The taxi snaked along the two-lane road; the girls sat in silence. Pretty soon, Charlene’s and Amanda’s DHIs hit interference, sputtered, and vanished. Mattie closed her eyes and tried to nap.
It was impossible.
With cell coverage restored, an invisible Amanda spoke.
“Why hide Dillard on the ship?” Frustration punctuated Amanda’s digitally manipulated voice. “If they wanted Finn dead, they would have just killed him.”
“Well, that’s a cheery thought,” said Charlene’s.
Mattie’s head tracked left to right to left like she was watching a tennis match.
“Maybe not,” said Amanda. “They brought him back to the ship. If they haven’t already, at some point they’re going to realize it’s not Finn. That can’t be good for Dillard.”
“I don’t get it,” Charlene said. “Why bother with all this? Why not just capture Finn on the ship?”
Mattie said, “Because if it happens off the ship, it’s someone else’s responsibility. No one’s going to search the ship for someone who disappeared off the ship.”
“They wanted the cruise to continue,” Amanda said.
“We don’t know if they still think it’s Finn.” Charlene sounded excited. “If we’re lucky––if Dillard’s lucky––the disguise is still working. And that means Finn can’t be seen on the ship. If they discover they’ve been tricked, that won’t be good for Dillard.”
“Mattie,” Amanda said. “We need to send Philby a text using Charlene’s phone and have him tell Finn to stay in the stateroom, out of sight. He can’t be seen by anyone. We’ll have to smuggle him food and stuff.”
“The boy in the duffel bag…he was alive,” Mattie said. “Dillard was alive.”
Charlene said, “Let’s hope we can keep him that way.”
Mattie took out the phone and began to type out a text.
* * *
The parting was not easy. Mattie repeatedly told them she’d be okay, but she didn’t believe it. A teenage girl in a foreign country, headed for the boat to take her up the coast to Puerto Vallarta. Willa’s passport. Charlene’s iPhone. A fair amount of cash, and a credit card Philby had “borrowed” from his mother’s purse. His mother wouldn’t look for the card until she needed more cash from an ATM. She didn’t use her plastic in foreign countries.
But it was still risky. Mattie and Willa didn’t look perfectly alike, but in an odd way the red streak in Mattie’s dark hair helped. If you took Willa and made her Goth, there was enough of a similarity between her and Mattie to believe a four-year-old photo.
Amanda discovered that her DHI could not cry tears. But still, feeling herself crying while a DHI was just another on a long list of things that surprised her about the hologram experience—like not feeling humidity and temperature change in the same way, and rarely if ever feeling hungry. But her heart could ache, as it did now, as she stood on a street corner beneath a tropical tree, the sound of car horns in the distance like coyotes crying beneath the stars.
“Do you think the passport will work?” Charlene asked.
“I think that’s the least of her problems. You know how far it is?”
“But she’ll beat us there?”
“Supposedly. But who knows?”
“Have a little faith!”
Amanda found Charlene’s gung-ho energy annoying. She was all for optimism and courage in the face of danger, but a long boat ride up the coast for a sixteen-year-old girl carrying someone else’s passport? Was it better than even odds that they’d ever see Mattie again? And how would they feel if she failed to make the rendezvous in Puerto Vallarta? What then?
“It was supposed to be her and Dillard traveling together. That made a lot more sense than her going it alone,” Amanda said.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“But not always a good reason!” Amanda had had about enough.
“Since when are you a glass-half-empty type?”
Amanda reached out her hand. The Return would be an easier transmission if their holograms connected into a single graphics file.
“She should be requesting the return from Philby any—” Amanda failed to get the last words out.
She awoke in her upper bunk in Mrs. Nash’s house. Before she fully opened her eyes, she ached to be back aboard the Disney Dream…with Finn.
INFORMED BY UNCLE BOB of the boys’ visit to his office, Clayton Freeman walked with Rafina, a fellow security member from Rwanda. The breakthrough had come only moments before Bob’s call. A child had spilled lemonade at a table with a view of the mammoth Funnel Vision screen. Clayton had jumped up to help clean it, but had stopped in the midst of laying napkins across the spill, his memory jogged: a string of successive drops stained the decking in a straight line.