Finn fingered the page torn from Jess’s diary. The boy and the girl kissing. The building in the background that looked like steps, or maybe a multiplex. Something was bothering him about it, but he couldn’t make sense of it. He looked up. Everyone was staring at him. They seemed to be waiting for him to say something.
He looked around the table at his friends. He thought about Amanda collapsing to the ground—that look in Jess’s eyes. He felt worse than he’d ever felt.
“We’d better get started,” he said.
THAT NIGHT, FOUR OF THE KEEPERS entered Epcot prior to closing, while Philby monitored the DHI server traffic from home, prepared to warn them if bandwidth usage indicated the presence of OT holograms. Finn entrusted Dillard Cole to Park hop and hide three of their four phones in the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and the Studios in the event they later crossed over.
Finn’s mother dropped him, Maybeck, and Charlene off in the Epcot parking lot. She planned to stay in the car, prepared to help them make a hasty retreat if needed. After much begging and promises made by Finn that both mother and son knew would never be kept, she had visited Wanda Alcott in her apartment on his behalf. If the OTs were watching Wanda—his reasoning went—the arrival of a grown-up at the apartment was unlikely to stir much interest. The visit was short, but significant. Finn’s mother, working from a note card and passing along Jess’s two sketches, briefed Wanda on the events of the past week, culminating in the Keeper theory that they had all been betrayed by someone within the Imagineers—who was either under the spell of, or cooperating freely with, the Overtakers. From what his mother later told Finn, this news had apparently come as no great surprise to Wanda; she had been avoiding contact with the Keepers because she harbored the same suspicions. However, now, given the immediacy of their need, she’d agreed to help.
Finn, once again in baseball cap and sunglasses, hid his phone—the fourth and last—outside Mouse Gear in a wall-mounted metal fixture near the Epcot plaza. Leaving the phone behind made him painfully aware of the isolation that resulted. But should they fail in their efforts and the need arose to cross over later that same night, they gave themselves a chance to Return, and that overruled all other considerations.
The three Keepers—Finn, Maybeck, and Charlene—used the employee passes Wayne had provided a year earlier to enter Epcot by an employee entrance shortly after eight pm.
Within minutes of their arrival into the Park, Maybeck said, “Do you see who I see?”
No Park visitor would have recognized her with her dark hair up in a bun and a Rays baseball cap worn backward. She looked tomboyish in a loose-fitting, man-tailored shirt, and dark green Capri pants. But for those who knew her well, there was no mistaking Willa.
They caught up to her, showering her with smiles.
“But I thought—” Charlene said.
“Yeah, well…my mother has a library board meeting tonight, and my father took a sleeping pill because he’s flying to Europe tomorrow, and they can ground me for eternity for all I care, but there’s no way I’m leaving Amanda under some stupid spell.”
Her act of courage elevated the spirits of the entire group. She would team up with Maybeck in Morocco, while Finn and Charlene took China, as already planned. Philby was home monitoring server activity. Willa had “borrowed” her father’s BlackBerry and called Philby to give him a way to reach them. Charlene had brought a pair of walkie-talkies that had a short range; her family used them on ski trips. It wasn’t a perfect setup, but Finn felt confident they could at least communicate one pair to the other.
They split up.
He and Charlene caught up to Dillard at an outside merchandise stall in front of Mexico. Like two spies, Finn accepted the pass of a folded sheet of paper from his friend, and Dillard was gone, off to scout China and Morocco. Dillard had written down detailed descriptions of the locations for the phones he’d hidden in the other Parks. For Finn, desperate to free Amanda, it felt like the hastily assembled plan was actually coming together. He radioed the locations to Maybeck so that all four of them now knew how to execute a Return if later needed.
On Dillard’s part, playing even a small role in a Kingdom Keepers mission was the thrill of a lifetime. He’d often begged Finn to turn him into a DHI and make him part of the group. Finn had told him that was impossible, though he was now reconsidering, beginning to wonder if expanding the Keepers might be necessary. The Overtakers were outnumbering them. Something had to be done.
Willa and Maybeck headed around the east side of the lake; Finn and Charlene, the west. Remaining alert for crash-test dummies, Security patrols, jesters, trolls, spiders, vultures, and a twenty-foot snake, they kept to the crowds.