The Leveller (11 page)

I CRASH DOWN ON JOSEPHINE LIKE A TON OF BRICKS AND SLAP MY
hand over her mouth.

Wyn, whose job was to ambush Rico, swears, then looks out the staff door. It appears Rico sent Josephine in alone, the coward.

“Damn,” Wyn says. “He's already vanished.”

“That's okay, we still have Josie here,” I say, looking down at my captive.

Josephine struggles frantically beneath me and I almost feel sorry for her. She never even saw me coming as I slid down the rappelling line and knocked her to the floor. Now I've got her pinned underneath me, though I've made one crucial mistake. I'm still in the wench dress, which makes it hard to maneuver.
“Closet!” I say, then quickly select my commando clothes. My avatar's outfit transforms instantaneously.

That's better. Now it's Josephine's turn.

“I want to see the real you,” I say into the MEEPosphere without taking my eyes off Josephine. Her tawny skin, black hair, and white dress begin to pixelate like she's a human blender just switched to puree. A new image solidifies before us.

Holy heck.

“Kora?” Wyn and I both say at once.

Yes, Kora. Josephine Baker in her slinky satin dress has just transformed into Diego Salvador's trusted assistant. She's in a black catsuit, her long black hair pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail. She wears no makeup, but her fingernails are long, sharp, and red. She looks ready to scratch my eyes out, but I've got her claws trapped firmly under my knees.

“What are you doing here? Did my father send you? Why didn't you reveal yourself?” Wyn asks in a tirade of questions, but I keep my hand clamped tightly over her mouth. “Let her speak, Nixy,” he says. “Kora works for my dad. I've known her for years. She's here to help.”

“I know who she is, but she's not
here to
help
.” I lean in, pinning her down harder. “Don't you get it? She's one of the bad guys.”

Wyn shakes his head like he doesn't believe me. “She can't be. Kora's like family. . . . My dad trusts her implicitly.”

Well, that was a huge mistake
, I think, though I refrain from saying so out loud. The last thing I want to do is argue with Wyn. We've got bigger fish to fry.

Meanwhile, Kora is blinking rapidly, like she's trying to figure out what her story will be if I ever let her speak. She looks scared.

“If Kora came to rescue you,” I say, “why was she stalking you in disguise? It makes no sense.”

Wyn shrugs and looks at Kora for an answer. She turns her eyes away.

“You know I'm right,” I tell him, wishing I was wrong.

Wyn still looks doubtful. “Kora,” he says quietly, and her eyes turn back to his. “What are you doing here? Did my father send you?” he asks, then puts a hand on my shoulder. “Nixy, let her answer. If she starts reciting code or accessing her inventory you can stop her.”

I purse my lips and give Kora my don't-even-think-about-it glare. “Fine. But she doesn't move.” Slowly, I slide my hand off her mouth and put it around her neck instead.

“Let me go, please,” she begs, her eyes looking at Wyn, not me. “I have to get back immediately. You don't understand.”

“You're right, I don't understand,” says Wyn, his eyes growing darker. “Enlighten me, Kora. Why have I been trapped here? What do you know?”

Kora's eyes dart between me and Wyn. “I can't say. Please,
let me go! If I'm not back soon, they'll kill me!”

“Who, my father?” exclaims Wyn. “Kora, what are you talking about?”

“Not your father, the . . . others,” she says. “I told you, I can't say. But if they find out I've been caught, I don't know what they'll do.”

I want to shake her now. “What
who
will do? Who are they? And why are they keeping us locked up here?”

Kora ignores me and keeps her gaze on Wyn. “Listen, just let me out of here and I'll go straight to your father, I promise. I'll tell him everything. It's the only way to save us both now. Wyn, please. Hurry!”

“Save us
both
?” I ask, glaring at Kora. “There are
three
of us here, by the way, and I'm not buying your little sob story. Now tell us how to get home.”

Kora glares back at me, but I don't flinch. I've already won a staring contest with the Wicked Witch of the MEEP and Kora's got nothing on that hag.

She finally looks away and I glance at Wyn, who rubs a hand over his face. I can tell he's torn.

“She's bluffing, Wyn,” I say, pressing down harder on Kora's shoulders with my knees. “I bet she's some corporate spy, paid to steal programming from your father. There's no way she's going to make nice with your dad at this point. It's too late; she's already incriminated herself. All she can do now is run
and hope she's not caught. Right, Kora?”

