She reached under the edge of the netting, almost touching the camera, her fingers grasping for the dangling wire. If she could only reconnect it, Amanda could take over the surveillance. It was no use—she was too far above it, and to move any lower would risk her being discovered. But Charlene was not one to be discouraged. She squirmed her upper body slightly farther off the ledge and stretched out, her fingers now only an inch or two from the wire.

She lunged and grabbed hold of it, the wire firmly in her hand.

The worker who had entered the enclosure only a minute earlier, the man whose hair she had dusted with sand, now came back through the twin doors and shut them. There was no time for Charlene to retreat. Instead, she hung over the wall ledge directly above him, her left hand holding the wire, her right keeping herself from falling.

The man stopped and put down a white bucket.

“Well done.”

Charlene heard the voice—a woman’s sterile voice, uncaring and even rude, if uttering two small words could be made to sound rude.

“Tie him up,” the same voice said.

Immediately three big monkeys appeared from around a corner. Fast as lightning, they swarmed the worker. One tied and knotted a length of rope around the man’s wrists, holding them behind his back. Another secured his ankles. Within seconds, the man was bound. The third monkey leaped at the man and knocked him over. The man fell, and the two monkeys immediately dragged him across the blacktop and propped him up against a metal box, while the third tied a gag around his open mouth.

Only then did Charlene detect movement to her left, from where the voice had been heard: a flash of purple fabric and green skin.

Maleficent.

Charlene didn’t actually see her, but she didn’t have to. Purple and green were like Maleficent’s team colors. Who else could it be?

With the monkeys’ attention on the hostage, Charlene reconnected the camera and wire. The camera immediately sprang to life, tracking left. Charlene quickly retreated back to the top of the wall, flattening herself. She had a choice now: she could leave this to Amanda and the camera or…

She spun around and crawled in the direction of the noises. She had to see for herself. Something prompted her to glance back toward the viewing booth. From this height she could see out to several sections of the Jungle Trek path. It surprised her how much she could see—including Maybeck and Finn, who, standing to the side of the path, were shaking their heads furiously at her.

And then she understood: if she could see so much, then Park guests on the trail—like Maybeck and Finn—could see her as well. But rather than go back, she continued crawling, her curiosity ignited by the flash of green and purple, by the eerie sound of the woman’s voice, and by a trio of large monkeys who had acted on orders. She crawled past a narrow wall that acted like a buttress, supporting the fake rock wall. It also screened the source of the noises, and by leaving it behind, she now saw through the netting what all the commotion was about.

Four hairy orangutans were directing smaller monkeys while Maleficent stood in the shade watching. The monkeys were unloading bags of ice from a large rectangular truck. They were stacking the bags into a heap, and the ice was melting in the sunshine and leaking out into a large puddle that disappeared beneath the truck. The whole operation looked so human—bosses and workers. And yet these weren’t humans at all.

Then she saw the two cages. Big, as Amanda had described. They sat on the pavement, pushed up next to the steel barn. Both were wrapped in canvas tarps, but the canvas was not secured well along the bottom, allowing Charlene to see a slice of forest green fabric inside the cage: a ranger’s uniform.

Willa!

She couldn’t see anything inside the second cage, but she didn’t need to: Philby. She had no doubts.

“Faster,” Maleficent ordered. “We need more room. Bigger! If he’s to fit, it must be bigger!”

Were they taking Philby somewhere? Smuggling him out of the Park in an ice truck? Or was she talking about some other hostage?

She tried to make sense of it all: the monkeys clearly obeying Maleficent’s orders as if they understood her, the cages containing her friends, the melting pile of ice bags, the urgency in Maleficent’s voice.

She knew what had to be done: she had to untie the worker and set him free. But did she dare climb down and attempt that? Wasn’t it wrong not to? And if she messed up, if she got caught, would she end up like Willa and Philby? Where would that leave Maybeck and Finn, except further isolated?

Backing up slowly now, she decided this needed a team effort. She was no match for the power of Maleficent, who had once, with nothing but a wave of her hands and a mumbled incantation, created an electronic fence to surround Charlene’s friends.

The climb back down the wall proved more difficult than her ascent. She had just strapped her feet back into the stilts when she heard: “Look, Mommy! What’s that?”

The “that” was her, of course—the boy was pointing at her.

She stood absolutely still.

It felt like five minutes passed; it was more like thirty seconds.

“What? Where? The big one hanging from the rope?” the mother asked.

“Not the bats! The thingy. The creature. The vine thingy.”

But no one saw her. Charlene had blended into the foliage around her. A few minutes later the unwilling boy was led away, still protesting that he could see the vine lady, and why couldn’t anyone else see her?

It took Charlene fifteen minutes to work her way around the rock wall, and a second distraction—this time executed by Maybeck—to leave the enclosure.

A moment later, Finn and Maybeck joined her.

“So?” Finn asked. “Did you see anything?”

“We’ve got problems,” Charlene answered. “Big…big problems.”

39

FINN IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTOOD what Charlene and Maybeck did not: it wasn’t Philby and Willa in the cages. Not exactly.

He took off down the jungle path, forcing Maybeck to hurry to keep up with him. Charlene had been asked to blend into the jungle and keep a strict eye on the bat enclosure. He used the DS to tell Amanda the same thing. Now that Charlene had repaired the sabotaged camera, Amanda had more opportunity to monitor events backstage.

Though winded, Maybeck kept up. “What’s going on, Whitman?”

“You, of all people, should know,” Finn said.

“Me? Why?”

“Space Mountain.”

Maybeck said, “What about it?”

Finn stopped and pulled Maybeck to the side of the path, out of earshot of the other guests who passed in a steady stream. He spoke in a hush. “When they trapped you in perma-sleep, they put your DHI in—?”

“A maintenance cage!” Maybeck answered. “It wasn’t Willa and Philby Charlene saw. It was their DHIs.”

“Exactly,” Finn agreed. “Even someone as warped as Maleficent wouldn’t put a kid in a cage that small. But a DHI is another story.”

“But if the DHIs are in those cages,” Maybeck said, “then why don’t they just walk out?”

“Why didn’t you just walk out of the maintenance cage in Space Mountain?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was like I was half asleep or something. Until you showed up, it hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Because we had crossed over, and you had not. With your body in perma-sleep I have a feeling your DHI is kind of in this suspended state. It doesn’t know what’s up. Remember, Wayne programmed the server that controlled our DHIs. Maleficent is running the second server. Who knows how their DHIs are programmed?”

“So we need to cross them back over,” Maybeck said. “That’s the only way to get them out of the control of the second server.”

“Exactly!”

“But why would the Overtakers do this?” Maybeck wondered aloud. “Why trap them in perma-sleep in the first place?”