THE CONSTELLATIONS GREW DIMMER, the night sky swallowing them whole. These were no normal stars—they were red, blue, white, green, yellow. Nor were they strung in familiar patterns. Instead, they formed long, straight lines, the stars symmetrically spaced.
It was only as white, foaming clouds rose to challenge the stars, dousing Finn Whitman’s face with salt water, that he realized the lights weren’t stars at all.
But neither was he a boy.
Not exactly.
“Help!” A girl’s cry. Finn fanned the water, turning around as the ship’s wake arrived, bobbing him higher. Just before plummeting into another wave trough, he saw a girl flailing to stay afloat.
Willa. He remembered now: the two of them jumping from Deck 4 of the Disney Dream cruise ship, leaping into the darkness to avoid a pack of mad hyenas on their heels. Leaving their fellow Keepers back on the ship.
The Disney Dream was on a celebration cruise to inaugurate the opening of the new locks of the Panama Canal, while also promoting the onboard installation of the Kingdom Keepers’ hologram DHI guides. The dangers that had arisen on and off the ship during the cruise’s first stop at Disney’s private island, Castaway Cay, had happened less than a day earlier. It felt more like a year.
The speed with which the Dream now receded surprised and frightened Finn. As a passenger he’d had no idea how fast they’d been moving. As he watched the cruise ship shrink away at an alarming pace, he understood that in a minute or two it would be just another flickering light on the horizon.
Another wave from the ship’s wake caught Finn, lifting him like a cork. He saw Willa riding the top of the adjacent crest, looking toward the ship.
“Over here!” Finn shouted.
Treading water, Willa turned to face him.
Then she sparkled and vanished.
Finn pulled hard, bodysurfing down the rolling wave and swimming strongly toward Willa. Stretching to extend his freestyle stroke—amazed by his own strength—he saw his hand and forearm dissolve into glitter, a sparkle of light washed away by the hungry spray.
An instant later, Willa reappeared—and so did Finn’s arm.
The phenomenon would have stunned, even frightened, an ordinary person. But to Finn it made perfect sense. He and Willa were holograms, three-dimensional projections of light generated by a computer server on board the disappearing Dream. The farther away from the ship, the worse the projection. Being low in the water as they were, the two holograms were subject to additional interference from each wave. Riding the crests, they came into clarity. But it wouldn’t last, and once their projections failed, Finn would have no way of finding Willa. The audio stream, being a narrower bandwidth, might last slightly longer, but it wasn’t a risk worth taking.
“Here!” Finn shouted a second time. Kicking ferociously, he propelled his hologram down from the wave’s crest, through the trough, and up the other side, cutting the distance between them in half. Their holograms sputtered, a result of distance from the ship. Any farther, and they would dissolve altogether.
He and Willa, along with several other high school kids now aboard the Disney Dream, had once modeled for the roles of Disney Host Interactive (also known among Disney Imagineers as Daylight Hologram Imaging) teenage Park hosts, holograms that guided families around the Disney parks. And now the cruise ships.
Undisclosed at the time (some would say “unknown”) was a side effect that allowed the DHIs to “cross over” in their sleep, becoming their hologram replicas. Finn and his friends often found themselves inside a Disney park while their bodies, their human selves, slept at home. They’d quickly discovered that their holograms had been engineered by Disney’s Imagineers to do battle with certain Disney villains—the Overtakers—whose one desire was to take over the parks and ruin them.
The OTs, as the Kingdom Keepers referred to the Overtakers, dreamed of a darker experience for Park guests than the one Walt Disney had envisioned. That same dark force, in the form of Maleficent, the Evil Queen, and Cruella de Vil, was currently aboard the Dream—and intent on turning it into the Nightmare.
This time, the Overtakers had stolen a historic journal once belonging to the Disney Imagineers—or perhaps even Walt himself. The Overtakers had infiltrated the ship, and smuggled Tia Dalma and Chernabog—a mysterious and monstrous creature from Fantasia—aboard at Castaway Cay. The addition of a witch doctor and the most evil of Walt Disney’s creations didn’t bode well. Where Maleficent went, trouble followed.
Which accounted for the man-eating hyenas that had forced Finn and Willa to jump overboard in the first place, and had put them in their current predicament.