A/N: This one is over 1,000 words longer than the average chapter, but I figure that's okay, because the wait was certainly longer than I would've liked. Thank you all for being patient, and I hope you like this one as much as I do!


The world hadn't ended, but Sally was afraid to move. She sat on a bucket, holding Jojo to her chest like he was a little kid (which was especially easy considering how small he was). Everything had been shaken off the closet's shelves; she vaguely remembered being brained with a 24-pack of bar soap, and toilet paper hung like streamers over every available surface. The naked, dangling lightbulb had shattered, thanks to being thrown against the wall, and without being able to see anything she felt untethered, lost and small and quiet in the blackness.

Finally she became aware of an impatient snapping, and realized with a start that her son was trying to wriggle free. "Sorry, kid," she said with a shaky laugh, loosening her stranglehold. "Guess I was a little spooked." A dismissive snap, and then the closet was flooded with light as Jojo opened the door. He slipped outside, looking like a shadow against the brilliant afternoon, made even brighter by the fact that all the windows were missing. So was the front door. "Yikes," she breathed, climbing over a pile of mops and brooms into the lobby. "That was some earthquake, huh? Hey — Jojo?" She found him wading through the front lawn, showing a desk chair out of his way. "Hey! HEY! Where are you going?"

He pointed up at the observatory on top of the hill.

Ah, right; his hideout. "Gotta make sure everything's all right in the secret laboratory? Check that Frankwhonstein didn't get out?"

He rolled his eyes but nodded, continuing through the muddy water.

"Don't be out too late!" she called, watching his tiny black head bob down the road. "I don't want you alone if there's another one of those things!"

Another snap. Her son would be fine. Her daughters, on the other hand . . .

She frantically pulled out her cell phone, but before she could dial, it rang, a shrill polka that Ned loved. "Honey, is that you?" she asked, hoping for either her husband or one of her daughters.

"See, I knew I was her favorite," she heard Patrick say smugly, followed by Sarah telling him to shut up.

Sally sighed. "Hi, guys. Everything okay?"

"Yeah, we're at your house. You know, to go to the WhoCentennial like we agreed? Where are you?"

"At Whoville Hall. Things are . . . fine, I guess. A little swampy. But the girls are all right?" After being reassured several times that everyone was okay, they decided to meet in the town square and see what Ned had to say.

"Hey, Sal?" Patrick's voice was softer, nervous. "Do you think there'll even be a celebration? I mean . . . how bad is this?"

She sighed and looked back at the hall, where dozens of Whos had already grabbed blow-dryers and were trying to dry out the lawn. The crumbled bricks and shards of glass would be harder to repair, though. "I don't know, Pat. But whatever it is, I think it's been going on for a while."


Ned crawled out from under his office, which had been moved to the balcony and arranged in a giant heap of splintered wood. Interesting design choice, he thought, fighting a manic urge to laugh.

"Are you okay?" Horton's voice was tinny and distant — or maybe that was just his concussion, he wasn't sure.

He put everything back where it belonged and returned to the balcony, looking down at the wreck of his front lawn. It was almost time for the WhoCentennial, and Whos were straggling dizzily from their wrecked houses and headed toward the town hall. "Well . . . more or less." Then he remembered the danger they were in. "What happened? The bird?"

"Yeah, it attacked me. Mayor, your people are in danger!"

The concern in his invisible friend's voice touched him. If no one else would, Horton believed in him. He thought Ned could do this. And for the first time, it really hit him what a risk Horton was taking to bring them to safety; the least he could do was try to make things easier. "You know what? I'm gonna do it." His confidence wavered as he saw the crowd building in front of his office, but he pushed that aside as the giant elephant in the sky (and wasn't that still a weird sentence) gave him a hasty farewell — another reminder that things were far from well in Whoville.

Suddenly he caught Sally's eye. She had crept to the front of the crowd with a handful of children in tow, their friends huddled behind her. They were battered and rumpled, and a thin cut had dyed the cream-colored fur on his wife's cheek red, but mostly they just looked confused and scared.

And they were his responsibility.

Taking a deep breath, he lifted his chin and faced his people, trying not to look as panicked as he felt. "I'm declaring a state of emergency."


"So it's bad," Patrick affirmed in a whisper, even as the Chairman stepped up to declare everything fine, insisting that the Mayor was "just being a moron."

"Pretty bad," Eric agreed, grabbing one son in each arm and pulling them close. Sally ignored them, unable to look away from the tiny form on the balcony. Things had been bad before, and over the course of their marriage she'd had to stand by more than once and seethe as her stupid brother-in-law humiliated Ned, but never before had he done it in front of the entire town. And never before had her husband had such a desperate, determined look in his eyes. And never before had the people turned on him so openly, she realized, watching them "vote" to continue the celebration even as the skies darkened and the wind picked up.

