“We see you!” Finn and Emma shouted practically at the same time. Then Finn added, “And Natalie sees you now, too.”

  Chess seemed to be trying not to smile too widely, just at the thought of Natalie.

  “Anyhow,” Emma said, turning back to Lana.

  “Right,” Lana said. “Some of this happened before I was even born. First, a group of scientists invented a foul-smelling chemical that affected people’s brains, and they offered it to the military as a weapon.”

  “That’s illegal,” Kona said confidently. “We studied that in school. Chemical warfare was outlawed after World War One.”

  “In your world, maybe,” Lana said. Then she winced. “Or maybe it was outlawed in mine, too, years ago, but people ignored that law. It’s not something I ever learned about.”

  “How does the smell work?” Emma asked. “I guess it must trick people’s brains into thinking they should be terrified and sad. And that they should give up. Is it pheromones? Does it affect the hippocampus or the thalamus or—”

  “You think you’re going to figure it out scientifically?” Rocky asked incredulously. “And then, what, come up with an antidote?”

  “Don’t be mean!” Finn told him.

  Emma put her hand on Finn’s knee, like she needed to calm him down.

  “Somebody might be able to come up with the antidote,” Emma said. “I’m not saying I know enough about chemistry, but if we could get a really smart, really brave chemist to come from the good world, then—”

  “The smell doesn’t matter that much now,” Lana said. “Because the leaders moved on. The smells were just the first step. Like, I don’t know, bicycles with training wheels. And now the leaders are using the equivalent of rocket ships.”

  “You mean the TVs people can’t stop watching,” Kona said.

  “Yes,” Lana said.

  Finn reached over the opposite edge of the bed and grabbed a handful of coins.

  “But your side—our side—we have these to fight back with,” he said, letting the coins sift down through his fingers. “Right? You have all these coins under your bed, and your parents don’t know, and that’s how you can resist the TVs and they can’t. How do you have all these coins? Where did they all come from?”

  Was this what it felt like to be Emma—to always have more questions to wonder about?

  Lana kept her lips pressed tightly together.

  Finn patted her knee the same way Emma had patted his.

  “Our mother—Emma’s and Finn’s and mine—she told us about the beginnings of the coins,” Chess said. “Or the first coin, anyway. When our family lived in this world, eight years ago, our mom sent a coin to her double in the other world. And her double was Rocky’s mom.”

  Lana raised an eyebrow, looking back and forth between Rocky and the three Greystone kids.

  “And we know Natalie and her mom got coins from their doubles in this world,” Kona went on, taking up the story from Chess. “Lana, did you help the Natalie here send those?”

  Lana shook her head.

  “No, but I was the one who told Natalie about the coins,” she said. “A week ago. After the party where Natalie could have been killed. Natalie wanted to do something. Something big. She said she was sick of everybody lying all the time, everyone having to pretend that everything’s great. When, actually, everybody is scared all the time in this world. Nobody is allowed to think for themselves or make any decisions on their own—did you know that there’s only one political party for anyone to belong to? We hold elections, but they’re just for show. Fake. There’s only ever one candidate for anyone to vote for, for any office. The government can arrest anyone they want, and just make up a reason. And the ‘criminals’ can’t even defend themselves. If they even get a trial, it’s just, like, make-believe. Propaganda, to make people hate the criminal. Who might not have done anything wrong at all.”

  “We saw that happen!” Finn exclaimed. “They put our mom on trial, and they made it look like she was lying, and admitting she was guilty!”

  “Multiply that by a hundred,” Lana said bitterly. “By a thousand. By ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. I don’t even know how many people have been punished like that, just because some official doesn’t like them. There’s so much I don’t know, because no one’s allowed to tell the truth.”

  “Our parents told the truth,” Chess said quietly. “Even when they knew it could lead to their deaths, they still kept trying. They still kept gathering and sharing the truth.”

  Finn felt a surge of pride. He wanted to brag, That’s my mom and dad, too! You should hear how brave they were! How brave my mom still is, and how hard she’s kept trying!

