AJA KILLIAN

ONE

The armored soldiers dragged Aja Killian through the black gates of the castle, down a long, echoing corridor and into a huge—but nearly empty—room. At the far end of the great chamber, a thin, black-clad man stood next to a large wooden throne. The soldiers hauled Aja across the cold marble floor and slammed her to the ground in front of the man.

“Kneel before King Hruth!” shouted one of the guards.

“Avert your eyes, rebel!” shouted the second guard.

As she tried to get her balance, two more guards dragged her friend Nak Adyms into the room. She and Nak had been traveling together in a trading caravan to visit the capital of Qoom. But when they had reached the gates of the castle, a group of soldiers had taken them captive.

Aja looked up at the man by the throne.

“Avert your eyes!” the guard shouted again.

The man—King Hruth, apparently—waved his hand languidly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You may look upon me if you wish.”

King Hruth was a thin man with long black hair and very pale blue eyes. He was dressed entirely in black, with no sign of rank other than a small crest embroidered on his collar. It was the crest of the kingdom of Qoom. He studied Aja for a long time without speaking. Nak knelt next to her, but King Hruth seemed uninterested in him.

“I’m surprised at you, Princess Mara,” he said to her finally. “Coming into our city in such a thin disguise! Did you actually think we wouldn’t recognize you?”

“I’m a merchant from Rubic City,” she said. “My name is Aja Killian. I’m bringing trade goods to sell to the people of your city.”

King Hruth laughed genially.

“Tell him, Nak!” she said. “We’re merchants.”

For the first time King Hruth seemed to acknowledge Nak. “Is it true, Nak?” he said. “Is she really here to sell gimcracks to the people of my realm?”

Nak looked at Aja. Then he stood up and tossed his hair back. He had shaggy brown locks that were always slipping into his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “She’s Princess Mara, the rebel leader.”

Aja felt her eyes widen. “Hey!” she shouted. “You’re supposed to be on my side. You said—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have trusted me, huh?” Nak said, smirking.

Aja felt a wave of anger wash through her. Before she could think of an appropriate comeback, a frightening cry cut through the air. It was hard to tell where the sound was coming from. It seemed as though it was welling right up out of the stone floor. Wherever it came from, the howl made the hair stand up on the back of Aja’s neck. It sounded like some kind of wild animal.

“My goodness, the Beast sounds hungry,” said King Hruth. “Do you suppose the Beast is hungry, Nak?”

“The Beast is always hungry,” Nak said.

King Hruth turned back toward Aja. “There are those who believe that I am not the rightful king of Qoom,” he said. “They claim that your little brother, Prince Norvall, should be sitting in this chair instead of me.” The king thumped his hand against the throne next to him, then sighed theatrically. “I must tell you, I am growing quite weary of hearing these same tedious arguments. It’s time to put them to an end. For good.”

The huge iron-bound doors at the rear of the room opened with a loud boom. Aja turned. A large soldier wearing full armor came into the room. In his arms he carried a squirming, howling red-haired boy. Aja guessed him to be eight or nine years old. He looked very familiar.

“Leave him alone!” she shouted.

The king raised one finger. As he did so, there was a loud rasping noise, like two huge pieces of rock being ground against each other.

At the sound, a large rectangular hole began to form in the middle of the great stone floor. The armored soldier carried the squirming boy toward the hole. The grinding noise stopped and the hole ceased growing. The soldier held the boy over the hole.

The boy screamed in terror. “No! No, please! Why are you doing this?”

“Why?” the king said. “Because it pleases me.”

With that, the king clapped his hands. The guard let go of the boy. The boy’s mouth opened in a silent scream and his eyes went wide. Then he fell into the blackness.

There was a thump. Then a soft moan.

Then the weird howling cry. “Send some guards into the maze,” the king said. “Restrain the boy somewhere down there. Let us see how long it takes the Beast to find him.”

“Yes, your majesty!” the soldier said.

Aja turned to Nak and shook her head. “I don’t like this, Nak,” she said. “I don’t like this at all.”

Nak laughed. “Hey, I’m having fun,” he said.

The king turned to one of the other guards, snapped his finger, and pointed at the hole in the floor. “Her too.”

The guards grabbed her.

“I’ve had enough of this game, Nak,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

Nak shrugged.

She held up her left arm, expecting the silver jump-control bracelet to appear so that she could terminate the jump.

But nothing happened.

She held up her arm again, feeling alarmed. Nothing. She had been on literally thousands of Lifelight jumps—and not once had the jump-control bracelet failed to appear when it was time to end the jump. Again she raised her arm.

Still nothing. This was not good!

Two guards seized her arms and started dragging her toward the hole in the floor. Again the bloodcurdling howl rose up out of the floor.

“The maze is a sort of puzzle,” King Hruth said, “that I designed sheerly for my own amusement.”

Aja managed to briefly yank her hand away from the guard. “Command Level One, password Z-X-E-four-seven-one, invoke jump termination!” she shouted. That was supposed to be the fail-safe command that would end any jump no matter what.

But still nothing happened.

“It might interest you to know,” the king said, “that there is an escape route built into the maze. Anyone who finds the route and successfully escapes the maze is automatically granted a royal pardon. No exceptions.”

The guards restrained Aja’s free arm and pulled her closer to the edge of the rectangular hole in the floor. They stopped only when her toes were sticking out over the edge. She stared down. Below her was a stone shaft leading into inky darkness. Aja’s stomach clenched. The guards were holding her so that her weight was out over the darkness. If they let go, she knew she would fall.

“Of course, in all fairness,” the king said, “I should mention that no one who has been thrown into the maze has ever escaped.”

“Nak!” she shouted angrily. “Nak, the jump won’t terminate!”

“My goodness,” he said. “How strange.”

But the last glimpse she caught of his face—full of fake innocence—told her that he knew more than he was admitting.

One of the guards nudged her gently. And then she was falling down into darkness.

TWO

The darkness was endless. There was no up, no down, no cold, no heat—no nothing. Aja waited to hit bottom. But nothing happened. Nothing at all.

And then Aja felt herself waking up. Not the darkness of some frigid old castle, but a warm, pleasant darkness. Despite the warmth though, she was shivering with cold.

She opened her eyes and looked around. She was in her usual jump tube, linked up to the machines that carried her off to the vivid dreams of Lifelight.

She sat up slowly. Something wasn’t right, though. She felt puzzled. This wasn’t like any Lifelight jump she’d ever been on before. Usually Lifelight jumps were neat and simple. A game, a little scenario, a historical vignette. They were always vivid and engaging. But when you were done, you were done. You climbed a mountain. You water-skied. You jumped out of a flyer. Then you just raised your arm and the silver control bracelet appeared. When you hit the termination button, it was over.

But this one hadn’t worked that way. This one had felt less like a jump—and more like a nightmare. And strangely, she still felt cold, the chill of King Hruth’s frigid castle still permeating her bones. That had never happened to her on a jump before.

With a flash of anger, she remembered the knowing look on Nak’s face as she’d fallen through the floor and down into the hole that led into King Hruth’s maze. She slid out of the tube, then pushed open the door of her station. Nak Adyms stood in the doorway next to her cubicle, with his usual smug I-know-something-you-don’t grin plastered across his face.

“What did you do?” Aja demanded.

“Keep your voice down,” he said. His grin faded, and he looked at her with a cold expression on his face.

“You tricked me. You said we were going to do an instructional tandem for history class and—”

He shook his head. “Okay, so I misled you slightly. It’s a simulation. A game. A game I designed. But it’s all based on real history. King Hruth was a real guy. You can look it up in the history files. He had a maze with a beast in it and everything.”

“I don’t like games,” Aja said. Aja wanted to strangle him. Her hands were trembling. She knew what this was about. She was the top student at the academy. Nak Adyms was number two. And he couldn’t stand it. He was always trying to show her that he was smarter than she was. “But that’s not why I’m mad. I want to know why my control bracelet didn’t work.”

Nak cocked his head curiously. “It what?”

“Don’t play dumb. You heard me back there. I even invoked termination with a level-one audible command. Nothing happened.”

Nak looked blank. “Oh, yeah. I vaguely remember that.”

“Oh, please!” Aja said, jabbing her finger at him. “I saw your face.”

Nak shook his head. “Hey, I was just amused because you were losing so badly.”

“Losing? I wasn’t losing. I just didn’t like being there.”

“Come on, Aja, it’s a game. Any fool can see that. The point of the game is that you’re supposed to go into the maze and rescue the kid. That’s how you win the game. Getting captured and all that junk—that’s just the introduction to the game.”

“Well, there’s some kind of serious bug in your game. I’ve never had a control bracelet failure. I’ve never even heard of one!”

“OE,” he said.

“What?”

“OE. Operator error. You must have goofed up. Called out the wrong password or something.”

“Nak, don’t be ridiculous. I use my password twenty times a day. You think I’d forget it?”

Nak made a face like he didn’t care much. “If it wasn’t OE, then there’s something wrong with Lifelight.”

She shook her head. “Jump-control bracelets are hardwired straight to Lifelight’s origin code. Everybody has the right to terminate a jump at any time. That’s basic jump protocol. You know that. No, Nak, it has to be something you did. Something to do with the way you programmed your game.”

Nak’s rolled his eyes. “Oh, so now you’re saying I hacked the origin code!”

“You know that’s totally impossible,” Aja snapped.

Nak gave her an enigmatic smile. “Well, then it must have been you, right?”

“Oh?”

“Come on. How many times have I heard you say that simple logic will solve any problem. It’s simple logical deduction. If it’s not a bug in Lifelight’s origin code…then it had to be you.”

Aja couldn’t think of a comeback. He was right. It was hard to dispute his logic.

Nak Adyms turned and walked toward the elevators that ran down the center of the Lifelight pyramid. Aja frowned.

Assembly period started in about ten minutes! As the top student in the class, she was supposed to be there to lead the assembly. Now she was going to be late.

 

Aja flew into the front door of the academy at precisely 1803 and then charged into the assembly hall, breathing as if she’d just sprinted about a mile. Which she pretty much had. She was surprised to see that assembly period hadn’t started yet. Usually everything at the academy ran like clockwork.

She ran down the aisle and up onto the stage, expecting to be scolded unmercifully by Headmistress Nilssin. Oddly, the headmistress just glanced at her and said, “Oh, there you are.” Like it was no big deal that she was late.

