Oof. New Abby. She did have some surprisingly good game ideas, though. And it didn’t sound like I’d be able to stop her from charging ahead. I sat back and shrugged.
“Thanks,” said Abby. “Can you get me some light?”
I passed her a flashlight from my supply corner and watched as she disappeared into the darkness. The seconds ticked by, but nothing happened. No cries for help, no Council bursting in from every pillow, no explosion, no collapsing links. Were we okay, then?
I ran my mind over the Council’s lecture about their weird rules, and suddenly remembered the map of Camp Pillow Fort they’d refused to let me see. Our network had made a strange shape on it, bumpier than it looked on our map. Was that because it showed this fort too? A fort that was already linked in, but I just didn’t know about it yet? If it had been here all along, it might be okay to use. . . .
A light hit my face from inside the new link. “Hey, Sleepy McTiredface,” came Abby’s whisper, “come on.” I sighed, pushed down my neverending questions, and squeezed in after her.
We were in a small, boxy fort, built around a folding table shoved into a corner. Pillows lined the walls on two sides, with a blanket hanging down to the floor on the others. The cold linoleum floor was littered with art supplies, and as Abby waved her flashlight, I saw colorful drawings taped to the underside of the table above our heads.
“Good thing you were careful coming in,” she whispered, “or you might have been seriously injured on all these crayons and pieces of construction paper.”
I ignored her.
“It definitely looks like a little kid’s fort,” Abby went on. “So that’s okay. But how did it get linked in? Do you recognize anything?”
I shook my head. Uncle Joe’s made sense, but I didn’t have the faintest idea how we could’ve gotten linked in to some random little kid’s fort. It felt totally creepy, sneaking around a stranger’s space by flashlight. What if the owner turned up and found us? Or worse, what if they were sitting just outside, only inches away on the other side of the blanket, listening to our every word?
And what was outside, anyway? Sure, it looked all sweet and innocent in here, but that didn’t prove anything. It could all be part of the trap! This fort could be set up in a pitch-black attic, or the musty basement of a haunted mansion, or a locked classroom in an abandoned boarding school, and when we crawled out, we would find our names scrawled on the chalkboard in jagged letters, waiting for us.
“We’ll have to go out there and look for clues,” I said, shivering.
“Agreed,” said Abby. “And it’s your turn to go first, fearless leader.” She pointed the flashlight at a crack in the blanket walls. “Watch out for ghost badgers.”
“Oh, you are just hilarious tonight,” I whispered. Abby giggled.
I took a deep, steadying breath, put my secret-agent shoulders back, parted the sheets the tiniest bit, and looked out.
We were in a hospital room. The walls were pale pastel green, and the cool air smelled like hand sanitizer and paper towels. The lights were turned off, but a computery glow came from a group of machines clustered around a bed on the opposite side of the room.
And in the bed, fast asleep, was a small girl.
“Oh, wow,” said Abby, lying flat on her stomach and ducking her head under my arm. I leaned on her shoulders. New Abby sure was a lot more cuddly than Old Abby, and I had to admit, that part was nice. We both watched the girl sleep quietly.
“She must be really sick,” I said, scanning the room. “Look at all those cards taped to the wall. She’s been here awhile.”
There was a soft tap on the door, and it swung open. We scrambled back, killing the flashlight and hardly daring to breathe, as someone came in.
Footsteps crossed the floor toward the bed. There was a faint click, and one of the machines beeped.
“Mmph, whassat?”
“Hey, Kelly,” whispered a voice. “Sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
I felt my hair stand on end. I knew that voice. I opened the teeniest crack in the sheet and looked out.
My mom was standing over the bed.
“Deep, slow breaths, sweetie,” she said to the girl named Kelly, “and you’ll be asleep before you know it. Then when you wake up, it’ll be tomorrow and you can play in your pillow fort again.”
“Will you be here?”
My mom sat down on the edge of the bed and rested a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “I’ll always be right here when you need me,” she said.
“Okay,” murmured Kelly. “G’night, Dr. Hetzger.”
“Good night,” whispered my mom. She waited until Kelly was asleep, then adjusted her blankets, scribbled something on a chart at the foot of the bed, and left, closing the door quietly behind her.
I let out a breath.
“Wow,” said Abby. “That was weird.”
I didn’t say a word. It was more than weird. My mom had just promised to be there for this total stranger whenever she needed her. This stranger who wasn’t her family, who wasn’t her daughter, who wasn’t me.
Something hot and spiky settled in my stomach.
“That girl’s really sick then, isn’t she?” said Abby. “Since your mom’s a cancer doctor?”
I nodded. We looked out at Kelly. She couldn’t have been more than eight.
“And this is her fort,” Abby said, shining the flashlight around again. She ran its beam along the pictures taped to the ceiling and smiled. Apparently Kelly liked drawing two things: cats and space. Mostly together. She was good, too. There were cats in space suits, cats on the moon, cats meeting aliens, cats pushing buttons in control rooms, and cats in rockets counting down to liftoff.
The memory of saving Samson from
