She hesitated a moment, seeing a possible route play out in her mind’s eye—each toehold, hand and finger grip she would take. One pipe to the next; one clamp at a time.
She drew in a deep breath and made her first move.
* * *
Philby heard Elvis meowing on the other side of the bathroom door.
“Tssst! ” He tried to discourage him using the family tongue-between-the-teeth sound.
“MEEEEOWWWW!” Elvis wailed, sounding like a police siren.
“Tssssssssst! ”
Bang! Bang!
He was jolted back against the well of the toilet.
“Dell?” His mother.
“Busy,” he said.
“You open this door this minute!”
Philby said, “Be right out,” while looking for somewhere in this shoe box room to hide his gear.
“OPEN THIS DOOR!”
When his mother shouted like that, he lacked resistance. He obeyed, turning the knob.
Seen from his mother’s perspective, her son, fully dressed, was sitting on the closed toilet, his computer open in his lap, a phone, also on, resting on his thigh. Her face burning a new shade of crimson, she said nothing; she simply extended her hands expecting delivery of the goods.
“Mom, I can’t.”
“I don’t want to hear it, young man.”
Her hands, now shaking with rage, remained extended.
“Mom.”
“It’s nearly one o’clock. We’ll discuss it in the morning.”
He glanced at the time. How had the time passed so quickly? One am? Finn would be expecting the Return.
“Mom! Please! Just listen.”
“I’ll listen in the morning.” She added, “Maybe.”
Philby had never seen her in this particular state before—like a teakettle boiling over. Wayne had said that a friend would turn his back and betray them. He hadn’t mentioned mothers.
He closed the laptop and handed it to her, feeling like a traitor. Maybe that was it, he thought: Maybe I am the traitor Wayne warned us about.
* * *
“Guard!” Finn hated to put Pluto at risk, but the dog seemed their best chance to get out of this with all their limbs intact.
“Higher ground,” Amanda said. “It’s the best defensive position.”
“Move slowly,” Finn said.
They backed up, taking small steps, never taking their eyes off the alligators. Pluto saw them, but held his ground.
“Good dog!” Finn called out.
They slowly worked up the hill, reaching a path.
Amanda said, “Did you know that alligators can run thirty-five miles per hour?”
“TMI,” Finn said.
“If we turn and run—” Amanda proposed.
“—they’ll have us for breakfast,” Finn said, completing her sentence for her. “I’m thinking: Scratch’s Mine.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“It will force them into single file. They’ll have to switch directions, which slows them down. If we hurry, we get out the other end of the tunnel ahead of them, at which point we head uphill, which is not what they’ll instinctively think. By the time they figure it out—if they figure it out—we’re gone.”
“What if we just made a run for it? For Minnie? The raft?”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll put you onto the raft. That works,” Finn said.
“Me? What about you?” she said.
“I…The thing is, after everything we’ve figured out…Philby, me, the others. You and Jess. I need to check this place out,” he said. “The pirate, Stitch, the alligators. It just doesn’t add up.”
“Then I’m not going.”
“You should.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“I can do this alone,” he said.
“Keepers work in pairs,” she said.
Technically, she was not a Keeper. But it seemed like the wrong time to remind her. He thought maybe that was her point.
She said, “What if I, you know, used my…What if I pushed?”
“You’re mostly DHI at the moment.”
“Actually, I’m barely DHI. Trust me, I feel much more human than hologram. What if, once we’re inside the mine, I could push the gators, and we could run for Minnie? Being inside the mine will concentrate the push. I wouldn’t need much for it to work. We could tell Minnie to leave without us. The gators might be fooled, and think we’d left.”
“We’d be trapped here,” he reminded.
“So we’d tell her to hang on the other side and wait for our signal.”
It seemed like the best way to get the gators off their trail, but a plan not without risk. If Minnie had to abandon the raft…
He said, “I guess if the push works, we go for it. If not, we’ll rethink.”