“That car is empty,” Avalon told her. “We already got all the sleepers out, and none of them will have a coin until they wake up anyway.”
“Not in it,” said Jill. “Under it.”
They all went around to the other side of the car, to see Milos still helplessly pinned.
“Hello, Milos,” said Jill, far too pleasantly to actually be pleasant.
“Switching sides, Jill?” he said. “I am not surprised.”
“He’s got a coin,” Jill announced. Avalon looked at the train car, then at his mob.
“Check his pockets.”
“You don’t have to,” Jill said. “It’s not in a pocket. He keeps it wedged in the laces of one of his shoes.”
Milos moaned, and Avalon pointed at Jix. “You. Go check.” Jix knelt down and reached under the train for Milos’s shoes. Milos kicked and struggled, but Jix was able to get a good hold on his shoes with his sharp nails. He checked the laces of both running shoes and found the coin wedged in the right laces, just as Jill had said. He pulled it out, spared a quick glance toward Jill and held it out to Avalon, holding it in his palm.
“Hey,” said Avalon, “how come you can hold it and not get sucked into the light?”
“Because I’m a skinja—” But Jix stopped himself. Could it be that these Afterlights didn’t know about skinjacking? If they didn’t, he wasn’t about to tell them. “I guess it’s because I’m just not ready,” Jix told them, then he gave it to Avalon, who carefully put it in his shirt pocket, holding it by his fingernails, just as he did the first one.
“All right, then,” he said. “Where are the other coins?”
“Not here,” Jill told him. “But there’s a bucket that’s so full of coins you can barely carry it.”
Avalon glared at her, baring his Oreo-clogged dental work. “You think I’m an idiot? You’re making that up.”
“She’s not,” called one of the other kids that had been captured. “I saw it. The Chocolate Ogre’s army had it when we fought them. But I don’t know where it went.”
“I do,” said Jill, and she refused to say anything more.
Jix grinned like the Cheshire cat. Jill’s ploy was cunning and clever. And to think she had done this for him!
“All right, then,” said Avalon. “But you’ll have to tell me eventually.” Then he ordered the Neons to send all the other prisoners downtown. “Two coins saves you and your cat,” he told Jill. “I got no use for the others.”
Jix tried to help them, but he was held back. In the end all he could do was watch as more than twenty kids were pushed into the earth. Then the Neons left, taking their two prisoners, all the Interlights, and Mary in her glass coffin, while behind them Milos spewed Russian curses at all of Everlost.
CHAPTER 15
Memory Makes the Man
Moose and Squirrel waited a good long time after the Neon Nightmares left before dredging up the nerve to come down from the mansion roof. Around them other kids were coming out of hiding as well—but just a handful.
“Where’s Mary?” the refugees all asked. “She didn’t go down, did she? Please don’t say that she went down.”
“They got her,” Moose informed them. “The Neons got her and took her away, coffin and all.” Which made the kids as miserable as if she had sunk.
Milos, however, was relieved—but it didn’t temper his anger. “Are you two idiots going to help me or not?” Moose and Squirrel hurried to him, making all sorts of excuses, but Milos would have none of it. “You are both cowards! Now go get the kids that are left, and get this train off of me.”
Moose and Squirrel went to gather the Afterlights who had hidden but had not run away. When Moose and Squirrel took a final head count, their number was forty-three.
“Forty-three?” wailed Milos from beneath the empty sleeping car. “How can there be only forty-three?”
“Most of ’em got scared off,” said Squirrel.
“Fine. Get them to push this thing off of me.”
But try as they might, forty-three Afterlights were not enough to leverage a train car off the tracks.