Free Disney in Shadow by Ridley Pearson Page B

were not following either of us—me or them—and I could never be absolutely sure.”
    “Are there Overtakers outside the parks?” Amanda said.
    “Wayne has always believed so. But he tends toward the paranoid when it comes to his enemies. I have no proof either way. But he warned me, and I’ve always taken his warnings seriously.”
    “You’ve known him a long time,” Amanda said.
    “You might say that,” she said. “I’m his daughter. Wanda. Get it? Like Mickey’s wand?”
    “Aha,” Amanda said.
    “What is it?” Jess repeated. “This thing you’ve brought?”
    “My father has a very active imagination. It’s why he’s been such a successful Imagineer. That includes…well, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but he can ‘see’ things. Or he thinks he can. He claims it’s an extension of his imagination. Most of the time it’s little things: he’ll mention someone’s name and within a matter of minutes that person calls him—I’ve seen that happen a lot with him. Or he’ll know, five minutes before it happens, that all the lights are going to go out, that there’s going to be a power failure. It’s not that he talks about these things. But he’ll go get a flashlight out of the garage, and right then all the lights go out. That sort of thing. As a child I always considered these things coincidences. As I grew older I saw them more for what they were: prescient moments. Prescient, meaning—”
    “We know all about prescience,” Amanda said. “‘Knowing beforehand.’”
    “It’s a gift.”
    “Or a curse,” said Jess, winning a sympathetic look from Amanda.
    “Yes, I suppose,” said Wanda. “Though for my father, a definite gift. He would do things like pull over to the side of the road without explanation. A minute later a car would come zooming down the wrong lane head-on at all the traffic. That kind of thing. Quirky things.”
    “You still haven’t told us what he gave you,” Jess said.
    “I didn’t say he gave it to me,” Wanda said, correcting her. “I merely told you I had something of his.”
    Amanda said, “Jess has a similar gift to your father’s.”
    “I’d like to see it,” Jess said, sounding somewhat trancelike.
    “Please,” said Amanda.
    “Of course. I have no problem with that.” Wanda reached into her purse. “He made this the day before all that craziness at the Animal Kingdom, the day before he disappeared. He’d kept everything about your friends private until then. I hadn’t heard anything about it. But we spoke that day—he called me, not the other way around, which was the far more common occurrence. He told me in detail about the Overtakers, about Finn and Maybeck and the others. You two included. He’d not done that before and I knew just his talking about it meant it was significant. I’m now of the belief that he might have foreseen his being captured, that he called me because of this. He was laying the groundwork for your friends to save him, or at least to save the parks if it came to that.”
    She withdrew the item from her purse, opening her palm to reveal a small, white cube made of typing paper. There were symbols written and drawn on the cube’s six surfaces.
    Jess picked it up and studied it, spinning it and taking in the various images. She closed her eyes, opened them and looked over at Amanda. She shook her head slightly: she hadn’t immediately flashed on anything to do with the box.
    “We can get it to Finn,” Jess said, not wanting to surrender it.
    “Oh, yes! Could you, please? As soon as possible!”
    “Tomorrow,” Amanda said. “I’ll see him tomorrow.”
    “I can help your friends,” she offered. “I want to help.”
    “We can show the box to Philby,” Jess said. “He’s smart. He might know what it means.”
    “I looked up each symbol on the Internet,” Wanda said. “They were all easy enough to find. But none of it added up. And who can tell what order they’re supposed to be in? Without