If you are also now worried that Button will take Rocco into her terrier paws, shove him into her mouth, and gnaw him to bits, imagine how Henry feels. Because right then, it seems fairly certain that Rocco will be lost forever in the twisty innards of Button’s belly. This will be disastrous for Rocco, of course, but any dreams of friendship Henry has are also vanishing as fast as a rare bird in the wild.

  A Rare Bird in the Wild

  Instead of chewing on a delicious, satisfying lizard, though, Button is standing on the dry, scratchy front lawn, waiting next to Apollo’s bike. Rocco is sitting upright on her back. This is surprising, but also somewhat of a miracle, given the general history of dogs and fast-moving creatures. Apollo puts his hand to his heart, relieved. Henry can’t believe his eyes. He clutches his secondhand copy of the Ranger Scout Handbook, sixth edition, to his chest with joy.

  “Button!” Henry leans down and scruffs her neck. He kisses her, big and noisy. Not right on the lips, but sort of. “Good dog!”

  And then, Button does something else extraordinary. She paws at the bike. You know, like a dog in a movie. The champion dog. The best kind of dog that you want to fling your arms around and hug hard, even if there’s no time for that.

  “You’re right. We need to get out of here,” Henry tells her.

  “This place is dangerous!” Apollo says. This is quite true. It’s so true that for a second, Henry wants to cry the way you do when someone notices something you’ve felt for a long time.

  Henry scrambles to the side yard near the garbage cans, where his old bike leans against the fence. It’s a little rusty, for sure, but the bike is the last of his most cherished possessions. He bought it for two dollars at the neighbor’s yard sale. He tucks his Ranger Scout Handbook under the nearby rhododendron for safekeeping.

  “Follow me!” Henry says. This just pops out of his mouth, too. He has no idea where this sudden command has even come from. The little brother, the crying mother, the potential best friend, evil—it’s made pieces in him whirl and shift and click into new places. On a normal day, he’d be huddled in his room doing homework, even though there was no homework, even though it was summer and school was out and everyone else was playing. Now, though, he just ran away from his father’s roar, and astonishing stuff is bursting out of his mouth right and left. It’s rather alarming. Even more: When he says Follow me, Apollo actually follows him.

  Henry gets on his bike, and Apollo gets on his. The thing is, Henry knows just where to lead them. There’s only one place to go when you need help this badly.

  CHAPTER 5

  Vlad Luxor Sends a Message

  They pedal like crazy, their tires whirring and spinning. Button runs alongside. Rocco holds on, same as a cowboy on a wild horse.

  “Hey, Henry!” Apollo shouts. “Where are we going?”

  “The lighthouse!” Henry shouts back.

  “The lighthouse? Are we even allowed to go there?”

  “Trust me!” Henry calls.

  A Cowboy on a Wild Horse

  And it seems as if Apollo does, because when Henry looks over his shoulder, there’s Apollo, hunched down with speed, his tennis shoes a circling blur. Henry has made this trip many times, in secret, without his parents noticing he was gone, and so he knows the way. After their neighborhood ends, Henry will lead them into town, down to the very end of Main Street. There, they’ll take the dirt path through Huge Meadow. As the cobbled streets retreat behind them, they’ll bend and weave through the glorious-smelling green and yellow grasses now packed with dandelions and wildflowers, until they reach the flat circular grass around the Y.

  Now, though, Henry pedals through town, past the French bakery, the candy store, the Always Open Grocery. His tires bump along the cobblestones, past the brick buildings and lampposts. Today, there’s no time to gaze at all the wonderful things in the windows that are never his—the glazed sweet rolls in the shapes of animals, the buttery braids of bread, the Rainbow Target Pops and Sugared Fruit Zips. His feet press hard on the pedals; his fingers grip the handlebars. He passes Big Meats, and Creamy Dreamy Dairy. Just as his front tire crosses into the town square at the very center of Main Street, though, he skids to a stop.

  The big billboard with Vlad Luxor’s image . . . Well, when he spots it, he’s so shocked, and he brakes so fast, that his bike tires actually make an arc of black on the street. Behind him, Apollo screeches to a stop, too. Button freezes, staring upward.

