Kingdom Keepers III(88)

“So let’s do it,” Willa said.

The film can was incredibly heavy. Even working together, the two couldn’t budge it.

“We’ll have to unwind the film far enough to get the leader over there,” Jess said. “And it can’t touch the floor or it’s ruined. Use your socks as gloves.”

“What?”

“Take off your socks and use them as gloves. You’re going to have to hold the film.”

A minute later Jess was uncoiling the film from the can and Willa was supporting it, keeping it from touching the floor. Jess managed to get the splice up to the edge of the projector, from which a brilliant white light seeped out and illuminated the dark rectangle of spliced film.

What she saw astounded her.

“It’s a seat belt sign,” she said.

“A what?”

“You heard me. Like you’d see on an airplane or something.”

Jess had turned to look back at Willa. In doing so, she’d lost track of her hands. They wandered into the projector’s beam, interrupting it. She noticed this immediately, but it was too late: she’d broken the image being projected to the screen.

“Uh-oh,” she said. Glancing out through the projection windowpane she could just make out the two tiny figures well below, at the control console. The bigger of the two—the man—was pointing up toward the booth.

“The lights!” she said to Willa. “The room lights can be seen from below. They know we’re here!”

Willa kept her calm, immediately coiling the film back into the can. Jess fed her the extra length.

“I saw something…I have to check something,” Willa said.

“Saw what?”

“In this book over there. It’s a journal. It’s marked A-three, whatever that means. But I think it’s some kind of maintenance log. There was something about seat belts…”

“No way,” Jess said.

“Way.”

The projector stopped.

“This is not good,” said Willa.

They’d fed enough film into the can that Jess could take over and finish it up. Willa pulled her hands from her socks, dropping one in the process. She hurried over past the projector. The journal was an oversized notebook with a hardcover. She flipped through the pages as Jess finished putting the film away and closing the canister.

“He’s got to be on his way up here,” Jess said. “I know he saw the light on.”

“I knew it!” Willa said. “The last entry lists a seat belt inspection. Some of the seat belts were locking but not opening. And get this! The dates of all the other maintenance work…it ends like two years ago. They must have automated the work or something. But this seat belt thing…it’s dated three weeks ago.”

“Right when Wayne went missing.”

“Bingo,” Willa said.

“It has to mean something.”

Willa moved to the projection window.

“Oh, no…” she gasped. “He’s on his way up here.”

“Well, we can’t go out the door.”

“And it’s not like we can hide in here.”

“There!” Jess said. She pointed beyond Willa to a door.

They hurried and opened the door. It led into the upper-level superstructure of the ride—a catwalk that led out into the dark and the steel girders that supported Soarin’s huge swings below.

“We’re supposed to go out there?” Willa groaned.

“Just don’t look down!” Jess said.

They stepped out into the dark and pulled the door closed. Jess made the mistake of not following her own advice: she glanced down. One misstep, and they would fall sixty feet through steel pipes to a concrete floor.

“Keep moving,” she said, her voice dry with fright.

* * *

As the test car crested the hill, the Dan Patrick voice announced the start of rough road tests and the car turned and dropped back down a ramp, shaking and vibrating its way to the bottom. Finn remembered this as the place his sister would try to talk and her voice would rattle, amusing the family.

Thought of his sister and his family made him wonder what would happen when he couldn’t be awakened, when his mother discovered him stuck in the Syndrome. An unpleasant thought, he pushed it aside.

He heard Philby scream, a skin-crawling sound that echoed through the ride and he called back, shouting his name. “Philby?”

The stupid seat belt wouldn’t let him out of the car no matter how hard he wrestled with it. The more he fought it, the tighter it gripped him; he suddenly saw what an easy target he would make if anyone came after him. He’d given Philby his own means of self-defense; but Finn was a sitting duck. A strapped-in sitting duck, at that.