The Strangers: Chapters 34–44

Finn stretched, his left hand clunking against the wall that he kept forgetting was there, because his bed back home sat in the middle of the room, not off in a little alcove like this one.

That was why Emma had been working on her mother’s code as close to around the clock as she could. She’d carried notebooks full of notations to school with her, and worked on the code every time the teacher looked away.

She was breathing hard, her eyes wild, her cheeks flushed, her hair held back only by a pencil she’d stuck behind her ear two hours ago and clearly forgotten about. She looked feverish, or maybe even delirious.

“It isn’t possible to travel between two different alternate worlds!” Emma shouted. “All of this is just...hypothetical! Alternate worlds are just hypothetical!”

Natalie’s calligraphy-like printing mixed together with Emma’s mad-scientist-style scrawl; even the pretty lettering got messier and messier, the farther he looked down the page.

Natalie’s calligraphy-like printing mixed together with Emma’s mad-scientist-style scrawl; even the pretty lettering got messier and messier, the farther he looked down the page.

It never occurred to me that my secrecy would endanger my doppelgänger. But I covered my tracks too well. So when the bad people came, they found her and her family, not me. They thought she was me.

“Saturday’s tomorrow,” Finn said solemnly, as if he was the only one who could have figured that out.

And even though he’d been at Natalie’s house for days now—and talking to her and everything—his voice this morning came out sounding like he was still that flustered fifth grader who didn’t know what to say when a sixth-grade girl said he was cute.

It kind of freaked Chess out to hear her talking about the alternate world like it was a fact. And—like it was something fun to speculate about.

And even though Chess missed his cue to say, “Yeah, sometimes when Mom’s away, the only thing that makes Finn feel better is sitting in her closet, breathing in that smell,” Natalie picked up on it, and pretended that she’d noticed Finn getting calmer in Mom’s closet, and wasn’t it better to try that than to have to listen to a hysterical eight-year-old over breakfast?

Would she notice anything amiss if someone had been there searching the house? The middle drawer of the coffee table stuck out just a little—maybe an eighth of an inch—but for all Emma knew, maybe it had been like that before.

Still, it was a smell that beckoned Emma forward, as if a smell could whisper, Come see.

Is there anyone in the crowd who doesn’t look afraid? Emma wondered. Even the littlest children—also mostly dressed in orange or blue—cowered against their parents’ shoulders.

Everything strong about Mom’s face looked defiant and ugly.

For him, as they moved forward in a group—trying not to be too conspicuous about passing other groups ahead of them—he felt more like he was on a constant downward slide into despair.

This pond looked muddy and dark, surrounded by nothing but sparse blades of dying grass.

After they’d gone six or eight blocks, the scenery changed even more: The street opened out into a wide boulevard with imposing buildings on either side.

The stairs ended in a long, flat surface, and then the crowd bottlenecked through a pair of narrow doorways.

The doors and doorframes were marble, too, and ornately carved.

Blinking and squinting helped him realize: The searing light came from a giant screen at the front of the room.

The camera angle zoomed in and panned from the floor up, showing the bolts holding the chair in place, then blue-jeans-covered legs shackled to the rungs of the chair, then two wrists held together by handcuffs.

The resolution on the screen was so precise that he saw Mom’s chin tremble, ever so slightly. She only lost control for an instant, but it was enough to make the crowd jeer and cry out, “Coward!”

Finn was so used to that face he had every detail memorized: the dancing eyes, the hint of freckles across the nose, the wide mouth that always seemed ready to smile at Finn’s antics.

“The protocol will be different than previously announced,” the guard said, somehow sounding stiff and formal and angry all at once. “The defendant has decided to confess. That will happen first.”

She leaned forward to grasp a microphone someone had put on a stand beside her; she had to reach with both hands, since they were bound together at the wrists.

But when Emma and Chess glanced back, their faces were anguished, their matching dark eyes full of matching despair.

The acrid odor around them seemed worse than ever.

Or maybe this time it was because the guards were so close now. They were so muscular, so stern in their dark blue uniforms. They thronged into the circle of light, just inches from Emma and the old lady—and from Finn hiding behind the old lady’s coat.

Maybe someone in the crowd behind her was trying to signal her, and she just couldn’t tell. Why hadn’t she learned sign language? Or semaphore codes? Or whatever people used in this alternate world?