THE AIRFIELD LAY silent under a big sky full of stars. Airfield was a fancy word for it: It was nothing but a dirt runway in a field of grass in the middle of what looked very much like nowhere. There were no people visible around it in the night darkness. There was no traffic on the country two-lane nearby. Nothing was moving here except for an orange wind cone, which lifted off its pole a little whenever a breeze whispered over it.
Across the runway from the cone, there was a small, low building, a one-story clapboard structure with plate-glass windows on three sides. Inside that small shack, Victor One was waiting. He stood by the window on the eastern wall, watching the starry sky through the glass.
Behind him, Leila Kent paced nervously, her low heels rapping the floor tiles. The Traveler sat in a small metal chair against one wall, staring off into nothingness, lost in his own thoughts. Bravo Niner sat behind the counter opposite. The leathery tough guy was very still, but Victor One could sense his tension and alertness.
Victor One rubbed his arm absently. He’d used the first-aid kit in the car to clean out his bullet wound and bandage it, but it still hurt like the devil. Plus his mind was troubled. He was no deep thinker, he never pretended to be, but the old brain was working overtime now. How had those gunmen in the red Beamer found them? Who had told them the Traveler was on the move? Was it someone in the project? Leila? Mars? Ferris? Or even one of the other bodyguards, Alpha Twelve or Bravo Niner himself. And had they been trying to kill the Traveler? Why? What good was the scientist to anyone if he was dead? Had they been trying to capture him? Or something else . . .
The whole thing didn’t quite fit together somehow.
But before Victor One could unpack the problem any further, the landing lights outside suddenly went on. Two lines of white bulbs appeared along the edges of the strip, a line of green bulbs along the bottom, and a line of red bulbs shone where the runway ended. They had been turned on by a signal from the oncoming plane. Victor One scanned the sky for it.
“Here she comes,” he murmured.
At that, the others quickly joined him at the window. Leila Kent reached him first. The clop-clop of her pacing heels stopped, and she was at his right shoulder in a moment. Then the Traveler’s chair scraped, and he was at Victor One’s left shoulder. Finally, Bravo Niner strolled over to join them, a little bit apart.
The four stood at the window, staring up into the night sky. A silent moment passed. Then, sure enough, they all saw it. What at first seemed just another star began to grow brighter, larger. The plane detached from the constellations and descended through the faint night mist.
Victor One took a deep breath. He heard the Traveler do the same behind him. He glanced at Leila Kent and saw her hugging herself anxiously. He lifted his eyes to Bravo Niner, and B-9 looked back.
“All right,” said Victor One tensely. “Let’s do this.”
In the Realm, in the Sky Room, Reza waited for the moment. His demonic figure hovered a few inches off the stone floor, his bat-like wings waving intermittently to keep him aloft. His great claws curled and uncurled nervously. His oversized eyes watched his master floating in the air above him.
This is Kurodar’s hour, Reza thought, excited. The second Real Life test of the Realm was under way. It would be a relatively small operation—though still much bigger than the Canadian train crash. And far more important. Assuming it was successful, it would guarantee their funding from the Axis Assembly and secure the technology that would put the Realm beyond the reach of the Americans forever.
In the last moments of suspense, Kurodar’s misty presence drifted silently beneath the starry dome. Reza could see a blinking beacon of white light moving slowly above him, crossing the night-like blackness. This represented the Traveler’s transport plane. It was coming in for a landing, ready to bring the Traveler on board.
Reza held his breath as the beacon moved. Even the beetle-like bots swarming the dome’s edges seemed to pause in anticipation.
Then came the signal. It appeared on the dome as a flash of blue lightning: there and gone in an instant. This was the radio wave that was sent from the plane to the computer in the landing field in order to automatically switch on the runway lights.
Now! Reza thought eagerly.
And even as he thought the word, Kurodar moved. The master’s misty presence darted forward like a striking snake. It seemed to seize the blue signal. And as the signal flashed back into the plane, a tendril of Kurodar’s misty pink went with it.
Reza let out his breath in relief. Kurodar had done it. Of course he had.
His mind had entered the controls of the Traveler’s aircraft.
At that same moment, Rick slipped out of the portal point and entered the Realm.
But what was going on? He couldn’t see! Everything was dark. For a moment, he stood where he was, completely disoriented.
Then he understood. It was night in the Realm now. The once yellow sky had gone black. There were enormous stars burning in it—red, purple, blue, green bursts of light the size of saucers. On the horizon, there was a sliver of a golden crescent moon.
None of which makes any sense, Rick thought. There wasn’t even a sun in the Realm. Why should there be night? Kurodar could have just created a world that was in daylight always. But maybe things here don’t have to make sense. The Realm emanated from Kurodar’s mind, after all. It was a product of his twisted imagination. He remembered how Mariel had told him that Kurodar thought he was God. Well, maybe he made a world with day and night—a world like the real one—just so he could go on pretending.
Rick peered around him as his eyes adjusted. He saw he had come out right where he had left, right beside the purple diamond that floated between the moat and the looming fortress wall.
And then he saw the guards.
That is, he saw the twin red beams shooting from their eyes first. The beams were moving all along the verge of the moat, sweeping the area. A second or two later, he made out the shapes of the alligator guards themselves. There must have been at least a dozen of them, walking here and there, looking left and right, searching the area.
Searching, Rick realized with a jolt of fear, for him!
Of course. They were keeping an eye on the portal point and the moat and the spider-snake’s tunnel.
And one of the guards was coming right toward him.
The two red beams that shone out of the alligator’s eyes swept back and forth across the dark grass, coming closer and closer to Rick as the big two-legged lizard patrolled the strip of land between fortress and moat, moving his way. Another few seconds and the beams would touch Rick’s leg. The alligator would send up the alarm, and the others would converge on him, their huge swords drawn and ready.
Rick dropped onto his belly, fast. He crawled quickly through the grass toward the edge of the moat, trying to get out of the guard’s path. The alligator kept coming, the beams cutting through the air just above Rick’s body.
The alligator guard stopped, his massive clawed hand curling around the hilt of his sword. He had spotted something. In the grass, right by the portal point: Rick’s footprints.
His voice—a cross between an animal’s growl and an electronic hum—uttered one guttural word:
“Intruder!”
All around the strip of grass, the red beams turned his way. The alligators began tromping over the grass toward the portal point. They scanned the area where Rick had been crawling on his stomach.
But Rick was gone. He had dropped over the edge of the moat and sunk himself in the water.
The shock of the plunge nearly knocked the breath out of him. The water was not like the water of the real world. It was thick and viscous like melted metal. And cold! If real-world water had been that cold, it would have been solid ice. The freezing liquid seemed to bite into Rick’s flesh with a million tiny teeth. He wanted to let his breath out in a shout of pain. But when he glanced up toward the surface, he could just see, through the metallic waves, the red beams of the patrolling alligators, searching for him. He forced himself to push downward off the moat wall, until he was fully submerged. Then he turned his body and swam for the bottom.
He swam hard, frogging with his arms and legs. The metal resisted him and the effort tired him quickly. Maybe—he thought hopefully—maybe he wouldn’t have to hold his breath here. It was like that in some video games he’d played: the character could stay submerged underwater as long as he needed to. The Realm, unfortunately, was more realistic. A few more strokes, and he could feel the pressure on his chest as his lungs called for fresh air.
But there was no going back to the surface, not with the alligator guards swarming up there. He went on swimming, down and down. It was hard to see through the water’s metallic thickness. Only a few feet ahead of him were visible, and even those were unfocused and shifting. Miss Ferris had said the moat might drain into the fortress—but how in the world was he supposed to find his way to the drain before he drowned? Maybe he’d better try to sneak up to the surface for a breath so he could . . .
But before he could finish the thought, something swam past above him. Something huge.
Oh no! Rick thought.
He twisted his body around and looked up. There was a creature circling in the water up there. He could only guess what sort of enormous, vicious, sharp-toothed beast Kurodar had created to patrol the moat. He didn’t want to get any closer and find out. He just wanted to get out of there.
He turned and headed down again. If there was a drain or a culvert of some sort, it would be at the bottom. But though he kicked and stroked even harder than before, he seemed to make no progress. The moat seemed bottomless. His lungs were starting to pump desperately in his chest. He was out of breath. He had no choice. He had to get to the surface, now.
He reversed himself. Pointed himself upward. He gave a great kick with his legs. He rose through the freezing mercury-like fluid. His lungs screaming in his chest, he peered upward eagerly, hoping to see the surface. But it was still too far away, out of his limited field of vision. He kept rising.
What happened next happened so quickly, he could hardly take it in.
He felt the water quake. He felt a wave of pressure push against his body. A second before he saw it, he understood with a feeling of despair that something was coming for him out of the deep.
Then, suddenly, the black mouth of the monster was speeding toward him out of the water. Its jaws were spread wide. Its teeth were gleaming. It was about to swallow him, devour him whole.
But before it could, a rushing tide seemed to sweep Rick away and carry him down out of the creature’s path.
Everything was confusion. The cold of the water was gone and he was bathed in warmth. The monster—whatever it was—was passing overhead without following him, as if Rick had simply vanished from its sight. Rick, meanwhile, was being dragged downward relentlessly by the tide—and yet his urgent need to reach the surface was gone. Somehow—amazingly—he could breathe again! He was breathing underwater! What was happening? How was it possible?
As he began to gather his wits about him, he realized: Mariel.
She had him in her arms. She had somehow surrounded him with her presence. The warmth was her warmth. The air was her breath. He could even feel the softness of her imprinted on the liquid around him. If he squinted and peered, he could almost make out her face just above him. Once again, she had come to his rescue, fashioning a shape for her spirit out of the metal liquid and using it to protect him.
He looked below him—and now he saw the drain he had been searching for. She was carrying him right to it. It was a round opening in the base of the moat with a large valve built into the wall beside it. The cold washed up over his feet again—then over his knees. He understood: Mariel was releasing him so he could open the drain.
He drew a last deep breath from her and held it. As Mariel let him go, as the bone-chilling cold surrounded him, he swam down the last few feet until he could get his hands on the valve. He had to brace his feet against the wall for leverage. He had to strain his muscles—so hard that the metal water bubbled around his mouth as breath squeezed out through his teeth. But now the valve began to turn. Hand over hand, he moved it a half circle. It went slowly. Rick looked toward the drain. It was still closed. He turned the valve another half circle, then another.
The drain sprang open and Rick was swept away. As the moat water was sucked down into the opening, it sucked him with it. His hands were torn from the valve. He was carried toward the drain in a swirling flood of liquid metal. His heel scraped against the drain’s edge, and then his feet went into the hole and he was dragged through in an instant. In an instant, he was falling helplessly through a narrow pipe, banging painfully into the sides with the freezing water splashing all around him.
He expected to slam into the bottom of the pipe or smack into the wall, but in the next moment, the water was warm again, and he landed softly, somehow held still while the freezing metal went on rushing past him and pouring over him.
Now, from where he stood, he saw another valve in the wall. He grabbed it as the flow of water hammered harmlessly past him. Gritting his teeth, he turned the valve once . . . twice . . . then the drain snapped shut above him and the flood of water ceased.
Breathless and shivering, he looked around. A glow that came to him from the far reaches of the pipe gave him just enough light to see by. He saw that he was standing at the elbow of the pipe, right at the spot where the drop ended and the pipe turned off to travel underground toward the fortress. The water had stopped pouring in, and what was there had spread out so that it only covered his feet to his ankles. It was like standing in a freezing puddle.