The headmistress was a tall gray-haired woman with a slight stoop that betrayed her age. She stood up on the podium. “Settle down, settle down!” she said. The kids in the lecture hall quieted slowly.

Normally, Aja made some announcements and then turned the assembly over to Headmistress Nilssin. But today the headmistress skipped over Aja.

“Look, I know you’ve been hearing rumors,” Headmistress Nilssin said. “So let me take a moment to get this settled.”

Rumors? What was she talking about?

“A student in the first level has gone missing,” the headmistress said.

There was a rustle from the crowd. Kids looked nervously at one another.

“His name is Omni Cader. For those of you who don’t know him…” She gestured at the holo projector.

A hologram of a young boy with red hair and freckles floated in the air in the middle of the stage. Aja recognized him immediately. He looked just like Prince Norvall—the kid in Nak’s game who’d been dumped into the maze.

He’d looked familiar to her during the jump. Now she made the connection: She’d seen him around the academy once or twice. He’d always looked like a sweet kid. Nak must have harvested a scan of him and inserted it as a character in the game.

“Omni is a good boy,” the headmistress said. “But for those of you who don’t know him, he comes from a somewhat troubled background. He’s already run away from the academy a couple of times. But never for this long. Needless to say, we’re concerned for his safety. If you would, please keep an eye out for him. If he spoke to anybody, or gave anyone an indication where he might have gone, please contact me or one of your teachers immediately.”

Heads nodded throughout the room.

Odd, Aja thought, that the boy had disappeared at the same time as his image had shown up in a Lifelight jump. But she couldn’t see any logical connection.

“In the meantime, I’d like everyone who resides in Zetlin Hall to make a top-to-bottom search of the building. I’m going to rely on Aja Killian to organize the search.”

Aja saw Nak sitting in the back of the room, slumped down, arms folded. When the headmistress announced that Aja would be leading the search, his eyes narrowed slightly. Could he possibly be more jealous of me? Aja thought. As Number One Student, she was entrusted with a lot of responsibilities—most of which, frankly, she could do without!

There were some more announcements, then Headmistress Nilssin said, “That concludes the assembly. Everyone in Zetlin Hall, please stay here.” She turned to Aja. “I’ll leave it in your capable hands, dear.”

Aja stood up and waited until only the students from Zetlin Hall remained. “Okay, people,” she said. “Let’s keep this short and sweet. Zetlin Hall has four stories and a basement.” She pointed at the holo projector. “Holo, please display 3-D map of Zetlin Hall.”

Nothing happened.

She repeated herself.

“I’m sorry, I don’t recognize your instructions,” the voice of the projector said. The projector had an irritatingly condescending voice.

There were a few snickers. She noticed Nak Adyms on the back row, covering his mouth. She flushed. Something was wrong with the projector apparently.

“Re-initialize holo projector,” she said.

“Please enter your password.”

She walked to the projector’s keypad and typed in her password.

“Password not recognized,” the projector said.

There was laughter throughout the room. Aja was angry now. This was twice in one day that something weird had happened with her password. What was going on?

“Well, forget about it,” Aja said angrily. “We’ll meet in the basement of Zetlin Hall and I’ll decide the teams.”

“Password not recognized,” said a seventh-level kid in the front row, doing a humorous imitation of the projector’s irritating voice.

More laughter.

“Ha-ha,” Aja snapped.

But that only made things worse. The laughter spread.

 

They spent most of the afternoon searching Zetlin Hall, the playground, and the surrounding parkland.

They never found Omni Cader. And every time something went wrong, every time some kid got bored or didn’t want to do exactly what Aja said, she’d hear it: somebody whispering, “Password not recognized.” And then they’d all laugh and laugh and laugh.

THREE

The search consumed most of Aja’s afternoon—time she had intended to devote to her senior project. She had been working on a program to reorganize Lifelight’s security protocols. Every one of the teachers had told her that if she could pull it off, it would be the most impressive senior project in the entire history of the academy.

It was an audacious project. Because to do it, she would need access to Lifelight’s core—the central brain of the Lifelight system. Normally no student at the academy would ever have access to Lifelight’s core. The core control room was considered to be a nearly sacred place. At the academy, the Alpha Core was spoken of in whispers. It was where only the best phaders worked—the smartest, the most experienced, the best of the best. It was certainly not the kind of place you let little peons from the academy mess around.

But everybody knew Aja was special. So when she proposed her project and showed just how carefully she’d thought it through, she’d been granted access.

She still had a lot of work in front of her before the project was complete. But first, she had to sort out this stupid password situation.

Aja walked into Lifelight, under the vault of the great pyramid of glass, then down a corridor approaching the large door of the core control room. She paused in the hallway for a moment. She could remember the first time she had come here. It was on a tour of the building with her first-level class. She’d immediately thought, Someday I’m going to work here!

It still gave her a thrill to be here.

Several of the senior phaders stood in the corner, laughing about something. Another was sleeping at his terminal, a thin stream of drool slowly descending into his lap. Several sat at their terminals, motionless, bored looking. Another was eating gloid. A big fat pink blob of gloid fell off his spoon onto the terminal controller. The guy didn’t seem to notice. Or care.

Back when she first came, she’d been intimidated by them, imagining them to be brilliant, all powerful, all knowing. But these guys? She had to admit they didn’t look that intimidating. Actually, they mostly looked bored.

She smiled. Well, maybe some of the phaders were bored here. But not her!

She moved forward, inserted her card key into the slot near the door handle and stepped toward the door.

Which she bumped into, bashing her nose.

“Ow!” she said. Something was wrong with the door. She tried her card again.

Again, nothing.

She realized that whatever had gone wrong with her password had probably affected her access to the control room too. She rapped on the door.

One of the senior phaders, Dal Whitbred, looked up from his terminal at her and waved.

She pointed at the door. Dal frowned, then thumbed a button on the terminal. The door opened.

“Thanks, Dal!” she called as she entered the room. “Something’s gone wrong with my password. You think you can help me out?”

“Hey, no problem,” he said. Dal was a young guy, kind of cute, with longish brown hair and warm brown eyes. “Just log on with my password and reset yours.”

“Um…” She looked at him, puzzled. “You’re not really supposed to give out your password are you?”

“You going to tell anybody what it is?”

“No,” she said.

Dal grinned. “Then we’re fine, aren’t we?” He scribbled down his password as she sat down at the terminal next to his.

“Thanks.” She logged in.

“So it sounds like you’re probably gonna get valedictorian, huh?” Dal said.

She looked up from the terminal. “How’d you know that?”

“Oh, your buddy Nak comes in here a lot. He talks about you all the time.”

“He does?” She’d always thought he hated her.

“Don’t tell him I said this,” Dal said with a grin. “But I think he might have a thing for you.”

She laughed harshly. “Not likely! No, he just wants to beat me. He wants to be Number One Student and take valedictorian.”

“Could be,” Dal said. “He’s a complicated kid.” He laughed again. “Between you and me, I think he’s got some problems.”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, he’s a brilliant phader, though. He’s been practically living in here lately. I’m surprised you haven’t seen him.” Dal scratched his head. “No, now that I think about it, he always comes here in the middle of the night. I guess you’re probably sleeping when he’s in here.”

Aja looked at him curiously. “But…he doesn’t have a job here. He doesn’t have clearance….”

Dal smiled. “We kind of adopted him. He’s like an informal intern. That kid’s a wizard. I’ve never seen anybody that can make Lifelight jump like he can. Well…other than you maybe.”

“But—what if he—”

“Hey, believe me, we keep an eye on him to make sure he’s not doing anything crazy.”

Aja turned back to her terminal. Reconfiguring her password was a simple process. But, still, you had to—

She paused. Strange. It should have been a simple process. Now suddenly Lifelight was bringing up menus she’d never seen. For some reason, she couldn’t seem to get to the screen she needed in order to change her password.

“What’s going on here, Dal?” she said.

Dal rolled his chair over and peered at her screen. “Huh,” he said. “Weird.” He tapped at the keyboard a few times. “Very weird!” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“What?” Aja said.

“Well…it seems as if Lifelight has partitioned your identity. It’s put your whole security file behind some kind of firewall.”

“But…” She stared at the screen. “That’s not possible!”

“Scoot over,” Dal said. “I need to take a closer look at this.”

Something was blinking red on the screen now, a small red flashing icon that she’d never seen before.

“You know what?” Dal said. “I…uh…I hate to do this to you. But I think this may take a while. Why don’t you head back to the academy? I’ll call you when I get it sorted out.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay and watch.”

He cleared his throat. “Um—no, I think—no, I think you need to go home. Right now Lifelight’s saying your clearance has been revoked.” An alarm began to chime. Everybody in the core control room looked up to see what was going on. Even the drooling guy woke up and looked around.

“Revoked! Why?” Aja felt outraged. Everybody knew she was trustworthy. Everybody!

“Seriously. You need to go.” All of a sudden Dal was not his usual relaxed self.

“But—”

“Look, there’s been a protocol breach here. The Lifelight directors are very strict about this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you want me to have to call Lifelight Services?”

Aja’s eyes widened. Lifelight Services ran the security force that protected everything connected to Lifelight. “What!”

“Sorry, Aja. You of all people should understand. It’s procedure. If Lifelight shuts down an ID…” He spread his hands helplessly.

He was right. Security was important. Keeping the core safe was critical. If Lifelight said she needed to go, she needed to go.

Still, it stung.

“I understand,” she said softly. She stood and walked to the door. Everyone in the room was looking at her. Her face burned. She knew there had been some talk among them—especially among the old-school senior phaders who felt that letting a kid into the core control room was wrong. Much less letting her fiddle with security protocols.

“I’ll be back!” she said forcefully. Then she looked at the locked door, and remembered her useless card.

“Uh…can somebody help me get out of here?” she said.

Aja wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

FOUR

The thing she couldn’t figure out was, why had this happened? Somebody had put up a security firewall around her Lifelight identity. Who? Why? How?

There was no conceivable reason why any of this would happen. Maybe during her work with the security protocols she had triggered some kind of automatic security precaution. She’d never heard of anything like that happening. But maybe it was possible.

No, she didn’t want to admit it, but everything pointed in the same direction: Nak Adyms.