  But then Emma said, just as quietly, “And then our dad was killed. Eight years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lana whispered.

  “Others died, too,” Kona said. She hugged Kafi close for an instant, before gulping and going on. “Like the physicist who figured out how to make the first coins. And Natalie’s grandmother in the other world.”

  “Did you and Natalie know you were risking death?” Rocky asked. “For . . . coins?”

  He didn’t sound like he was making fun of Lana, or trying to bully her. It was more like he just couldn’t understand.

  “The coins seemed like the only way to change anything,” Lana said. She began to pick at the threads of her comforter. It was lumpy—maybe it had coins sewn into its stuffing. “I was just at the lowest level of the people working with the coins.”

  “You joined the rebels,” Kona said, sounding awestruck. “The resistance. The freedom fighters!”

  Lana looked terrified again.

  “We never called ourselves any of that,” she said. “We didn’t dare to. We just said . . . we were helpers. Or, we thought of ourselves that way. We mostly didn’t dare to talk to anyone else working with us. It wasn’t safe. I would just get notes, hidden under a rock by my family’s fence: Pick up coins stored here. Move them over to there. Store them until it’s safe to send them out again. And sometimes I used coins to record my own messages, and sent them out when I felt really brave. After I talked Natalie into helping, too, she was also recording messages and transporting coins. And I know she was planning to send hers into the other world. She must have done that today. With the ones that were my own, I could just drop them and they would disappear, and I would know they’d gone to my double.”

  “But why?” Emma asked. “What good did any of that do?”

  “FIND US, SEE US, HEAR US—that all sounds pointless!” Rocky agreed. “I guess there’s HELP US, too, but . . . how does that help? What’s it all for?”

  “I don’t know,” Lana whispered, her voice so soft now that Finn had to hold his breath, because even drawing air into his lungs might be too loud for him to still hear Lana. “Not entirely. But we all thought our doubles could rescue us. We thought they would come here and take care of us. Make all our decisions for us, maybe.”

  “That’s what you want?” Finn asked. “I like making my own decisions. Like if Mom says, ‘Do you want spaghetti or tacos for dinner?’ sometimes I want Italian, and sometimes I want Mexican. It can depend. And she knows I like being able to choose.”

  “But my people have made such bad choices. . . .” Lana was still whispering. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away. “Never mind. None of this matters now. The coins stopped working. Your lever doesn’t work, either. The TVs are telling everybody in my world how to think and what decisions to make. We no longer have any choices. And now Mayor Mayhew’s in the other world making sure no one has choices there, either.”

  Everybody else was squinting at Lana. They all looked like they were about to cry. Even Kafi, and there was no way she understood what the big kids were talking about.

  Finn hoped his face didn’t look like crying. Because he wasn’t going to do that.

  “But the coins do still protect us from the TVs,” he said. “They still work a little.”

  “So what?” Lana asked, with a helpless shrug. “At some point, one of us is going to give in. And then we will be trapped, and the coins will be like Rocky said. Pointless.”

  It’s not fair that the bad guys have two weapons, and we only have one, Finn thought.

  Finn glanced at the TV across the room. Even broken, it seemed too scary to think about.

  So he thought about the game rock-paper-scissors instead.

  This is like if Rock and Scissors ganged up on Paper! he thought, getting mad all over again at Mayor Mayhew and all the other leaders of this awful world. Only, for us, it’s like the game is smells-coins-TVs, and Smells and TVs are on the same side! Coins don’t have a chance!

  But maybe Finn wasn’t thinking about things right. In rock-paper-scissors, you chose what you were, you won or you lost, and then you could be something different in the next round.

  You got to choose a different “weapon” every time.

  What if . . . What if . . .

  Because he didn’t want to look at the TV, Finn looked down at Kafi, cuddling against her sister’s knees. Maybe his thoughts were as crazy as her saying “Pretty” when she saw the pile of broken glass under the TV.

  But she was right: Some of the broken glass did kind of gleam in the sunlight coming in through the window. If you didn’t know the TV was evil—and broken—it did look pretty.