He tried to catch his breath, gather his thoughts. And as his mind cleared, he understood that she was there with him.
Mariel had flowed out of the moat with the water. It was she who had caught him and softened his fall and kept him from being swept past the bend in the pipe.
He spoke her name softly: “Mariel.”
On the instant, she rose up before him out of the water around his feet. Silver and lush and beautiful, she was standing very close to him in the narrow space of the pipe. He could feel the warmth of her even as he shivered with his feet submerged in the freezing water. Her face—or the mercurial impression of her face—was inches below his, turned up toward him. Before this, she had always loomed above him like some sort of goddess. He was surprised to see how small she was up close. She was just a girl—no older than he was: he could see that now with her gentle eyes so near to his and her lips too close even to think about.
“Are you hurt?” she asked him softly.
“No,” he said. “No. Are you?”
She didn’t answer. She only smiled. But it was a weary smile and her eyes looked weary, too. He could see that the effort to help him had drained her.
Which reminded him. He looked at his left hand. He could see a red light pulsing in his palm.
“They gave me something—for you,” he told her. “It’s supposed to help. They said you’d know how to use it.”
Mariel glanced at the pulsing light. “I do,” she said. “But there isn’t time now.”
“But . . . you have to,” said Rick. “You have to restore yourself . . . You’ve come to my rescue three times. You’ve used up so much energy helping me . . .”
“That’s what my energy is for,” she said. “And that’s why you have to listen to what I tell you now. It’s important.”
“But . . .” Instinctively, Rick reached out to touch her—but, like water, she was barely there. Her substance surrounded and warmed his hand, but there was no presence to it, no flesh. “Who are you?” he said. The words broke out of him. “What are you? Where did you come from?”
She shook her head. “There’s no time for that either, Rick. Listen to me. Please! I’ll be with you as much as I can, but there are things you have to know . . .”
“I might not make it back,” he said. “Then I wouldn’t be able to help you.”
“You have to make it back. You will make it back. If you listen.”
He began to speak again, but forced himself to stop. “All right,” he said. “What. Tell me.”
“I’m going to give you your armor again . . .”
“No! It takes too much energy out of you. You’ll kill yourself . . .”
She held up a glistening finger. “Listen!” Her echoing voice was soft but forceful.
Rick clamped his mouth shut, swallowing his protests.
“Remember what I told you before. Your spirit has power here. A lot of power. If you focus it, use it, it can transform the substance of the Realm itself. You need to learn how to do this.”
“But I—”
“Shh. Listen. I will give you armor, but they have armor, too. I’ll give you a sword, but they have swords as well. Your spirit is the only weapon you have that can make you more powerful than they are. You can’t let it go weak, no matter what your emotions are. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Rick began to say yes, but then only shook his head: in fact, he wasn’t sure what she was telling him at all.
“There are so many of them in there,” Mariel told him. “And their leader is like a demon.”
“Reza, yes, I saw him,” said Rick.
“You’re going to be afraid, but if you surrender to your fear, you’re lost. You might despair, but if you give in to your despair, they’ll destroy you. Remember, your emotions are only emotions. Live in your spirit, Rick, however you feel. Live in your spirit and you can defeat them.” She lifted her hand—a small hand, he could see now—a girl’s hand. She held it so close to him he could feel the heat of it on his cheek. “Now, take this.”
He reached his hand up to hers, trying to stop her. “No, don’t waste any more of your strength on me, don’t . . .”
But before he could finish, she made a sweeping gesture toward him. Once more, her silver substance spilled over him, covering him head to foot.
“Mariel!” he said.
But she was gone.
Rick looked down. He was clothed in armor again—fuller, stronger armor than before and yet as flexible and free-moving as the mercurial liquid out of which it had been formed. The sword that was suddenly gripped in his hand was a mighty weapon, nothing like the rude blade of pitted iron Mariel had given him at first—stronger even than the one she had coated over with steel. This was some rare and gleaming metal clear through, a dangerous battle-tool, long, thin, light as air. The blade flared at the bottom to form a solid defensive bar, then tapered to a vanishing point that looked sharp enough to pierce stone. The handguard was fashioned into the shape of wings, and the hilt—like the hilt of the other swords—was braided to fit perfectly into his hand and topped off by the image of a woman’s face, now shaped so expertly and in such detail that Rick could see clearly it was Mariel.
The sight of the armor and the blade made him ache. He knew he was going to need them—but he wished Mariel had not expended her dwindling life force to give them to him. But here they were and she was gone, and if he did not use the weapons well, it would be a waste of her sacrifice. With a sigh, he slipped the sword into the scabbard built into the side of his armor.
He looked down at his right hand. The timer in the palm there was just ticking down to the seventy-five-minute mark. He could almost hear Miss Ferris speaking in his ear:
We’ve given you ninety minutes this time . . . We’re pushing it . . . Stay on the safe side, Rick. Come back as soon as you can.
The safe side! The safe side was back in his stupid room!
He bowed his head and ducked into the pipe that led toward the fortress.
“Now!” said Victor One.
Gun drawn, eyes moving, he led the others across the dark airfield. Leila Kent and the Traveler were just behind him. The leathery hard man, Bravo Niner, was bringing up the rear. They moved quickly over the grass to the runway.
There the plane sat like a throbbing shadow, its lights off, its propeller beating the night air. The plane was a U-28A, Victor One saw, a single-engine turboprop the military often used. This one had been repainted in civilian colors, the fuselage white and gold; the nose, wings, and tail deep blue. It had landed on the dirt strip gently and expertly. It had slowed quickly and turned around at the end. Now it was just waiting for its passengers before leaping into the sky again.
As the four people came near, a door opened up in the plane just behind the cockpit. A short stairway unfolded from the fuselage to the ground. A man leaned out and beckoned to them. Victor One recognized his old pal Echo Eight, a large black man with a voice like a roll of thunder. Ex-Army, like Victor One. Good soldier; good man. Victor One was glad he’d be on board.
Victor One stepped up his pace, and the others hurried along behind him.
At the base of the stairs, Victor One stepped aside. Leila went up the steps, helped into the plain by Echo Eight. The Traveler followed her, then Bravo Niner. Victor One went up last, checking the shadows over his shoulder before he ducked through the door.
Inside, the U-28A was fitted out like a military cargo plane, stripped of all decoration and with serviceable canvas seats lining the sides.
“No in-flight movie?” Victor One asked Echo Eight.
“No, but I’m gonna sing a medley of my greatest hits,” the Echo rumbled, deadpan.
The Traveler and Leila Kent strapped themselves into seats against the right wall. Bravo Niner strapped himself in on one side of them, Victor One on the other. Echo Eight took a seat across from them, next to another man: an older man with silver hair and a craggy face that seemed to be pulled downward into a permanent frown. The silver-haired man was dressed in khaki military pants but wore a civilian’s button-down white shirt. He said nothing, merely nodded once at Leila, who nodded back.
Victor One had never seen the silver-haired man before, but he recognized him from his dossier. This was Jonathan Mars, the commander of the mission.
The moment they were all seated, the plane began to roll.
Above Reza’s head, Kurodar’s shifting essence was spreading out across the Sky Room’s dome. He already had the transport plane in his power, but he wanted more than that. The Great Assembly had agreed to fund the Realm in the hopes of destroying America once and for all, but there were plenty who doubted the worth of the project, and some who outright opposed it. The Realm was not ready for full use yet, but with this mission, Kurodar wanted to demonstrate its capabilities.
As the pink mist that was Kurodar’s mind spread across the painted sky, Reza was filled with a warmth of admiration—more than that, even a kind of worship. He wanted to stay and watch this first trial of his master’s genius from beginning to end.
But just then, there was a soft fizzing in his ear. A mechanical growl said: “Intruder!”
Reza cursed silently. The guards had spotted something. He’d better go see what was going on.
He flapped his leathery wings and flitted swiftly to the room’s big double doors. The alligator guards stationed there swung the doors open, and Reza flew out into the Great Hall. He needed to find out what was going on by the moat, but first, just to be sure, he traveled along the wall to the door of the Generator Room. The alligator there pulled the bolt, opened the iron door, and let him in.
All was well. The three-story-high Disperser Wheel was turning smoothly. Down below, Reza could see the intermittent blasts of energy feeding into it from the portal points outside. The power station of the fortress was working perfectly.
Reza flew out through the iron door. He crossed the Great Hall to the stairs as the alligator shut and locked the door behind him.
He flew up the winding stone stairs quickly. Came out on the battlements among his alligator bowmen. They stood arrayed along the castellated stones, their weapons at the ready. They scanned the darkness below, the red beams from their eyes trying to pick out any signs of trouble.
Slin—the chief bot of the archers—saw Reza emerge from the stairs and hurried toward him, his heavy alligator feet tromping loudly on the stones.
“An intruder?” said Reza.
Slin spoke in the inhuman burr of the alligators: part growl, part static. “Kaaf saw signs of disturbance in the grass. They are searching.”
Reza nodded, stepped to the edge of the wall, and looked over. Hard to see in the darkness. Reza didn’t know why there had to be night here. It only made his job more difficult. But Kurodar had decreed it so, and Kurodar was his master, so he asked no questions and merely peered down into the shadows.
As his eyes adjusted, he could make out the shadows of the alligators searching the grass beside the floating purple diamond of the portal point. He saw the red beams from their eyes crisscrossing in the shadows.
“Kaaf,” he said. The communicator was built into his avatar as it was built into the bots. They could hear him when he spoke to them, even at a distance. “Is there an intruder?”
With another fizz of static, Kaaf replied, “We do not see him. There is a disturbance in the grass, but the intruder is not here.”
Reza was not reassured. Obviously the intruder, whoever he was, was coming and going through the portal points that supplied the Realm with power from RL. These points had to be spread out around the Realm in order to keep the whole world operational, and they had to be left open to keep the power flowing, but it made the Realm vulnerable to invasion. If the grass around the moat was disturbed, it might well mean the intruder had returned.
Reza continued to stare down at his searching soldiers. They were checking the intruder’s trail, moving between the portal point and the moat. Reza lifted his gaze a little to scan the silver moat.
He thought, The drain.
Aloud he said through his communicator, “Send guards below. He’s heading through the pipes for the cellar.”
Rick traveled through the network of pipes as quickly as he could, but he felt the digital timekeeper in his palm ticking away relentlessly. He had to keep himself bent over as he worked his way down one narrow cylinder, then down another. The posture made his back ache. A low-running stream of water bathed his feet in freezing cold. After a while, his teeth began to chatter. He felt his will weakening. He had to force himself to keep moving at top speed.
A small glow continually appeared ahead of him like the glow from a fireplace. He kept hoping he would turn a corner or come around a bend and see the source of the light: an exit. But with each new turning, the glow seemed to recede from in front of him. He began to suspect that the light was simply a design flaw in the Realm. Maybe Kurodar had been unable to imagine utter darkness and had put the light here without a source—sort of like the light that shone down from the yellow sky. It was a weird world, after all.
Rick traveled on. He kept his hand on the hilt of his sword. Some kind of strength seemed to come to him through the steel, as if a piece of Mariel herself was fashioned into the weapon.
Remember, your emotions are only emotions. Live in your spirit, Rick, however you feel. Live in your spirit and you can defeat them.
He came to a junction of pipes, and the space opened up above him. He stood erect gratefully, groaning as he stretched his back to work out the aching pain.
