Page 110 of One Adult, Please

“No. You're not taking them on alone.”

"I've done more with less."

"You've done more with less and gotten lucky."

"Lucky is a skill."

"Lucky is the absence of a skill and the presence of probability."

The walkie erupts. Grace's voice, different now. "Okay, so I'm looking at this control panel and there are a lot of buttons, and I think some of them do things to the rides and I have an idea."

Joel's wrench pauses. "Don't touch the panel."

"I'm not touching it. I'm evaluating it. Touching implies commitment. I'm in the assessment phase," Grace says.

"The operations center has override controls for every ride system in the park. Those controls are not toys."

"If I can activate the rides in the adventure part, the noise will pull the wrong people away from you and toward the rides. That's just science. That's how sound works, things go toward the louder thing, I saw a documentary about it once."

"You saw a documentary about zombies being attracted to sound?"

"I saw a documentary about moths and lights and the principle is the same."

"Do it," I say.

"Beck, don't encourage her."

"The man with the wrench needs two more minutes and the woman with the moth theory needs one button. The math works."

"That's not math."

"Joel." Grace's voice again. "I need you to trust the crayon plan."

"One ride," he says. "One. The loudest one. Turn it on, draw them off, turn it off. Do not improvise."

"I would never."

Mythic Frontier wakes up. Every ride, every attraction I've walked through and fortified and memorized and made mine, lighting up in the gray dawn. The coasters' chain lifts engage with a grinding metallic roar.

The ride queue music from every ride plays simultaneously in a cacophony of adventure soundtracks layered on top of each other. Heroic orchestral swells colliding with pirate sea shanties colliding with fairy-tale woodwinds, and underneath all of it, the steady mechanical thunder of coaster cars cresting lift hills and plummeting down drops empty.

It's beautiful. It's horrifying. It's the most Grace thing that's ever happened.

"Grace," Joel says into the walkie. His voice is doing the flat thing.

"I may have pressed more than one button."

"You pressed all the buttons."

“I pressed one button, Joel! Then I leaned over to read the label beside it and my hand slipped and the rest of the buttons were where my hand landed. It was a button situation. The overlap was inevitable.”

Below us, the response is immediate and absolute. Every wrong person in the big middle stops. Turns and orients toward Mythic Frontier. The drift pattern reverses. Six, eight, twelve of them, shambling away from the operations center, drawn by the wall of sound rolling out of my zone.

"It's working," I say.

"It's not working," Joel says. "It's accidentally succeeding, which is different."

"Result's the same."