Kingdom Keepers II(47)
Finn checked his watch. “Where’s Philby? And Willa? Philby’s never late to anything.”
“Haven’t seen either of them. Amanda’s hanging at the Conservation Station,” Maybeck said. “Philby hooked up a bunch of other cameras somehow. So now she can see basically everything going on: the attractions, the paths, and all the buildings, inside and out. But she’s stuck out there. She can’t leave her AnimalCam console because she doesn’t want anyone to discover what Philby rigged up for her. What about you?”
“The thing about the brooms—” Finn said, starting to explain the way he’d felt. But then he cut himself off.
“Yeah?”
“Doesn’t make any sense.”
“As if any of this makes sense! Hello? Try me, Whitman.”
“Okay. So pretty soon after I arrived at Hollywood Studios, I thought this crow had spotted me. Then the brooms show up. You know? But they didn’t exactly come after me. They just kind of followed me there. At Voyage of the Little Mermaid it was almost like they were there to watch the show. The way I was.”
“I don’t get it,” Maybeck said.
“You see?” Finn said. “When the BlackBerry rang they saw me. Everybody saw me. But I think the brooms were surprised to see me there. Or maybe they didn’t care.”
“I still don’t get it,” Maybeck admitted, though somewhat reluctantly. Maybeck prided himself on knowing things before others.
Finn blurted out what he’d been thinking ever since the encounter. “Maybe the brooms were at Voyage for the same reason I was: to look for answers. My being there both confirmed they were in the right place and threatened them.”
“Threatened them how?”
“What if the crow was some kind of spy?”
“Like the bat,” Maybeck said.
“Yeah! Exactly! And what if the brooms were sent to follow me? So they did. Until The Great Movie Ride. They didn’t follow me into there. Why?”
“I hope you’re going to answer that.”
“Because by my going in there, they were no longer worried about me. And then when I got to Voyage, they weren’t even looking for me. It was the show that they were interested in.”
“The show,” Maybeck said. “Listen, I’m not getting this. What’s up?”
Finn gathered his courage. “I think the Overtakers heard ‘Under the Sea,’ same as we did.”
“Meaning?”
“Think about it,” Finn said.
He watched as the mental tumblers clicked into place and unlocked Maybeck’s thought. Maybeck spoke slowly. “They’re following the music clue the same way we are…because…they’re…looking for Jez.”
“She escaped,” Finn declared. “They had her in the stump on the savannah. We know that much. Maybe in transferring her, maybe sometime before they ever moved her, she managed to escape. She hid someplace here in AK. And for some reason yet to be determined, she used the music as a clue.”
“She’s stuck in the Park,” Maybeck said, “and she can’t get out without our help. So she played the music to send us a clue.”
“We heard it,” Finn said, “but so did the Over-takers. We both started looking at anything and everything that had to do with ‘Under the Sea.'”
“It makes sense,” Maybeck agreed.
Finn tried the D-Gamer chat room again, sending a shout-out to Willa and Philby. But the screen didn’t change. They weren’t answering.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
“We can’t wait for them any longer. Maybe the dreams in Jez’s journal are supposed to help us find her.”
“We need Willa and Philby,” Maybeck said. “There are a lot of drawings to make sense of.”
Finn said what they both were thinking. “What if something’s happened to them?”
The two boys met eyes with horrified expressions.
33
AMANDA PRESSED THE right-hand button on the camera controls, zooming in to get a closer look at Finn and Maybeck.
The AnimalCam stations—four in all—were enough like a video game that she had immediately gotten the hang of it: a small screen to her right displayed rows and columns of thumbnail images, each representing a different camera mounted somewhere in the Park. Normally, there were about a dozen vantage points offered, all of them devoted to the wildlife on display in the Park: giraffes, elephants, tigers. Philby had upgraded hers. Scrolling down the thumbnail screen, she had dozens of views available to her—maybe a hundred or more. Selecting a particular camera transferred the view to a much larger television screen mounted at eye level. She could then zoom in and out using the two buttons to the right, or maneuver the camera to look left or right, up or down, using a joystick. It provided her with a virtual tour of every aspect of the Animal Kingdom.