He stood still. He listened. At first, all he could hear was the murmuring breath of the running water. But as his ears got used to the sound and set it aside, he heard something more: footsteps. Splashing footsteps.
Guards! he thought.
More footsteps arrived—then more. It sounded like the guards were rushing en masse into the fortress cellar to search for him. Had they somehow guessed he was traveling through the pipes?
Hand on his sword, he bent forward again. He entered another pipe and crept along slowly, moving toward the noise. He slid his feet carefully so as not to splash through the metallic water and give himself away. Meanwhile, the tromping, splashing footsteps ahead of him grew louder.
Then he saw them: beams of red light crisscrossing the circle of darkness where the pipe ended up ahead. He heard the sound of water as the guards kicked through the puddles to search the fortress underbelly.
Quickly, he pulled up short. He pressed close to the iron wall of the pipe. At almost the same time, an alligator—dressed in armor and walking upright—came into view at the exit point. Rick saw the leathery snout of the thing as it bent forward to peer into his pipe. He could make out the teeth overbiting the long jaws as the creature scanned the darkness with its red beams.
Rick had truly stopped himself just in the nick of time. He was just far enough into the pipe so that the angle prevented the guard’s beams from reaching him. The red laser-like lights scoured one wall of the pipe then began to cross to the other—coming toward Rick where he pressed himself against the curved side of the iron cylinder. The red beams shot down the center of the tube, right past Rick, not two feet away. He held his breath, his heart hammering in his chest.
But when the beams reached his wall, they fell short. They hit the iron about two inches away from Rick’s elbow. The alligator guard could not see him from where he was. Satisfied the pipe was empty, the guard moved on.
Cautiously—very cautiously—Rick edged forward, still pressed tight against the side of the pipe, still bent over in the low space. Inch by inch, he moved to the pipe opening and peeked out.
What he saw made his heart sink.
He had come to the end of the pipe. He had reached the cellars of the fortress. Spreading out on every side of him were dank, dripping walls of heavy stone, dripping archways and moss-covered vaults, running streams of metallic water, corridors vanishing into darkness, and stairways rising out of sight.
And everywhere there were guards. The two-legged alligators in their suits of armor patrolled the cellars with red lights beaming out of their lizard eyes. Their right hands—green, horned, and clawed—rested on the hilts of their swords, each ready to grip the weapon, draw, and fight—and kill—the moment they spotted the enemy.
The enemy—that meant Rick. He just managed to pull back into his pipe as one of the alligators turned its snout and the red lines of light from its eyes swept over the space where he had been. Rick pressed against the pipe’s curved iron wall, breathing hard as the lights swept past him. He snuck a glance down at his palm. He nearly groaned aloud to see how much time had been lost as he wandered through the maze.
46:08 . . . 07 . . . 06 . . .
That was all the time he had left—assuming his mind didn’t disintegrate early this time.
He had to move. He couldn’t just hide here—and yet he knew if he stuck his head out of the pipe again, he would be spotted in seconds. He had to get past this army of guards. But how?
He gripped his sword more tightly, felt Mariel’s power flowing up through him.
Live in your spirit, Rick, . . . and you can defeat them.
Yes—but how?
About an hour after takeoff, the plane carrying the Traveler came within radar range of the GTD Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility (TRACON). Three controllers were working the sectional screens in the glassed-in top floor of an air traffic control tower rising about 150 feet above the airport below. Overlapping long-range and short-range radar feeds gave the controllers a view of traffic in airspace that included more than thirty other airports. But the controllers were responsible for guiding and separating only nearby traffic flying below 17,000 feet.
William Lasenby was one of those controllers. He was a quick-witted, intense man in his thirties with thinning blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses that reflected the colored lights on his radar screen. At the moment the U-28A appeared in his section, he was vectoring two commercial flights into their approach for landing, and guiding two more through the airspace above.
“Air East 2612, fly heading 120, descend and maintain 10,000 feet,” he murmured into his microphone to one of his approaching aircraft. “Expect visual approach runway 33R.”
“One hundred twenty for 33R, maintain 10,000 feet, Air East 2612,” the Air East pilot’s voice came back.
“Jet Tomorrow 151, descend and maintain 15,000 feet,” Lasenby continued in the same low voice, speaking to the other approaching pilot.
“JT 151, descend and maintain 15,000,” came the pilot’s reply.
It was at this point that the aircraft carrying the Traveler appeared at the bottom left of Lasenby’s black screen. But because it was not his responsibility, he considered it “eye clutter,” and he didn’t pay it any mind. He went on guiding his planes.
“Air East 2612, descend and maintain 8,000 feet . . .”
Lasenby was responsible only for the planes that appeared on his screen in yellow—data-blocks that showed the plane’s type, direction, speed, and altitude. The Traveler’s U-28A was just a blue dot, with no information at all, which meant it was a private plane carrying no transponder. He ignored it.
“Air East . . . ,” he began when his approaching pilot didn’t respond at once.
“Air East 2612,” came the pilot’s voice—suddenly tense. “Controls are suddenly unresponsive here.”
Lasenby sat up quickly in his chair, his heart racing. “Say again.”
“Air East 2612, controls unresponsive, unable to descend.”
“TRACON Approach, Jet Tomorrow 151,” came the other pilot’s voice. “My controls are unresponsive suddenly . . .”
A cold sweat broke out on Lasenby’s forehead. He raised his hand to wave his supervisor over. “Stand by, Jet Tomorrow; Air East 2612, are you declaring an emergency?”
There was a pause. Then the Air East pilot said, “Uh . . . negative emergency, Approach. Air East 2612 is entering a steady holding pattern at 10,000 feet, but . . . well, it’s not in my control.”
“Approach,” came the Jet Tomorrow pilot, “JT entering a holding pattern at 16,000 feet, uh, but, uh, I’m not doing it.”
Lasenby blinked, trying to understand what was happening. He looked around for his supervisor, a fat little man named Mark Stanley. Stanley, framed against the night sky seen through the tower’s glass walls, was hurrying across the room—but not to him. He was moving to the radar screen two stations down—Julie Winner’s station. Julie Winner also had her hand up to signal him, and Lasenby heard her say, “I’ve got two on approach with unresponsive controls . . .”
Before he could even take this in, Lasenby heard yet another voice coming over his headset, saying, “TRACON Approach, TransNational 3630, controls unresponsive, entering a holding pattern . . .”
“I’ve got three incoming with unresponsive controls,” Lasenby called out. His mind was racing as quickly as his heart, but he couldn’t make any sense of it.
And in all the excitement, he failed to notice—everyone failed to notice—that the little blue dot representing the Traveler’s U-28A prop plane had disappeared from his screen altogether.
Trapped inside the pipe, with the alligator guards marching back and forth in the cellars beyond, Rick leaned against the wall and tried to think what to do. Again, as he clasped the hilt of the sword in his scabbard, he could almost hear Mariel’s voice whispering to him:
Your spirit has power here. A lot of power. If you focus it, use it, it can transform the substance of the Realm itself.
It was not the first time she had told him something like that. He remembered back when he had killed the spider-snake. His sword had been a ruined, rusty relic then. Mariel had said to him:
Your spirit has power here—power over material things, once you learn to use it. Strike with your spirit and the sword will be strong enough.
She’d been right, too. When he attacked the spider-snake, he had focused some power inside himself—some power that was not his brain, not his feelings, not his wishes or hopes—something that was essentially himself—he had focused it, and the rusty blade had been transformed in his hand into a weapon strong enough to do what it needed to do.
Now he had been given a much stronger sword, but so what? What good was a single blade against all those alligator guards marching around out there? There were twenty of them at least, each one a bot programmed to hunt and fight and kill. No matter how powerful his sword was, he stood no chance against them. The moment one of the guards spotted him, they would all . . .
But the thought dissolved in Rick’s head as a new idea came to him. He saw at once that it was a great idea. Unfortunately, it was also nuts. There was no possible way it could work, but . . .
Well, but maybe it could. After all, this wasn’t what gamers call RL—real life. This whole world was the construction of one madman’s imagination. Rick himself had entered the imaginary country by willing his spirit into it, willing it to slip through a portal like liquid through a straw. What he was here—his body—was just an avatar, a digital representation of that spirit inside him. It wasn’t flesh and bone like his body back home. If he could will it to become like liquid, then maybe . . .
His fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword, and Mariel whispered into his mind:
If you focus it, use it, your spirit can transform the substance of the Realm itself.
He glanced up. The red lights beaming from the alligator guards’ eyes darted here and there across the dungeon darkness beyond the mouth of the water pipe. He drew his gaze away from that and looked down instead at his own hand.
If you focus, he thought.
Rick knew all about focus. Focus was when you were fading back to pass and you had to keep your mind pinned on the receiver downfield, even as two ginormous tacklers were charging toward you like crazy bulls. Focus was when you had to throw with the full motion of your arm, smooth and crisp and accurate, even though you knew some 250-pound guy was about to hurl himself headfirst and full speed into your midsection.
He could do that. He could do this.
Forget the alligator guards, he told himself. Forget the footsteps splashing only a few yards away. Forget the red beams searching for him in the shadows. Think about the hand. There was nothing in the world but his own hand. Nothing . . .
Despite the danger all around him, Rick slipped into a zone of concentration. His hand. Nothing but his hand. The shape of his hand, the feel of his hand, the substance of his hand . . .
Suddenly, something shifted deep inside him.
The shape of his hand began to change.
Hiding there inside the water pipe, he drew a deep breath. Using the strength of his focus, the strength of his spirit, he forced his hand to grow and metamorphose. He transformed the pink, soft skin into green-brown living leather. He forced the change to ooze up his arm, into his torso, through his whole body. His face elongated into a snout. His teeth grew sharp and overlapped his jaws. His spine extended into a great, heavy tail.
It was a huge effort of will, an enormous expense of energy. It felt like he was bench-pressing the earth and he knew he couldn’t keep it up for long. Any minute now, any second, his focus would falter and his body would snap back into the only shape it had ever known.
But for now—for this second—these next few minutes—he had transformed himself into the living image of one of the alligator guards!
Just before the plane started falling out of the sky, Victor One sensed they were in trouble. He didn’t know what it was that made him think so. Just something in the motion of the aircraft made him sit up straight in his canvas seat and glance across the heads of the Traveler and Leila Kent into the questioning eyes of Bravo Niner.
B-9 lifted his chin in a question: What’s wrong?
But it was Jonathan Mars who noticed the look of alarm on the bodyguard’s face and spoke aloud: “Victor One, is something the matter?”
Victor One wasn’t sure. He just had this weird sense that something had seized hold of the plane from outside, as if a giant hand had wrapped itself around the fuselage. He was about to shrug this off as some kind of superstitious notion brought on by anxiety.
Then the plane went nose down and started plunging toward the earth.
Leila Kent screamed.
“What’s happening?” the Traveler shouted.
“We’re going down!” shouted Echo Eight.
They were. There was nothing but night at the windows. They couldn’t see what was happening, but they could feel the fall accelerating every second, the g-force pulling at their faces, throwing their bodies hard into their shoulder straps. Victor One knew they didn’t have much time. The U-28A had already been flying low, trying to stay in uncontrolled airspace and avoid the attention of local air control. Dropping at this rate, they would pancake into the earth in under a minute. They’d all be dead before they ever felt the crash.
“Did someone fire on us?” shouted Jonathan Mars as the plane screamed toward destruction.
“We’re going to crash!” Leila Kent screamed.