Their friends had seen their fair share of petty bullying directed Ned's way, but this was a first for them as well, and Erik had to grip Sarah's arm to keep her from springing at the nearest laughing Who. "Those jerks," she snarled. "If I could get that Birch alone in a room for five minutes, I'd —"

"Children, dear," Erik reminded her, jerking his head towards the kids and stopping what was sure to be an impressive stream of profanities.

"We have to do something!" she shot back, dropping her voice as the crowd fell silent in response to the Chairman's question — except for one guy, who shouted "Yeah!" and tried to high-five Patrick, who avoided his unwashed hand and turned back to them as soon as it was safe to whisper again.

"What are we supposed to do?" he asked. "We're four assholes in the middle of an entire city —"

"Children!"

"Five assholes, if you count our dear mayor up there," Sarah added helpfully. Erik rolled his eyes but said nothing.

"— and it's not like any of us are gonna win them over."

On the balcony, Ned was trying and failing to deflate a beach ball with a pen. It hurt to watch, and despite herself Sally began wondering if Ned was having a mental breakdown. The stress of being mayor had become too much for him, and she hadn't been able to support him the way she should've, and now he was imploding on himself, as slowly and painfully as that whining plastic ball. Could she have prevented it? She'd seen the signs — should she have said something?

"Sally, are you okay?" Erik asked gently.

She waved him away as Tom Birch smirked at Ned. "No one believes you. No one supports you." The words tore through her, brutally sharp and cold. Was that true?

"I hate to say it," Mimi said, speaking for the first time, "but it does sound kinda crazy. I love my brother, don't get me wrong, but . . ."

There was an uncomfortable silence. "Yeah," Patrick finally agreed. "There is that."

As though to punctuate the statement, Ned declared defiantly, "Horton is . . . a giant elephant in the sky!" When they glanced up, he quickly added, "Don't bother looking, he's invisible. And he's the one risking his life to get Whoville — which, by the way, is a speck on a clover! — to safety!"

Oh, no. Sally let her head drop into her hand. "Not this again," she muttered.

"Again?" Mimi quirked up one eyebrow at her, but before she could say anything else, the mayor hurried over to a large horn that had been shoved into a drainpipe, calling into it for Horton to speak to them. The helpless, pleading note in his voice made her cringe, and despite her better sense she caught her breath, praying to hear something come out of that pipe. Please, please, let Ned win one. Just this once. Let him be right. Not crazy. Please don't let my husband be crazy.

When the Chairman declared that it was time for the kite races to begin, her head had begun spinning from not breathing, and she almost fell over before she felt someone under her arm, holding her upright. She looked down again and smiled despite everything, tousling her son's head. "Thanks, Jojo. Again."

He nodded, not looking at her. His face was ashen, brown eyes huge and horrified as they watched his father sprint down the hall's front steps. Several Whos tried to stop him, some serious and some mocking, but he waved them all off with a quick "Get underground" and rushed to Sally's side, taking her hands in his with a gravity that frightened her almost as much as his strange behavior.

"I am so sorry that I let you down, but this . . . this is bigger than me. Get the family together and get somewhere safe." His hair was a tangled mess hanging in his eyes, his fur flat on one side from being pushed into the balcony railing, his eyes wild and manic. He looked absolutely nuts, and she had half a second to decide what to say to him. Get help? What's going on? Why didn't you tell me any of this earlier?

Then she saw the lines of exhaustion around his eyes, and the way his hands were rock steady despite the fact that his lips were trembling. "I will," she said, and was gratified for a split second to see relief flash across his face, turning him back into the clumsy, awkward kid she'd fallen in love with, the man she'd chosen to always trust. As he dropped her hands and hurried away, she pulled Jojo close to her side and called, "I believe you!"

It was, she thought, what he needed to hear.

Once he'd left, she turned back to her friends with a shrug and a half-sheepish smile. "Wanna spend some time underground with Mr. and Mrs. Crazy?"


It had taken a long time to round up their children and bring them to the storage facility, and none of them were happy to crouch among old parade floats and other official equipment, but finally they were all there: Sally and her kids, Patrick, Sarah and Erik with their children, and a few dozen other Whos that had decided to bet on the mayor. It was bitterly cold and uncomfortable, but the older kids had organized the younger ones into a game of Ninja, and everything seemed okay . . . sort of.

Ned sighed with relief as Sally relayed all of this over the phone, standing on his office balcony and watching the wind howl through the square. "That's good, honey. Stay down there until it's safe." Not that he knew when that would be. Or what "safe" even meant. Once he'd left the square, he'd found Dr. Larue in her lab, flipping through giant textbooks and blissfully ignorant of everything around her. He'd convinced her to stop her research and they'd begun rounding up everyone who'd listen and herding them into safe areas. It'd had mixed results; though Larue was respected for her brilliance, she was also considered something of an eccentric, and not everyone trusted her odd ideas.

