A girl with red-streaked hair stood less than five feet away, also looking out. She’d been aboard the Dream when a banged-up white van had pulled up to the ship in Puerto Vallarta. She smiled at the three of them.
A drone blimp advertising the Disney Channel floated in the sky.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that blimp was following us,” Finn said.
“Oh, no!” Charlene said.
The other two looked at her.
“A kid in the lounge. She said her friend saw us on TV. That it was scary… I thought she was talking about a three sixty-five.”
“But those weren’t scary.” Finn looked up at the blimp.
“That’s exactly what Charlene said,” Willa said. “What’s going on?”
“Two point oh,” Finn said. “Reality TV.”
“W…h…a…t?” Willa looked pale.
“Remember the new contracts they had us sign when they installed the upgrade?”
“A formality,” Willa said. “My mother called it a formality.”
“My parents, too,” Finn said. “But then there’s…that.”
He pointed at the blimp.
“They’re filming us?”
“They’ve turned us into a reality TV show.”
“We don’t know that!” Charlene said.
“Ah, come on!” Finn said, “We’re the real-life Hunger Games! It’ll be the most popular show ever.”
“They would tell us!” Charlene complained.
“And we’d start acting, and they don’t want that. They want us as natural as possible.”
“As if this is natural!” Willa said.
“No kidding.” Finn took his eyes off the blimp. “Like it matters. We’ll know soon enough.” He pointed out at Los Angeles.
“Well, even if they are filming us, it’s not all bad. We’ve got to focus on the positive,” Willa said, attempting to encourage Finn. “Maleficent could be dead.”
“She is dead,” Charlene said.
“No matter if she is or isn’t, they’ll never find their way out. Chernabog is trapped, maybe drowned. They brought their most evil monster, and we defeated him. Them. We beat the Overtakers, Finn. They’re finished.”
“You know what they say about evil,” Finn said in a gravelly, flat voice. “You end it one place, it pops up in another.”
Charlene shot him a disapproving look. Finn’s resulting expression of fatigue and sorrow said it would never be over for him.
“They’re keeping Dillard on ice,” Charlene said, “you know…”
“He’s dead,” Finn said. “I killed him.”
“You shouldn’t have told them that,” Willa said, angrily. “That was a stupid thing to do.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s a crime. You’ll be deported.”
“Extradited.”
“Whatever! Tia Dalma killed him. Not you.”
“You think a judge’ll buy that?”
“We won,” Willa said.
“Too great a price,” Finn said.
“There’s another possibility.” A new voice.
The three turned. Philby and Maybeck walked out onto the deck. The girls swallowed them in leaping hugs.
“Which is?” Willa asked, linking arms with Philby.
“Since you’re all so deeply worried,” Maybeck said, interrupting. “We passed our physicals. No side effects for the second day in a row.”
Finn proposed his theory about the blimp and the reality TV show. Philby just laughed. “You need some rest, man.”
Willa squeezed Philby’s hand as the five lined up against the rail, looking out in the far distance at the rather flat Los Angeles skyline.
“What other possibility?” Willa asked Philby.
“You ever heard of plea bargaining?” Philby said.
“I have nothing to bargain with,” said Finn.
“Not you. Tia Dalma.”
“You lost me.”
Philby reached into his pocket and pulled out a crude-looking hand-sewn doll. “This was found on Tia Dalma.”
The doll, dressed clearly as a boy, had a pin stuck in its chest. Charlene gasped.
“What if this represents…what if this is Dillard?” Philby said. “You handled the knife, sure. But what if Tia Dalma handled you?”
Finn rubbed his finger over the head of the imbedded pin.
“What if we offer to let her go in exchange for her removing that pin?”
“Let her go?” Finn was aghast.
“Is that even possible?” Charlene said hopefully.
“What’s the one thing we’ve learned from all of this?” Philby asked.
Maybeck answered. “Anything’s possible. Every-thing.”