“I don’t think this is damage,” said the Traveler—his voice, Victor One noticed even now, was remarkably quiet, remarkably calm.
Then none of them said anything. There was nothing to say. The plane drove downward through the night, its engines letting out a shrieking whine that filled the air around them. Her mouth wide with fear, Leila Kent reached out a hand for the Traveler and he gripped her hand in his own. There was no time for anything else but last prayers and last thoughts . . . pictures in their minds of the people they loved or should have loved . . . spirits reaching out to God . . .
Then, with a stomach-dropping swoop, the plane leveled out. Victor One jolted straight in his seat as the g-force released him. They all did. They all looked out the windows.
Victor One wasn’t sure where they were—somewhere over forest near the East Coast, he believed—but he could make out the lights of a house or two in the near distance and he could see how far they’d fallen, how low they were, how close to the earth: close; they were very close! Another three seconds of dropping as they had and they would have been smashed and fried.
The others were staring questions at one another, their mouths still open in shock: What just happened? Each of them felt a sort of mad disorientation, as if they’d been torn from the darkness of death and hurled back into the blinding light of life again. Which, of course, they had.
Leila Kent was the first to speak. “Is it over? Are we going to be all right now?”
As if in answer, the door to the cockpit banged open. The copilot, a young Air Force man named Danny Roth, stood in the frame, one foot over the threshold. His face was white, and his expression showed he was as dazed as all the rest of them.
“We’ve lost control of the plane!” he said breathlessly. “It’s flying on its own.” He looked from frightened face to face as if begging someone for help. Then he said, “Which one of you is the Traveler?”
The professor adjusted his glasses and with a voice still almost supernaturally calm, he said, “I am.”
Copilot Danny Roth stared at the Traveler for a long moment before he spoke again. It seemed as if even he did not believe what he was about to say.
“There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” he blurted out finally. “He says . . .”
But before he finished, a new voice came over the cabin intercom. It was a deep male voice with a thick Russian accent.
“Dr. Lawrence Dial,” it said thickly.
The Traveler looked up as if he expected to see the speaker floating near the cabin ceiling. “I’m Dr. Lawrence Dial,” he said. “Who are you?”
The answer came back at once: “I am Kurodar. And I am in control of this plane.”
There was no time to hesitate, no time to waste. Even as Rick started out of the water pipe, he could already feel his alligator morph beginning to fizzle and fade. He had to keep all his focus on maintaining his shape, even as he moved out into the guard-infested cellar. One slip of his focus, and he would snap back into his ordinary form and they would spot him.
He strode with as much confidence as he could muster through the freezing mercury puddles. He stepped out of the end of the pipe and felt his feet touch the slimy moss of the cellar flagstones. With a huge effort of will, he turned his heavy snout this way and that, shooting red lights out of his eyes as if he were searching for someone—as if he were searching for himself! And all the while, he kept moving. The morph would last only another few seconds. He had to get through the guards and get out of there.
All around him, the other alligators were doing the same as he, their clawed feet kicking through the puddles, their tails lashing back and forth behind them, their snouts turning, their red beams lancing the dark.
And now a pair of those red beams passed over him. Rick felt a surge of fear. For a moment, he lost his concentration. A line of static sizzled through his shape before he could will himself to hold his form.
But too late! The alligator guard had already noticed him. The guard’s red beams moved on—then stopped—then moved back and pinned Rick where he stood. Rick held his breath. The large guard-bot was looking right at him, staring at him as if it knew that something about him was not quite right.
Rick fixed his concentration, trying to keep his morph steady. If the alligator shape slipped now, he was done for.
The guard stared at him for what felt like twenty minutes. He was a fierce-looking creature with a huge sword at his side and a strange symbol emblazoned on the breastplate of his armor. Rick held his alligator shape in place and kept moving, pretending he didn’t see how the guard was watching him.
Then his pulse skipped as one of the other guards shouted, “Kaaf! I heard something here!”
At that, the alligator with the symbol on his breastplate—Kaaf—turned away.
Rick seized the moment. He had spotted a great stone stairway against the far wall. Three other alligators were patrolling the area between here and there. Focusing all his spirit on remaining in his shape, Rick joined them and wove his way among them, moving as quickly as he could over the damp and slippery cellar floor.
He got past the alligators. He reached the stairs: bulky flagstone steps leading to a heavy wooden door above. He started climbing out of the cellar, away from the other guards—and as he did, he felt his energy give way. His mind was exhausted. His focus slipped altogether, all at once. His alligator morph crackled with purple lines of energy—then it faded away. He slid back helplessly into the shape of himself.
He ran the rest of the way up the stairs. There was nothing else he could do. He took the steps two at a time, stretching his long legs to make the leaps, hoping for all he was worth that none of the alligators in the cellar below happened to look up the flight of stairs and see him. He was at the door in seconds. He seized hold of its iron ring and pulled it open.
He stepped through the door and shoved it shut behind him, praying that none of the alligators below would follow him up.
He had come into a narrow hallway. The walls were of rough uneven stones, and rose high, high above him toward a vaulted ceiling. To his left, the corridor dead-ended against a heavy stone wall. To his right, though, there was an exit. Rick crept cautiously toward the exit. When he reached it, he pressed close to the wall and peeked out.
He caught his breath. He saw at once he was in the heart of the fortress. It was an awesome sight: a vast, soaring Great Hall of stone and stained glass. The walls seemed to rise and rise forever. The rosette windows seemed as big as suns, decorated with richly colored scenes that Rick could not identify. Huge statues of men he likewise didn’t recognize stood in niches looking out with dead stares. Enormous antique furniture—throne-like chairs and ornately carved tables and tall display cases holding bizarre weapons—lined the walls at the edge of the elaborately designed carpets. Above it all, there hung chandeliers—enormous wooden wheels, each the size of a flying saucer, each with dozens of candles burning in them, bathing the hall in wavering red-and-yellow light.
Below, along the walls, there were heavy black doors. At each door, there stood an alligator guard, his leathery hand resting on his sword hilt, his eyes moving back and forth to sweep the area around him with red beams.
As Rick surveyed the scene, there was a noise . . . a movement. Rick ducked back—then cautiously peeked around the corner again. He saw a great pair of double doors swinging open in the center of the wall across from him. He saw the alligator guard there stand aside respectfully.
And then he saw Reza.
This was the first close look Rick had had of him. An amazing and frightening sight. The assassin whose hologram portrait Jonathan Mars had shown him had been transformed into a long, tall, purple humanoid with leathery wings. He was almost naked except for the heavy belt that held a dark skirt over his lower torso. He had rippling muscles in his narrow chest and strangely thin yet powerful-looking whip-like arms. Huge yellow eyes beamed out of the purplish skin of his sharply angled face. And as he hovered above the floor, a thin tail lashed the air behind him. He had large hands with even larger claws coming out of them. He looked very much like the devil himself.
As he came out the door, Rick got a glimpse of a magnificent room within: a huge circular space with columns and statues and a starry dome like a planetarium’s. Hanging in the middle of the air in there, he saw some sort of moving mist. A living mist, it looked like. And there were images inside it. Images of faces. People.
With a jolt, Rick thought he recognized one of them: Jonathan Mars!
But before he could be sure, the double doors swung shut. The guard took his place before them again. And Reza moved away to float farther along the wall of the Great Hall.
The demon moved to a small black-iron door set in the stone. Another guard stood there. He unbolted the door for the assassin. With a flap of his wings, Reza went through.
Rick had only a moment to glimpse what was inside: a huge moving engine of some kind, a great wheel throwing off crackling purple energy. Some kind of generator.
Then the demon entered the room and the black door clanged shut behind him. The guard moved back into place in front of it.
Rick drew back into the corridor, breathing hard. What had he just seen? What should he do now? He had to think. He needed a plan. His mission was to find out what was going on here. That meant getting into the domed room—that was obviously the center of the fortress; that was where the action was. He had to figure out a way to get in there.
He wasn’t sure he had the energy to morph into an alligator again, but he might have to try. Other options? The walls of the corridor were uneven, with stones jutting out here and there. He might be able to climb up one of them. He might be able to get onto one of those chandeliers . . .
He never got to finish the thought. Suddenly, red light pierced his field of vision. He turned and saw that the door to the stairs behind him had opened. The guard named Kaaf had come looking for him, following him up out of the cellar. The beams from the alligator’s eyes touched Rick as he spotted him.
Kaaf’s jaws opened wide, baring his dagger-like teeth. He was about to call for help.
Rick drew his sword and rushed at him.
Reza had dispatched his guards to search the cellar for the intruder, then tried to contact the master through his communicator. There was no reply. He hurried back to the Sky Room to make his report to Kurodar in person.
“Master!” he cried as he flew in.
“Quiet!” boomed the presence above him. The mist of Kurodar had now spread out in tendrils across the painted sky. It pooled here and there, and moved in some places in circles of light that turned into misty corkscrews. At the foggy pink core of the great man’s presence, images were forming. Reza saw they were the images of the people in the Traveler’s plane.
Reza understood that the master’s enterprise had reached its crisis point. Still, he had to tell him, “Master, I think the intruder has returned!”
“Then find him!” Kurodar boomed imperiously. “Kill him! That’s what you’re here for! Go!”
Reza bowed his head and flitted out of the room. The cellar next, he thought. And he was about to fly across the Great Hall to the corridor on the other side—the corridor where Rick was hiding right that minute.
But then he thought: No. He had to check the Generator Room again. He knew he was being obsessive about it, but it bothered him—haunted him: the idea that someone might sneak in there and bring the whole fortress—and Kurodar’s plan—to a standstill.
Quickly, he flew to the small iron door. The guard unlocked it, and Reza ducked in to check the Disperser Wheel one last time.
Sword drawn, Rick charged down the alley toward Kaaf the alligator guard.
Kaaf let out a hissing snarl. With a sting of metal, he drew his own weapon, a massive broadsword. In one fluid motion, he lifted it above his head and brought it sweeping down at Rick as Rick rushed toward him.
Only Rick’s athletic reflexes saved him from being cleaved in two. He threw up Mariel’s blade crosswise above him. The steel sang out as it caught Kaaf’s descending broadsword on the thick of its blade. Rick felt the jolt of the impact as the two swords crashed together only inches above his skull.
The powerful Kaaf tried to force his sword down through Mariel’s blade, but Rick grabbed the guard’s arm with his free hand, lifted his own leg, and planted it square in the middle of the alligator’s belly. He kicked out. The guard went stumbling backward. In almost the same motion, Rick brought his sword whipping around toward the alligator’s enormous head.
The corridor was too narrow for such a swing. Rick’s sword point scraped the stone wall, sending up sparks. That slowed his attack and Kaaf, still off-balance, managed to bring his sword around to defend himself. There was another sting of metal on metal as the two swords came together, the guard blocking Rick’s blow. The alligator went into an answering attack at once, slashing at Rick with a backhand stroke. Rick stepped back, and the alligator’s sword point swept past his face, so close he felt the wind of it as it went by.
The force of that swing turned the alligator half around. That gave Rick the opening he needed. He stepped forward. Grabbed the alligator’s forearm, holding his sword at bay. Then, with a cry of fear and fury, he thrust the point of Mariel’s blade up into the underside of the reptile’s enormous snout.
The blade struck home. The point pierced the alligator’s throat and continued up into its head. Kaaf’s eyes went wide—then blank with death. His body flashed and flickered with purple bolts of energy. Even as Rick pressed the sword point home, the lizardly security bot winked out and vanished in a hot violet flash of light.