"Where are you, Ned? You're coming down here, right?"

He grimaced, hating to disappoint his wife again. "I can't. I have to get as many people to safety as I can." The ground had begun to rumble, and judging from the concerned voices emanating both from the celebration below him and the phone in his hand, he wasn't the only one who'd noticed.

"Then I'll come up there with you! I —"

"Please don't. It'll be okay. I'll . . ." He had no idea how to end that sentence without lying again, and feeling the earthquake becoming still more intense, he fell silent.

"Take care, Ned." Her voice was small and sad, like she wasn't sure she'd see him again but knew that it was time to let him go.

"You too." There had to be something more to say, in case this really was it. "I've been so lucky, Sal. I love you."

"I —" But the phone cut off with a burst of static, and he let it fall to the floor as he raced to the balcony.

"Get underground!" he shouted again, taking the horn down from the drainpipe and using it to project his voice above the alarmed crowd. There wasn't time to get them all into the storage facility, but . . . "Basements! Everyone get to the nearest basement and —"

Suddenly his feet left the ground. In a surreal and strangely beautiful scene, gravity had been suspended, and he watched in awe as everything in the town that wasn't bolted down — cars, people, street vendors and their wares — floated up into the air, spinning around as the wind buffeted them back and forth. People grabbed at everything in reach, making chains of Whos to keep everyone from flying away. Never in his life had he seen such cooperation in Whoville; even the Greenies were trying to help.

"Mishter Mayor!" Larue's hand closed around his ankle, tethering him to a line of Whos that stretched across the square.

"Thanks, Mary," he said, smiling down at her. Then he lifted the horn to his lips again and shouted, "EVERYONE HOLD ON! WE'RE GOING TO —"

But before he could finish, gravity reasserted itself. There was a flash of gray, green, pink, white, white, blinding white —

And then everything was black.


It had been silent for an hour. No one in the underground storage facility had said anything that entire time; after the screams and crashing that had sounded like the city was falling down on top of them, everyone was too shocked to speak. Even the youngest children were silent except for an occasional sniffle. But it had been an hour of emptiness, and Sally couldn't bear to wait any longer. "Someone should go up," she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. "Make sure everything's all right."

"What if it starts again?" Mimi asked, holding Heady in her lap and stroking the sleeping baby's hair.

Sally wasn't worried about that, not as much as she feared the opposite: that Whoville was dead, and nothing would ever start again. "I have to find Ned," she finally replied. "He'll need help putting things back together."

No one said what they were all thinking. "I'll come with you," Patrick said, climbing to his feet and pulling her to hers. "We'll send a small party up to make sure everything's all right, and everyone else can stay down here with the kids."

"So who's going?" Sarah was already standing as she spoke. "That's three of us. Or four?" she added, glancing over her shoulder at Erik.

He shook his head. "I think one of us should be here for the children, and something tells me that nothing will keep you in this hole for another minute."

"You know me so well."

A few others agreed to go as well (including some of her kids, who were very angry when she refused to let them join the exploration party), but Sally was surprised to find that Mimi wasn't one of them. "But what about Ned?" she asked.

"Ned's job has always been to take care of Whoville, and my job is to take care of him. But you've been doing that better than I ever could." She looked down at Heady again, and something tender and sad crossed her face. "So I'll watch his family while you guys are up there saving Whoville."

A lump rose in her throat. Sally kissed Mimi on the cheek, then said goodbye to the children that were awake.

"Nervous?" Sarah asked, the three of them leading the way up to the surface.

"Only of dying a horrible death at the face of some cosmic shitstorm," Patrick quipped.

"Well, if that's all," Sally said, "then let's get out of here."

Aboveground, everything was covered in dust and rubble. Most people were sprawled on the ground, or sitting up and assessing their injuries. "What happened?" someone shouted, and then everyone began to move, calling for their loved ones and asking what to do now.

Sarah whistled. "It looks like a war zone."

"Maybe it was," Patrick murmured. "We still don't really know what's going on, and — Sal?"

She pushed past them both, moving from Who to Who frantically. "Have you seen Ned?" she kept asking. "The Mayor — is he all right?" Patrick and Sarah had to rush to keep up with her, dodging the people and debris littering the grass and trying not to lose sight of her in the confusion.

Suddenly he caught Sarah's arm, pulling them both to a halt. "Go get Sal," he said, pointing. "Hurry!"

One glance at Ned's prone body, hidden and half-buried under a Boozleberry tree, and Sarah took off sprinting.


The first thing Ned was aware of was pain in his side, like something hard and sharp was being jabbed into it. The second was of the strange noise his breath made. The third was a voice in his ear: "Buddy, you all right?"

