,” she said. “And when I freak I talk too much. All I meant to say is that if anything happens—”

“Do not say it.”

“But—”

“No! Do not go there.” He felt his hands shaking.

Over the speakers, he heard the mirror speaking to the Evil Queen.

“…in Mickey’s imagination, beauty and love will always survive.”

“Beauty and love! Did you hear that?” Charlene asked.

“I…yeah.” Beauty and love. They seemed to define Charlene.

It was time to return for the sword. Maleficent would be on the stage soon.

“That’s our cue,” Charlene said.

“Right.”

“Okay then,” she added.

“Okay.”





43


GLADIS PHILBY, wearing a Hawaiian housedress over her nightgown, stood sobbing in the hallway outside her son’s bedroom as paramedics with the ambulance service moved her comatose son from his bed to the wheeled stretcher that would move him to the vehicle.