The first indication of trouble had been inside his game. First the silver control bracelet malfunction. Then when she invoked termination with an audible, passworded command—still nothing.

But unless Nak had made some kind of very strange mistake in the programming of his game, then it was hard to see any possible answer.

Except one: Nak had hacked the origin code.

Lifelight’s origin code—the basic program that ran Lifelight—had been written by the founder of Lifelight, Dr. Zetlin, years and years ago. He had written every line of it. And since then, the origin code had never been touched. Never.

Sometimes phaders joked about hacking the origin code. But it was just a joke. Everybody knew that Dr. Zetlin had installed a maze of security features that made it impossible to—Wait! A maze!

That was it.

Nak’s game was a maze. It was a puzzle. It was—

As she walked through the great glass Lifelight pyramid, Aja rapidly thought through the many possible implications of her conclusion. If Nak really had hacked the origin code, then he would have done it for a reason. And what could that reason be?

To show her up, to make her look foolish? No…not just that. He was trying to prove that the security innovations she was testing were fundamentally flawed. That’s what he was doing. He was trying to wreck her senior project. If he could poke a hole in it, expose it as flawed, her grade for the project would inevitably suffer. In which case—theoretically—he might be able to edge her out for valedictorian.

At that moment a young man with floppy brown hair bounced around the corner. Nak Adyms. “Hey!” he said, grinning. “I was just thinking about you. Did you sort out your little password problem?”

She glared at him. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“What!” he said innocently.

“Surely you’re aware that any gain in class standing that you might make by crashing my security protocols will be lost when Headmistress Nilssin finds out that you’ve hacked the origin code.”

Nak squinted at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right.”

Aja’s communicator chimed. She pulled out the small silver device. “Yes?”

“It’s Dal,” the voice on the other end said. “We’ve run into a really serious problem. Whatever this program is that’s attacked your identity…Well, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s starting to move deeper into the core software.”

“So you’ve isolated the program?”

“Well…sort of. The program we’ve located is just a shell. It sits over the top of more programs. But we can see what’s underneath it. The shell program is hiding its real function.”

“Well, go Command Level One.”

“Come on, Aja. We’ve done that already.”

“I wrote a new security facility called—”

“I already tried that. We’ve tried everything obvious.”

“Then why are you calling me?” Aja said.

There was a long pause. “Because the program that crashed your password…”

“Yes?”

“Well…you wrote it.”

Aja felt momentarily confused. “What! That doesn’t make any sense. Why would I write a program that crashed my own identity?”

“Look,” Dal said, “I know you’ve been messing with a lot of Lifelight’s deeper code for your project. If you made a little mistake or something, hey, we understand. But you need to tell us.”

Aja felt a stab of dread. This was starting to get serious. “I swear!” Aja said. “I didn’t do anything. What’s the name of this program anyway?”

“It’s got some kind of goofy name. Hold on….” She heard some keys clicking. “It’s called ‘King Hruth’s Maze.’”

Her eyes widened. “That’s not my program!” she shouted.

“No need to get emotional,” Dal said. “Just admit what you did, and we’ll figure out how to stop it.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

There was a very long pause. “All right.” Dal’s voice sounded distant and cold. “If that’s the way you want to play it. But I’ll be forced to notify the Lifelight directors about what you’ve done here.”

“Dal, how could you even think that—”

“Last chance, Aja. Your little program is already attacking the core.”

“No, Dal, I—”

“All right. But don’t say we didn’t give you a chance.”

Her communicator went dead. She started to call Dal back. But what would that do? Right now logic pointed straight at her. If she was going to prove she didn’t have anything to do with this problem, she’d have to get more evidence.

Nak was still leaning casually against the wall, a placid smile on his face. “Everything okay?” he said.

“Nak, you framed me!”

Nak shook his head, as if she were speaking a language he didn’t understand. “You seem kind of nervous,” Nak said. “Maybe a quick jump would calm you down. I have an excellent game in mind that might—”

“This is not funny anymore!” Aja said. “Your clever little program is attacking the core!”

“My program? What program? All I’m talking about is playing a game.”

Something was forming in her mind. An idea. A plan. She could feel the shape of the idea…but she couldn’t quite get her fingers around it yet.

“You can’t win if you don’t play.” Nak was still smiling. But she could see something in his eyes underneath the smile—anger, spite, envy.

“The program that’s attacking the core—it’s inside the game, isn’t it? You buried it inside a jump program.”

Nak laughed. “Boy, you sure are being dramatic.”

“You won’t get away with this.”

“But, just for the sake of argument, if I were going to attack the core using some kind of game program, I wouldn’t put it inside the game.”

She looked at him for a long time. Then it hit her. “It’s not inside the game, is it?” she said. Her eyes widened. “It is the game!”

Nak raised one eyebrow. “Want to play?”

“Nak,” she said, “I just told Dal that I had no idea what King Hruth’s Maze was. If I played your game right now, Lifelight would send a message straight to the control room saying I had invoked the program. Dal would think I had just lied to his face. He’d think that I really was the one who’d written your nasty little program.”

Nak rolled his eyes. “Give me a little credit here. I’ll reroute everything so they’ll never even know you’re jumping. I’ve got tricks the phaders in the control room can’t begin to figure out. Those guys do everything by the book. I can run rings around them. You’d be totally safe.”

Aja hesitated. If she was right, the only way to beat the program, to keep it from destroying the core, was to play the game. But if she got caught before she figured out what Nak was up to—well, it could be disastrous. Just for starters, she could kiss valedictorian good-bye. In fact, she’d probably get thrown out of the academy. Even worse, the Lifelight directors could ban her from ever working as a phader. Everything she’d been working for would be down the tubes.

Aja was not a natural risk taker. But right now she didn’t see any logical alternative. If she went to Dal and tried to blame everything on Nak, she’d look like a liar. Nak was a good phader. If he’d intentionally made it look as though she had written the program, then talking to Dal right now would only make things worse. The problem was, Nak’s program was already munching away at the core. She had to do something to stop it.

But the only way she could think of to stop Nak’s program was to jump into his game. Now.

Aja pointed at the tier above her. “Okay, Nak. I see a free jump station up there.”

Nak smiled. “I knew you’d see the light eventually.”

FIVE

Aja landed with a tooth-jarring thump. Pain shot through her left ankle as the impact smashed her to her knees. She stood, tested the ankle. It hurt a little. But she could tell it wasn’t broken or too badly sprained.

She looked around. She lay in a small chamber of closely fitted black stone. Maze? This was no maze. It was a prison cell, barely wide enough for a person to lie down in.

Above her head she saw a bright rectangle of light. Silhouetted in the light was a figure. No, two figures.

One was King Hruth. The other was Nak Adyms.

“Bye-bye!” Nak shouted, waving cheerfully. “Have fun!”

Then the stone above her head began to slide back in place. She could hear the terrible grinding sound again, stone gnashing against stone. Nak’s arrogant smile disappeared as the trapdoor closed.

The room was plunged into darkness.

The grinding stopped. Aja felt a terrible sense of claustrophobia. Her heart raced and her palms were sweating. If she thought it would work, she could activate her silver bracelet and terminate the jump. But like Nak said, he’d hacked all the codes. He’d blocked her. This jump wasn’t going to end until Nak felt like ending it. Besides—she was here to solve the puzzle. She couldn’t very well quit now.

Aja tried to calm herself, breathing deeply.

Suddenly the grinding noise started again. This time the sound was slightly different and seemed to come from a different place. For a moment she imagined the walls were closing in, preparing to smash her like a bug.

Wait! Light. She could see light—a thin crack, widening slightly at one corner of the room.

The walls were moving! The chamber was opening. As soon as she could, she squeezed out past the still-moving gap between the walls. She found herself in a long stone passage lit by flickering torches lodged in recesses along the wall.

On the walls were carved images. A strange, simian creature recurred in each carving. That must be the Beast that King Hruth had talked about earlier. In each picture the Beast was eating people, tearing them limb from limb, trampling over their bodies.

“Yuk!” Aja said. To think all this nutty stuff came right out of Nak’s imagination. You thought you knew somebody and—

The grinding stopped once more. Suddenly the silence seemed extraordinarily intense. She’d never experienced silence like this before. There was literally no sound at all. She could actually hear her own heartbeat, the rush of the blood.

She was breathing very fast, she noticed.

There was a stale, pungent odor in the air. Then she heard something. A loud rustling noise, like a bag of meat being dragged along a floor.

Then a loud, inhuman scream.

The Beast. It was the Beast of the maze. And it was coming for her. She looked behind her. Where before there had been a tiny chamber, now there were three more passages running off in three directions. All three passages seemed more or less identical. Each one had some kind of symbol carved into the rock over the entrance. The passages ran off into the murky distance, until the torch light died out.

She looked over her shoulder. Two yellow eyes appeared around the distant corner at the end of the corridor. A gleam of light on long sharp teeth. The Beast! It was hunched over, walking on two powerful hind legs. Its hair was long and matted. The Beast resembled a monkey, but was much larger and stronger than a person. Its human-looking hands were tipped with long curved talons.

Dread ran through her like a spike between the shoulder blades. She began running, fear driving away all sensation of pain in her ankle. The scream followed her. As she ran down the corridor, other corridors branched off from it. She could hear the thudding of the Beast’s feet, growing closer and closer. It was obviously faster than she was.

As big as it was, she could probably turn corners faster. She turned into another corridor. Then another. Then another. She found herself running past a row of barred cells. Inside the cells were old men, bearded, broken down.

“You’ll never make it!” they all shouted. “You’re doomed!”

Thanks for the encouragement, she thought. She knew it was all part of Nak’s plan to psych her out. But still. It was creepy!

“Doomed!” they moaned. “Doomed!”

She passed the cells and ended up in another corridor. This one was more brightly lit. On the walls, these carvings were bigger, clearer. Above each picture of the Beast was a symbol, some kind of alphabet or pictogram—similar to the ones she’d noticed in the first passageway. It was like nothing she’d ever seen in a history book though. She studied the symbol for a moment, looking for a pattern. Then she realized that now was no time to be messing with puzzles.

She stopped, listened.

Nothing.

No pounding footsteps behind her. No dragging noises. No screaming. She began tiptoeing forward. She must have shaken it!

At the far end, the corridor turned left.

She peered around the corner.

