The Messengers by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Author:Margaret Peterson Haddix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Four

Finn

“Emma, you’re amazing!” Finn cried. “I didn’t even think of doing that! I’m so glad you’re a genius!”

He watched the broken shards of glass trickle down from under the tattered quilt. He grinned wider and wider with every bit of glass he heard hitting the floor.

“You even had great batting stance,” Kona congratulated her.

“I wish you’d told us you were planning to do that,” Rocky said. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack, watching you walk over there. If you’d turned on that TV, I—I . . .”

“We all would have watched it,” Chess finished for him. “We all would have been trapped.”

Emma stared down at the lever in her hands. She didn’t look as triumphant as Finn thought she should. She was sweating and gasping for air, as if she’d narrowly escaped falling off a cliff.

Well, she kind of did, Finn thought. We all did.

“I . . . really wasn’t sure what I was planning to do,” Emma said, grimacing. “It could have gone either way, until that last minute when I felt Chess’s hand on my shoulder. But then I hoped . . . Why didn’t the lever open a tunnel to the other world? Why didn’t it work, even here?”

“Was that what you were trying to do?” Finn asked. “You really are a genius, if you could think about swinging the lever and making a tunnel and all that, even when the TV was calling to you.”

Emma slammed the lever against the wall directly below the TV.

Nothing happened.

She dropped the lever.

“Just when I had hope again!” she moaned.

Lana slid her hands under the lever and scooped it up as gingerly as if she were handling priceless jewels.

Or, maybe . . . eggs.

Seeds.

Something that could turn into something else.

“You thought this was going to open a route to the other world?” she asked. “Is this actually one of the coin-levers?” She turned it over and over in her hands. “Oooh . . . So this is what the coins look like when they’ve succeeded together. And united.”

“‘Succeeded’?” Finn repeated, pouncing on the word as if it were another coin to be discovered. “What does that mean? The lever didn’t succeed, or else we’d be on our way back to the other world right now.”

“I mean, the coins in here all must have reached the right person in the other world,” Lana said. “See how they all have messages like SEE US and FIND US and HEAR US instead of just a bunch of code? That must mean the messages have been delivered. And listened to. I’ve only heard whisperings about this, but people say if someone has enough coins delivered to them, they can bind them together to open doorways that anyone could travel through, between the worlds. Not just one double reaching another.”

“We’ve seen that work before with this lever!” Finn assured her, picking up the one Emma had dropped. “It brought us here! It can take us back, as soon as we find

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