But there was no time to celebrate the victory. Rick heard a hissing roar from the vast hall behind him. He heard thundering footsteps on the flagstones out there and more thunder on the flagstone stairs leading up from the cellar below. More guards! Rick realized: Kaaf must have raised an alarm.
The thundering alligator footsteps grew louder on every side of him.
He was surrounded.
Victor One’s eyes darted from face to face. He looked at the Traveler, who seemed strangely serene as he waited for the voice of Kurodar to continue over the plane’s loudspeaker. He looked at Leila Kent, who seemed amazed and shocked at what was happening. He looked at Bravo Niner and Echo Eight: the faces of the professional fighting men were still and watchful. He looked finally at Jonathan Mars, whose deepset eyes were alive with ferocious intelligence. Then he looked back at the Traveler, as Kurodar’s voice once again filled the U-28A’s cabin.
“I have taken control of seven passenger planes,” said Kurodar in his thick Russian accent. “Altogether, there are two thousand and six people on board these aircraft. They are flying above a city with a population of over half a million. If you do not do what I tell you to do, I am going to bring every one of those planes crashing into the most densely populated portions of that city. I estimate it will take me between one and a half and two minutes to bring down all seven planes. In 120 seconds, I will snuff out an untold number of lives and cause a level of destruction and terror not seen in your country for over a decade.”
The Traveler nodded. “Very impressive,” he said quietly.
A touch of pride seemed to enter Kurodar’s voice as he answered: “It is only the beginning—only a hint, a taste—of what the Realm can do. If there weren’t so many doubters in the Assembly, I would have waited and shown you what it could achieve in all its glory. Then you would have seen something. Your entire nation in flames. But you will see it yet. As I say, this is only the beginning.”
The voice fell silent. The U-28A continued to skim swiftly over the trees below.
“Go on,” said the Traveler, his tone still calm. “What is it you want?”
“I want you, Dr. Dial,” said the Russian’s voice.
The Traveler shrugged his thin shoulders, blinking bemusedly behind his glasses. “It seems you already have me.”
“I do,” Kurodar replied. “And it is very helpful. There are many who fear you in the Assembly, you know.”
“Fear me? No one of goodwill needs to fear me.”
“Oh, don’t be so modest, Doctor. We both know what you’re capable of. It is you, I assume, who sent the intruders here.”
The Traveler shrugged again. “My work made it possible for them to enter your Realm, that’s all.”
“Then you have sent them to their death, you know.”
For the first time, Victor One saw the Traveler’s calm demeanor falter. He grew pale. Victor One remembered Leila Kent saying to him back at the cabin, We’ve asked Rick to go into the Realm. He remembered the Traveler had lost his calm then, too, crying out, You can’t do that!
Now, the Traveler had to draw a deep breath before he could speak again. Now, Victor One knew, he was only pretending to be calm. He said, “You’ve killed them—the intruders? They’re already dead?”
“All but one,” said Kurodar. “We are hunting the last one now. He will be dead momentarily, I promise you.”
Victor One saw the Traveler begin to breathe normally again. “I see.”
“And now we are going to make it so your presence does not trouble the minds of the Assembly anymore,” Kurodar continued. “I am flying you to an island off the coast of your state of Georgia. I will set your plane down there, after which you and your laptop will be transferred to another plane, one of mine. You and your work will be brought to me, and we will review the work together. You will explain everything to me. You will show me this new program you have been protecting so carefully. You will demonstrate what it is capable of and outline what you are planning and how I can defend the Realm against whatever attack you and your masters had in mind. Then there will be nothing more for the Assembly to fear and the work of the Realm—the destruction of your country—can continue safely. It’s all very simple.”
“Very.” The Traveler nodded. “And if I resist or refuse or try to destroy the work on my laptop before it reaches you . . .”
“The planes in my control will crash into the city. All seven of them. Many thousands will die.”
The voice ceased. The plane was silent except for the thrum of the engine. Victor One’s eyes flitted from face to face. Leila, the other bodyguards, Jonathan Mars, the Traveler again.
He saw the Traveler give another nod, blinking mildly behind his glasses. “All right,” he said calmly. “I have no choice. I’ll do what you say.”
Then Jonathan Mars reached into his jacket, drew out a gun, and pointed it at the Traveler’s chest.
“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that, Dr. Dial,” he said.
Responding to Kaaf’s alarm, the alligator guards thundered toward the corridor. They came up from the cellar on the stone stairs. They left their guard posts by the doors and rushed across the Great Hall. They all reached the corridor at about the same time and, in a moment, the hallway was crowded with armored two-legged reptiles, their swords drawn, their fangs bared, their eyes shooting red light through the shadows as they sought the intruder.
But the corridor was empty. Kaaf was gone—and so was Rick.
The alligator guard had vanished as he died. And Rick had scurried up the wall.
Fear had spurred him on. He’d climbed quickly, his fingernails and sneaker-tips gripping every outcropping he could find on the uneven stones. He pulled himself up the face of the wall like a climbing chameleon. He was already halfway toward the far distant ceiling when he looked down over his shoulder and saw the guards flooding the corridor below him.
He knew it was only a matter of time before one of the alligators lifted its snout and pinned him with a pair of red beams. He couldn’t just hang around up here. He had to keep moving.
Clamping his mouth shut to keep from grunting with the effort, he sidled along the uneven rocks toward the end of the corridor. He crept around the corner and was now hanging high above the Great Hall. The rosette windows soared above his head. He looked down past the candles in the circular chandeliers and saw the statues and furnishings on the floor below.
He saw something else, too: All the guards had left their posts and rushed over to the corridor at the alarm. The Great Hall was empty.
The strength in his arms was beginning to give out. He couldn’t stay up here much longer. Soon, the alligators would decide he was gone and come back to their posts by the doors. This was the moment to make his move. He began to climb down the wall.
As he did, the iron door across the way—the door to the Generator Room—was flung open, and out flew the winged demon, Reza.
Rick froze where he was, clinging to his precarious perch on the wall by his fingernails. Looking over his shoulder, he watched the demon cross the expanse of the hall below, heading to join the guards in the corridor. He hung on—hung on—his arms aching, his muscles beginning to quiver with the effort. He feared he would lose his grip and drop right into the winged demon’s path.
But now Reza entered the corridor and moved out of sight. Rick quickly scrambled down the wall—dropping the last few feet to land quietly on the edge of a rug.
The moment his sneakers touched down, he spun and started running—running for the double doors that had been left unprotected. That was the way into the domed room. He knew he needed to get there fast, get out of sight before the guards started pouring back out of the corridor and spotted him. But he was amazed at just how great this Great Hall was. It must’ve been as far across as a football field at least, maybe two. By the time he got to the other side of the hall, he was panting hard.
As his hand closed around the handle to one of the double doors, he glanced back over his shoulder. He couldn’t see very far into the corridor across the way. He just caught a glimpse of the demon’s lashing tail in there—a glimpse of movement as the alligator guards milled around, looking for him.
Quickly, he pulled the door open a crack and slipped through.
He closed the door. Turned. Looked up.
His mouth opened at the stunning sight. The monumental room. The lofty columns. The statues several stories high. The seemingly endless dome of stars above, its moving streaks of light, its moving lines of darkness that seemed almost alive.
But more than anything, it was the vision at the center of the place that gripped him, held him, made his eyes go wide.
A misty and somehow animated presence hung in the air high above him. Its tendrils reached out across the dome, twining and spiraling in places here and there. And, swimming in the depths of that strange disembodied presence, there were images—the images he had glimpsed from the corridor across the way. Jonathan Mars—sitting in a canvas seat along the wall of what looked to be a plane. He was holding a gun, Rick saw now, pointing it at one of the passengers across from him.
They—the others—were visible, too, in this floating, living 3-D image. There was a shifty-eyed tough guy with skin like jerky. An elegant woman with swept-back golden hair. And then . . .
“Dad!” Rick whispered.
His father, Lawrence Dial, was there as well! Large as life—or small and bald and yet somehow impressive in his serene and unshakable inner strength. Rick stared up at him, his lips parted, thoughts and emotions twining and spiraling through his mind and heart like the twining and spiraling tendrils of pink mist above him.
He saw his father look across the plane’s cabin at Commander Mars and he realized: that gun in Mars’s hand—it was pointed directly at his dad!
“What are you going to do, Jonathan?” Rick’s father asked calmly—his voice was audible throughout the vast domed space. “You going to shoot me dead in cold blood?”
Commander Mars looked at him for a moment, silent but unmoved.
Then he said, “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“No!” Leila cried out over the grinding noise of the airplane’s engine. “What do you think you’re doing, Jonathan? Put that gun away!”
“I can’t do that, Leila,” said Jonathan Mars in a steady voice. “The Traveler’s program is the only way to destroy the Realm. Everything we’ve done has been done to keep the technology out of Kurodar’s hands. I’m not just going to let him turn it over.”
“You can’t just shoot him!”
“Yes, I can.” Mars continued to train the gun on the Traveler. The Traveler watched him calmly.
Kurodar’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “I’m not bluffing about crashing those jets, Commander. Pull that trigger, and I’ll bring them down.”
Mars slowly shook his head. “I know you’re not bluffing about crashing the jets. I just think you’re lying when you say you won’t crash them if we hand over Dial and the laptop. Whatever happens, you’re going to slaughter all those people and we both know it. Why wouldn’t you?”
“He won’t, because my work is encoded,” said the Traveler quietly. “He has no chance of understanding it without my help, and I won’t give him that help until I can see for myself the planes have landed safely.”
“All the same,” said Mars. “We can’t let him have your equations. The Realm would be unstoppable then. The MindWar would be lost. All of us, the whole country, would be lost.”
Victor One’s mind raced as he watched the confrontation. The ramifications were impossible for him to figure out. If the Traveler refused to hand his work over to Kurodar, then Kurodar would crash the planes into the city, sure. But Mars was right: he would probably crash them anyway. And if Kurodar got hold of the Traveler’s equations or whatever they were, he would be unstoppable and God only knew what damage he could do then. At the same time, Victor One had been assigned to protect the Traveler’s life. He didn’t see how he could just sit there and watch while Mars put a bullet in him . . .
Even though his arm still throbbed from his wound, he went to his hip and drew his weapon quickly.
“I’m gonna ask you to drop the gun, Commander,” he called across the plane.
Mars’s eyes flashed to him, then back to the Traveler. “Don’t be an idiot, Victor One,” he said. “This has to happen. We can’t let Kurodar get that laptop. I’m telling you: he may kill thousands today, but a lot more—millions more—will die once the Realm is fully operational.”
Victor One hesitated. He was a simple guy. He never claimed to be anything else. He couldn’t work all this out; he just knew it couldn’t be right for Mars to kill the Traveler in cold blood. He just knew it was his job to stop him.
“Listen—” he said.
But before he could finish the sentence, the plane keeled over.
It happened with shocking speed. The engines roared, the nose of the U-28A jerked skyward, the left wing went up and the right wing down, and for a moment it seemed the plane would flip completely.
Mars was thrown forward against the straps of his seat so hard that the gun was jolted out of his hand. It flew across the cabin and landed at the feet of Bravo Niner. But before the wiry bodyguard could grab it, the plane had swerved again, still climbing, and the gun spun away across the floor.
Victor One was hurled back into his seat canvas. He nearly lost his weapon, too. It slipped from his grip, but hit his leg as it fell. He grabbed it, first with his left hand, then with both, and held on. His stomach rolled as the plane leveled out fast.