Crouched there, not ten feet away, was the Beast. Its head was lowered, resting its weight on the knuckles of one massive hand, its nose sniffing the ground.

Oh, no! she thought. Somehow she had ended up behind it.

She froze, afraid that even the slightest sound would give her away. Suddenly the Beast stopped sniffing the floor. Its head came up.

Her pulse pounded in her ears. It sounded as loud as a hammer.

The Beast turned, fixed its eyes on her and charged.

There was no escape. It’s all just a Lifelight jump, she tried to tell herself. If I can convince myself of that, then Lifelight won’t try to shut down my brain when the Beast’s jaws clamp down on my—

Grinding.

Suddenly the grinding noise she’d heard when the walls moved started again.

The Beast froze, looked around. It was no more than five feet from her. But a section of the ceiling was moving downward now. The Beast eyed it nervously, blew several breaths from its large nostrils, and then began backing away.

Apparently, it was not interested in being squashed.

Aja too backed away. Now she could feel the entire floor moving beneath her feet. The grinding sound seemed to invade her bones. It may have saved her life, but it was sure a scary sound. The wall was getting closer and closer, the corridor narrower and narrower.

Suddenly she realized that the threat was no longer the Beast. It was the maze itself! The corridor was squeezing in on her. She sprinted for the far end of the hall.

But as soon as she began to move, she realized she’d never make it. She had figured out a long time ago that she had a sort of computer in her brain that could measure distances, make sense of motion and shapes and sizes, and spit out answers. How close, how far, how many seconds it would take to go from here to there…

And the fact was, if the walls kept closing in, she’d never make it.

But she kept running anyway. The terrible claustrophobia was on her again as the walls squeezed tighter and tighter.

As she ran, a voice called to her: “In here!”

She stopped. Where was the voice coming from? The corridor was more than a hundred feet long, without a break.

“Aja! Here!” The voice came from behind her somewhere.

She whipped her head around. Nothing but—Wait! There! As the walls closed in tighter and tighter, she saw that a tiny slit had opened behind her. She hurled herself toward it.

Just in time, she burst through the slit. It was barely large enough to admit a human body. But that was all she needed. She squeezed through, finding herself in a tiny room not much larger than a coffin.

In the dim light, just inches away, she saw a man. He was chained to great rusting bolts driven into the black rock wall.

The only light in the room came from the corridor. As the walls squeezed shut, the light began to die.

Oddly, the chained man was smiling at her.

Then the light was gone. She was trapped! She moaned slightly. This was horrible! This wasn’t even a room. It was nothing but a tiny shaft.

“We’re gonna die here,” she gasped. She tried to tell herself it was all in her mind. It was just a jump, just a fantasy, just a—But her body wanted to explode. She felt herself panting with fear.

“Listen to me,” the man said softly. His voice was deep and calm. He sounded like he was on a picnic, not chained to a wall in a stone coffin. “You’re okay, Aja. I know you’re claustrophobic. But you will get out of here.”

She tried to calm her panicked breathing. “How do you know who I am?”

“I have come a long way to see you,” the man said.

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

“My name is Press,” the man said. “I’ve come to tell you something very important.”

Then his face began to fade, and the world around her began to disappear.

SIX

Hurry! Now!”

“Huh?” Aja felt bleary and strange. It took her a moment to figure out where she was. Back in the Lifelight jump tube. Nak was standing over her.

“We gotta go!” he said in a tense whisper. “Somebody pinged us.”

Pinging was a technique that phaders used to contact people inside a jump. If somebody pinged them, it meant that a phader had located them somehow. Busted! This was a disaster. She could get thrown out of the academy. She could—

Nak grabbed her by the hand. “Let’s go.”

“But…if they pinged us, then they know who we are. They know I’m—”

Nak yanked her up off the jump table. He started running. Aja followed him into the hallway. Her legs were stiff and her shoulders hurt. “Run!” he shouted.

She started running too. Though for the life of her she couldn’t see why. If a phader had pinged them, then the phader knew who they were. She felt sick with fear. They were going to be in so much trouble!

“I rerouted everything,” Nak shouted over his shoulder. “Right now they don’t know where we are. I changed the registry, too. Our IDs were fake. It was probably just a routine system check. If we can just get out of the building, they’ll never know it was us. Run!”

So there was hope. Aja ran faster. Her ankle was hurting though. It was weird. It was almost like the hit her ankle had taken when she fell into the maze had stuck with her after the jump. But that wasn’t possible.

They pounded down the softly lit hallways, passing empty jump station after empty jump station. As she ran, she spotted a clock. It was late, almost midnight. Academy students weren’t supposed to be at Lifelight any later than eight. She couldn’t believe that she’d been playing Nak’s game for that long. It seemed like she’d only been in for a few minutes.

Nak shouldered past her. “This way,” he said. “Quickly. They’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

They retraced their steps, then went through a doorway into an emergency stairwell. She followed Nak into a lower level of the Lifelight pyramid. The lights in the hallway were dim. It was a little creepy.

“What is this place?” Aja said. She thought she had been all over Lifelight. But she’d never been here.

“The old research wing,” Nak said. “They used it a lot back when Dr. Zetlin was still perfecting Lifelight. Now it’s pretty much deserted. Except for these guys.” He pointed into one of the stations. A pair of legs stuck out of the machine that synched you up to Lifelight. “These are hardcore jump phreaks.”

She’d heard stories about jump phreaks, people who quit their jobs and just lived in the basements of Lifelight, making unauthorized jumps, sometimes getting so involved in their jumps that they risked starving to death. She’d always figured they were just stories.

Far down the hallway a disheveled man ducked furtively into a booth and slammed the door. An old woman in a strange black dress hobbled toward them. She had something written in tiny letters on a piece of paper that was taped to her clothes. “They’re taking your brains!” the old woman shouted. “They’re taking your brains!”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Nak said. “She’s harmless.”

“I don’t like this,” Aja said.

“Phaders and vedders don’t come down here much,” Nak said. “We’ll be safe. Wait about ten minutes and we can sneak out.”

They kept walking down the hallway. From almost every darkened tube, she could see a pair of legs sticking out on the jump table. Every jump at Lifelight was supposed to be attended to by a vedder. Vedders monitored vital signs and made sure no one experienced health problems during a jump. But down here there wasn’t a vedder in sight.

She kept looking at the legs sticking out, wondering who these people were. To think that this secret underworld had been here all this time…and she’d never known it.

One pair of legs shocked her. It was a kid. Kids weren’t supposed to be in Lifelight past eight o’clock. All she could see was a pair of small green athletic shoes sticking out of the machine.

“Sad, huh?” Nak said, noticing her gaze resting on the green shoes.

“Should we do something about it?”

“Like what?” he said. “Go tell a phader that while we were escaping from an unauthorized jump, we ran across a kid who should be home in bed?”

Aja felt terrible. She knew he was right. But still, it made her feel queasy. This whole situation was so bad! There were no right answers here.

Nak’s face softened. “Poor kid. Most likely both his parents are jump phreaks too. If we try to intervene, Lifelight Services will probably grab him. They might even take the kid away from his family. I’ve seen it happen down here.”

“Wow,” Aja said.

Nak pointed at the clock. “It’s been ten minutes. I think we should be safe. Let’s get out of here.”

“Okay.”

“Our odds are better if we split up,” Nak said. “You go that way; I’ll go this way.”

 

Aja’s heart was racing as she walked out one of the service exits of the Lifelight pyramid. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to her. But that didn’t stop the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She turned the corner and started walking down the broad avenue that led back toward the academy. The streets were dark and empty.

As she approached the building, she saw two figures standing near the entrance to her dormitory. One of them was Nak. The other was tall and thin. A teacher from the academy?

Aja wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to be seen out this late, so she ducked behind a bush. Nak and the other man talked for a moment. Then they separated, and Nak disappeared through the front door of Zetlin Hall.

The man stood for a moment watching him go. His face was shadowed in darkness. Aja wasn’t sure what it was about him, but something made her feel frightened.

Suddenly the man turned. A beam of light from the streetlamp overhead illuminated his face momentarily. Aja gasped.

The man turned and melted back into the darkness.

She had only gotten the briefest glimpse of the face. But there was no mistaking those pale blue eyes. She’d recognize them anywhere. It was King Hruth.

SEVEN

The next morning Aja awoke to the sound of pounding on her door. She opened it and looked out.

Headmistress Nilssin stood in the hallway. Behind her was a large, burly man with a shaved head. He wore the insignia of Lifelight Services on his shoulders. A visit from Lifelight Services was never a good thing.

Aja’s heart raced.

“Hi, Headmistress,” Aja said, trying her best to sound confident and unconcerned. “Something wrong?”

Headmistress Nilssin’s face was tense, and there were spots of color high on her cheeks. “This man is from Lifelight Services. I’ll let him speak for himself.”

“Aja Killian?” the man said.

“Obviously,” Aja snapped.

“Aja Killian,” the burly man said, “on behalf of the directors of Lifelight, this constitutes formal notification of the suspension of your Lifelight identity and privileges. Certain irregularities have been flagged on your profile. Until further notice, you will not be permitted to enter the Lifelight premises or to utilize Lifelight equipment. Pending resolution of those irregularities—”

“Irregularities!” Aja shouted. “Somebody is hacking into the core. And it’s not me. I happen to know—”

Headmistress Nilssin held up her hand. “Aja, stop talking. Now! Not another word. You have rights. Anything you say at this point could be misconstrued or used against you. Just…be quiet. I’m handling this.”

“Headmistress Nilssin,” the older man said, “if the young lady is willing to cooperate, we might be willing to consider leniency. Perhaps only a five-year suspension of her privileges could be arranged if she—”

Five years! Aja felt like a giant steel clamp had been tightened around her chest.

“Sir,” Headmistress Nilssin interrupted, “you have made your notification. I would request that you leave the academy now.”

“I’m in the middle of a major project at Lifelight!” Aja said. “I have to—”

“Aja!” Headmistress Nilssin said. “Quiet.”

The man from Lifelight Services glanced at Aja as if she were a bug he was about to squash. Then he turned back to Headmistress Nilssin. “I will be forced to notify the directors of your lack of cooperation.”

“I am simply insisting that you respect the legal rights of my student. You have done your job. Thank you. Now go.”

The man’s eyes narrowed slightly. Then he turned on his heel and marched away.