  “Oh man.” Apollo’s cheeks are red from pedaling so hard. His handsome forehead is sweaty. “Oh man, oh man, oh man, Henry. What is that?”

  Henry has no idea, but it’s alarming, for sure. As usual, Vlad Luxor smiles down from the enormous sign, wearing that black tuxedo with tails, a gold crown on his head. His chest is puffed out, his hair is perfect, and his teeth have the yellowish tint of an old pillowcase. But there’s something new above the billboard. It’s a long, thin screen with scrolling words, lit with blue lights. Maybe it’s an ever-changing message or advertisement. Certainly, it’s a new way of spreading misery. Along the street, men slide ladders and plunk equipment back into their trucks. There’s the shuddering sound of doors slamming shut.

  “I don’t know, Apollo. It’s like he’s trying to talk to us.”

  The grocer from the Always Open steps outside and looks up, too. So does Ms. Esmé Silvooplay, the baker. A child and his mother come out of the candy store and look toward the screen, and so do people from the other side of the town square. Customers from the two fanciest restaurants, Rio Royale and La GreenWee, run out into the street with their white napkins still tucked into their shirts, toast still gripped in their fingertips, pancakes stuck on forks. Ms. Toomey, from Socket-Toomey Hardware, looks up and crosses her arms over her overalls. Henry spots Mr. Needleman, Vlad Luxor’s new right-hand man, leaning against a lamppost, his arms folded in satisfaction.

  Henry reads the words scrolling on and on. VLAD LUXOR MAKES YOUR LIFE BEAUTIFUL! VLAD LUXOR MAKES YOUR LIFE BEAUTIFUL! VLAD LUXOR MAKES YOUR LIFE BEAUTIFUL!

  “It’s a—” Lie, Apollo is about to say, but Henry claps his hand over Apollo’s mouth. That mother with her child could be one of the people who leave baskets of fruit at Vlad Luxor’s iron gate in that iron wall around Rulers Mountain. Even Ms. Silvooplay, unlikely as it seems, might be a spy who whispers things into Needleman’s ear. The last thing Henry needs is two naked lizards on his hands.

  Under the lamppost, Needleman whistles a cheerful tune. He adjusts his cuff links, entirely pleased with himself. He smiles as if he’s done a good deed, and when he does, Henry gets that shuddery feeling you get when a person pretends to be one thing but is really another.

  When a Person Pretends to Be One Thing but Is Really Another

  “Let’s go,” Henry says.

  They get on their bikes and head off again. They ride through the town square, and all the way to the end of Main Street. They bump down onto the dirt road of Huge Meadow, but Henry’s confidence has vanished, and his legs feel heavy. There’s an enormous weight in his chest. Apollo is pedaling with great effort, too. When Henry sneaks a glance back at him, it looks like Apollo is about to cry. His shoulders slink. Even Button has slowed to a trot.

  Huge Meadow feels especially huge. It’s hard for Henry to remember that it’s summer and that he’s in a large and lovely expanse of yellow and green grasses with sweet-smelling flowers all around. The blades of passing weeds scrape his ankles, and dandelion fluff stuffs his nose, and by the time they reach the Y at the end of town, nothing feels very beautiful. In the spot of round, flat grass that surrounds the Y, Henry brakes to a stop. Apollo does the same. Button and Rocco stand still.

  In the Circle of the Y, on a day like this, you can see the whole of Hollow Valley in front of you, and after that, the young green trees that mark the beginnings of the Wilds, the tangle of deep, thick forest that leads to the Jagged Mountains. When Henry squinches his eyes, he can actually make out their white, snowy tips marching unevenly across the blue of the sky. Button lifts her nose into the air and sniff-sniffs, and Henry is sure that she can smell the sun-warmed valley and the mossy darkness of the forest and the cold, sheer rock faces of the mountains. What’s beyond the Jaggeds, though, no one knows. No dog could smell that far, either.