Leila Kent clutched her stomach. Her high cheekbones had taken on a greenish tinge. Mars’s face was red with fury as he watched his pistol skitter across the cabin, out of his reach. Only the Traveler’s expression remained the same. He didn’t seem afraid. He didn’t even seem particularly excited. Victor One wondered if that was because of his faith or just because he had guts of steel—or maybe both.
Kurodar laughed—and his laughter filled the plane.
“So much for your gun, Mars,” he said. “Now we continue, and when we reach our destination, Dr. Dial, you will give me what I want and I will safely land those seven planes. Agreed?”
The Traveler nodded once. “Agreed,” he said.
Rick saw all of this, playing like a three-dimensional movie in the mist that was Kurodar’s mind. As he watched, his thoughts and feelings veered and dove and rose like the plane. Jonathan Mars ready to shoot his father dead in cold blood! His mild-mannered dad, so cool and unafraid. Then the plane going crazy . . . the last-minute rescue that was really not a rescue at all . . . Rick didn’t understand everything he was seeing—but he understood enough.
He understood, in a single moment, that he had lived these last months of his life lost in a fog of lies. The lie that his father was unfaithful. The lie that his mother was broken and in despair. The lie that he himself was helpless. It had all been untrue—all of it. In fact, his father had given up everything he loved in an effort to protect his family and his country. His mother had been sorrowful, but faithful and strong. And he, Rick—despite his pain, despite his injuries—he had held the power to help them in his spirit all along.
He had let the lies imprison him. Now, in a moment, the truth had set him free. He had to act. He had to help his father—he had to save his father—he was the only one who could. He had to do it no matter what it cost him, no matter what it took—even if he had to sacrifice everything he loved to save everything he loved.
For another second, Rick stood where he was, there on the floor of that soaring domed room, his head tilted back as he looked up into the computerized mind of Kurodar. There was no way to touch that mind, no way to stop what he was doing—not here.
His face set and grim, he turned away—turned to the Sky Room’s double doors.
He knew what he had to do.
Pressing his wings down against the air, Reza lifted himself above the crowd of guards milling in the corridor. He glided over them, looking down as they searched for any signs of trouble. He could hear their voices growling and buzzing.
“False alarm.”
“No problem here.”
“We should return to guard the doors.”
“We should return to the cellar to search for the intruder.”
Reza considered the situation. The alarm had come from Kaaf—a quick, sharp cry for assistance over the communicator: “Intruder in corridor C.” And yet here they were in corridor C and—never mind the intruder—Kaaf himself was nowhere to be found. Where had he gone?
Reza’s eyes played over the heads of the alligators. What if the intruder had somehow killed Kaaf? That would explain why the guard-bot was gone. But how could the intruder have gotten away? There were only two exits from this hallway: down the stairs to the cellar, and out to the Great Hall. If the intruder had left in either direction, the incoming guards would have spotted him . . .
Hovering there, Reza lifted his eyes to the wall. It was a rough surface with a lot of outcroppings. He supposed if someone was particularly resourceful and athletic, he could have climbed up the wall somehow, but . . . Well, it didn’t seem likely.
He called out to the guard-bots below him: “Return to your stations. Resume patrol.”
At once, the crowd of two-legged alligators began to disperse, some heading down into the cellars again, others returning to the Great Hall to take up their posts by the doors.
Thoughtful, worried, Reza drifted above them. What if the intruder had climbed up the wall? He couldn’t have reached the stairway from there . . .
Flapping his wings slowly, Reza moved back into the Great Hall. He hung in the air, looking around. The guards were returning to their posts at the various doors. One placed himself before the Generator Room. Another moved to the doors leading into the Sky Room—and just as he did, those doors swung open.
To Reza’s surprise, out came Kaaf! The chief guard was not dead at all! He nodded once to the alligator taking up his post and quickly moved away along the wall.
He was heading toward the Generator Room.
Still on the other side of the Great Hall, Reza contacted his minion through the communicator: “Kaaf! What’s going on? Why did you raise the alarm?”
But Kaaf didn’t respond. He didn’t even stop walking. Reza started flying toward him, calling again, “Kaaf. What’s the matter? Where are you going?”
Kaaf reached the Generator Room. The guard there stood aside as his superior approached. Kaaf went past him and unbolted the room’s small iron door.
Reza flapped his wings and flew toward him more quickly. Overriding the communicator completely now, he simply shouted to him, “Kaaf! Wait! Where are you going?”
But Kaaf did not wait. He still did not respond at all. He ducked into the Generator Room.
A moment later, Reza reached the door himself. The guard there nodded at him. Reza ignored him and flew past. He flew directly through the open door and entered the Generator Room.
At first, he saw nothing. Only the metal walkways winding around the walls. The immense Disperser Wheel turning. The flashes of lightning as the energy fed into the bottom of the wheel three stories down and was dispersed into various outlets on the way up.
And then, startled, Reza saw Kaaf. The chief alligator guard was standing right beside him, right behind the iron door.
“What are you doing?” Reza barked at him. “Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused?”
Without an answer, Kaaf pushed the iron door shut and threw the inner bolt, locking both Reza and himself inside.
“What—” Reza began.
But before he could finish, Kaaf began to change—change impossibly—before his very eyes.
That was close! Rick thought.
It couldn’t have been any closer. He couldn’t have kept the Kaaf morph in place another second. Exhaustion and fear had eaten away his energy to nothing. He was sure Reza would reach him before he’d gotten through the door. As it was, the demon-like assassin had come in before he could shut him out.
Now the morph gave way in an instant. Rick’s alligator size and shape melted away into his old humanity. He was just Rick again, clothed in the armor Mariel had given him, with Mariel’s blade in the scabbard by his side.
He turned from the door to face the creature who hovered in the air beside him. He saw Reza’s expression change from one of puzzlement to a look of such red, smoking, offended rage that it would have been almost comical—that is, if Rick hadn’t known it could be deadly.
“You!” Reza breathed the word with fury. And then he snarled, the disdain nearly dripping from his lips: “The American.”
“My name is Rick Dial,” said Rick, and he drew Mariel’s blade. “And I’m here to destroy this place.”
The demon’s face contorted with anger, yet he managed to nod with a measure of respect. “You must be a man of great spirit. You are the first to learn to change shape like that. I congratulate you.” He even gave a courtly little bow. Then he said, “I am Reza. And I’m going to kill you.”
And without another word, he attacked.
Rick nearly died in that first assault. It was so quick, he could barely react in time to defend himself.
Reza dove at him out of the air—and, as he dove, the claws of his right hand extended into razor-sharp blades. His long, thin, flexible arm snapped like a whip. The claws snaked toward Rick’s head with incredible speed and violence.
Reflexively, Rick threw up his sword and ducked, off-balance. Reza’s claws struck Mariel’s blade hard. The impact sent Rick sprawling. He stumbled over his own feet, tumbled down onto his side, rolling across the narrow walkway until he hit the walkway’s rail. Beside him, above him, below him, the generator’s enormous wheel turned and flashed with energy bolts, drawing in the purple lightning from the energy pods below and shooting it forth again into the circuits of the fortress.
Reza came after Rick where he lay. The demon landed on the walkway, drew back his arm to slash again.
Rick kicked out, hitting the creature in one of his elongated legs. His foot caught Reza squarely on the knee and Reza’s leg buckled. To keep his balance, the demon had to flap his wings and lift up. He had to draw back before he could strike again. That gave Rick the time he needed to scramble to his feet.
But that was all the time he had. Reza renewed his attack. His arm whipped—his claws flashed—again and again in rapid succession. Backing up along the walkway, Rick turned his sword this way and that, catching the claws bare inches from his face and body, feeling the vicious steel tips brushing past his cheeks.
Panic began to flood through his nerve endings. Reza was a master fighter. His whipping blows came on so fast and furious that Rick didn’t have time to strike back. If this kept up, he’d wear out, slow down. Then Reza would move in and cut him to pieces. He had to get away, gather his strength, gather his thoughts . . .
But Reza kept pressing in on him. The air whistled and snapped as he struck again with whip-like speed. There was a clash of claws on blade—and then another and another. Rick backed away . . . backed away . . . blocking . . . looking for a chance to deliver a strike of his own.
There was no chance. Reza moved in closer, struck again—then again—forehand, backhand. Blindingly quick. One blow got past Rick’s defenses but by good fortune struck only his breastplate. Still, it sent a jolt through his body and a clang through the air that warned of worse to come.
Rick leapt back, but the claws slashed again and this time sliced across a vulnerable spot on his forearm. He cried out as the steel tips tore through his skin, sending trails of blood spitting into the air. The thin cuts on his arm were like lines of fire burned into his flesh.
Rick stumbled on the walkway. The great generator wheel turned above and below him. The purple lightning flashed everywhere.
Reza saw his moment and charged in. Off-balance, Rick had no chance to fight him. He had to get away. He grabbed hold of the railing and flung himself over.
Reza’s claws whipped past him—missing by a hair as Rick went over the rail. Rick held on with one hand, gripping his sword in the other. He dangled over the side, his sword trailing down, its steel blade reflecting the purple flashes that went in and out of the generator wheel.
Reza didn’t hesitate. He flew over the side of the railing and began to come down after Rick where he hung.
Rick sheathed his sword—and then let go. He dropped through the sizzling air of the generator pit. His body began to turn helplessly, and he felt his stomach flying up as he fell and fell. He knew the fall might knock him senseless, might even break his legs. But before he struck the bottom, he passed the lower walkway—and with those quick, athlete’s reflexes of his, he managed to grab the railing with one hand, then the other, dangling now from the lower walkway as he had dangled from the walkway above.
He looked down. The floor of the Generator Room was not that far beneath him. He could make that drop if he had to.
But right now, he needed a place to stand and fight. Reza was already flying down after him.
Quickly, Rick hauled himself up and dropped onto the walkway, his metal armor ringing against the walkway’s metal floor. Then he leapt to his feet, drawing Mariel’s sword again as fast as he could.
And none too soon because there was Reza, flying in the air on the other side of the railing, the big wheel turning behind him, the lightning flashing all around him.
The demon’s purple face split in a white smile. “Do you understand what’s going to happen now?” he said, shouting over the slow grind and buzzing sizzle of the generator. “Death in the Realm is a fearful thing, Rick Dial. It’s not like ordinary death. It’s worse, much worse. It goes on and on. There’s a slow, slow fade into helplessness. Then an endless agony of decay. Your spirit gets trapped in here, you see. It can’t free itself to go on to the next life. Death in the Realm is death forever. Think about that, Rick. Think about it hard.”
Rick did think about it. He couldn’t help himself. He knew that what the demon was saying could not be wholly true. Nothing humans make lasts forever. Even the agony of death in the Realm would end when the Realm collapsed and the spirits trapped here were free to move on. But knowing that wasn’t much comfort. He remembered the sight of that poor creature in the spider-snake’s tunnel, his skeletal face and the look of pain in his huge, bright eyes. He remembered the terror that haunted Favian, who knew that one day—one day soon—he would be a creature just like that. And now he, too—Rick—would become such a creature, if Reza finished him off in here. He thought about it, and the thought made him feel weak inside.
Which, he understood, was exactly what the demon wanted. Fear. Weakness. An expert killer like Reza understood that ninety percent of any battle is won or lost in the mind. In the mind was where Rick had to fight him. He gritted his teeth and forced the terrifying thoughts down inside him. He gripped his sword tighter, lifted it into the air. He remembered Mariel’s courage, how she had given up her own dwindling strength to armor and arm him. He couldn’t let that go to waste.
