Bringing Down the Mouse (23 page)

“And if you touch anything other than the wheel,” the scarred man said, stopping halfway down the alley and jabbing a hand in their direction, “you're gonna be in big trouble.”

He shifted the same knifelike hand toward the
brick wall, pointing at a window, which was at about the man's shoulder level. As Charlie and Sam inched closer, Charlie could see that the window was halfway open. It was too dark to make out anything inside, but Charlie guessed that if a screen had been there, it was now gone. Scarface had taken care of everything. Or more accurately, had done whatever Miranda had asked of him.

Charlie trembled, as Scarface gave them one last look; then the man hurried back down the alley toward Solar Avenue. A second later, Charlie and Sam were utterly alone, both of them still pressed against the wall, listening to the breeze play across the gravel beneath their feet. It was strange, being in that place after dark. And especially being alone with Sam. Being next to her like that in the dark made his pulse quicken; it was a strange feeling, one he couldn't quite define. Sure, sometimes Crystal had made him lose his words—when she did something particularly cute, or laughed just the right way—but this was different. This was something much more palpable, in his gut. Everything about this moment had him on edge, tingling like he was about to catch fire.

Just an hour ago, the last remaining tourists had been happily strolling their way down the Avenue on
the way to the park's exits, but now that the park was closed, Charlie felt like he and Sam were in the middle of some sort of alien planet. Incredo Land just didn't feel right after hours. In the first place, it was just too freaking quiet. The electronic music was gone, but even more noticeable was the lack of ambient sound. Now, Solar Avenue was like a corpse, facades instead of real live buildings, a shell without a soul.

Sam reached the window first and stretched her arms over her head. Even at full extension, she could just get her fingers over the sill. Charlie stood next to her, shaking his head.

“Shoot, that jerk could have at least given us a boost. We're never going to get up there without some sort of ladder.”

Before he could finish the sentence, Sam's fingers had gripped the edge of the sill, and she swung her legs up, a study of pure grace. A second later, her feet were through the open window in a perfect tuck, then the rest of her, until only her head remained in the alley. She smiled down at Charlie.

“You're next.”

She held out both hands, leveraging her body against the inside of the windowsill. Charlie swallowed hard; obviously Sam had some gymnastics training. He felt
even more uncoordinated than ever, but he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of her. He had to at least try. He reached up and put his hands on hers.

Her grip was incredibly strong for such a small girl; using his feet against the bricks while she pulled, he managed to scramble up the wall with surprising ease. Getting himself through the half-open window was a bit trickier; Sam had to move out of the way, and Charlie found himself wriggling through like a caterpillar attacking a leaf. Hands feeling the darkness in front of him, he let himself drop into the room on the other side of the window—thankfully feeling carpet against his palms, then rolling into a clumsy ball. Sam helped him back to his feet, brushing dirt from the sill off his borrowed jean jacket.

The jacket had been Magic's; Charlie hadn't planned on sticking around the park after dark, when the breeze, combined with the humidity in the air, turned the temperature cool enough to bring goose bumps to his skin. Truthfully, he hadn't planned on being involved in this part of the game at all. Breaking into a building to measure a giant wheel was not his idea of using his brain to beat the system. But when Sam had volunteered, and Miranda had asked who she'd want to come along to help, and Sam had looked at Charlie,
well, he hadn't had much choice. His mind had already begun to figure out a way to sneak away from Jeremy, pretending he had to call home to go over some old science project with his dad. He had no idea why Sam had asked for him. Likewise, at first he'd been surprised that Miranda and the rest of the group had even let Sam herself volunteer. But seeing her lithe form slink away from the window and into the dark room, Charlie realized she was incredibly athletic, and from the way she'd gone through the window, she seemed to have a catlike agility.

“This isn't going to be as hard as I thought,” Sam whispered, pointing ahead into the darkness.

At first, Charlie couldn't see anything, but as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out shapes. They were in a storage room, with cavernous walls and a high, barely visible ceiling. There were steel shelves lining the walls to his left and right, covered in objects of all sorts of sizes and shapes, and a big glass cabinet on the other side of the room, by the interior door that led to the rest of the building. But Sam wasn't pointing toward the shelves or the cabinet; she was pointing to a huge shape standing in an alcove, directly across from them. Even in the darkness, Charlie knew exactly what he was looking at.

At least twice Charlie's height at its peak, at least two feet deep, draped in a heavy sheet—the thing was enormous, and made to seem even bigger because it was up on a huge motorized metal dolly with rubber-soled wheels. The frame of the dolly was all steel piping, with a high iron cage reaching up behind the sheet. Charlie had no idea how much the thing weighed, but he did know that to adequately measure the thing, there was going to be some serious climbing involved. Even to reach the monstrosity's halfway point, one of them was going to have to monkey up the side of the dolly.

“It looks way bigger than it did on the video,” Charlie murmured as Sam crept forward toward the alcove. She seemed to be calculating something as she moved, her gaze measuring the carpet in front of her, the distance between her feet and the dolly.

And then suddenly, she leaped forward into a perfect front handspring. Her palms barely touched the floor, then she was flipping over in the air, landing softly on the edge of the dolly, her hands tight against the steel bars.

“Wow!” Charlie gasped. “You're like a superhero.”

It was a pretty dumb thing to say, but Sam just laughed. She hauled herself up along the bar, then reached out, grabbing a section of the heavy sheet, and
gave it a yank. The sheet slid halfway down, revealing the top part of the great wheel. As Charlie moved closer, he could see the outline of Maddy the Turkey Hawk in one section, and a piece of the Frog.