After he was gone, Headmistress Nilssin turned to Aja and said, “Look, Aja, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what you’re involved in—”

“It’s not me!” Aja said. “I’m being framed!”

“Aja, listen to me. Listen carefully. Dal Whitbred has showed me the evidence against you. It’s very, very strong. But right now they’re too busy trying to stop this program from destroying the core to worry about you personally. Lifelight could be severely damaged within a matter of hours. In fact, things are so desperate that they’ve asked me to lend my expertise.” As Aja knew, Headmistress Nilssin had once been one of Dr. Zetlin’s top assistants during the early days of Lifelight. She was still a top authority on the inner workings of the system. “On top of that, we still haven’t found Omni Cader. Right now I just don’t have time to discuss the matter with you.”

“But—” She wanted to explain about Nak’s game.

Headmistress Nilssin raised her hand sharply. “Go to class. Follow your normal routine. And needless to say, don’t even think about trying to go over to the Lifelight pyramid.”

“Headmistress Nilssin, look—”

“We’ll talk later.” Headmistress Nilssin walked swiftly away.

Aja went back in her room and gently closed the door. She felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. The fact that the Lifelight directors had personally acted to suspend her privileges—well, there were just no words to express how sick she felt. What was wrong with these people? It wasn’t fair. Why didn’t they believe her? She was arguably the best student the academy had ever had. Not once had she ever broken a rule, ever cheated on an exam, or ever been a behavior problem. Not once!

Her mind began clicking through the alternatives. Nak was smart. There was no doubt about that. Smarter than she’d given him credit for. If he had done things right, it might literally be impossible for her to prove she had nothing to do with the program.

In which case, she only had one alternative: finish the game. And win it!

She picked up her communicator, called Nak. “It’s me,” she said. “Lifelight Services has suspended my privileges. Can you get me into Lifelight?”

Nak started laughing. “I was wondering when you’d call.”

 

Within minutes they were inside the huge Lifelight pyramid, heading down into the old research wing. Nak had all kinds of tricks up his sleeve—fake ID chips, bogus passwords, and an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the architecture of the building. As they were walking down the hallway, she noticed a pair of green shoes still sticking out of the same jump tube.

“That kid’s still here,” she said. “I wonder who he is.”

She started to poke her head into the station to look into the tube at the boy’s face.

Nak grabbed her arm. “You want to play the game or not?” he said sharply.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

“Here,” Nak said. “Your tube’s ready. This time there’s no way they’ll find you. I took extra precautions.”

She looked him in the eye. “You sure?”

He nodded.

She walked in and lay down on the jump table.

“Go save Prince Norvall, Aja,” Nak said as he leaned over her to plug in the neural connection wires. Then he smiled coldly. “If you can…”

EIGHT

She entered the jump in the tight rock shaft again, the cold walls pressing against her. It was completely dark. Aja felt her skin crawl. Even though she knew it was just a jump, she still felt claustrophobic.

As she tried to calm herself down, she could hear breathing across from her. She’d forgotten all about that. She’d been trapped in here with a man. A man who’d said his name was Press.

“Ah,” the man named Press said. “There you are. We had a bit of an interruption.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d notice,” she said.

“I’m not part of Nak’s game,” the man said. “I’m like you. I tandemed into his jump. The difference is, Nak doesn’t know I’m here.”

“What?” Aja said. “How’s that possible?”

“That’s not important,” the man named Press said. “We don’t have much time. So listen carefully.”

“Okay.” She cleared her throat. The sound was flat and compressed inside the rock tomb. She tried to breathe slowly. But her skin was clammy, and she felt a little light-headed. “So why are you in Nak’s game?”

“I came to tell you about your destiny.”

Okay, this was getting more strange and improbable by the moment. “My destiny?”

What was he getting at? She tried to focus on what he was saying, tried to push aside the fact that she was entombed in a coffin-size slab of rock.

“You and I are what’s known as Travelers,” the man named Press said. “We are engaged in a great battle against forces that seek to destroy Veelox. But not just Veelox. There are other worlds similar to Veelox. Their fate hangs in the balance.”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Aja said. “You said you’re not part of Nak’s game.”

“Correct.”

“So this stuff you’re telling me—”

“Also has nothing to do with Nak’s game. Nothing directly.”

“Then, uh…why not just come talk to me at the academy or something?”

“Saint Dane is very powerful on Veelox. The academy is part of his strategy here. He’s watching it very closely.”

“Saint Who?”

“I’m sorry. Saint Dane is the adversary of the Travelers. You’ll know him as a tall thin man with long black hair.”

“That sounds like King Hruth.”

“For the purposes of Nak’s game, yes. In real life he’s taken the identity of the man you saw talking to Nak the other day, a man name Allik Worthintin. He’s a director of Lifelight.”

“But…how…”

“We don’t have much time. Save your questions. All I can tell you is that you’ll soon be ready to assume your responsibilities as a Traveler. Other Travelers may come to visit you. When they do, protect them from Saint Dane.”

Something in the back of Aja’s mind said, This whole thing is totally ridiculous. And, despite what Press is saying, he’s probably just another trick in Nak’s nasty little game. But the good thing was that his calm voice was keeping her claustrophobia at bay.

“Now, it’s time for you to go.”

“But, I need more answers to—”

“We’re in a shaft. If you climb up my chains, you’ll find a ladder cut into the rock. Climb up to the top of the shaft. When you get there—”

“But what about you?”

“As long as you win the game, I’ll be fine. My jump will terminate, and I’ll flume off to some other territory, happy as a clam.”

Flume? What was he talking about? What was a flume?

“Well, what if I don’t win? What if the Beast catches me?”

“Don’t think about that.”

There was a brief silence. Aja was putting things together, little slivers of evidence that had been assembling and reassembling in her head.

“I noticed something strange the last time I finished my jump,” she said. “It was cold in King Hruth’s castle. After I finished the jump, I kept shivering. That’s not supposed to happen.”

“As you know, Aja, there is an intimate neural connection between your brain and your body. Lifelight taps into that connection. As far as your brain knows, Lifelight is reality. Back when Dr. Zetlin designed Lifelight, one of the biggest hurdles he had to get over was the feedback loop between the body and the mind. If somebody tripped and fell in Lifelight, their leg would hurt when they finished the jump.”

“That happened to me this morning!” Aja said. “I hurt my ankle in the jump. When I got out, I was limping.”

“Sure. But it can be a lot worse. Back when Dr. Zetlin was first testing Lifelight, several people actually died. There was some debate about the cause. But it was suspected that it had something to do with the neural feedback loop. So he tested it himself. He went on a jump in which he crashed a vehicle into a wall. He almost died. His heart stopped, and he spent a week in the hospital.”

“Okay, but they solved all those problems,” Aja said. “There’s a damping program in the origin code that cuts the neural feedback loop when anything happens that would hurt your body. Lifelight’s a hundred percent safe.”

“Unless…”

Aja gasped. “Are you saying that Nak interfered with the neural damping protocols?”

Press didn’t answer.

“Oh my god!” she said. “But—”

“Right now all the modifications he’s made to the origin code only apply inside his game. But if the program succeeds in taking over the core…”

Aja felt her eyes widen. “You’re saying—”

“That’s right. Every single jumper in a Lifelight pyramid would be at risk.”

“But…that’s like half the people in Rubic City!”

Press said nothing.

Once again, Aja was aware of the walls around her, the oppressive silence, the darkness. She shivered.

And then something else struck her. The pair of green sport shoes sticking out of the jump tube. The bare legs of the boy in the tube had been freckled. Like a red-haired boy’s would be. And when they’d shown the hologram of Omni Cader during assembly, he’d been wearing red shoes. She hadn’t made the connection until just now.

“Prince Norvall,” she said. “The point of the game is to save Prince Norvall. I thought that Nak had just harvested his image. But he didn’t, did he?”

“No,” Press said.

“Omni Cader’s in this jump too, isn’t he? He’s trapped in the game.”

“That’s right. And if you don’t save him, he’ll be its first casualty.”

For a moment, dread sluiced through her. But then she took a deep breath. She wouldn’t let Nak get away with this. “I’ll figure it out,” she said firmly. “Nak can’t beat me. I’m smarter than he is.”

“True.” She sensed that Press was smiling at her. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll beat him.”

Aja’s breathing quickened. “This game is a puzzle. Nak told me there’s a way out. He’s too vain to have lied to me about that. There has to be a solution. A clear, logical solution.”

Press didn’t say anything. But she got the impression he was laughing silently.

“What!” she said angrily.

Before he could answer, the grinding noise began again. She felt the vibration running through the rock.

“What are you laughing about?” she said. “This isn’t funny.”

“Sometimes the solution to a problem is that there is no solution,” he said.

“That doesn’t make sense!” Aja said. “Every problem has a logical solution.”

“Now’s not the time for philosophical debate,” Press said. “Go!”

The grinding was getting louder. She could feel the vibration through the rock. She felt in front of her until her fingers closed around the chain.

“Just step on me,” Press said. He must have felt her hesitate, because he added, “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been through lots worse stuff than being walked on.” Then he laughed loudly. There was something reassuring about him, something that made her feel safe.

She put one foot on the chain around his wrist. Press grunted. It was obviously a little painful. But then she felt him lifting her into the air. She slid her hands up the shaft until she found a slot like the bottom rung of a ladder. She hauled herself up and began climbing.

“Remember.” Press’s voice echoed up toward her. “You are a Traveler. You’re destined for this.”

She kept climbing until she felt her head bang against the ceiling.

“Ow!” she said.

Then the grinding stopped. She felt behind her. The shaft had disappeared. She was in another room. From the way sound echoed in the chamber, she was sure it was quite large.

It was also pitch black. She began feeling her way along the hard stone, moving farther into the large room. As she moved, she felt objects on the floor. Some were hard and metallic. And some were rounded and softer. Wood, maybe.

They clattered as she moved over them.

And then she realized, as her fingers brushed over a large round object with several holes in it…No, not wood.

Bone. It was a skull.

She was crawling over bones. Bones and armor and shields.

Her blood ran cold for a moment. She paused. What was this place? And then she heard it. Somewhere in the distance, a soft snuffling sound. Then a dragging sound, like a bag full of rocks being hauled across a floor.

The Beast. Somewhere out in the darkness was the Beast.

How far away was it?

