And sometimes Emma wanted to shake Natalie, and boss her around: Whatever you do, don’t hurt my brother! Even if you don’t have a crush on him like he does on you, be nice to him!
Which was crazy, because Natalie was nice to all three of the Greystone kids. Now, anyway. She hadn’t been like that when they first met.
“Emma, you haven’t even looked at yours,” Natalie complained, pretending to pout. “It’s so sparkly—I know you’ll love it!”
This was a joke. Emma looked down, ready to act disgusted. The object she’d knocked to the floor was a pink pillow covered in sequins. But . . . it was actually an interesting sequined pink pillow. The sequins were two-sided, and they were sewn on in a way that made them reversible. Emma had seen this kind of thing before: If she ran her hand across the pillow in one direction, the sequins would show an iridescent white heart. Running her hand in the other direction would flip the sequins to purple.
But when Emma knocked the pillow to the floor, it had landed oddly. Half the heart was white; half was purple.
And in the middle, on the jagged line that divided the white from the purple, one row of sequins stood straight up, as if they couldn’t make up their minds which way to go. One or two of the sequins were even broken—bent or warped in a way that made it seem like they would never lay right again, in either direction. Emma squinted thoughtfully at the narrow, jagged line that was neither white nor purple, but clear, see-through.
And then Emma leaped up, snatched the pink pillow from the ground, and screamed, “That’s it! This is the clue we needed! Now I know how to find Mom!”
Three
Chess
Clearly Emma had lost it.
“Um, Emma, just because that’s a heart, it doesn’t mean it’s from Joe,” Chess said. And though he tried to sound comforting and big-brother-ish and as if he could take care of everything, his voice came out sounding nothing but sad. He didn’t know how to sound any other way lately.
For the umpteenth time in the past two weeks, he wished that their last moments with access to the other world had ended differently. What if Chess hadn’t pulled the lever that shut the tunnel to the other world forever? What if he’d shoved all the other kids—and Ms. Morales—to safety, and then marched back to confront the awful people chasing them?
What if Chess had run even farther back once everyone else was safe, and found Joe, the mysterious man who’d helped them escape and promised to rescue their mother, too?
Chess was sure Joe had failed. If there was any chance Mom and Joe had escaped from the other dimension, Mom would have come and found the three Greystone kids immediately.
“I know this isn’t from Joe!” Emma said. She was practically jumping up and down, holding the pink sequined pillow in the air like a trophy. “The heart he showed us was red, and it was drawn by Finn. Joe was using it as a symbol. Nobody wanted this heart to mean anything except, I guess, ‘Sorry you poor kids lost your moms.’ They weren’t trying to tell us anything else. But the sequins, the sequins—they helped me figure out everything!”
It hurt Chess’s eyes to watch Emma move so quickly when he felt so sluggish. But finally her words sank in.
“Everything?” Chess whispered.
“Yes!” Emma spun around, as if the pillow were a dance partner. “See, I was all wrong in how I was thinking of the other world. I was thinking of it as being underground, and so we needed to find another tunnel. With another lever to open the tunnel, and another spinning room to burrow through.”
“Isn’t that what we need?” Natalie asked.
“No,” Emma said. “I mean, I guess that would work, if we found it, but we’ve been trying for two weeks, and it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Or a single basement tunnel on a planet with millions of basements. We don’t even know if there is another tunnel. But we’ve already got what we need to get back to the other world. We had it all along. Like Dorothy had the ruby slippers that would get her back to Kansas practically the whole time she was in Oz.”
Automatically, Chess glanced toward Emma’s feet. She was wearing red sneakers, her favorites. But he didn’t think that was what she meant.
“Look,” Emma said, holding out the pillow. “Think of our world and the other world like this heart. Let’s say we’re purple, and they’re white.” She ran her hand back and forth over the sequins, flipping the colors, white to purple, purple to white. “The worlds are underneath each other, but they’re also above and beside. Every molecule of their world is crammed in between every molecule of our world. Like the white side of the sequins are all in between the purple sides. Every sequin is both things at once. And it’s clear in between. There’s part of the sequin that touches both the white side and the purple. So every part of our world is connected to the other world!”
Sometimes Emma made Chess’s brain hurt. He did perfectly well in math and science at school—his teachers always praised him as a good student. But he couldn’t flip his brain inside out thinking wild thoughts as much as Emma could.
Looking at the pillow did kind of help. He understood two-sided sequins. He understood how the heart changed from one color to the other, and how every sequin had a middle that was neither white nor purple.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “But what’s that got to do with Mom and—”
“It means we can go back to the other world anywhere!” Emma said. “We can crawl through any sequin!”
Chess glanced toward Natalie, hoping she could read his mind: Please don’t tell Emma she’s crazy. Please play along. Remember, she’s only ten. Natalie was squinting at the pillow just as intensely as Emma.
“I’m trying to understand,” Natalie said. “Really I am. But this is like when Mom and I go back to Mexico and her relatives are all speaking Spanish a million miles a minute, and I can’t keep up. Translate, por favor. The two sides of the sequins are the two worlds, and the way to ‘crawl’ from one side to the other is . . . is . . .”
Chess could tell that Emma was trying not to look disappointed with him and Natalie.
“With the lever,” Emma said. “The lever we tore off the wall when we closed the tunnel. It’s the key, the connection between the two worlds, the thing that opens the route. The lever itself isn’t broken—it’s just that location that’s off-limits now. Like this sequin.” She tapped one of the ruined sequins, showing how it was too warped now to flip colors. “The lever is like a bridge through the middle, from one side to the other. And the lever will still work in other places besides our basement. I’m sure of it!”
Chess and Natalie both gaped at Emma for a long moment before Chess said gently, “Emma, we don’t actually have that lever. It’s still back at our house.”
“Right,” Emma replied. “So we have to get Natalie’s dad to take us there.” She dropped the heart pillow and started tugging on Natalie’s arm, pulling the other girl toward the stairs. “Come on. Let’s go signal Finn to bring your dad back!”
Chess watched the two girls run up the stairs. They didn’t need his help with the blinds. But he sat up straight, feeling his first glimmer of hope in two weeks. He believed Emma’s theory was . . . possible, at least. He picked up the pillow Emma had dropped and brushed his fingers back and forth against the sequins. The way they flipped from one color to another could stand for lots of things.