Finn Whitman is dancing with Amanda Lockhart. Truth be told, he doesn’t hear the music. He’s pretty much in an alternate universe—a realm in which Amanda is the sun. She throws off heat and brilliance that make his cheeks redden. Four whole hours of this—whoever came up with the idea of prom night should be immortalized, Finn thinks. They deserve a national monument in Washington, D.C., a library on the banks of the Mississippi, and a statue in Central Park.
Amanda’s arms are clasped around his neck; his hands hold her waist. They aren’t all glued together the way some of the other kids are. There’s a sliver of distance between them that feels magnetic; Finn has to hold himself back from pressing closer.
“This is nice,” Amanda says. The queen of understatement.
“Not really,” Finn says. He feels her body tense in apprehension. A cloud of confusion suddenly hangs between them. Amanda seems ready to push away. He speaks in a whisper. “It goes so far beyond ‘nice,’ so far beyond amazing and perfect and brilliant and glorious and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, that you ought to have to sit in the corner for making it sound so underwhelming.”
Amanda’s arms slip down from around his neck to his back and she compresses the space between them. For an instant, they hug. It’s quick, but powerful.
“Thank you.”
Her breath, so close to his ear, sends chills down his spine.
“My only complaint, and it’s a small one: it had to be Disney World.”
“Can you believe it?” She laughs. “More work than treasure.”
He nearly corrects her. The expression is “more work than pleasure” or “more work than leisure.” But he lets it go. Learning to care about someone means trying not to correct or criticize.
By work, Amanda is referring to Finn’s own version of an alternate universe, a universe in which she and her sister, Jess (who isn’t her biological sister) have become full-fledged citizens. Amanda and Jess now travel in the same orbit as Finn and his four closest friends, who have all earned full college scholarships by serving as models for Disney hologram hosts in the theme parks.
The internal Disney technical term for the role Finn and his four friends play in the parks is Disney Host Interactive or Daylight Hologram Image: DHI. What started essentially as a modeling job has grown into something more complex; the kids—they were so young when they all started, Finn thinks—learned that they’d actually been recruited to form a five-person strike force, the Kingdom Keepers. That’s the nickname the Internet community has assigned Finn and the other DHIs. Their real job was to enter the parks at night and battle a dark force attempting to corrupt the park experience. Disney villains who wanted to take over the parks—dubbed Overtakers—were wreaking havoc. The DHIs were meant to put an end to all that.
It turned out that the OTs’ ambitions went far beyond stealing cars from Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin; they meant to destroy the magic of the parks, the magic of Disney. They were instigating a revolution, and the DHIs turned out to be the only force standing in their way.
For the past several years, Finn and his co-DHIs, Philby, Charlene, Maybeck, and Willa, have been more Navy SEAL than hologram host. And even though Amanda and Jess are not official DHIs, Philby and the Keepers have secretly installed the girls’ data onto the DHI computer servers, enabling them as holograms. All of the Keepers have, on numerous occasions, risked their lives to keep the magic alive. If they’d known from the start what they were getting into, maybe they wouldn’t have volunteered. But the expansion of their responsibilities just kind of crept up on them. On one level, Finn thinks, their mentor and leader, an original Disney Imagineer, tricked them into accepting their roles: they were told that if they bailed, Disney would never be the same. Thanks for the warning, Finn thinks grimly.
It has been three years since Finn lost his friend Dillard Cole in the Mexican jungle. Dillard died because of the Overtakers. Since that dark day, the Kingdom Keepers have enjoyed three years of relative quiet. Yet not a single night has passed that Finn hasn’t dreamed of that awful moment. Finn can’t help but feel that he was responsible for Dillard’s death. But according to their fellow DHIs, that is far from the truth.
After he returned from Mexico, Finn’s parents made him go to counseling. That came to an abrupt halt when Finn showed up one day as a DHI and shocked the psychologist by walking through the office door without opening it. It was the psychologist who needed therapy after that.
Next, they put Finn on “medication.” That ill-conceived solution lasted all of one week. He slept better and didn’t dream about Dillard, but he didn’t feel like himself. Finn and his parents decided it wasn’t worth it. Weirdly, the ordeal drew him closer to his parents, especially his mom. For a long time he’d felt alone as a Kingdom Keeper. His mom eventually rallied behind him, but then became a victim of the Overtakers herself. Not a good situation. Throughout an entire fifteen-day voyage on a Disney cruise ship, Finn worried he might never get his real mother back. Now their family was reunited, feeling somehow stronger than before. And Finn’s mom knew what it was like to live with the fear of the Overtakers.