Close enough. Close enough that it would find her. Maybe if she crawled back down the shaft. She felt the wall behind her. The shaft was gone! The wall was completely smooth—other than a row of small holes.

What could she do? How could she get away if she couldn’t even see? She felt blindly around her. Maybe there was another passage somewhere!

Her hands closed around something. A thigh bone? Wait…no. It was the handle of an old spear. She felt her way up to the top until she reached the point. It was still sharp. A spear!

The snuffling stopped. Then the Beast screamed once. It knew she was there, Aja was sure of it.

Suddenly she had a thought.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Come on! Come and get me!”

There was a brief moment of silence. Then she heard it. The Beast was coming for her, charging through the dark. Aja felt behind her. The holes! Where were they?

Finally she found one. It was chest high. She thrust the hilt of the spear into it so it stuck straight out from the wall.

Footsteps thudded toward her. How far away was the charging Beast now? She couldn’t tell. Close. Very close.

“Come on!” she shouted. “Come get me!”

Closer. Closer.

Just as she felt that the Beast was on her, she dove to her right.

As she smashed painfully into the unforgiving rock floor, she heard a massive impact. The Beast had hit the wall. And if her plan had worked, it had impaled itself on the spear.

On cue the Beast screamed. This time it was not a scream of anger. It was a scream of pain.

Perfect! She’d skewered the Beast. Or, more accurately, it had skewered itself. The question was, how badly. Aja decided there was no point in sitting around waiting to find out. She started running as fast as she could. She figured if she slammed into something or tripped over something—hey, that was better than getting eaten by the Beast.

Behind her she heard the Beast thrashing wildly.

The Beast screamed again. She tripped, righted herself, tripped again, then continued on. And as she did, she heard footsteps. The Beast was following her. It was hurt. But by no means was it dead.

She ran as fast as she dared.

But the Beast ran faster. She could hear it, getting closer and closer.

I’m not gonna make it! Aja thought.

She literally felt its breath on her neck.

Oh, well, she thought.

And then suddenly she was airborne, falling through some kind of hole, out into space.

She hit the hard ground with a painful thud. She somersaulted to her feet. What now? she thought.

The answer came before she had a chance to decide for herself. The great horrible grinding noise had begun again. And as it did, light flooded into the chamber. She could still see up into the chamber above. The dying Beast was thrashing and rolling in pain. It stopped moving just as the door to the upper chamber slammed shut.

Yes! I’ve done it! I’ve killed the Beast. For a moment she felt triumphant. But then she realized that killing the Beast was only the first step in winning the game. She still had to find Omni Cader…and then escape the maze.

A light shone from a hole in the ceiling, beaming directly on a symbol carved into the wall. There had been symbols like this in every chamber. They looked like mathematical symbols, but they weren’t any kind of symbol she recognized.

Mathematical symbols. Something was tugging at the back of her mind. Mathematical symbols. Why was she thinking about mathematical symbols when—

Again, the grinding noise. Again, the walls began to move…revealing a passage much like the first one she had entered when she was thrown down here. She began running down the passage. Now that the Beast was no longer a threat, she didn’t care how much noise she made.

“Omni!” she called. “Omni, where are you?”

 

For what seemed like hours, she ran through the ever-shifting maze, calling and calling. Just when she had despaired of finding the boy, she heard a high, thin voice.

“Hey! Over here!”

Where “over here” was, Aja wasn’t quite sure. She blundered through the maze. And then the walls moved again.

And then…there he was. Not fifty feet away from her.

Omni Cader sat in a heap, pale face smudged with dirt, his red hair a mess. He looked scared out of his mind. A single thin chain of gleaming steel led from his ankle to an iron stud driven into the wall. “Aja? Is that you? Aja Killian?”

She nodded.

“What’s happened to me?” he shouted. “I can’t get out of Nak’s jump. My bracelet isn’t working!” He held up his arm.

“Don’t worry!” she shouted back. “I’m getting you out.”

She ran toward him.

“No!” the boy screamed. “Not yet!”

Aja halted about twenty feet from the boy. He was in a small chamber just tall enough to lie down in. The door was open…but Omni didn’t come out.

“What’s wrong?” Aja said.

“The door shuts really fast. If you don’t time it right, it’ll—”

Before he could finish his sentence, the door to the chamber slammed down. It was a massive slab of rock. If she’d been standing there, it would have squashed her like a bug.

In the center of the rock was a large symbol, similar to the others she’d seen in the maze.

After a moment the entire passage began to move, squeezing shut. She dove backward until she reached another passage. Soon the passage to Omni’s cell was gone completely.

What was she going to do? She looked around. Symbols on the walls again. What was it about—

Suddenly it hit her. Math! That was the trick. The maze was a mathematical puzzle. Lifelight was a computer. Computers ran on math. There were symbols on all the walls of the maze. But there was some kind of pattern to the way the walls moved here. Math was just patterns. Right? Maybe they weren’t mathematical symbols she’d learned in school. But that didn’t mean they weren’t part of a mathematical sequence. If she could figure out the pattern that controlled the walls, she could figure out how to get out of the maze.

On some level, the mathematical structure of the maze had to be connected to the structure of the program that Nak had sent to take over the core. By solving the puzzle—that is, by getting Omni Cader out of the maze—she’d shut down the program. And in so doing, she’d save the core. Along with the lives of hundreds—probably even thousands—of people.

For a moment the enormity of the task in front of her made her feel sick to her stomach.

Focus, Aja! she thought. It’s just math! You know how to do this.

She waited until the grinding began. The walls began moving, the entire maze reconfiguring again. The grinding stopped. She kept count in her head of the seconds as they passed. Then she just sat down on the floor and waited, letting three more cycles pass.

Yes! It was regular as clockwork! The walls moved for exactly thirty seconds. And they moved on one-minute intervals. Not every single minute. But each move began anywhere from one to five minutes after the previous one. Exact to the second.

She began scribbling on the floor with her finger, making patterns in the grime that coated the rock. The symbols on the walls were suddenly as clear in her head as—

And then she had it! The pattern. The walls changed at regular intervals. And the symbols on the walls corresponded to…well, she wasn’t sure what. Not quite yet. It had something to do with the pattern of the passages. The maze was made of rock. Even if that rock was just a pattern in the Lifelight computer, still, it was modeled on real rock. It had to act like real rock. It couldn’t melt and reform. It couldn’t pass through other rock. So there had to be a limited number of configurations to the maze.

And one of those configurations had to lead out of the maze. If it didn’t, then Nak’s game was unwinnable.

Whatever you might say about Nak, she was pretty sure he wasn’t a cheater. Not by his own definition anyway. He wanted to prove he was smarter than she was. Which meant he’d want to beat her fair and square. There had to be a pattern and there had to be a way out.

The grinding began again. Again she had to flee to avoid getting squashed.

When the grinding finally stopped, it hit her. There were five symbols, five configurations of the maze. They were running in a sequence. But the sequence was changing. It was a complex numerical puzzle. She just had to figure out the sequence.

As soon as the walls stopped moving, she began scrawling on the grimy floor again.

There! She had it! The sequence ran backward. Eventually it would hit a stopping point.

What then? Zero. The final configuration was zero: no symbols.

The grinding began again. “Help! Aja, help!”

Again she had come to the end of the short passage leading to Omni’s cell. There was something different about the cell this time though, she realized.

“It’s getting smaller!” Omni shouted. “You have to do something!”

“Wait, Omni!” she called. “I’m gonna get you out. But I have to figure out how to—”

The huge door slammed shut.

Wait. She stared. On the door was a sixth symbol. That couldn’t be right. The sequence only had five symbols.

Then she realized she’d been wrong this whole time. There weren’t five possible configurations. There were six. When the sequence of numbers ended, the sixth configuration would happen. And that would end it all. Something terrible would happen to Omni. Probably the walls of his cell would move together and…

And that would be the end of Nak’s game.

She scribbled furiously on the floor. To her horror she realized that the sequence had almost run its course. There were five more reconfigurations. Then the game was over. Five moves to go.

From above her head, she heard laughter. She looked up and saw a tiny hole in the ceiling. An eye looked down at her.

She heard Nak’s mocking voice. “Took you long enough,” he said, laughing some more.

“The final configuration,” she called back. “It squashes the place where Omni’s chained up. But it also opens the maze, doesn’t it?”

“You still have time to get out,” Nak called. “I don’t think you can get Omni out too, though. Save yourself or save him. I don’t think you can save both him and yourself in five moves.”

She continued scribbling. Then she saw it. Yes! There was a solution. Nak was wrong. She could do it in five moves. Three moves to get to Omni, two moves to get out.

Nak continued to taunt her as she scribbled the symbols on her arm. Then she leaned over and erased her calculations from the floor with her hand. She had to follow the sequence of symbols each time. If she did it right, the symbols would lead her to Omni again.

The grinding began. Move five. She scanned the walls for symbols. There! She ran down the passage, looking for the next symbol in the sequence. There! She turned. One more and—

The grinding began again. Wait! She spotted the final symbol in the sequence just in time to make her way into the next chamber before the door slid shut. She waited breathlessly.

As soon as the next reconfiguration began, she was off and running. This time it was easier. She knew exactly what she was looking for. Again she found herself standing at the door covering the passage that led to Omni.

Two minutes later the grinding began again. Move three. She waited until she saw Omni.

“Come out!” she shouted.

“I can’t,” Omni screamed. He pointed to the door. “It’ll drop on me.”

“No!” she shouted back. “There’s a way. Come out all the way. The door will drop on the chain and break it. Then we’ll run.”

Omni shook his head. “I thought of that already. The chain’s too short.”

“Maybe it was. But it’s not now. See?” She pointed at the back wall where the steel chain was attached. “The wall moved.”

“But—”

Without another thought, she charged into the room and dragged the boy out. He struggled furiously. “No!” she shouted. “You have to come out all the—”

Wham!

The giant stone door dropped.

Omni screamed. In horror, Aja looked to see if she’d been wrong. Had the door dropped on his leg?

No. He’d gotten out completely. But the steel chain was so close that it had just torqued his ankle a little. More important, though, the chain had been broken by the weight of the falling door.

“Let’s go!” she shouted. The walls of the short passage were grinding shut.

“I can’t,” Omni whispered. “My ankle. I think it’s broken.”