“Actually, I always wanted to be a superhero,” Sam whispered as she traced one of the wheel's sections with a finger. “I've been a gymnast, going on about five years now. Started when I was eight. I was originally enrolled in ballet dance class, but I hated it. I begged my mom to let me do gymnastics instead.”

Charlie reached the base of the dolly. He thought about trying to climb up next to her, but decided getting through the window had taxed his abilities enough. Instead, he reached into his pocket and retrieved the heavy-duty tape measure that Miranda had given him for the job.

“My mom was against it at first,” Sam continued, her expression invisible in the darkness. “She thought that little girls should take dance. But I convinced her that gymnastics would help with my math homework; I was already kind of obsessed with the science and math behind the moves. How many steps it would take to get to the vault. What was the proper force and angle necessary to jump off a springboard and stick a front handspring. The rotational kinetics of the parallel bars.”

Charlie felt himself growing more and more impressed by her as she reached down and took the tape measure from him. She really was a geek like him, even if her overall package had nothing geeky about it.

“I even wrote a paper about it,” she added. “When we moved from New York and I had to transfer schools, my mom sent the paper along with my admission package. I think that's partly how I got into Nagassack as a seventh grader. They're pretty picky for late arrivals, you know.”

Charlie nodded, and then something struck him.

“That's probably how Miranda found you. Your essay.”

“Yeah, I figured that out a while back too. When Finn and Magic first approached me to join the team. I'd just transferred in from New York, and Miranda had made it seem like she was interested in me because she was from the City as well, and she knew how hard it could be to adjust to the suburbs, but I knew it was more than that.”

Charlie watched as Sam slowly extended herself out to reach the far edge of the wheel with one hand.

“So it was Finn and Magic with you, too,” he said.

“Yeah, well, mostly Finn. He has a special relationship with Miranda. I think she's friends with his family.
They kind of grew up together. At least that's what I've gathered.”

That was something new. Finn had never mentioned that he'd known Miranda beyond the Carnival Killers. Charlie had assumed that he had been recruited because of his school record as well.

“What do you think of her? Miranda?”

Sam shrugged in the darkness.

“She's pretty amazing. And intense. But I admire her a lot. She's smart, and she's also beautiful, and she doesn't seem to be scared of anything. She's kind of a role model for me. She can be a little scary, but I think her heart is in the right place.”

Charlie pressed his lips together. They had just climbed through a window into a dark warehouse room to secretly measure a wheel. He wasn't sure he agreed with Sam's thinking.

“The money, the fifty thousand dollars.”

“Yeah, It's a whole lot of money. I guess we were all surprised by that. Miranda as much as any of us. Last year it was a few hundred dollars, which went to charity.”

That's exactly what Miranda had said, when the group had gathered by the monorail, right after Charlie had won the contest. The money was a big surprise; just
as the man on the steps had said, nobody could have known that there would be such a huge prize. Miranda had promised that she'd find a good charity to put the money toward, since her school program wouldn't be able to accept a donation that large. It was crazy and shocking, but they would do something good with it, she'd insisted, that was what mattered.

“I don't think it changes anything,” Sam whispered. “Every one of us got into this because we love math and numbers. For me, it was gymnastics. For Finn, maybe swimming. You were the last piece in the puzzle. So whatever Miranda really thinks, no matter what her real reasons, I think the important thing is that she got us together. It's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”

With a sudden motion, she flicked the end of the tape measure toward Charlie with her fingers. The tape spat out like a lizard's tongue and Charlie just managed to catch it before it smacked into his chest.

Sam grinned at him through the darkness, then extended her body out across the dolly, stretching her long, lean arms toward the far edge of the wheel. . . .

IT WAS TEN MINUTES
past eleven in the evening, and waves of soft violin music drifted out through the crack under the locked door, cresting softly against the faux wooden walls of the narrow hallway. When Charlie closed his eyes, he could almost see the layers of air vibrating outward and washing over him in great, bulbous, concentric circles, the near atomic molecules vibrating back and forth as they clambered through his ears, varying the air pressure against his eardrums, reverberating against his microscopic skin cells at wonderfully specific frequencies: 440 Hz, a beautiful, searing A, sliding all the way down to 220 Hz, another A an octave lower—and then, almost to nothingness, and back again, rising, rising, rising. Charlie's mother had
always told him that the violin was the most perfect of instruments, because it always told the truth. Charlie had never really understood what she'd meant by the comment. Standing there in the hallway, waiting for Miranda to open the door, he thought maybe his mother was right; he couldn't imagine what it would sound like to hear a violin tell a lie.

Another moment passed, the violin the only sound in his ears. He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty hallway; the rest of the resort had gone quiet as a tomb. Eleven p.m. wasn't that late in much of the world, but in Incredo Land, it was certainly the middle of the night. People went down early because they couldn't wait for the next day to begin. Tonight, Charlie didn't want to go to sleep for precisely the opposite reason—he wanted to put off the next day for as long as he could.

He hadn't intended to stop by Miranda's room to give her the measurements from the wheel; after all, she didn't need the precise numbers, she already knew how Charlie's equation worked. But when he'd returned to his own room to find Jeremy fast asleep in one of the double beds, and three missed calls from his parents on his dad's iPhone, he'd felt awash in guilt about all the white lies he'd told, to his parents, his friends, and especially to himself. Sneaking into a warehouse to
measure the wheel with Sam had been thrilling, but it had also been wrong, and no amount of rationalization would make it right.