Game Over (11 page)

The small, tense, compact woman stared at the door blankly, her lips pressed together to make a thin line. It was odd, thought Rick, stealing a glance at her. Somehow, he had come to like this woman. When he had first become a MindWarrior, he had thought she had no emotions, that she was cold and uncaring. Now, though, he was no longer sure. He thought maybe the truth was: she forced her emotions down so she could do the difficult things she had to do. It wasn't that she didn't care whether or not Rick died in the Realm. It was that she cared so much she couldn't show it, not even to herself.

That was his guess, anyway.

“There was a major breach in our security last night,”
she said. She spoke with as much emotion as the lady in a GPS when she tells you to turn left. “Someone hacked their way into Commander Mars' computer.”

Rick and his father exchanged a quick, secret glance. That was Rick! Rick was the emergency! Rick's lips parted. He was about to admit the truth. But his father gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head:
Wait.
They still didn't know whom to trust around here. Rick kept silent.

“No one could have gotten in there without setting off alarms in the compound,” Miss Ferris went on. “And no one should have been able to get into the computer itself. That means it must've been Kurodar. If Kurodar's mind has somehow gotten into our compound . . .” She let the sentence trail off, then in the same flat tone, she said: “Well, it would be a disaster.”

Again Rick met his father's eyes behind Miss Ferris's back. He didn't want the whole compound to go on red alert because of him. But he could tell by the expression in his father's eyes that he wanted him to keep quiet, so he did.

“So what are we going to do about it?” was all he said.

Miss Ferris gave him a brief, blank glance over her shoulder. “We're sending you back into the Realm to see what you can find out.”

The elevator touched down. Miss Ferris strode out and headed down the hall. Rick and his father had to hurry to keep up. She was a small woman, but she took long strides.

“I thought Mars was reluctant to send Rick back in,”
the Traveler said to her back. “I thought he was afraid Rick's mind may have been compromised somehow when he ran through the Breach.”

“It's a chance we have to take,” she said, marching ahead.

They came into the Portal Room. The techies were already there, four men and two women, each in his or her seat, before his or her screen and keyboard. They all looked like they'd been dragged out of bed to be here. Hair uncombed. One guy with his shirt buttoned wrong. All of them blinking at their machines as if they were dazed.

In the wall at the head of the room was the device Rick always thought of as the glass coffin: the portal into the MindWar Realm. It was a box with a transparent lid, the insides lined with a kind of thin metal. When Rick lay down in the box, the metal wrapped itself around him, and he felt all these pinpricks as the device plugged him into the MindWar system. He hated it. He hated getting in there. It made him claustrophobic. It made him sweat.

Next to the coffin, there was a small set of steps. Next to the steps was Juliet Seven. Juliet Seven was a security guy like Victor One, the only difference being that Victor One was a human being, whereas Rick suspected Juliet Seven might be a cartoon character. He looked like one, anyway. He was so huge and so muscular, he looked as if he were a bunch of gigantic squares and rectangles somehow welded together. Rectangle arms crossed over a square chest under a square head and all of it held up by two legs that looked like cement rectangles. He looked as
if he were so strong he could pound you into the ground with a single blow to the top of your head. Which was why Rick never made fun of him for getting stuck with the code name Juliet.

“Let's do this!”

The voice came from behind them, and Rick turned to see Mars enter the room. Rick stopped in his tracks, staring. It had been only a day since he'd last seen Mars, but he'd changed. He'd changed completely.

His solid, angry aspect was gone. He looked disheveled. He looked . . . well, he looked terrified. Instead of his usual crisp dress, he was wearing wrinkled slacks and a wrinkled white shirt, no tie. His silver hair (which Rick sometimes thought was made of steel) was all out of place. And those deep-set glaring eyes of his were staring out at them like the eyes of a hunted animal hiding in a dark cave.

Up until that moment, Rick had not imagined Mars could even feel an emotion like fear. But Rick could see it was worse than that. Mars wasn't just afraid. He was in a complete panic. Totally messed up.

