“She thinks everything’s okay,” Finn gasped.
“And maybe it is,” Philby said. “Maybe it isn’t the Overtakers inside, but Wayne. Maybe the snake is on his own, patrolling Wonders for the Overtakers, sure, but not with them.”
“That would be a lucky break,” Finn said.
“Only one way to test it,” Philby pointed out.
Finn nodded. He extended the flashlight through the wall of leaves and pushed its button once, signaling: danger.
24
THE AREA OF THE BUSHES where they’d seen Maybeck’s flashlight remained dark. But from the grass there appeared a silver gray flash of a different sort: snakeskin. As Philby had predicted, Gigabyte had seen the signal and had taken off in Maybeck’s direction to determine its source.
“This is our shot,” Finn said. “Maybeck just bought us the front door. We can’t wait for Charlene.”
“Are you nuts?” Willa said.
“We go now!” Finn said. He reached out, took Amanda by the hand, and led her out of the shrubbery, somehow knowing that the others would follow—that Jess would stay with Amanda, and Philby would join him; Willa wasn’t going to remain in the bushes alone.
Their DHIs sprinted across the lawn, jumped a rail, and hurried up the ramp leading to the pavilion’s front door. All of them were panting, and Philby bent over to catch his breath.
“Give me two seconds,” Finn said, closing his eyes and attempting to settle himself into all-clear. But it required a profound depth of concentration, mixed with a surrender and the subsequent removal of any fear. Standing in the dark, in front of an enormous abandoned pavilion with a fifteen-foot python somewhere out there, he found it difficult to picture the pinprick of light in the sea of darkness inside his eyelids.
“How do we know it isn’t coming this way?” Willa asked.
“Shh!” Philby understood the challenges of all-clear.
“How do we know there isn’t something, someone, much worse inside?”
Amanda tapped Willa on the shoulder and pointed to Jess who, standing alongside Finn, had her eyes squeezed shut.
“I know that look: she’s picking up on something,” Amanda whispered so softly that not even Philby could hear her.
In the gloomy darkness, Jess’s right hand reached for her back pocket and pulled out a small spiral notebook, her eyes still pinched shut. Her left hand found a mechanical pencil in her front pocket and, as she slowly came out of her trance, began to sketch.
Finn passed through the glass of the pavilion’s front door and turned to face them. He could be seen taking a deep breath. He tried to push the door’s panic bar, to open it, but his hand slid right through the glass barrier, and he pulled it back inside. He shook his arms.
“It’s coming back,” Willa announced, pulling Philby and the others down to a crouch.
Philby peered out to see the silver python slithering toward them at a high speed. “Stay down,” he said.
Finn tried a second time, and his glowing arms went right out the door. The third time was the trick: the door opened.
The others slipped inside and Philby quietly pulled the door closed. Willa backed her way through the door, never taking her eyes off Gigabyte.
“Look!” she said pointing. “Where’s he going?”
The python reached the path and headed off, his body maintaining a giant S-shape yet still propelling himself forward, moving toward the center of the park away from the pavilion.
“Reinforcements. If we could follow him—”
“He might lead us to the Overtakers,” Philby concluded for Finn.
“And maybe Wayne.”
“You can’t be serious!” Willa complained.
“It’s too late,” Philby said. “He’s too fast. The only way we’d be able to follow him is at an all-out run, and he’d spot us.”
Jess gasped and they all looked at her and her pencil that had stopped in the midst of making the sketch.
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
“It’s me…” Jess answered. “They’re coming for me.”
For a moment Finn couldn’t think. His mind, free of all thought only seconds before, was bombarded with reality—the hardest part of going all-clear. It was like being jostled awake from the deepest sleep ever. Like waking up in the middle of a class only to realize the teacher has just called your name. He shook his head. His hands were doing the tingling thing, and his feet felt as if he were walking on a bed of a thousand needles.
“Where?” he managed to say.
“The image stopped,” Jess said, shrugging her shoulders. “The minute I realized it was me, the image stopped.”