Kingdom Keepers V(63)

“I may have been here before,” he muttered.

“That’s random,” Charlene said.

“But I don’t have the fob.” He was talking to himself. Staring into his own projected palm. “I had the Return before.”

“Last I checked, we don’t live in the future. Only Jess. Even then, she doesn’t live it, she dreams it.”

Finn snapped his head in her direction. Was that what was happening to him? he wondered. Had he really begun to dream the future the way Jess did?

“It was Willa, not you,” he said.

Charlene wasn’t paying attention, staring down the long deck at the circling hyenas.

“Maybe we could put a pin in this and come back to it later, huh? My kingdom for a dog bone,” she said.

Finn patted the pocket of his shorts, an astonished look on his face. “It crossed over!” He reached into the pocket. “You gotta love 2.0.” He withdrew a Snickers bar.

“Okay,” she said, staring at it. “Here’s the plan.”

* * *

The steel beneath her feet shuddered as the sound of water rushing against the hull filled Willa’s ears.

“Hyenas,” she said, having read Charlene’s text.

“I like mine barbecued,” said Maybeck.

“I’d prefer visible,” she said. “I’d rather know where they are.”

“Wish granted,” he said.

Two hyenas, one toward the bow, coming at them; the other at the stern, also closing in.

“I think we walked into their trap,” she said. “They’re hunters, you know. They work in packs.”

“So do we,” Maybeck said. “The pack thing. Any ideas?”

“Have you ever seen shows on Animal Planet? They capture snakes and alligators with those wire things? Like a noose.”

“Yeah. So?” He paused and said, “I am not wrestling a hyena. Forget it.”

“Get real, macho man. Take off your belt.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She unfastened her belt and withdrew it from the loops. Her shorts hung loosely on her hips. “Now, slowpoke.” She passed him, staying close to the wall.

The hyenas, loudly sniffing the air, closed in on them like the jaws of a vise. Drool splattered the deck.

“They’ve got our scent,” Maybeck declared.

“Your belt!” she repeated.

Maybeck slipped off his belt. “You are one weird girl.”

“Ugh,” she grunted, grabbing a shuffleboard cue from the wall rack where the disks and cues were stored. The game’s two opposing triangles were painted onto the ship’s deck. The cues and disks were secured in a rack on the wall. She passed Maybeck a cue and one disk, keeping one of each for herself.

“Awkward time for a game, don’t you think?” he said. “Rain check?”

The cue’s pole ended in a semicircular Y that fit around the disk. As if she knew what she was doing—and maybe she did—Willa popped the plastic ends off the two pushers at the end of the Y and forced her woven belt over them, securing the belt to the end of the cue.

“What are you doing?” Maybeck asked.

“Hold this!” she said, repeating the procedure with his belt. She extended the cue, and Maybeck saw that she’d pulled the belt through its own hasp, leaving a loop dangling from the end of the shuffleboard cue.

“A croc catcher,” Maybeck said.

The belt loop formed a noose.

She said, “The disk is to lure them. They’ll think it’s food. Hold the disk in your weak hand, pole in your strong hand. When they stick their heads through the loop—”

“Bam!” Maybeck said. “I got it!” He moved judiciously toward the slinking hyena that lumbered toward him with a pronounced sway, as if drunk or maybe very, very confident. The hyena showed no sign of backing off. If anything, it seemed poised to strike. Maybeck took two steps toward it, then, as it lunged for him, a step back.

A costly mistake.

* * *

It was exactly the same, only different, Finn thought. The hyenas…the factory—only it wasn’t a factory, it was a ship. And he was on the ship. And so were the hyenas. He was a hologram, not himself. It wasn’t a dream, but it wasn’t reality.

“Why was I running,” he asked Charlene, “if I’d crossed over?”

“Fear,” she answered. “You weren’t fully crossed over, I’m thinking.”

A logical explanation, but Finn could control his hologram better than any of the other Keepers. He wouldn’t have let fear corrupt him.

“Maybe it was for Willa,” Charlene said. “Maybe you were afraid for Willa. You had the Return, right? So in order to hold on to the Return you couldn’t have been pure DHI.”