Full Tilt

“Got it!”

“Great! Now figure out how to aim it.”

He looked at me like I’d asked him to perform open heart surgery.

“Never mind. Just blow up stuff in our way.”

“I can do that.” He concentrated all his attention on the debris field, with his finger paused above the button.

I pulled sharply to the right, trying to dodge Cassandra’s blasts, but she scored a direct hit. Part of our dome bubbled and singed, but it didn’t rupture.

She knows me! I thought. She knows every move I’ll make and every direction I’ll turn. I was too predictable. If I was going to pilot us through this, I had to fight every natural tendency I had. To outsmart Cassandra, I needed to become a master of wild, unpredictable behavior. Which meant. . .

“Quinn, I need your help.”

“You’ve got a plan?”

“My plan is not to have a plan. That’s why I need your help.”

“You want me to fly, then?”

But that wouldn’t work either. Cassandra would know right away. She’d be able to predict Quinn’s moves as well as mine. The only way to outsmart her was to outsmart ourselves. So I told Quinn, “We have to somehow do it together.”

I scanned the sky ahead of us.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something big to hide behind.”

“No,” said Quinn. “Look for something small. We can knock it into her path.”

“What if we knock something big into her path?”

“If it’s too big, we could blow up when we hit it.”

I smiled. She wouldn’t expect that we’d risk that! We came around to see the Arc de Triomphe floating in our path in a slow off-center revolution. I turned toward it.

“We’re crazy, you know?” said Quinn. I had to agree. And, you know, it felt good.

We smashed into the huge stone arch, sending it spinning away from us. It crushed our nose flat, but it also spun right into Cassandra’s ship, which tumbled wildly off course. Her ship looked almost as dented as ours. In a few moments she had her vehicle under control again—but for once we were on the offensive.

“Blow it out of the sky!” Quinn said.

That was my first instinct too, but it would be too obvious. She’d have some sort of shield against a direct attack. Instead, I singled out the nearest obstacle: the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps Miss Liberty would buy our freedom.

Quinn fired. Miss Liberty detonated, sending a rain of green-copper shrapnel into Cassandra’s path. She hit the shrapnel field, and one of her engines began to smoke.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Quinn. “Bring us around and head back for the Hindenburg, but don’t make it obvious.”

Quinn had trusted me, so now I put my trust in him. I maneuvered in a wide arc, bobbing in and out of debris, making it appear that I was just trying to evade Cassandra’s blasts. The airship was the largest piece of debris in this brain-junkyard, and it wasn’t hard to find again.

“Fly like we’re going around it,” said Quinn. “Like we’re going to hide behind it.”

“We’ll let her think she’s catching up to us and—”

I didn’t have to say the rest, because we both knew. Quinn and I were connected now, like we were when we were younger, when our differences didn’t pull us apart, but made us complete.

Quinn looked behind us, keeping his eyes on Cassandra’s ship, letting me know her position second by second. We bobbed and wove closer to the behemoth of an airship, its taught silver fabric a pale lavender, reflecting the sparking violet heavens. As we rounded its belly Cassandra was right on our tail. Then suddenly I pulled up, tearing though the fabric of the airship, smashing through its support girders. The hydrogen gas ignited, and for an instant flames tried to engulf us, but then we came through the other side. Cassandra’s ship got caught right in the heart of the blast. I brought us around to watch as flames consumed the Hindenburg. As the airship burned down to its aluminum skeleton, Cassandra’s crippled ship fell away from the wreckage, charred and smoking.

Quinn kept his hand near the weapon controls. “She could be faking....”

So we watched. We saw an engine try to fire, then go dark. She was completely disabled, and although I’m sure she knew her way out of this ride, she could no longer attack us.

It should have been enough, but it wasn’t. Besting her was not enough. We had to beat her—and that meant getting out of the ride. I took us away from the flaming ruins of the airship and sped toward open space. Before us a series of smaller objects dotted the sparking sky—hundreds of them, maybe thousands. It took a moment for me to realize what they were, and when I did, my heart sank. It was a minefield . . . of sorts.

“Are those . . . cars?” Quinn asked.

I nodded. “Not just any old cars. They’re Pintos. Every last one of them.”

It was a field of floating automobiles that stretched as far as the eye could see, and it was so dense, you couldn’t even see beyond it.

“How hard do you have to ram a Pinto to make it blow up?” Quinn asked.

“I’m sure that here, they blow up on impact. And how much you wanna bet the only way out is on the other side?” I scanned the minefield, then turned to Quinn. “Okay, what would you do?”

“I’d try to weave through them.”

“And I’d try to go around them.” I knew neither strategy would work. Going around would take too long, and weaving through, well, I wasn’t that good of a pilot. I took a deep breath and prepared myself for a third choice. “Close the blast shield.”