  Even more important than the hinterland outstretched in front of them are the last two roads you can reach at this farthest-most edge of town—the one now on their right and the one now on their left. When Best Farriver was their ruler, either road was safe and fine, because everything all around was full of goodness. Today, if they take the road to the left, they’ll wind down, down until they arrive at the beaming lighthouse at the edge of the Indigo Sea, but if they take the road to the right, they will come to a dead stop at the barred iron wall and the now-gated entrance to Rulers Mountain. Past that gate, the road winds up, up until it reaches the top, where Vlad Luxor’s immense black-mirrored tower sits. The Wilds ahead, the Jagged Mountains, all that land between left and right—well, that’s where things get murky. In all that middle ground, it’s hard to tell exactly where you are, and if you venture into it, you could easily find yourself in places you hadn’t intended.

  Apollo gets off his bike. As he stands there with his feet planted in the Circle of the Y, he looks up toward Vlad’s mirrored tower at the top of Rulers Mountain. It’s so enormous that you can see it from anywhere in town, and from any distance. The tower rises to the sky, fifty-eight stories of black mirror stretching past the clouds. The mirrors reflect the whole sky and earth around it, but the images are dark and buckled and warped, and in those mirrors, the trees appear to stretch and tilt, and the sky slants. The shadow of the tower seems enormous, too. Enormous enough to maybe reach the sea, to cover the lighthouse, even.

  “Do you think he can see us from here?” Apollo’s voice is almost a whisper. This is not the same Apollo who slides into first base without even noticing the burn on his knees, or who stands at the map right in front of the class and points to Constantinople. Apollo looks as small and scared as a rabbit in the middle of the road.

  Apollo and Henry and Button and Rocco—they all look very small with the mirrored building looming above them. You can feel a sudden and overwhelming helplessness when you are up against something so big and so bad. You can feel tears well up when a little brother has been turned into a lizard and is now riding on the back of a Jack Russell terrier. You can almost want to give up.

  “I don’t think he can see us. It’s quite far,” Henry says. His voice wobbles.

  “The lighthouse seems very far, too,” Apollo says. “I can’t even smell the ocean from here.”

  The lighthouse. It’s been Henry’s only hope his whole life long. There, you can find practically all the wisdom in the world, and all the safety of a circling beam of light. But right then, every bad thing feels bigger than every good thing, which is almost the very definition of despair.

  “It’s closer than it seems.”

  Henry barely believes his own words. His voice is tired. His thin little legs are exhausted from all that pedaling.

  “I don’t know, Henry,” Apollo says. “I mean, it’s just you and me and Button. How can we turn Rocco back into a boy when we’re not—” He doesn’t dare say it right there in the open: spell breakers. But Henry understands anyway.

  Henry looks up at the tower and its monstrous shadow, edging close. He feels what Apollo does, that they’re a too-small army with no weapons. He wonders if goodness ever truly has a chance, which is a fair question, given Henry’s life. And he realizes right then, too, that when it comes to goodness, you need all the people you can get.

  “I just wish there were more of us,” he says.

  CHAPTER 6

  Pirate Girl and Jo Join In

  Picture words rising into the sweet, warm air of summer. Picture them lifting, like the fluff of dandelion seeds you make a wish on. Picture them being carried as if by magic to the exact place they need to land. This is what it feels like to Henry, anyway, because he has barely spoken the words more of us when something quite extraordinary happens. A lightning bolt of yellow appears in the center of the meadow road, and then a flash of red. His eyesight is bad, and so at first he can’t be sure who is speeding toward them. But when they get closer, Henry’s spirits do a cartwheel.

  “Look who’s coming!” Apollo shouts. “It’s Jo and Pirate Girl!” Apollo’s face has brightened, and suddenly he’s like a dry plant that’s been watered, and even Button starts hopping around on her hind legs as Rocco holds tight with all of his lizard toes.

  And no wonder there’s this sudden rush of joy, because aside from his grandfather, these two girls from his class—Josephine Idár and Pirate Girl—are the best, smartest, and bravest people Henry can think of. Once, Jo gathered two hundred signatures to remove the cruel principal Mrs. Gary, who used to pinch students on the soft part of their underarms. And when Mr. Morris Gene Glucose said girls were bad at math, Jo got everyone in their class to save their milk cartons for an entire month, since math is her favorite subject. They dropped the mountain of sticky, sour parcels on his desk, with Jo’s note that read 23 × 30 = 690.