He sat up with a jerk, opening his eyes and seeing only blackness. "Am I dead?" he asked, hearing the echoing again. Then with horror as he recognized the voice: "Pat? Does that mean you're dead too? What about Sally? The kids? Jojo —"

Patrick laughed. "Hold on, I've got you." His large hand held Ned's shoulder down, while something tugged on his head.

"Ow!" He pawed at his head and felt cool metal. "This is the weirdest afterlife."

"Just — a second — almost got it — there!" The tugging ceased and his vision was flooded with light. "There you go," Patrick said, smiling down at him. "Better?"

He shielded his eyes from the sudden glare, looking around at his almost-familiar city. "So I'm not dead?" he asked, staggering to his feet.

"Nope, just knocked out. And thank goodness for that." Before Ned knew it, he was almost bowled over as Patrick gave him a bear hug, jabbing the thing in his side with one bony elbow. "We were seriously worried, man."

"Ow! I was worried about you guys too." Wincing, he wriggled out of his friend's grip, yanking the painful object off of him with a yelp of pain. He groaned when he realized it was the stapler from his office. "Where did it even come from?"

Patrick shrugged. "Staplers hate you." He waved the horn that had been on the mayor's head. "Apparently so do these things. And Boozleberry trees — it took three guys to get it off you."

He realized with irritation that he'd been crushed by the same tree that he'd planted in Mr. Smirgle's yard, back when he'd first been married. It had fallen on him then, too. But that was quickly wiped from his mind when he remembered where he was and what'd happened. "Is everyone all right? Where . . ." He trailed off, noticing that they were in the center of a small circle of people — one that was growing as more and more Whos came over. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he leaned close to Patrick and asked, "How many of them saw me with a horn on my head?"

He shrugged, but before he could reply they were suddenly surrounded by purple and red fur. "Ned! You're okay!" Sally cried, squeezing him so hard he could barely breathe.

"You idiot, you could've gotten killed!" But Sarah gave him a quick peck on the cheek to soften her words. "And Pat wouldn't let us help you get up," she added sulkily. "He made us go get everyone from storage instead."

"Glad you're okay, Ned," he heard Erik say, though he couldn't see anything through Sarah's curls.

"DADDY!" a chorus of girls shouted, and then he was buried in even more hugs.

He kissed the top of Sally's head, then gently pushed everyone off of him, looking around at the damage. "We have to get this under control," he said, holding out his hand for the horn and raising it to his mouth. "Listen up!" he called. "I want anyone who's injured to get into the Town Hall, and anyone who can walk carry those who can't!" He let Dr. Larue organize a team of medics, and ordered his friends to form cleaning committees.

"What're you going to do?" Sally asked, watching as Whos gathered up the mess and tried to make sense of it, battering cars back into shape and piling up whatever couldn't be fixed in the center of the square.

He pointed the horn in the direction of his balcony. "I need to check in with Horton."


Sally had never been so relieved to meet a giant, invisible elephant in her life. She watched Ned's eyes light up as he heard Horton's voice, smiling as he joked around with his newest friend. It was like meeting God . . . and finding out that He was an elephant with her husband's strange, dorky sense of humor. She didn't know how much he'd been told about the Chairman, but the pure joy on Ned's face and the confused outrage on Tom's when Horton called him a boob was one of the most beautiful things she'd seen in her life.

She was impressed by Horton's memory, thrilled at his existence, and touched by his determination to save them. As the entire city listened with rapt attention to the story of the speck — Ned filling in what had been going on in Whoville, Horton explaining things in the sky, which he called "Nool" — she realized that everything she'd ever known was being shattered into a billion pieces. It was terrifying, but at the same time everything started to make sense: the strange weather, that G-something guy from the land of Snowflake, and more than anything her husband's strange, disturbing behavior over the past few weeks. Despite that Horton's existence changed the very bedrock of their knowledge, what she felt most was relief that Ned could finally be honest with her again (and the fact that he wasn't crazy certainly didn't hurt).

And Sally could see in Ned's expression that he felt the same way. While it was nice to be validated as right, to have the Chairman mocked in front of the entire town, and for once feeling the respect of Whoville's citizens, above all she knew that he was happiest that everything was out in the open, and he didn't have to lie to anyone anymore.

This peace — the cleaning-up and healing of Whoville and listening to Horton's stories, watching Ned take charge and have people listen to him, for once fully confident in his decisions — only lasted for a few hours. Sally was helping Nora and Jojo put a smashed unicycle back together when they heard Ned:

"Everyone! They don't believe we're here! They're going to —" He cut himself off as the horn exploded with shouting, calls for the speck's destruction and boiling oil. Over the panic in the square, Ned's voice rang out, frantic but determined, "We've got to make some noise! We are here! We are here! We are here!"

Their trouble had only begun.