Kora doesn't answer. Her eyes are wide and unblinking now, staring at the ceiling.

“Look, I don't know who or what you've got yourself messed up with, but just tell us how to get out of here,” says Wyn, kneeling beside her. “You must know a way out. As soon as you tell us, we'll let you go.”

I give Wyn a glare. I have no intention of letting Kora go so easily.

Then again, maybe it can't hurt to let her
think
we'll let her go.

“Wyn's right. We'll settle the rest of this when we get back. Just tell us how to return to the Landing and we'll all go home.”

Kora doesn't answer at first, then suddenly yells, “8-9-7-4-5—”

I slap my hand over her mouth.

“Nice try,” I say. I am losing patience with Wyn's good-cop tactics. Time for some bad cop. I need to get Kora to talk.

“Tell us how to get out of here, Kora, before your Big Boss decides this game is over,” I say. “Who are you working for anyway? Russia? China? I bet those guys don't mess around. No wonder you're scared.”

Kora narrows her eyes at me like I'm a fool, but I can see fear beneath the contempt.

“Tell us this minute, Kora, or I will tie you to the seawall
and let the crabs pick at your eyeballs until you talk!” I say, getting right in her face. I slide my hand off her mouth but keep it raised only a few inches away, ready to slap it down at any second.

“Wyn, please—” she says again, looking over my shoulder.

Wyn begins to speak but I throw him a look and he swallows his words.

Kora's really starting to look scared now. “Okay, I'll tell you,” she says, her voice trembling. “I'll tell you what I know, but then promise me you'll let me go before they find me.”

Wyn nods.

“Start talking,” I order.

“I work for LEGION. They've trapped Wyn here to blackmail Diego. They want him to give up control of the MEEP.”

Wyn and I glance at each other. He looks as incredulous as I feel.

“LEGION?” he asks.

“That's ridiculous,” I say. “LEGION's just a group of internet nerds with an axe to grind. They're hackers, not kidnappers. She's lying.”

“It's the truth,” Kora cries. “The LEGION you know—the amateur hackers and gamers—they're just a front, a source of data for the Legionnaires.”

“Who?” I ask, my mind going a hundred miles a minute.

“The Legionnaires,” she repeats. “I don't know their real
names or what they look like—no one does. But they've sworn to use any means necessary to bring down the MEEP.”

“But why would they do that?” Wyn asks. “Kora, you know what the MEEP can do, what it can be . . . once my dad and his scientists work out the glitches, it could change the world!”

Kora's eyes fill with a mixture of pity and sadness now as she answers Wyn. “All your father has done, Wyn, is invent a form of mind control . . . mental slavery disguised as a game. Don't you see? Diego Salvador is the world's new Oppenheimer, only instead of creating an atomic bomb, he's created something even worse, something even more dangerous. One day your father's toy will control us, or kill us all.”

Wyn is shaking his head, his eyes wild with disbelief. “That's a lie! You can't believe that!”

“I'm sorry, I never thought it would come to this,” Kora continues, the pity in her eyes now replaced by tears. “I never thought you'd get hurt. I just wanted to stop your father. Now please, let me go! They'll be coming!” Her voice is almost a sob now and her whole body is shaking beneath me. “8-9-7—”

I slap my hand back over her mouth.

“Nixy—” Wyn starts, but I don't let him finish.

“We're not done yet. How do we get to the Landing, Kora? Where'd you hide the portal?”

Kora opens and closes her mouth a few times, like a fish. Her eyes stare straight up, almost glassy looking. She looks like
she's about to have a seizure, but that's impossible. She's an avatar. Maybe she's bluffing, trying to throw us off balance so she can blurt out the numbers.

“Where's the portal, Kora?”

“Please,” she says in a strangled gasp. “They're hurting me.”

“Nixy, stop!” Wyn says, taking Kora's face between his hands. “Kora, are you okay? What's happening to you?”

Kora's body takes on a shimmery quality, like it might disappear any moment. We don't have time for this. I shove Wyn away from her. “The portal, Kora,” I yell, my face just inches above hers. “Where is it?”

Her eyes roll a bit, but then they find me and she looks straight at me.

“Black,” she whispers, as her body convulses once, then fades beneath me.

“WE'LL THINK MORE CLEARLY ONCE WE'VE HAD SOME SLEEP,” WYN
says, squeezing my hand.

