“That’s why you like him.”
“I guess,” Willa said.
“It’s okay to like him,” Charlene said. “To want to go out with him.”
“I don’t want to go out with him. I don’t want to like him. The five of us…it’s like we work together. Right? It’s totally consuming, this DHI stuff.” Willa hesitated. “To tell you the truth, if this stuff about our being replaced is for real, I won’t be complaining. I mean, I love you all. You know that. But these past couple of years, I’ve had four friends and no life.”
“We get free cruises,” Charlene said.
“With our parents.”
“Hey,” Charlene said. “My mom doesn’t expect to see me. She knows I’m working and that when I’m not working I’m in Vibe. She’s loving this trip, believe me.” Charlene paused, and brushed her hand gently across Maybeck’s forehead. “For the record: we are not leaving him behind in Panama,”
“The passage is tomorrow morning. We’ll reach the Pacific, the Panama side of the canal, at the end of the day around sunset.” Willa stared at Maybeck. “Whoa!” She sat forward.
“What?” Charlene asked excitedly.
“How stupid can we be? I mean we’ve done it before, several times!” Willa was talking to herself. “No reason we couldn’t at least try.”
“Try what?”
“What happens when we’re asleep, Charlie?”
Charlene didn’t answer.
“We cross over.”
Charlene still wasn’t getting it.
“Maybeck’s asleep!” Willa reminded her.
“O…M…G!”
“If Philby turns on the 2.0 server, maybe his DHI appears and we can find him and talk to him. Maybe we can get through to him. Get him to wake up.” Willa took a moment to think it through more carefully, and then nodded decisively. “We need to call a meeting.”
* * *
At noon, with their DHIs on break for an hour, the Keepers met up in Vibe, the teen-only lounge. They sat off by themselves, wary of OTK spies.
The discussion began with Finn’s excitement over the concept of the three steps. This prompted a response from Willa.
“Before I talk about Maybeck, there’s something we have to think about,” Willa said. “In my Web searches, I read that Aztec priests believed ‘a great ongoing sacrifice sustains the Universe.’ That almost matches the line in the journal about the gods: ‘with their sacrifice, they gave us life.’”
“The OTs are looking to perform some kind of sacrifice?” Philby sounded deeply concerned.
“Three steps,” Willa said. “At Castaway, they got a witch doctor. On Aruba, a key flower. And that leaves a sacrifice. It says it right in the journal.”
“‘One of you will die,’” Finn said, quoting Luowski—admittedly not the most reliable of sources.
“That’s comforting,” Storey snapped sarcastically.
“The person sacrificed was often a young woman,” Willa said. She looked directly at Charlene.
Finn looked over at Philby, who said nothing.
Finn said, “We received an e-mail from Amanda.” He made a point of not indicting Philby in front of the others. “Bottom line is—”
Philby interrupted in a whisper. “It had to do with Aruba, and Aruba’s behind us. We will work in pairs from now on. We stay out in public—no crew corridors unless absolutely necessary.”
Finn boiled. “No, it had to do with Charlene. It showed Charlene in trouble. So we have to at least consider the possibility that she is the one who is meant for the sacrifice.”
“We don’t have near enough to make that jump,” Philby said.
“Tell them about Terry,” Charlene said to Willa, attempting to deflect attention from herself—a rarity. But everyone looked at her intently just the same. “Seri-ously,” she said. “Philby’s right. Been there, done that. We made it through the cave drama. Let’s move on.”
A long silence settled over the group.
Willa offered her theory about crossing Maybeck over while in a coma.
“That’s brilliant!” Philby said.
“If we can explain his situation to his hologram, then maybe when we return him he can try harder to wake up.”
“If he were here,” Charlene said, “he’d tell us that’s a stretch.”
“It’s worth a try,” Finn said.
“So, as soon as the ship’s DHI server is down, we light up 2.0 and try to find Maybeck’s DHI.”
“We can’t afford to wait,” Charlene said.