She grabbed the boy in her arms and ran. The walls were closing in and in and in and…

Then they were into the next chamber.

The grinding stopped. Three moves down, two to go.

“Why can’t I get out of the game?” Omni said. Tears were running down his face now. “I don’t understand! Nak said it would be fun!”

“It’s gonna be okay,” Aja said softly, stroking the boy’s hair. “I’m gonna get you out of here.”

She sat, cradling the crying boy and saving up her strength. She hadn’t calculated on having to carry the kid. She just hoped she had the strength to make the next two moves in time. She stared at the symbols on her arm, memorizing the sequence. The key would be spotting them quickly and then—

The grinding started.

She leaped to her feet, threw Omni over her shoulder like a bag of laundry, and then sprinted down the next hallway. Then left. Then right. Omni moaned softly as she staggered through the maze.

And then she reached the final chamber. “One more move,” she whispered, setting Omni on the floor. Her breath was heaving and her lungs were burning. By herself the maze wouldn’t have been too hard to get through. But carrying the boy? It was brutal.

Before she could catch her breath, the grinding began.

Final move! She picked Omni up and began to run, moving through the final sequence. Left. Down a shaft. Up a flight of stairs. One final symbol. Where was it? Where was it?

There!

She dashed down the final passage. She’d only made it about halfway before the grinding began again. This time it was the ceiling coming down. She wasn’t sure she’d make it. Her arms were sore from carrying Omni, and her lungs felt as if they were full of burning needles.

Just a little farther! The ceiling was so low now that she had to run in a crouch. Just a little farther. She could see the final chamber now. Light—natural light!—was flooding through it. Faster! Faster!

But she still had a little farther to go. And her head was scraping the ceiling. She dropped to her knees, yanking Omni behind her.

Omni howled. “It’s gonna squash us! It’s gonna—”

And then they were free!

Cold air flooded the room. In front of them was a huge open gate. Beyond that was the great frozen lake that lay on the eastern side of Qoom. Free! They were free!

She set Omni down and raised her fists.

“We did it!”

Omni blinked. “We’re free? We’re out? The game’s over?”

Aja grinned. “The game’s over,” she gasped. “All we have to do is walk out.”

Omni whooped. They began walking slowly toward the gate.

And then, with a massive, horrible thud, a great wall of rock thundered down and slammed into the floor, cutting off the gate and plunging them into darkness.

Aja’s heart went into her throat. What had just happened? She’d solved the puzzle! And now Nak had somehow snatched it away. But how? She’d beaten the game!

For the first time in hours she became aware of her physical surroundings again. She had forgotten how frigid it was in the maze, the oozing rock walls making the maze cold as a refrigerator.

“What are we gonna do?” came Omni Cader’s high, thin voice.

“I don’t know, Omni,” she said. “I really don’t know.”

NINE

Shivering. Aja’s first sensation as she resurfaced from the jump was cold. Everything was cold. She lay in the jump tube for a long time, hugging herself and shivering uncontrollably. Her arms and legs were sore, as if she’d been punched repeatedly.

But that wasn’t the worst thing.

Failure. Total failure. A cloud of misery hung over her. She had failed to beat Nak’s game.

“Is she out?” a voice said. “Is she out now?”

“I think so,” another voice said. “But she’s in bad shape. I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”

A jolt of panic ran through Aja. Oh, no! Somebody had found her. Before she had a chance to move—or even think—two strong arms slid her out of the jump tube. Around her was a half circle of faces. Headmistress Nilssin. The man from Lifelight Services who’d come to her room this morning. Dal Whitbred. A senior vedder, working furiously at the controls of the health unit. And a tall thin man with long black hair and pale blue eyes. What was it the man in the maze had said his name was? Allik? Yes, Allik Worthintin.

Headmistress Nilssin was shaking her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t even tell you how disappointed I am in you.”

Aja was still shivering so hard she could barely sit up.

“Stand up,” Allik Worthintin said.

“I still need time with her,” the senior vedder said. “She’s still not stable.”

“I don’t care,” Allik Worthintin said. “Stand up, young woman.”

Aja stood unsteadily.

“Do you have any concept of the problems your little stunt is causing?” Allik Worthintin said. “Your program has taken over eleven percent of the core.”

“Twelve,” said Dal Whitbred.

“Whatever,” the Lifelight director said.

“Sir, I have to protest,” the vedder said, still hunched over his health unit. “Her vital signs are—”

Allik Worthintin ignored him. “You’re coming with me, Aja,” he said. “You’re going to sit down in my office, and you’re going to tell us exactly and precisely how to shut down your little program.”

“It’s not mine!” Aja said. “How many times do I have to tell you. It’s…”

And then something terrible occurred to her. She’d seen Allik Worthintin with Nak. Why would somebody as important as a Lifelight director be hanging around with a sixteen-year-old kid? It didn’t make sense. Unless…

Unless Allik Worthintin knew exactly what Nak was up to already. The man in the maze, Press—he had said that Allik Worthintin was really Saint Whatever-his-name-was.

Aja’s teeth started chattering.

“Look at her, sir!” the vedder said. “Her lips are blue!”

“Look,” Aja said. “I’m trying to stop the program. It’s a game.”

“Young lady,” Headmistress Nilssin said, “if you think this is a game—”

“No! Not that kind of game. The program that’s attacking the core—it’s a game. It’s a tandem jump. And Omni Cader is still inside the jump. We have to get him out!”

Headmistress Nilssin looked at Dal Whitbred.

“Come on!” Aja said. “Follow me. I’ll show you. If you managed to get me out of the game, you can get him out too. He’ll verify everything I’m saying.”

“Secure her,” Allik Worthintin said to the burly man from Lifelight Services.

But before he could move, Headmistress Nilssin stepped in front of him. “That boy has been missing for two days,” she said. “If there’s even a chance Omni’s here, we need to know now.” Then she turned to Aja. “Show us.”

“He’s just down the hall,” Aja said. She stepped past the burly man as quickly as her wobbly legs would allow. She was feeling terrible, shivering as if she had a fever. And her entire body felt bruised from her encounter with the Beast. She walked down the hall to the tube where she’d seen the green shoes.

Empty.

The tube was empty.

“But—”

“Is this it?” Headmistress Nilssin said.

“Yes,” Aja whispered. The tubes were numbered. And Aja never forgot a number. This was the right one. Only…Omni Cader wasn’t in it anymore.

Aja put her face in her hands. Somehow Nak must have known they were coming. He must have moved Omni to another tube. For a moment she felt like just lying down on the floor and bawling.

Dal Whitbred was whispering into his communicator. After a moment he put it back on his belt. “Director Worthintin,” he said, “it’s up to thirteen percent. The program seems to be accelerating.”

“Get her upstairs,” Allik Worthintin said. “Five minutes alone with her and I’ll get to the bottom of this!”

Suddenly Aja’s mind flashed back to the maze. That man inside the maze, Press, had told her that she was special. He had said she was a Traveler, that it was her destiny to fight for Veelox. His calm voice came back to her. Sometimes the solution is that there is no solution. What did he mean by that?

She turned to Dal Whitbred, grabbed his arm. “Dal, please!” she said. “I think I can stop it. Just give me one more chance!”

Allik Worthintin snapped his fingers at the burly Lifelight Services man. “Now. Take her.”

“Please, Dal!” She tightened her grip on his arm. “I swear I was only trying to stop this thing. I have to jump if I’m going to stop the program.”

Dal Whitbred studied her face. It was obvious he wanted to believe her.

“It’s me, Dal! Have I ever given you any indication that I would try to mess up Lifelight? Headmistress Nilssin? Come on! That’s not me.”

Dal and Headmistress Nilssin looked at each other.

“Nothing else is working,” Dal said.

Headmistress Nilssin gave him a slight nod.

“Absolutely not,” Allik Worthintin said. “I’m going to question her personally. And I’m going to do it now.” He pointed his finger at Dal Whitbred. “That’s an order!”

Dal Whitbred swallowed. “Do you have the full authority of all the directors, sir?” he said. “Because unless you have the full vote of the directors on this matter, I have operational authority to do what I think is right. And I think we’re out of options here.”

Allik Worthintin’s blue eyes bored into Dal’s face. “Are you willing to stake your job on it?”

“Yes, sir, I am.” Dal’s voice was firm and calm.

Allik Worthintin said nothing.

As the two men locked eyes, the senior vedder hustled up behind them. He was a roly-poly man with a nervous face. “Something has gone wrong with the neural buffering,” he said. “I can’t guarantee her safety.”

“I don’t care,” Aja said. “I’ll take the chance.”

Finally Director Worthintin threw up his hands, his lips curling in anger. “All right. Fine. I wash my hands of this.” He turned and stalked away.

“Get me back in,” Aja said.

TEN

Cheater!” Aja shouted into the darkness. “You’re a cheater! You’re not smarter than I am! You’re not better than I am! You’re just a worthless little cheater!”

For a moment there was no sound. Just an empty, cold, featureless darkness. Omni Cader sniffled once.

Then, above them, a small square of light appeared. An eye looked down. “Oh, you’re so predictable.” Nak’s voice came out of the little hole.

“Predictable?”

Aja felt a horrible sick sensation in her stomach. What if she had been wrong about Nak? What if Nak was never going to let her out of here? There would be more Beasts. More sequences. More tricks. More gimmicks.

“I’m not a cheater,” Nak said. “I’m just smarter.”

“No offense, Nak,” she said, “but I’ve been better in math than you from day one.”

“Exactly!” Nak said. There was a note of triumph in his voice.

The tiny door through which Nak was looking slid shut. The room went dark again.

And then it hit her. She hadn’t looked deeply enough into the problem. There was a sequence to the rooms, yes. But there was also a sequence to the timing, too. The gaps between reconfigurations ranged from one to five minutes. There was probably some kind of sequence there too. And if there was a relationship between the time and the symbols…well, it would get into some seriously complicated math.

After a while the grinding noise began again. A new sequence, she thought. A new sequence would be beginning.

But how did it start? Was it random?

“What do we do now?” Omni said.

“I don’t know,” Aja said. “I have to do some calculations. Let’s move to a room with better light.”

“But…I thought you said you’d get us out,” Omni said.

“I will,” she said. But she wasn’t feeling all that confident.

A door began to open.

“Let’s go,” she said. She put her arm under Omni’s shoulder, supporting him. They walked slowly into the next chamber. And stopped.