We are walking through the lobby of the Hotel Nacional again. I'm a little more alert than I was last night when we were here, though equally distraught. I admit, I had a good cry in the Tropicana dressing room after Kora disappeared. I'm not sure exactly what happened to her, but there's a pretty good chance she wasn't lying. Which means there is a pretty good chance she's hurt, maybe even dead, and it's my fault.

I'm also pretty sure that if we
are
up against stone-cold killers, we are never getting back home.

As we go up in the elevator, I feel Wyn's eyes on me, deliberating, trying to decide what to do with me next. I don't blame
him. I'm a bundle of raw feelings and my brain's on overdrive. Part of me feels like knocking down a few walls again to relieve my frustration. The other part of me wants to pull a Rip Van Winkle and sleep for the next hundred years.

“It's not your fault, you know,” he says quietly.

“I trapped her here while someone in the real world was killing her,” I finally say, as the elevator doors open.

“We don't know what truly happened, Nixy. Maybe she's still alive,” Wyn says, but I can tell by his voice he doesn't believe it. Neither do I. We both felt the presence of death in that dressing room, something permanent when Kora's body disappeared. Besides, she never activated her return frequency code. And she'd been terrified. Which means either someone summoned her back remotely, or . . . she really died.

We stop by one of the hotel rooms to get blankets and pillows, and head to the rooftop.

“You know we don't have time for this,” I say as Wyn pulls two recliners side by side and faces them toward the west.

“There's nothing else we can do right now, Nixy, so we might as well do something useful. Our brains need rest. And besides, look over there,” he says, lowering himself into a recliner and pulling me down beside him.

The setting sun has made a picture in the sky, striping the horizon like a silk scarf of delicious colors: lemon meringue, orange sherbet, tangerine, blood orange, and pomegranate.
Wyn pulls a blanket over us and we lie there for a while in silence. I try to focus on the beauty of the sunset and let myself relax. Wyn is right, of course. Our plan to turn the tables on our captors failed miserably and now we have to think of a new one. Only I'm too tired. Too worried.

I think of my mom then with a small pang. I remember when I was younger, I was a total worrywart over every little thing. Jill would always tell me the best way to solve a problem was to sleep on it. “We work a lot of things out in our sleep,” she would say, tucking me under the covers. “Sleep is the brain's night shift, and we'd best let it do its job.” I used to imagine that my own brain's night crew was a bunch of sudsy bubbles, scouring my brain of all the bad, troublesome thoughts so I'd have a nice, clean, worry-free brain the next morning. Maybe I can summon the bubbles tonight.

I take a quick peek at Wyn. He is staring into the sunset, his face solemn and still, his mouth slightly turned down at the corners.

He turns to look at me. “Think you can sleep for a bit?” he asks, taking my hand in his.

“Sure,” I say, squeezing his hand in return.

But before I close my eyes, I lean toward him. At the exact same moment, he moves closer to me. And I'm not certain how this is happening or why, but all of a sudden I am kissing Wyn Salvador.

And while I know that none of this is real, the smell of the tropics and the sound of the ocean and the feel of the breeze and his lips—so soft, how are they so soft?—convince my brain that it is very,
very
real.

And this is wrong, and we are in serious danger, and we should be trying right now to find another way to escape but for a moment I can't think,
I don't want to think
, and although I wanted to pulverize Wyn Salvador almost forty-eight hours ago, kissing him right now is very,
very
surprisingly good.

And as long as I am doing it, I don't have to think at all.

When I wake up hours later, we're still holding hands, though Wyn's grip has loosened somewhat, his face soft and shadowy in the moonlight. I study him, poring over the contours and details now that he's sleeping: the strong dark shape of his eyebrows, the soft curls of hair along his forehead, the long lashes that would be the envy of any cover girl, the slight dimples in his cheeks, the square of his jaw. The only flaw on his face, the only thing keeping it from perfection, is the way his mouth turns down at the corners again. Even in sleep Wyn is troubled, searching for answers.

Like I am.

I leave my hand in his and stare up at the night sky. I know the answer is inside me somewhere, I just need to find it. If I dreamed while I was asleep, I don't recall, but I do feel more
clear-headed now, more focused. The bubbles did their work.

I go over the chain of events again, one by one:

        
1.
     
Diego Salvador says that Wyn has barricaded himself inside the MEEP and left behind a suicide note.

        
2.
     
The barricade is a type of maze, which several people before me fail to get through.

        
3.
     