  A Clove Hitch Knot

  And even though she’s nearly as friendless as Henry, Pirate Girl is fearless. When a kickball whizzes over home plate, she sends it flying, and when a baseball zooms like a bullet right at her, she smacks it hard. Too, she fastened the horrid Arthur Farley to the flagpole using a rope and a clove hitch knot after he told her she was a stupid girl. She muscled Ginger Norton onto a cardboard sled and sent her sailing down an icy hill when Ginger called her ugly. And when Jason Scrum said she was weird, Pirate Girl put her fingers in her ears and recited all of the states and capitals and held her head high. Dealing with so many bullies has given her the kind of resolve and endurance only a few gain in an entire lifetime.

  “Hey, guys!” Apollo calls, waving madly. Once again, Henry admires Apollo’s self-assurance, because his own mouth gapes like a cave, and his stomach cinches up with nerves. If it took a great deal of guts to speak to Apollo, well, this will be a thousand times worse. Whenever Pirate Girl lunges in front of Henry to make sure he isn’t struck by the ball in dodgeball, or whenever Jo offers him one half of her sandwich at lunch, not only do Henry’s pits dampen as his voice sticks in his throat, but he also trembles inwardly, like a cupboard of dishes during an earthquake.

  Jo’s hair flies out behind her, same as the streamers on her handlebars, and Pirate Girl’s face looks serious and determined. Strangely, it’s almost as if they’re heading straight toward them on purpose. The girls reach the Circle of the Y and stop.

  All the Accessories

  “That’s the fastest I’ve ever gone,” Pirate Girl puffs, hopping off her bike. It’s the most amazing bike you could imagine. It’s a shiny red metal and has a bullet-shaped sidecar, which she built herself from a set of complicated plans. And Josephine Idár—she has a Schwinn Sting-Ray with all the accessories: banana seat, low rider handlebars, basket with flowers.

  “Me too,” Jo says, hopping off hers. She takes a moment to ruffle the fur on Button’s neck and look the dog in the eyes. Besides being kind to all human beings and animal beings, Jo is the most beautiful girl Henry has ever seen, with long dark hair and dark eyes. At school, her desk is as organized as the cockpit of a plane, and she once did a book report on all of the encyclopedias, volumes A–Z. It’s her kindness, though, that really makes Henry weak in the knees. Now she reaches into the pocket of her denim shorts, which she wears with a T-shirt Henry has seen before—the one featuring Jo’s long-ago relative and the subject of her oral report, Manuela Sáenz, revolutionary hero of South America.

  “I can’t believe you guys are here,” Apollo says.

  Manuela Sáenz, Revolutionary Hero of South America

  “We came because we both got one of these.” Jo gives Henry a small rectangular sheet of paper. “A telegram.”

  “A telegram?” he manages to squeak.

  “A message that’s sent with electrical signals, which are then printed onto paper,” Apollo says.

  “Mine’s the same.” Pirate Girl hands over a second sheet. Even though it’s summer, she wears a leather pirate vest over her T-shirt, and sturdy pirate boots. Like any good buccaneer, she’s got a red pirate kerchief tied around her head, too, and colored beads woven into her brown hair.

  Henry looks down at the paper, but the words blur from nerves. He tries to hold it steadily. He can hardly believe what the day has brought.

  “We think it’s from your grandfather, Henry. At least, it’s signed Captain Every,” Jo says.

  “Captain Every is your grandfather?” Apollo’s eyes go wide.

  “You didn’t know?” Jo asks.

  “I knew.” Pirate Girl hooks her thumbs in her pockets.

  Henry feels a wind gust of pride. He can almost feel the sail of his personal ship fill in his chest.

  “Well, they have the same last name, of course, but with Henry’s parents, you’d never imagine they’d be relat—”

  Pirate Girl glares at Apollo, and he stops midsentence. Henry’s sail flattens, and the ship of his imagination vanishes just like that. People have noticed him more than he ever realized, which is both good and bad news.

  “The telegrams were delivered right to our doors, and then we came as soon as we could. Pirate Girl caught up to me at the dirt path, and now here you two are. We have no idea why he asked us to come. Is it from him? Your grandfather?”