After a while the grinding ceased.

“What’s in here?” Omni said. “Why don’t we keep moving?”

She shook her head. “I have to do more calculations.”

“Calculations?” Omni looked at her as if she were crazy. “How’s that gonna get us out of here?”

But Aja just began scribbling. As she furiously calculated, she realized her mistake. There were two sets of variables. The symbols and the times between reconfigurations. The time was anywhere between one and five minutes.

“Let’s just go!” Omni grabbed her hand and started yanking. “How are we gonna get out if we don’t explore?”

“Omni, please—”

“Let’s go! I wanna go! I wanna go into another room. Why do we have to stop here?”

Her eyebrows went up. That was it! That was why Nak said he wasn’t cheating. The times between the moves were a red herring! They were just random.

No, Lifelight reprogrammed the sequences depending on where you stopped. If you followed the symbols to the very end of the sequence, Lifelight would just start the next sequence. But if you didn’t, if you stopped in a room that wasn’t the final one in the sequence, then Lifelight would generate a new sequence—a sequence that was based on the symbol on the door of the room where you stopped. Which meant…

She began scribbling again.

“Let’s go!” Omni pleaded.

“Wait!” she shouted. “Shut up!”

Omni fell on the floor and started to cry.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just that—”

She started running sequences as fast as she could. There had to be a way to get out. Nak said he wasn’t a cheater. She had said that she was better in math. And he’d said, “Exactly!” Like that was somehow to his advantage. Like math wasn’t the solution to the problem.

Surely it wasn’t something stupid. Like she had to smash the wall down with a crowbar or something. No. Even if she had a crowbar, that wouldn’t work. These walls were all too thick. It had to be something else. It had to be.

And then she knew what it was. Press had said that sometimes the solution was that there wasn’t a solution. The solution wasn’t math! Not exactly, anyway. It was…well…anti-math!

She smiled furtively. Then she started to scribble.

It took three more moves and a lot of calculation. But finally she did it. Once she found the sequence, she memorized it.

“Let’s go, Omni,” she said.

“Did you figure a way out?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

The boy looked at her hopelessly. “Then why go anywhere? My ankle hurts. I just wanna lie down.”

“Can you trust me?” Aja’s eyes bored into the boy’s.

He nodded.

“All right then.”

They began walking. They walked and walked and walked, following the sequence of symbols she’d memorized. Through reconfiguration after reconfiguration.

“When are we gonna get there?” Omni said after they’d gone through at least six or eight reconfigurations.

“We’re almost there,” Aja whispered.

The walls began grinding.

“This way,” Aja said.

“But we’ve been in this same stupid room five times before. There’s no way out from here.”

“That’s right,” Aja said. “There’s no way out from here.”

They walked into the room. It was high ceilinged, with all kinds of scary carvings of the Beast chiseled into the walls.

“Now,” Aja said. “Stop.”

They stopped. For a moment, nothing happened.

And then, the carvings began to fracture, like reflections in a breaking mirror. A high-pitched whistle, like a terrible wind, filled Aja’s head. The fractured images grew dim as the whistle grew louder.

And then—suddenly—there was nothing at all.

ELEVEN

Aja woke to find herself lying in the jump tube. Her head was aching. Her teeth were chattering. Her mind was a blur. What was happening?

She sat up slowly. All the lights were off and a strange low pulsing tone was echoing throughout the building. As she stumbled out into the hallway, she saw a red light on the wall flashing on and off.

Dazed-looking people were walking around in the hall.

“What happened?” a man said.

“I don’t know,” a young woman replied. “I was in the middle of a jump, and I heard this weird noise….”

The lights blinked back on, the flashing red lights went off, and then a soothing voice broadcast: “Lifelight has experienced a brief break in service. All systems are now functioning properly again. However, all jumps will be temporarily suspended while diagnostic routines are implemented. Lifelight apologizes for the inconvenience.”

She noticed Headmistress Nilssin standing near her booth, talking urgently on her communicator. She turned and looked curiously at Aja. “Something happened to Lifelight,” she said.

And then it all came back to her.

“I just spoke to Dal from the core control room,” Headmistress Nilssin said. “We had a stroke of amazing luck. There was a brief power failure and a total system shutdown. That’s the first time it’s happened in years. But when the system came back, the program was inactive. Dal’s been able to quarantine it and erase it from the system.”

“Good,” Aja said.

Headmistress Nilssin looked at her closely. “Aja? Aja, are you okay?”

“Now that you mention it,” Aja said, “I feel a little funny.” Then her feet went out from under her and she slumped against the wall.

TWELVE

Aja Killian sat in Headmistress Nilssin’s office. After her last jump she had spent three days in the hospital. But she was better. And now Headmistress Nilssin was welcoming her back to the academy.

“Did you find Omni?” Aja said.

The headmistress smiled. “Omni’s fine. He was in a jump tube in a different level of the research wing.” Her smile faded. “But we can’t find Nak Adyms anywhere.”

“I don’t expect you will,” Aja said. “Not anytime soon. With the skills he’s got, he’ll be able to disguise his identity anywhere he goes.”

“I’m told that Nak hacked the origin code,” the headmistress said. “If Lifelight hadn’t had that temporary shutdown, you might well have died in his game. You’re very lucky.”

“No,” Aja said. “Luck didn’t have anything to do with it.”

The headmistress frowned. “Meaning what?”

“The shutdown wasn’t accidental.”

The headmistress looked at her curiously.

“Say what you will about him, Nak didn’t cheat. There was only one way out of the game. See, the maze was designed to reprogram itself based on where you went in it. But it followed a strict algorithm. The reprogramming of the maze was a solution to a mathematical sequence. Each time it reprogrammed, that would determine where you had to go if you wanted to get to the exit gate. The thing is, the exit gate was actually a tease, a diversion. It closed automatically before you could ever actually get out.”

The headmistress cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I see what this has to do with—”

“Listen,” Aja said. “Once I figured out that the route to the gate was a solution to a mathematical problem, and that the problem was based on which chambers you went into, I simply constructed a problem that the computer couldn’t solve.”

The headmistress’s eyes widened. “Like a nonterminating, nonrepeating decimal!”

“Exactly. The same idea. It’s possible to create a mathematical series that never ends. It just goes on and on and on forever. You see, in order to keep anybody from knowing what he was up to, Nak had to run his code in Lifelight’s Alpha Core. His game had Priority One access to Lifelight’s processing power, along with the ability to modify Lifelight’s origin code. So once the program started trying to solve an unsolvable problem, Lifelight rechanneled one hundred percent of its processing power into solving the problem. Since the problem was unsolvable, it maxed out the system. Boom. Automatic shutdown.”

Headmistress Nilssin looked at Aja for a long time. “Amazing.”

“There was one strange thing though,” Aja said. “Inside the game I ran into a man. A man named Press. He told me that he was tandeming into the game, but that Nak didn’t know he was there.”

“Press?” the headmistress said, eyes widening. “Press was inside the game?”

“You know him?”

Headmistress Nilssin smiled fondly. “Yes, I do.”

“He told me all this weird stuff about how I was something called a ‘Traveler.’ It didn’t seem like he was part of the game at all. He told me that he couldn’t talk to me in person because there was some evil guy here. Some guy who was spying on me or something.”

The headmistress’s face went pale. “What evil guy?”

“Saint Something. Saint Pain, Saint Rain…”

“Saint Dane?”

Aja looked at her, puzzled. “Yeah. That’s it. He said he was masquerading as that Lifelight director, Allik Worthintin.”

The headmistress didn’t say anything for a very long time. Then, finally, she reached into a desk drawer and pulled something out. “I’ve been holding something here that I probably should have talked to you about a long time ago,” she said. “But…you push yourself so hard. I guess I just didn’t want you to have this burden too. Not at such a young age.”

“What burden?” Aja said. She had an odd feeling rising inside her—the nervous, frightened feeling she got when things weren’t working out the way she’d predicted.

Headmistress Nilssin leaned forward, rested one fingertip on the desk, and then pushed something across the wood toward Aja.

There, on the desk, lay a small silver ring with a stone in the center. Aja picked it up and examined it. Around its rim were strange little symbols.

“Unfortunately,” the headmistress said, “it’s not a game. Press is real. Everything he said to you in the game was true.”

Aja swallowed.

“Before you take this ring,” the headmistress said, “I have to ask you something. What have you learned from this experience?”

Aja squinted, thinking hard. “I’ve always thought that the solution to every problem could be found through logic. But I guess sometimes it can’t. Sometimes you have to rely on other things. Feelings, emotions, whatever.” She paused. “Remember when Allik Worthintin was trying to get me to go up to his office with him? There was a moment there where Dal Whitbred could have decided not to let me jump again. And yet ultimately he decided to trust me.”

The headmistress nodded.

“I mean, honestly?” Aja said. “He didn’t make the logical choice. Everything pointed to me being the person who was destroying the core. But I think he did it because he saw something in my eyes. Something he trusted. He made his choice based on a feeling.”

Aja picked up the ring and studied the symbols. They were the same ones that had been carved into the rock inside the maze.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” the headmistress said. “The thing that has always worried me about you is that you put too much faith in logic. But now? Now I think you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“There are a great many things I need to tell you, Aja.” The headmistress put her hand on Aja’s. “You see, I am the Traveler on Veelox. And you are my successor.”

 

After her strange conversation with the headmistress, Aja walked out into the quad, her head in a whirl. So it was really true, the stuff that Press had said in the game? It just didn’t seem to make sense. She felt like Lifelight must have felt, trying to process a problem that didn’t have a logical solution. She wasn’t used to feeling that way.

As she turned the corner, she bumped into a tall man.

“Sorry,” she said.

The man stepped back. He had jet black hair and the palest blue eyes she’d ever seen. It was Allik Worthintin. A cold feeling ran down her spine. If everything Headmistress Nilssin had just said was true, then she was locked in a terrible struggle with this man.

You’d never have guessed it from the look on his face.

“No apology necessary, Aja,” the man said pleasantly. Then he leaned toward her in a confidential manner. “But in complete fairness, I should warn you….” He spread his hands lightly.

“Warn me of what?” she said sharply.

Before turning and walking briskly away, the tall man smiled and gave her a broad wink. “The game,” he said, “is only just beginning.”