Finn quickly scribbled down yensidtlaw. walt-disney spelled backward.

okay. got it.

you will see a video link button on the landing page. right click on that button: it will open up a video chat with me. see you in a minute.

The sudden closing of VMK had come as a shock to Finn and his friends. News that the Web site remained accessible surprised him. But he didn’t doubt Wayne for a moment. Wayne lived and worked in a secret world. He was full of surprises.

* * *

“It’s really you,” Finn gasped, seeing the man’s weathered face on his computer screen. There was no telling how old Wayne was, but he wasn’t young.

The video signal wasn’t perfect: static overlaid Wayne’s face, and the sound of his voice was crackling and uneven. He looked and sounded older than Finn remembered him.

“You don’t have much time,” he said, causing gooseflesh to ripple up Finn’s arms.

“Excuse me?” Finn replied.

Wayne was continually checking over his shoulder, as if afraid of being found out, which Finn found disturbing.

“You were lucky at the Park tonight,” Wayne said.

“You were there?”

“Never mind about me. You were there. That’s all that matters.”

“It was Maleficent.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

Finn kept his summary of the evening’s events as short and succinct as possible. He described spotting Amanda and Jez during the start of the parade; of later seeing a pair of monkeys in the bushes near the crowd. Wayne quizzed him about the monkeys. Then Finn described his being chased up Escher’s Keep, and finished with Maleficent’s daring escape out the window and down Tinker Bell’s zip line.

“We’d moved her there,” Wayne said. “Third move in as many weeks. We had intelligence that the Overtakers were planning for her escape. We thought by moving her around frequently…But it obviously wasn’t enough.”

“What about the weather balloon? The lightning strike?”

“The apartment was locked down like a jail cell. Sealed tight. We had to provide a way out in case of fire, but the closest exit was locked from the inside. Our security guard would have had to open that door for her to escape.”

“The Dapper Dan chasing us…was he one of your guys?”

“You had no way of knowing that.”

But I should have, Finn thought. The Dapper Dan had known the way up the Keep. Only Wayne could have taught him the route.

“We put on an ankle bracelet that would send an alarm if she moved more than fifty feet from the transmitter,” Wayne explained. “It housed a GPS transmitter, so we could track her down. They used the power of the lightning strike to break open the bars. Nothing short of a small bomb would have accomplished that. The lightning also temporarily knocked out the power, which was crucial for her to escape. They bought her enough time to cut the ankle bracelet off. We found it up there in the Tinker Bell tower.”

That didn’t sound good. “So she’s just…gone?”

“I doubt very far. A green face tends to stick out. It’s control of the Park that she’s after. She’ll stay in the Park, we think. But to accomplish her goal of domination, she’ll have to rebuild, and reorganize the Overtakers. And she’ll need the five of you out of the way. You defeated her last time. She won’t risk that happening again.”

Finn didn’t like the way Wayne said that so calmly. Out of the way? He tried to wrap his mind around the fact that they were talking about a Disney character—villain or not—as if she were human. And after all that he and the other DHIs had been through, it wasn’t so hard. Something weird was going on, and somehow they were now a big part of it. Whatever kind of being Maleficent was, however it was that she existed, her presence was very real, as was the threat to the DHIs.

“She needs cold, don’t forget, or at least the illusion of cold. She loses her powers in the heat. For this and other reasons, we think she’s likely gone to the Animal Kingdom.”

“Because?”

“There are several attractions there that are kept quite chilly. And of course there’s Everest.”

“Is that where Jez is?”

Wayne’s face tightened. “You want to explain that, please?”

Finn told him the rest of what had happened. He related what Willa had told him briefly upon their meeting by the castle: that Jez had been replaced by a DHI and the real Jez had vanished.

“That’s why I was IMing the others,” he explained. “At midnight we were going to meet and try to figure out how to get Jez back.” He listened to himself say that, and wondered what chance they had against Maleficent. Then he checked the computer clock and, seeing it was well past midnight, wondered why no one else had joined the chat.

“Amanda,” Finn continued, “supposedly said something about Jez being…different. Like she’s a Cast Member or something.”

“She’s not a Cast Member,” Wayne said knowingly. If he knew something about Jez, he hid it well, for although the reception was poor—sparking and sputtering—his expression didn’t change.

“What I’m going to tell you now,” Wayne said, “is done so in the strictest confidence. Do you understand me, Finn? You can share what you must with your friends, but only if absolutely necessary, and only if they promise to protect the information. It’s critical to the safety of all of us.”

“I promise.” A second chill raced through Finn.

Wayne glanced suspiciously over his shoulder for the umpteenth time. “I’m in hiding, as you must be aware by now. The Overtakers are said to have obtained the DHI technology. They are working on projecting me—turning me into a DHI so that they could mislead our efforts to defeat them. And if they managed to contain my DHI when I was sleeping…well…you saw what happened to your friend Maybeck.”

Months earlier, Maybeck’s DHI had been prevented from crossing back over—a process that was triggered by a small black remote control device that Wayne possessed. As a result, the human Maybeck had remained asleep in bed in a kind of induced coma while his DHI had been trapped in a maintenance cage in Space Mountain. Finn had freed Maybeck’s DHI, and Wayne had then crossed them over, allowing the human Maybeck to awaken from his comatose state. But the idea of that happening to Wayne or any of the other DHIs ever again was terrifying. Unthinkable.

“What you’ve just told me about Jezebel’s disappearance,” Wayne said, “figures into this theory, I’m afraid. It suggests the Overtakers do, in fact, have the DHI technology at their disposal, and that presents us with some difficult choices.”

“Our DHIs went back on line tonight,” Finn muttered.

“Precisely! You’re aware of the DHI expansion plan?”

Finn had heard rumors that the Animal Kingdom was planning Disney Host Interactive characters—using DHIs of Animal Kingdom animals to guide guests through the Park the same way holograms of Finn and his friends guided guests around the Magic Kingdom.

“Animal Kingdom this year,” Wayne said. “Then they’ll put your DHIs at Disneyland and the cruise ships within two years. You and the other DHIs have become so popular that the Imagineers are ramping up expansion into all the Parks around the world: Paris, Hong Kong, Japan. You have developed an enormous fan base.”

The video briefly sputtered and went dark, but a moment later Wayne’s face grew larger as he leaned toward the camera.

Wayne spoke softly. “Imagineering won’t confirm or deny my team’s accusations that the Animal Kingdom’s DHI server was cloned, but now with what you’ve told me, I’m sure of it. The Overtakers have a second DHI server, Finn. No one around here is ever going to admit it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. They have stolen the software responsible for projecting you five kids as holograms. If they’ve created DHI data for me, as I believe—and for Jezebel, as you’ve just told me—then it’s in an effort to trick us or spy on us or manipulate us. What if my DHI is used so that I give my people orders that they, the Overtakers, want given?”