Usually something very bad.
I scanned the crowd for any signs of trouble. A security guard, dressed as a member of a trade guild, stood at rigid attention next to the milk stand, his eyes hidden behind a pair of heavy black shades.
He was looking toward the gatehouse. His sunglasses made it impossible to tell if his gaze was focused on the crowd on the ground or the roof where my sister was crouched.
Stay cool, I told myself.
Gasps of surprise from several people ahead of me drew my attention away from the security guard. A figure clad all in black, flanked on either side by shorter guys in gleaming white armor, sliced through the milling crowd around me like a hungry shark through a school of mackerel.
The supreme leader and his fancy stormtrooper entourage.
Though his face was covered by his iconic black mask, I felt his attention on me. Normally I’d be thrilled for any character interaction. At that moment, though, I wanted to crawl into the nearest shadow and disappear. I didn’t have time for this. The competition was winding to a close, and I needed to find another cache before the final buzzer.
My eyes stayed fixed to my phone screen, and I jabbed clumsily at the app. I flicked through help screens to look busy, all the while thinking, Leave me alone. Please don’t look up.
I even tried some meditation exercises our mom had taught Biz to help her get through her treatments. One deep breath in, hold it, one deep breath out. Bring in hope and luck, push out fear and confusion. I didn’t think the breathing helped Biz much, but I’d found it really did calm my nerves.
“What are you doing on that datapad?” A heavily filtered voice oozed into my ears.
My heart rate shot through the roof at the sound of the supreme leader’s accusing tone.
So much for the calming powers of meditation.
“Just playing—” I started, only to be cut off by a stormtrooper’s harshly modulated voice.
“We’d really rather not waste our time searching your datapad,” he said. “Why don’t you put it away before we confiscate it?”
“Uh, sure.” My fingers flew to the power switch on the side of my phone, and the screen went black. “It’s off, see?”
“Scan the surroundings,” the black-masked figure snapped at the stormtroopers. “There are smugglers loose in this outpost. I want them found.”
Another wave of anxiety washed over me. The nearest stormtrooper looked up toward the rooftop suddenly, and my heart jumped into my mouth. He’d seen Biz. Everything I’d squirreled away for this trip, all the time we’d spent making sure she was ready, and all the effort we’d put into this one big push for something nice was gone. I might as well have taken the money I’d spent on our tickets and set it on fire outside the park’s gates.
The stormtrooper looked away from the gate just as suddenly as it had caught his attention. The leader and his escort brushed past me on their hunt to delight some other fan. I hoped whoever it was would enjoy the experience more than I had.
I finally reached the other side of the gatehouse. My heart was racing and my knees were so wobbly I had to lean back against the fake stone wall to pull myself together.
“Hey,” Biz whispered down to me from her hiding place on the roof. “You want to win this thing or what?”
“You were supposed to scout for caches,” I whispered up to my little sister. “Not climb around like a monkey.”
I tried to be stern with Biz, but it was hard to stay mad at her when she had that goofy, infectious grin plastered across her face.
“You can step up right there.” Biz pointed at a metal grill that jutted an inch from the weathered stone wall. “Then grab hold of the light fixture over there, put your foot on that little nubbin, and jump up to grab the roof’s edge.”
“Get down,” I demanded in a stage whisper that I hoped sounded very serious while still being quiet enough to avoid attracting attention from the hordes of tourists crammed into this replica of a galaxy far, far away or, worse, a cast member pretending to be a resident of said galaxy far, far away. “Hurry, before someone sees us.”
“No one can see me, but they’ll notice you if you don’t get up here,” Biz insisted. She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I found another cache.”
“Seriously?” According to the app, only one more cache remained to be found.
And if there was a cache on the roof, that had to mean it was okay to climb up there. I decided to go for it.
The climb was every bit as easy as my sister had claimed. It was almost like they meant for people to scramble up the side of the building. I reached the lip that surrounded the rooftop in a handful of seconds and dragged myself over it.
“It’s right over here,” Biz said. “Those season passes are as good as ours, bro.”
At thirteen, my little sister was so short and skinny she could have easily passed for a ten-year-old. Despite her size, she scrambled across the flat gatehouse rooftop with so much energy and enthusiasm it was hard to believe she had a terminal disease.
I shoved those dark thoughts away and followed Biz to the back corner of the roof.
The cache was set into the fake stone wall that surrounded this section of the park. Unlike the others we’d found, which had all looked brand new, this one was streaked with rust and dotted with clusters of golden lichen. It looked like it had been there for years.
That was impossible, of course. This section of the park wasn’t even a year old yet.
“Open it,” Biz said. Her eyes were fever bright, and her cheeks were flushed with red blotches.
She’d need her medicine soon. We’d planned our visit to the park to make sure she could get back to the room with plenty