Once I conquer the maze, I enter Wyn's Havana via a portal in the Floridita.

        
4.
     
I find Wyn (or he finds me), and he claims that he is trapped in the MEEP.

        
5.
     
He denies both creating the maze and leaving behind the suicide note.

        
6.
     
The portal in the Floridita disappears. Wyn's original portal is also gone.

        
7.
     
Wyn claims there are human players in the MEEP with us. We capture one of them, who turns out to be Kora Lee, Diego Salvador's personal assistant.

        
8.
     
Kora claims to be working for the Legionnaires, an anonymous group determined to shut down the MEEP.

        
9.
     
Kora also claims they will kill her if she is captured.

        
10.
   
Kora disappears, possibly dead.

        
11.
   
Wyn Salvador and I truly and very thoroughly make out before falling asleep.

The last two puzzle pieces make me feel a little ill.

We—
I
—may have accidentally caused someone's death, so I used the opportunity to hook up with a guy I hardly know?

Seriously? What is wrong with me?

I try to remember what Wyn has said to me over and over: that it's not my fault, that I was just trying to save him, save myself, and Kora could have been bluffing. She was our last chance of finding a way out of here. We couldn't afford to let her go. And even if someone did hurt her—
kill
her even—it wasn't me.

But who was it? Who was she truly working for? The Legionnaires? Chang and Moose talk about LEGION all the time. As far as I know, it's just a bunch of kids like Chang who spend way too much time playing online games, sharing data, and grumbling about Diego Salvador's monopoly on MEEP technology. Sure, they might consider Salvador an enemy, but they wouldn't have the means to actually kidnap Wyn and blackmail his father. It makes much more sense to assume that Kora was working for some big tech firm or even a foreign government trying to get their hands on MEEP secrets—the kind of people who have the power and money to buy Kora's cooperation.

My next thought sends a chill down my spine. If those same people killed off Kora for blowing the operation, what's to keep them from doing the same to me if I get in their way? They don't need me; they need Wyn, and they need him to stay inside the MEEP.

Had Kora been on the Salvador estate when she was killed? I grimace at the thought.

I picture my body back in Wyn's room. I've been gone almost forty-eight hours and I must look the same as the Wyn I saw two days ago—my body attached to monitors and IV fluids, completely vulnerable to anyone who might wish me harm.

I shiver. Then I remember Dad sitting by my side, keeping vigil with Mama Beti. Those two will keep us safe. Heck, my dad would take on dragons before he'd let anyone harm me, and I'm pretty sure that on behalf of her beloved grandson, Mama Beti could do some damage with that metal walker of hers.

The thought almost makes me smile.

Beside me Wyn stirs and murmurs something in his sleep. After a moment he begins to rustle, as if agitated, though his eyes remain closed. He continues to speak, but the words are slurred and I can't make out what he's saying. He's having a nightmare, I can tell, and I can't decide whether I should leave him be or wake him up. When he cries out, as if in fright, I can stand it no longer.

“Wyn, wake up,” I say, gently shaking him by the shoulder. “Wake up, you're having a bad dream.”

His eyes open slowly, and I can still see fear there. As he stares at me, the fear begins to dissipate and relief washes over him. “Nixy,” he whispers.

I reach over and lay a hand on his cheek, just like my mom
used to do when I had bad dreams. “It's over now,” I say.

“I dreamed we were being buried alive,” he says, sitting up in the recliner. “We were trapped in a deep pit and there were people above us—shadows, really—shoveling dirt on top of us. It was awful.”

“That does sound awful,” I agree, and my body shudders a bit. I don't say aloud what I'm thinking: Wyn's subconscious has painted a pretty accurate picture of our predicament. Gruesome, but accurate.

“All I could hear was Kora's voice saying
black
every time a new shovelful of dirt fell,” says Wyn.

“That
was
a pretty dramatic last word,” I say, remembering Kora's frightened face before she disappeared.

Wyn looks out at the city lights, his brow knitted in concentration. He gasps suddenly. “Nixy, what was the last thing you said to Kora, before she said
black
?” he asks, grabbing my arm, his voice now urgent.

I close my eyes and try to remember. “The portal,” I say. “I asked her where they'd hid the portal.”

It hits us both at the same time. Maybe Kora wasn't describing death with her last word. Maybe she was giving us a clue.

Wyn hops off the recliner, pulling me up with him.

“Come on,” he says. “Over the river and through the woods. We're going to Grandma's house.”