  Most of the time Finn didn’t care if things were pretty or ugly. He was a lot more concerned if things were fun or not. Oh, and if food tasted good.

  But if something ugly and broken could look pretty, then . . . then could something bad be used for good? he wondered.

  Could the TVs be used by the people on the good-coins side, not the bad-smells side?

  “What if we go on TV?” he asked. “What if we go on TV and tell the leaders they have to let levers and coins work again, and they have to be nice to people in both worlds, and, and they should only give people good choices? The coins and the TVs both deliver messages. So if we can use the coins for good things, why can’t we use the TV for good messages, too?”

  Thirty-Five

  Emma

  “Finn, you’re a genius,” Emma cried. She stood up and threw her arms around her brother’s shoulders.

  “No, no, no,” Finn said, playfully shoving her away. “You’re the smart one.”

  “Well, we can both be smart,” Emma said. Finn seemed willing to compromise: He let Emma keep one arm draped around his shoulders. And he let Emma keep talking about how smart he was. “You being smart doesn’t make me any less smart. And this time you were the one to remember this fact: Scientific discoveries usually aren’t good or evil just by themselves. Science is neutral. It’s what people do with their knowledge that matters.”

  Finn’s eyes grew big.

  “Emma,” he said. “I didn’t know any of that!”

  “But you knew that if the bad guys can use the TV, we can use it, too,” Kona said. “Only, we’ll use it for good reasons, not bad.”

  “That’s a nice theory,” Lana said grudgingly. “It’s just impossible.”

  “It is possible,” Emma insisted. “Lana, if your dad worked at the TV station, then he has a key, right?”

  “If nothing else, we could sneak in and turn off the power at his TV station,” Chess said thoughtfully. “The . . . what would it be called? The transmitter?”

  “But wouldn’t there be lots of TV stations?” Rocky asked. “So if we turn off one station, the others would just keep controlling people? I keep thinking about all the TV interviews my mom and dad did when my sister and brother and I were kidnapped—there were so many stations who sent reporters to their news conferences. And people from online news services and radio stations and newspapers and magazines . . .”

  “Really?” Lana said. It was like she was hearing of a situation too strange to even be a myth. “That’s another difference between the worlds. We do only have one TV network. Only one channel. All the others were outlawed. Just like political parties were outlawed, except for the one the leaders are in.”

  “Unh! Unh!” Kafi pushed against Emma’s leg.

  “That’s it,” Kona said, snatching up her sister and spinning her around. Kafi still struggled in her sister’s arms. “We have about a minute before Kafi starts screaming to get out of here.”

  “Then we escape to the TV station and let Kafi escape that way, too,” Emma said.

  Rocky and Chess both frowned, but they started to stand up. Kona put Kafi into a “You’re an airplane now” pose over her head and “flew” her toward the door. Emma and Finn followed.

  “You think it’s that easy?” Lana asked. “You’ll just . . . go?”

  “We’re hoping you’ll come, too, to help us,” Finn said, with a particularly charming smile that showed his dimples.

  “I don’t . . . I’m not . . . ,” Lana began. But then she stood up, too. “You think we should walk?”

  “I think maybe that one woman downstairs could drive us,” Emma said. “The one who kind of scolded your dad.”

  “You mean Irmine?” Lana asked. “With the gray hair and the lavender streak?”

  “We could ask her,” Emma said.

  Everyone traipsed toward the stairs. At the top, Emma was thinking, Maybe I should swing the lever at all the TVs in this house. But by the time she got to the bottom, she could barely keep herself from going over and ripping down the purple-flowered blanket that hid the TV from view. She felt herself longing to turn it on and watch.

  That would just be acting like a scientist, she told herself. Go look at the TV so you can study what it makes you think and do. . . .

  She caught herself turning toward the TV room. Just being this close to the TV, even without looking at it, was enough to make her think differently. And it was trying to trick her into believing those were her normal thoughts.