He glared at Reza across the shining blade, trying to look braver than he felt.
“Come and get me,” he said.
Reza’s smile vanished. He flapped his wings once and shot at Rick through the air like a bullet, snapping his arm, swiping his clawed hand directly at Rick’s face.
Rick was ready for him. He blocked the strike with his sword. He spun away. He grabbed the railing. He leapt.
The next moment, he was falling past the great Disperser Wheel, down through the flashing darkness. He hit the floor at the wheel’s base. He bent his knees to absorb the impact, but still had to drop and roll, his armor rattling on the cold stone.
He leapt up, his sword gripped in his hand. He looked around him. He was in the heart of the machine. The enormous wheel was grinding above him. The air was filled with noise, the mesh of gears, the snap and crackle of electricity. Everywhere, lines of purple power flashed and sizzled—shot into the spinning wheel—then went dark. There were power outlets built into the stone wall, he saw, each with a metal diaphragm. Each diaphragm in its turn would twist open. There would be a faint hum, the smell of ozone, then the purple burst would shoot out for several seconds, fueling the wheel. Then the diaphragm would twist shut.
Lifting his eyes through the flashing, smoky air, he saw Reza descending after him, the demon’s bat-like wings spread wide to steady his descent. Even in the chaotic atmosphere, Rick could see Reza’s oversized eyes burning brightly in anticipation. Another moment, and the creature would be on him, slashing at him with those vicious claws.
Rick’s mind was working fast, his eyes moving everywhere, even as his heart pumped hard with fear. He saw a spiral staircase against one wall. It led up to the walkways and to the door above, but if he tried to climb it now, if he even tried to reach it, Reza would cut him down. There was no other way out of here, no more railings to jump off, no more quick routes of escape, no place left to run. Rick would have to stand his ground and do battle with the demon. One way or another, this would be the end of it.
He didn’t have much hope. Reza was just much better at this killing game than he was. Plus he was exhausted. Mariel’s blade was growing heavy in his hand. His lungs were pumping and his muscles growing weak with both weariness and fear.
But even as his shoulders sagged, he felt the hilt of the sword pulse against his palm. He heard Mariel’s voice speaking in his mind:
You’re going to be afraid, but if you surrender to your fear, you’re lost. You might despair, but if you give in to your despair, they’ll destroy you. Remember, your emotions are only emotions. Live in your spirit, Rick, however you feel. Live in your spirit and you can defeat them.
He tried. Focusing his thoughts, he tried to leave his weariness and fear behind him. He tried to enter into the clean, cool, shining place of his spirit, to send the power of Mariel’s blade flowing down into the deepest part of himself. For a moment, he could almost feel it, could almost feel himself becoming one with the shining steel . . .
And a fresh thought came into his mind, as if someone had whispered to him: a new idea.
At the same moment, Reza gave a wild shout and dropped like Lucifer out of heaven. He struck at Rick’s head with incredible speed. A powerful flash lit his bright eyes and glinted off his whipping claws.
Rick moved as fast as he could, spinning gracefully, swinging his sword. He could feel the power of his spirit coursing all through him. He could feel himself in full control of his body, the way he used to feel when he was on the football field.
The two warriors came clashing together one last time. Reza snarled and slashed with his claws. Rick spun and blocked him—backing away toward the nearest of the power outlets. The wheel turned above them, sending out its flashes of lightning. The purple flashes bathed Mariel’s blade and Reza’s claws as they struck together, sending up fresh sparks of their own.
The two warriors separated for only a second as Reza gathered himself for the final strike.
Down by Rick’s leg, the power outlet hummed. Its diaphragm twisted, getting ready to open. There was the smell of ozone. A sizzle as the energy built to fire. It was going to flash.
This was what Rick was looking for. He knew it had better work or else he was done.
Reza attacked. The demon claws drew back, ready for the killing strike. At the same instant, the air went purple and a bolt of electricity shot out of the outlet toward the Disperser Wheel.
Rick lowered his sword into the bolt.
The purple lightning struck Mariel’s blade. The blade glowed bright as the blast hit it, but the hilt and handle blocked the flow, protecting Rick’s hands where they were wrapped around Mariel’s image. With a great breathless snap, the lightning ricocheted off the blade in a steady stream. Rick adjusted the angle of the sword and sent the blast directly into the onrushing demon. The lightning struck Reza just as he was about to deliver Rick’s deathblow. It hit him smack in the center of his forehead.
Reza’s mouth went wide in surprise as he was sent flying backward through the air. The creature’s thin, whip-like arms flew out as he tumbled wildly across the room. He landed hard on his back, his wings crushed beneath him.
Rick did not hesitate. With a roaring battle cry, he rushed across the space between them. The big wheel turned overhead, its engine grinding. The lightning flashed everywhere. The air filled with smoke. An instant later, Rick was standing over the dazed demon where he lay. He raised his sword.
Reza’s huge, yellow eyes stared at the death that hung above him. He was all hatred in that moment, all hatred and rage. He cried out, “No!” not because he was afraid of dying but because it infuriated him to be defeated by this American intruder. The hatred was like a fire inside him.
If Rick had had a qualm about killing something so much like a human being, it left him now. He could see Reza’s heart in his eyes and he knew: whatever soul this creature had been given had been withered to nothing, strangled by evil as by a vine. God might forgive Reza—God was God—but there was no place for a demon in the world of men.
Rick drove the sword home. Reza’s dying scream was hellish. It seemed to fill the room, to wipe out every other sound, to grow hollow and huge as if echoing from the furthest canyons of damnation. The winged, purple body flashed and crackled with electricity—but it did not vanish as the alligator’s had. Instead, it shrank and shriveled around the point of Rick’s sword as if all the fluid were draining out of it, leaving nothing but a shrunken husk. Only the eyes remained huge, staring in agony and terror, staring up from the dead shell of a thing that lay at Rick’s feet.
Rick remembered that stare. He had seen it in the spider-snake’s tunnel, seen it in the eyes of that poor creature buried in the niche, wrapped in the web. Seeing it again in Reza’s eyes—well, it was awful. He drew out his sword and turned away.
He glanced down at his palm. His heart sank. His time was almost gone—under three minutes left! If he did not leave the Realm soon, his mind would start to come apart again. He, too, would die in here, trapped, staring, decaying. He had to move, had to find the exit, reach the extraction point—now.
But he couldn’t. Not yet. Upstairs, in that domed room, Kurodar held his father captive, was taking his plane . . . who knew where? It didn’t matter. Wherever it was, it was where his dad would die.
Rick could not leave the Realm until his father was free.
He looked around him. He saw a control panel against the far wall, lights blinking on it, gears turning behind glass. This was the center of the Disperser Wheel’s mechanism. He rushed for it. A lightning flash cut off his path. He stood back, shielding his eyes with a raised hand as the power sparked and danced into the big wheel.
Then the flash ended and Rick ran forward again—but another aperture in the floor opened. There was another hum, the smell of ozone. It was about to flash again. At this rate, his time would run out before he could reach the control panel.
He looked to the aperture. He saw the flash building. He lowered his sword.
The lightning flashed and hit Mariel’s blade, bouncing off it, away from the wheel. Once more, Rick turned the surface of the blade, aiming the reflected electricity at the generator panel this time.
The lightning struck the control panel. The lights flashed rapidly. The inner mechanism smoked. Then the whole thing went dark.
All the lightning died at once. The electricity went off. The great wheel ground to a shuddering halt. The deep pit of the Generator Room was plunged into near blackness, covered in thick, smothering smoke. The engine of the fortress was dead.
I did it! Rick thought breathlessly.
Then the control panel exploded.
For Kurodar, it felt like dying. One moment, he was all power, his mind spread into the controls of seven jet planes plus the Traveler’s U28-A. Thousands of lives were his to destroy, an entire city at his mercy, and the only man who could possibly outthink him—the Traveler—was at his command.
The next moment, the power in the fortress went out, and he lost his grip on all of it, on everything. He began to slip back into himself, the disembodied mind tumbling and tumbling down into that hunched ugly little body hidden in the basement of its island fortress, wired into its machines and . . .
. . . Kurodar screamed. The sound filled the airplane—a cry so loud it seemed to blow Victor One back in his seat. Leila Kent covered her ears with her hands. The Traveler and all the others flinched and recoiled as if trying to escape the noise.
Something had happened. Something had changed.
The scream faded. It grew dim. It died.
And then, suddenly, the plane’s engine died as well.
In an eerie new silence, the U28-A keeled over slowly like a sinking ship. It went nose down. Its right wing lifted and turned over. The plane began to spin, falling faster and faster toward the earth.
Leila cried out once. Jonathan Mars lifted his arms uselessly, as if he could protect himself from what was about to happen. Bravo Niner and Echo Eight braced themselves, their faces grim and resigned. The Traveler’s lips moved silently as he prayed.
Then, there was a weirdly soft sound, like a man coughing. Quietly, the engine started again. The propeller took on speed. For another moment, the plane kept falling out of the sky. But Victor One could feel the power surging into it again. The spin stopped and the wings leveled. There was another long, breathless second.
Then the plane’s nose lifted. The U28-A straightened.
A new voice came over the loudspeaker.
“This is the pilot. We have the plane again. It’s back under our control.”
Slowly, the plane turned upward toward the open air. The U28-A began to rise.
The passengers looked at one another. Leila Kent’s elegant face was streaked with mascara and tears, but through the tears, she began laughing. Bravo Niner and Echo Eight were grinning, too. Even Jonathan Mars smiled.
Victor One turned to the Traveler—to Dr. Lawrence Dial. For the first time, he saw real passion in the absentminded professor’s face. The mild eyes behind his glasses were brighter than the bodyguard had ever seen them. The professor lifted a fist in front of him and shook it at Victor One in triumph.
“Rick did that,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion. “That’s my son. He’s beaten them!”
Not far away, in the glassed-in tower that housed the GTD Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility, the calls began to flood the controllers’ headsets. Controller William Lasenby heard the first one:
“Tower, Air East 2612 is under pilot control again.”
And then another: “TRACON Approach, Jet Tomorrow 151 is in control.”
More voices joined the others. All seven jets were coming back under pilot control. As Lasenby looked around him, he saw on the faces of his fellow controllers what he knew was on his own face. The pallor of fear was giving way to a rush of color and relief. As another pilot called in and another, Lasenby lifted his hand in the air. The other controllers did the same.
Then they all began cheering.
The first blast from the short-circuited control panel knocked Rick off his feet. He dropped down onto the flagstones hard. Mariel’s blade was jarred out of his hand and clattered to the floor.
Rick lay dazed, staring blankly into the darkness, shaking his head. He saw zigzagging lines of purple energy running up the body of the great wheel above him. Flames spouted from its energy receptors, and the flames began to spread around its circumference. A section of the wall above the generator panel—blackened and weakened by the explosion—began to crumble. A large flagstone came loose and tumbled down through the air. It crashed to the floor at Rick’s feet, breaking into pebbles and dust. The room grew steadily brighter with a wavering orange light as the flames spread around the great wheel. There was a grinding, tearing sound as the wheel began to wobble on its moorings.
Rick blinked, stunned. He looked around. Smaller stones dropped like dust from the ceiling.
The Generator Room was falling apart. The walls were crumbling. He was going to be buried alive in here.