Why?
Rick wondered.
What's he so scared about? Is it because I got into his computer?

And his father's questions came back to him:
Why would a space weapon be in Mars' computer. What's that got to do with MindWar?

Something was wrong here, Rick sensed. Something was terribly wrong. Maybe he shouldn't get in the coffin.
Maybe he shouldn't do what Mars and Miss Ferris wanted him to do.

“We're sending you back to your last location,” said Miss Ferris. She pressed a button and the lid of the glass coffin opened.

Rick turned to look at the opening box. Maybe . . .

“We need to find out what's happening,” Mars said. “We need to find out how Kurodar is getting into our systems. Sending security bots through cyberspace into reality. Hacking our computers . . .”

Mars's words tumbled together as he spoke. He was so panicked he couldn't even speak right.

Miss Ferris was gesturing at him to climb the stairs, to get into the box, the portal into the Realm. Rick hesitated another moment. He wasn't sure what to do.

He glanced at his father. The Traveler took a breath. “Maybe we need to think about this,” he said quietly.

Mars took a threatening step toward him. “You don't have a say in this, Dial. Your country's safety is at stake. More than that: the world's safety. We have no time to stand here and talk about it.”

The commander and the Traveler locked eyes, Mars's furious glare meeting Dial's steady gaze.

Then, after a moment, Rick's father turned to him. “It's your decision,” he said.

Mars looked at him too. So did Miss Ferris.

Rick nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I'll go.”

Mars was right. The Boar Soldier in the tower. The
hack of Mars's computer. Something was going on. And if he could enter the Realm and find out what Kurodar was up to . . .

“Let's do it,” he said.

He climbed up the steps into the portal box and lay down without saying another word.

Immediately, Miss Ferris pressed the button that closed the box's lid. Even before the metal lining began to wrap around him, Rick started to sweat with claustrophobic panic. He felt the pinpricks as his nervous system was plugged into the computers. Soon, the familiar floating feeling came over him. Darkness surrounded him. A portal of light formed above him.

Here we go
, he thought.

He focused his mind on the portal of light and . . .

Like water slipping through a straw, he was through.

He was through—and, the very next instant, he was being hurled into infinite blackness, heading for death so quickly there was no time to stop it, no time at all.

14. DEAD SPACE

TERROR GRIPPED HIS
heart. Wild, unreasoning terror flashing through every nerve ending. He fell and fell through nothing, total nothing, with nothing to stop him, nothing to reach for or hold on to, nothing to keep him from hurtling forever through this nightmare of absolute emptiness.

He understood at once what was happening. It was the darkness inside the sarcophagus. It was the darkness that Favian had told him about.

The darkness spread over everything everywhere. The Scarlet Plain. The Blue Wood. The Golden City is all that's left of MindWar.

It was true. The church sarcophagus had afforded a glimpse of all that was left of the MindWar Realm. Beyond the Golden City and its dead, there was nothing but this. This utter nothingness. And he was falling into the heart of it.

As he fell, even as he fell, he felt as if he were being crushed and suffocated by the unending night. Somehow,
the blackness was a living thing, closing on him, devouring him with malice, with relish.

Rick understood this too. The darkness was not just darkness. It came out of Kurodar's mind. It was the very hell of the terrorist's heart, the evil at the center of it.

And it was eating him alive!

Down and down and down he went. The agony, the terror, the whirling rush to death—there was no stopping it!

Never in his life had Rick felt so helpless, so hopeless, and so afraid. The rush, the blackness, the living evil. Falling into nothing, nothing, nothing!

His mind began to fade. His thinking grew dim and distant. His very consciousness was fading. Life itself . . .

He knew what would happen if he died in the Realm. The long, horrifying living decay . . . He'd seen it. Desperate, he tried to come up with a way to stop himself. But . . .

There's nothing . . .
, he thought in a panic
. It's all blackness. There's nothing anywhere to use or grab or cling to . . . There's nothing here at all!