  “Here,” Lana said behind Emma. She pressed a little cloth bag into Emma’s hands. Emma could feel the outline of coins inside the bag. “Wear this as a necklace, or tie it around your waist, under your clothes. Just in case.”

  “To protect me even more against the TVs and smells?” Emma asked. “Or do you mean, in case it becomes possible to send them into the other world again?”

  “Both?” Lana said with a weak smile.

  “Why not?” Emma agreed. She slid the looped drawstrings of the bag around her neck. Now the little collection of coins hung at the same level as her heart.

  Lana moved on to offering bags of coins to the other kids as well. Kona didn’t let Kafi have one, because she would have tried to eat it. But everyone else took one.

  It was strange how much better Emma felt to have the little bag of coins, along with the ones taped around her wrist. But maybe it just helped to know that Lana cared. Either way, the pull of the TV seemed to recede. Emma trusted herself to walk over to the maid—Irmine?—and ask, “If we untied you, would you drive us somewhere?”

  “Honey, if you untied me, I would go straight to that TV,” Irmine replied, struggling against the ropes to point longingly into the side room. “That’s all I can think about.”

  “What if one of us broke the TV?” Finn asked. “What if we broke every TV in this house?”

  Emma was glad Finn had thought of that, too. And that he could still think about it, even so close to a TV.

  “I can’t lie to you,” Irmine said. “I’d be running to the TV in the next-door neighbor’s house as fast as I could. I’d be a track star, getting over there.”

  “We could break all those TVs, too,” Finn said.

  “We can’t break every TV in town,” Lana said.

  “Or in the whole country,” Rocky added. “Or is it in this whole world?”

  “You don’t have to break any TVs!” Lana’s dad gasped. He was clutching his heart as if just talking about breaking TVs made him feel like he’d been stabbed in the chest. “Untie me, and I’ll drive you anywhere you want!”

  But his eyes kept darting toward the TV room.

  “Dad, I don’t know if you mean to or not, but you’re lying to us,” Lana said.

  “Then I’ll drive you!” Lana’s mom volunteered. “Untie me instead!”

  The other adults took up the cry: “No, me!” “I’ll help! Pick me!” “Lana! I’m your family’s chauffeur! I should drive you!”

  “Oh, brother,” Finn muttered, backing away. Emma saw that he’d pulled his coin bag from under his shirt and was clutching it so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

  “What if we gave the adults some coins?” Emma asked Lana. Emma tiptoed closer to Irmine and waved her own bag of coins before Irmine’s eyes. It probably looked like she was a magician trying to hypnotize Irmine.

  Isn’t that kind of what the coins and the TV do? Emma wondered. Isn’t it a lot like hypnosis?

  “Child, I do like money,” Irmine said, watching the bag of coins sway before her. Then she snapped her gaze back to Emma’s face. “But you could toss me into a whole swimming pool of coins and dollar bills—even one-hundred-dollar bills!—and I’d trade it all in a heartbeat for getting back to that TV.”

  “We can’t trust any of these adults,” Lana said. She looked like she was about to cry. “We’ll have to walk. It’ll take forever. And I’m not sure how safe we’ll be. . . .”

  “Lana, baby, you are giving up too soon,” Irmine said. “I can’t trust myself to drive you. You’re right not to trust any of us adults. But there is something you know how to drive. . . .”

  “Irmine, I’m thirteen!” Lana protested. “I’ve never driven a car! I’d wreck it! I’d hurt people!”

  Irmine put a hand on Lana’s arm.

  “What if I told you I know where the keys are to your daddy’s golf cart?”

  Thirty-Six

  Chess

  This is crazy, Chess thought.

  All of the kids were piled onto the golf cart. Lana was driving, with Kona and Kafi beside her—Kona had declared herself ready to grab the wheel if Lana weakened and started veering toward any house where a TV might draw her in. Rocky and the three Greystone kids huddled together on the second, backward-facing bench behind Lana and Kona. And propped between them, they had a giant duffel bag full of the coins from underneath Lana’s bed.