He swept Mariel’s blade off the ground. As his fingers wrapped around her image on the hilt, he felt fresh energy flow through him. He heard her voice in his head:
Hurry, Rick. Go.
He climbed to his feet. He caught one more glimpse of Reza where he lay, of Reza’s agonized and tragic yellow stare, his desiccated husk of a body. With a shudder, he tore his own gaze away. Looked to find the spiral staircase. There it was, through the smoke and flame, a curling shape against the wall. It was quivering and rattling as more stones began to drop out of the wall to which it was anchored.
Rick ran for it. The wheel was now bright with dancing fire. A burning piece of the mechanism dropped off and fell through the air to crash at Rick’s side. Rick kept running, went past it. A hunk of stone crashed in front of him, missing him by inches. He dodged around the fragments. He reached the spiral staircase. He grabbed the iron banister. He flung himself up the first two steps and began a running climb.
Another flaming hunk of the wheel dropped past him, sizzling as it fell through the air. There were more tearing noises. More dropping stones. The iron of the spiral staircase trembled beneath his feet as he climbed. He reached the first walkway. He had to run around the arc of it along the wall to reach the next flight of stairs—the stairs that rose to the door. As he took his first step, the room—the air—the flames—reality itself—seemed to zoom away from him, out of focus. The Realm seemed to dissolve into the energy at its source: snaking, hissing lines of power.
Rick reeled, dizzy, on the walkway, grabbing blindly at the rail. He knew what this meant: his time was up. His mind was beginning to disintegrate.
He forced his consciousness to steady. The world came back into focus. He found he had stopped for a moment on the walkway. Ironically, that pause saved his life.
Because just then, another flagstone came loose and plummeted off the wall directly above. It crashed into the walkway just a few yards ahead of Rick—just where he would’ve been standing if he hadn’t stopped. The stone crashed right through the metal, tearing a hole in the path, leaving a dead drop into nothingness between Rick and the stairs. The walkway wobbled from the blow, and Rick clung to the railing to keep himself on his feet.
He was scared now, good and scared. Everything was coming down around him—his mind was going—he was out of time. And he did not want to die in this place—to die Reza’s death, that death that wasn’t death, but nothingness and slow decay. He sheathed his sword. He gritted his teeth as he looked across the broken walkway to the stairs on the far side. Then, without another thought, he raced forward, charging at the gap.
In the moment before he jumped he thought: It’s too far! I can’t make it!
Then he jumped. He flew through the air between one jagged edge of the walkway and the other. His arms pinwheeled. His feet sought purchase on the emptiness. But he was right. The gap was too wide, the leap too far. He couldn’t make it. He dropped. He screamed. He reached out desperately. His wrists smacked painfully down onto the edge of the walkway—and slipped off as he kept falling . . .
But somehow, with one hand, he managed to snag a loose bar of metal. He held on with the top joints of his fingers.
His body dropped and swung. His own weight nearly pulled him right off the walkway, but still he held on. He dangled there above a fatal fall, the big wheel flaming right beside him, the fire licking at his back. He shouted with effort and pulled himself upward. He grabbed hold of the torn metal with his other hand. Another armload of stones dropped off the walls above him and fell all around him, peppering his face and hair with flecks of rock.
He dragged himself up onto the walkway. Pushed off his knees and stood. There was the stairway, right ahead of him. He rushed for it.
All around him, the Generator Room was now in flames and crumbling. The fire shot up to the ceiling and the stones rained down from the flames as he climbed the spiral staircase’s final flight, two steps at a time. He reached the iron door. Threw back the bolt. He heard a loud rending noise above him. He knew the wall was about to come down on top of him.
He hauled the door open and leapt through just as the rocks crashed into the stairs and tore the entire staircase from the wall with an almost human screech. The structure plunged into the flames below as Rick stumbled out of the Generator Room and into the Great Hall beyond the door.
An alligator guard was waiting to meet him there. He nearly ran right into it.
Rick cried out at the sight of the creature. It stared at him, its reptile eyes only inches away, its fierce teeth visible outside its snout. Rick spun to the side to avoid crashing into it. His sword gave a long, metallic whisper as he drew it from its sheath, ready to strike.
But the alligator didn’t move. It stood where it was, staring, its enormous hands at its sides. Another moment and Rick realized it wasn’t budging at all, wasn’t alive at all. In fact, he noticed that, here and there, other guards were also standing lifeless around the Great Hall. The animating force seemed to have gone out of them—out of all of them.
Kurodar is gone, he thought. Kurodar had left the fortress, had maybe even left the Realm—for now, at least—and he had taken his life force with him.
Rick turned to the double doors that led into the domed room where he had seen Kurodar and his father. He wanted to go back there now, to make sure he had set his father free.
But once again, as he gripped his sword’s hilt, the energy seemed to travel up his arm from where his hand held the image there—the energy and a voice. Mariel. Whispering in his brain:
Your father’s safe now. You’ve won, Rick. Go.
Rick nodded. Prepared to obey her, he took a step—but as he did, his vision fizzed and blurred again. The world began to fragment. Rick stumbled.
In confusion, he thought: My mind . . . going . . . have to get out . . .
He managed to steady himself again by force of will. He recovered his feet. Just as he did, there was another huge blast from behind him in the Generator Room. Stones flew from the wall above him. Flames spat out of the iron door. Across the hall, he saw water flooding out of the corridor, spreading across the rugs. And now the glass in one of the immense rosette windows shattered and came raining down in sparkling shards, making a chandelier swing and flicker.
The whole fortress was coming down.
Dizzy and sick, Rick pushed himself forward. He could see—way, way down at the other end of this enormous hall—a towering front door. He ran toward it on wobbly legs, shaking his head as he went, trying to keep his mind in one piece, feeling it collapsing inside him, even as he saw the Great Hall begin to collapse around him.
Another rosette window shattered. Another storm of glass rained down. More of the stone walls began to crumble, too. A rock fell from somewhere, smashing into an enormous statue. The statue wobbled on its base and then pitched forward, crashing face-first to the floor, the marble head breaking off the neck and rolling over the rug.
Rick reached the door, panting, dazed. Two alligators flanked the exit, but both stood frozen, lifeless, staring. Rick was still afraid—he still wanted to live—but weariness and confusion were beginning to eat into his willpower as his consciousness began to decay. Still he managed to throw up the bolt on the front door. He yanked it open.
There was a courtyard beyond. The walls, the ramparts, the big front gate with the winch and chain that lowered it. The night seemed to be bleeding out of the sky above, and the yellow color was seeping back into it. The red of the courtyard grass was becoming visible.
Rick ran into the yard. To his left, a section of the fortress wall collapsed and spilled forward, spreading across the grass and dirt, burying the frozen alligators standing on the ground beneath it. Rick reached the winch, knocking yet another alligator out of his way as he went. The guard toppled over like a rotten tree. Rick sheathed his sword to free his hands. He grabbed the handle of the big wheel and turned it quickly. The gate began to lower slowly. He felt the pressure of its descent. He let the handle go, and the gate came crashing down.
Something exploded in the fortress behind him. Rick looked over his shoulder and saw flames shooting out of the rosette windows. Another section of wall collapsed.
He ran out the door, through the outer walls, into the courtyard before the moat. There were more alligators standing here and there, frozen, gazing into empty space.
And there—there, finally—he saw the purple diamond of energy floating near the border of the silver water. The portal point. The way home.
He started moving toward it. But just then, a powerful wave of nausea went through him. Everything around him became energy and light. Reality—or what passed for reality in the Realm—quickly sank into a vague dream. Rick barely knew where he was. He barely knew who he was . . .
When he came around this time, he was on one knee. Sick, exhausted. He wasn’t sure what was going on—what he was supposed to do. And then, in a distant sort of way, he remembered. The portal point. The glowing purple diamond . . . He was supposed to do something . . . Oh yes. Reach it! Get out!
He was beyond fear now. Beyond everything but exhaustion and nausea and dissolution. Only a will he did not know he possessed made him push himself to his feet. He staggered toward the diamond out of sheer ornery stubbornness—the native grit that made him almost impossible to stop on a football field, a sort of physical faith that still upheld him when even his mind was nearly gone. He went forward. But it was like pushing through mud now, the mud of his own dissolving personality. His steps grew heavy and slow. His thoughts grew vague. His knees began to buckle.
He came to a stop.
He stood there, staring stupidly, blinking stupidly, his arms hanging loose at his sides. As his fading consciousness flickered back in him a little, he realized he was going to die like this, lifeless on the spot like the alligators around him. Except they were merely bots. He was a living soul. They would feel nothing in their death. He would die and die for a long time before his spirit could get free.
And yet, for all his fear, for all his will, for all his strength, he couldn’t bring himself to take another step. He didn’t have the power. He stood there helplessly as his mind went to pieces.
He had only enough mind-energy left to think one word. He thought: sword.
He lifted his hand. He laid it on the hilt of his weapon, on the image of Mariel.
His whole body straightened as a burst of clarity went through him like an electric jolt. A voice spoke inside him:
Live in your spirit, Rick! Go!
Rick shook his head, uncertain.
You . . . What will happen to you? he thought. To you and Favian . . . If I leave you . . . What . . . ?
The voice didn’t answer him. It just repeated, Go!
But Rick would not. There was something else he had to do. One last thing. What was it?
His hand.
He looked down, confused, at his left hand. He saw the red light flashing beneath the skin. He remembered: the program Miss Ferris had embedded in him. Energy for Mariel and Favian. To keep them alive a little while longer. Until he could come back. Until he could free them.
Now, using all the strength he had left—not much—Rick drew his sword. Its energy pulsed up his arm, pulsed through him.
Go, Rick! Spirit, Rick, Mariel commanded him.
I will not leave you here, he told her.
You have to. Go.
I will not.
He lifted the sword. He set its point against the flashing red light on his palm. He plunged the blade into his hand.
He screamed with the pain. But at the same time, he felt the energy pod burst out of his palm. The red force ran out of him, ran into Mariel’s blade, charging it with fresh power.
Go! said Mariel.
The silver blade was now pulsing with red light. Rick could feel it. It was making him stronger.
But now, he drew back his arm and with a mighty effort, he hurled the sword through the air toward the moat.
“I will come back for you!” he shouted.
The silver-red sword flashed over the silver water. The water rose up to meet it in a sudden wave. As Rick watched through unfocused eyes with fading vision, the rising water took the shape of a womanly hand. The hand caught the sword in midair. The red light flashed from the sword into the hand.
Thank you, Rick! Now, go!
And still gripping the sword, the hand sank down and vanished into the liquid metal.
The water closed over the sword and was still, as if nothing had happened.
Mariel was gone.
The burst of energy from the sword had given Rick a little more strength, just a little. Slumped, weary, he forced himself to shuffle forward another heavy step. Another blast of flame flew up over the fortress ramparts as something within exploded. He took one more step toward the portal point and then one more. He was almost there.
At last, nearly dead on his feet, he stood before the purple diamond. A thunderous blast made him turn just in time to see the fortress walls above him beginning to crumble and tumble down. He faced the purple glow of the portal point and marshaled his will. Lived in his spirit. The deepest part of himself.
I’m still here, he thought up into the heavens. Always here.
And from the heavens, the answer came back to him: So am I. Even in the Realm.
That still, small voice seemed to inspire him with the last strength he needed. He took the final step toward the portal. He willed himself into it.
There was a great liquid rush. The exploding Realm melted around him. He flowed into nothingness.