But no, wait. Wait, that wasn't right, was it? There
was
something, he realized. There was him. There was still him. He was still thinking, right? So he was still here. And Mariel had taught him that by focusing the power of his spirit, he could change the very substance of the Realm.

He tried it. He tried to focus his spirit on the blackness . . .

But he could tell at once: it was no good. The blackness
was too deep, too complete, too all-encompassing. It
had
no substance. There was nothing he could focus on, nothing he could change, and even if there were, his spirit was not large enough, strong enough to affect that seemingly infinite abyss . . .

It was hopeless. He fell and fell and the devouring night was endless. Nothing but blackness. Blackness and his own fading spirit . . .

But then . . . another thought . . . another idea . . . If he was here . . . If he was still here . . .

In the midst of that dying rush of terror, he heard his mother's voice.

You'll never go anywhere alone. I promise.

If he was still here . . . and if he was not alone . . . if he was never alone . . .

The logic of it clicked into place and suddenly, almost magically, Rick was himself again. His despair vanished—evenhisterrordulled—andhewasallaction:thequarterback, Number 12, the guy who never cracked or gave up under pressure. Never. Not even now. Not even here.

The living blackness was too powerful for him to change. So he focused his spirit beyond the blackness . . . beyond nothing . . . beyond even his own death . . .

And at once, he could feel it. His mother was right. He was not alone.

Rick steadied himself. He focused beyond the darkness of Kurodar's heart, beyond the darkness of his own destruction. Without his even thinking about it, the focus
of his spirit changed. The focus turned into prayer. But it was no ordinary prayer. There were no words in it. It was instead a prayer he made with his whole self, the deepest self of himself. His very spirit reached across the seemingly endless blackness to the place where the blackness ended, where the endlessness itself ended, to the Spirit from which his own spirit had its source. He could not see this Spirit—he could not even sense the hundreth part of its eternal vastness—but he recognized it. He knew it all the same. His father had been teaching him about it since he was a little boy . . .

So he prayed—prayed in that wordless way with his entire being.

And the darkness tore. It ripped apart like paper.

Light.

A portal.

Rick did not say thank you. He did not have to. His whole spirit had turned to gratitude.

He went into the light.

15. BETRAYAL

RICK AWOKE IN
the glass coffin and started screaming. The coffin lid was shut, its surface inches from his face. The metal foil was still wrapped tightly around him, holding him close like a cocoon. He could still feel the million tiny pinpricks going into his flesh.

The claustrophobia was overwhelming. He needed to get out of here. Like, now.

He yelled and struggled, his powerful arms pushing against the metal, bending it out of shape.

“Get me out of here! Get me out!” he shouted.

He felt as if at any moment the blackness would surround him again. He was terrified he might be sucked back into the Realm, sent hurtling, whirling, back into that animate nothingness.

“Help! Get me out!”

Over his own screams, he heard a sort of
chuck
sound and then a hiss. The glass lid of the coffin started rising. Rick continued to thrash and push against the metal that held him.

The next moment, Miss Ferris was there, bending
over him. She spoke in that same monotone as always, but even in his panic, Rick could see the warmth of concern in her eyes.

“Hold still. Hold still, Rick,” she said. “You'll hurt yourself. You'll be out in a second.”

Panting with panic, Rick forced himself to hold still. Sure enough, the metal wrapping began to open. He could barely wait for it to free him. As soon as he was able, he pushed out, reaching for the edges of the coffin to pull himself free. Miss Ferris tried to help him, but he was too big for her. She stepped aside. The next moment, Juliet Seven was there. The massive cartoon character of a man clamped a square hand around Rick's arm and practically hoisted him out of the box.

Rick nearly fell down the stairs to the Portal Room floor. He dropped to his knees. The room seemed to spin around him. He gagged. He felt like he was going to throw up.

That blackness . . . that awful living evil blackness . . . He had been sure it was going to devour him. He didn't know why it hadn't. There'd been nothing to stop his fall. Nothing to hold on to. In the fog of the present moment, in the daze of his return, in his sickness, he could not remember how in the world he'd gotten out of there.