Kingdom Keepers V(58)

She waved her hand and hit him, open-palmed, squarely on the waist.

“Ah!” she said. “The real item!”

“You were expecting?”

“What I expect and what I hope for are two different things. Which do you want to know?”

He tried to swallow, but his throat was plugged with nerves. His voice cracked as he said, “H-hope for.”

“Yes. I was hoping you were you and not the hologram you, although I know the hologram you a lot better. I bet I’ve toured with you a dozen times if you add up all the parks.”

Finn got this more and more: people who, by touring with his hologram, mistook that they’d spent time with him. She apparently knew the difference, but the look in her eyes was still somewhat dreamy.

“And you are?” he said.

“Thrilled,” she said. “To meet you.” She blushed. “Storey Ming.”

Finn offered her his hand and they shook hands. Hers were calloused. Not what he’d been expecting.

“Clay,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I work with clay,” she said, explaining her hands. “Dries out my hands. Makes them rough.”

“They’re not rough,” he lied.

“You think? They’re like reptile skin,” she said. “But I throw good pots!”

“You’re a passenger? A guest?”

“A friend. More like you than you think,” she said. “A so-called celebrity—not that you’re so-called, far from it; but I am. I’m giving a couple workshops in the middle of the cruise. It’s a new thing called All Hands On Deck. Me. There’s a painter. Someone doing beadwork. Jewelry. Sea days. You know about sea days?”

“Only that they were on the itinerary.”

“Days we never hit land. No port. Just out in the middle of the ocean.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Not as a guest of Disney, but yeah. Other ships. And my parents love the Disney cruises.”

“What’s Castaway Cay like?”

“The island? Tomorrow? Awesome! If you like white sand and beautiful water, that is. And food. And bikes. And feeding stingrays.”

“Seriously?”

“Totally! And Jet Skis. Snorkeling. Volleyball. It’s incredible. You’re going to love it.” She hesitated. “I could show you around, maybe? I mean, if you want?”

“Yeah! Sure! Of course.” He heard the reluctance in his own voice and regretted it. He was so used to hanging with the Keepers that he didn’t like making other plans. He needed to get over that.

“If you’ve got other plans—” she said.

“No, it’s not that. It’s just my friends…”

“The other DHIs? That would be way cool!”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll all do something together.”

That offer appeared to excite her. Finn thought fame a strange bedfellow. Storey Ming didn’t know any of the other Keepers, but she was stoked at the thought of spending a day with any or all of them.

It didn’t strike him as odd at the time that a girl, older than him and quite pretty, might take an interest in him.

But it soon would.

* * *

At one point, their mission had seemed simple enough. After all, they’d located an OT rogue computer server once before. That had been in Animal Kingdom, and it felt like a long time ago now. They’d learned so much since then. Get on the ship as planned. Attach the GPS. They’d be notified if the ISP location from the OT server matched the ship’s. If so, they would seek out the server and destroy it. The possibility that the ship’s refrigerators were being used as a hiding place by Maleficent made all the more sense when coupled with the existence of a server—computers worked best when operating at cool temperatures.

But retrieving Walt’s stolen journal presented a much bigger challenge and held far greater importance: first they had to find it; then they had to get it back; then the Imagineers would have to figure out what was so important about it. It obviously presented some kind of threat, or why would it be so important to recover it in the first place?

The staterooms came equipped with two complimentary wireless Wave Phones that could connect to other Wave Phones aboard the ship. Philby had made sure that all the Keepers had every number saved into favorites so the Wave Phones could be used whenever needed. They were also capable of texting.


asleep by midnight. crssovr at 12:20. arrival bckstge. wait 4 all.



Mrs. Philby had allowed Finn and her son to room together in Finn’s stateroom that connected to hers by a shared door. A big mistake on her part.

“She sleeps like a rock lately,” Philby said. “Give it fifteen minutes, we could drive a tank through there and she wouldn’t wake up.”