“What? We won’t be able to see!”

“Exactly.”

“What are you gonna do? Fly by Braille?”

“Kind of.”

“Should I trust you?”

“Probably not.”

But he did anyway. He lowered the blast shield as we approached the field. “I never thought you’d want to go out like this,” he said.

“I don’t intend to.”

I knew these worlds well enough now to know that their strength came from our weaknesses. The park tapped into our longings, our fears, our habits, and our choices. This minefield had been perfectly, strategically placed to cause the most damage if Quinn and I followed our normal patterns of behavior when we encountered it. So much of my life had been under tight control. So much of Quinn’s life had been wild insanity. What we needed now was both: a directed burst of controlled insanity.

I gunned the engine, then took my hand off the controls, letting the ship fly a blind beeline through the minefield.

We hit the first Pinto. It dented our hull. I heard the car blow up, but we were moving so fast, it blew up behind us. Another one hit our underbelly, jarring me through the seat of my pants, but again, it exploded behind us.

Impact after impact, explosion after explosion. Smoke clouded the cabin from a fire in the engines.

“This ship’s not going to last much longer,” Quinn said.

“It doesn’t have to. It’s just got to last a few more seconds.”

One more mine bashed in our entire left side, but the hull held its integrity, and I closed my eyes, waiting for the next one—the one that would do us in.

It never came. Nothing more hit us. The only sounds now were the crackling of flames at the back of the cabin and the sizzle of frying technology.

Quinn looked at me, then opened the blast shield. It labored open to reveal a new sight dead ahead. The minefield and all of its debris were behind us. A spiral pattern of stars slowly revolved in front of us. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

“Is that a galaxy?” asked Quinn.

I smiled. “It looks like a turnstile to me.”

Our engines were gone, our ship was burning up, but the cosmic turnstile pulled us in faster and faster toward its center. Acceleration pressed me back against the chair.

Then I did something I’d never done before. I put my hands up in the air. Way up, like you’re supposed to do on the fastest, wildest roller coasters. I looked to Quinn and grinned. He nodded and put his hands up in the air as well as we shot through the center of the swirling turnstile galaxy—one last thrill for both of us to share, in absolute defiance of the ride.

I think that was the moment I really found my brother.

15

Tilt

We skidded to a stop on a barren landscape—a cold, gray no-man’s-land beneath a black, dead sky. We climbed out of our pod, which was no longer a ship, just a small Tilt-A-Whirl ride pod, dented and lopsided, but otherwise not much different from how it started. Snaking fingers of ground fog streaked the cratered ground, and the air held a stale, caustic odor like the smell of a junkyard refrigerator.

“What is this place?” Quinn asked.

Dozens of poles poked out of the ground, and at the end of each pole was a sign. ONE WAY. DO NOT ENTER. STOP. YIELD. NO U-TURN. They all pointed in different directions, like they were just standing around, not sure what, or whom, to direct.

A pale clock face hung in the sky like the soulless face of a winter moon. The clock showed 6:00 A.M., but when I looked closer, I could see that the second hand showed twelve seconds to the hour, and I watched those last seconds tick away.

We’d made it through all seven rides in time.

So why weren’t we out?

“Cassandra!” I called out to the black sky. “I did it, Cassandra. I made all seven rides. By your own rules you have to let me out!”

No answer.

“You have to let me out!”

Then she appeared out of the fog, weaving through the forest of road signs. She was definitely worse for the wear. The copper sheen to her hair was gone; it was almost ashen gray. Her face was pale and world-weary, like a young woman old before her time. Her gown was moth-torn silk, like an old shroud, and its color, like the stuffed bear she first handed me, was what you get when you mix all your paints together.

Now I understood the threat I posed and why Cassandra was so frightened. With each ride, I grew stronger, while she—and the park itself—grew weaker. Because of me, her magic was faltering. I doubt even she knew what would happen if it failed completely.

“Six A.M.,” I said. “Time to let me go.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice raspy. “I said I’d let you go, and I will.” She sounded far too calm. It troubled me. “You get to go home. But Quinn goes to The Works.”

“What?”

“He only made it through five rides.”

I looked at Quinn, who was turning as white as the clock looming in the sky.

“You’ve made the rides unstable,” Cassandra said. “There’s lots of damage to repair, and I need every soul on the job. I’ve got a nice place for Quinn next to Maggie and Russ.”

I shook my head, refusing to believe it. “That’s not fair!”

“Life’s not fair,” she snapped. “Who said eternity has to be?”

“I won’t go without him!”

“I’ll make you go. I’ll put you outside the gate, and for the rest of your life you’ll know that you left your brother and friends behind. Unless . . .”