Amazingly, Raider somehow managed to clean his plate and eat dessert without ever shutting up. Then he got up from the table and announced he had to finish his homework. Rick stuck out a fist and touched knuckles with him by way of good-bye. He wanted to say something more, some words of wisdom the kid could remember in case he didn’t come home. He wished he could think of something profound or important. But all that came into his mind were the words of the famous football coach Vince Lombardi.
“Remember, kid,” he said. “It’s not about whether you get knocked down, it’s about whether you get back up.”
Rick thought it sounded dopey, him giving Raider advice like that for no reason. But the eight-year-old’s big round freckled face beamed like sunrise. The kid pressed his lips together with determination and gave Rick a second fist bump for good measure. Then he was gone, and Rick sat at the table, feeling hollow.
When he looked around, he saw his mother watching him from the other end of the table. She didn’t say anything. Just watched him. It seemed to him she’d been doing that a lot these days—watching him silently. And yet she never asked him anything: where he’d been, what he’d been up to. She just watched.
Rick tried to think of something to say to her. But he couldn’t.
“Well . . . ,” he said.
He worked his way to his feet. Got his crutches from the wall. Thumped his way out of the kitchen and down the hall, his legs aching under him. But before he got to his room, he paused at the foot of the stairs. He looked up. He could hear Raider making dopey noises in his room: singing the theme song to some cartoon show or something. He was probably blowing up his friends on his computer instead of doing his homework. Whatever.
Rick changed course. He put both his crutches in one hand, grabbed hold of the banister, and started hopping up the stairs. Good, good, good, he thought with each new thumping jolt of pain. When he reached the landing, he hobbled down the hallway to the room at the end of the hall. It was a room with a closed door—a door that hadn’t been opened in months. He opened it now. He went through.
He was in his father’s study. Such as it was. Little more than a closet really. An almost empty cell. There was nothing in the small corner cubicle but his dad’s wooden work desk and wooden chair. A few stray papers stacked on the floor in the corner. There wasn’t even a rug on the wooden floor.
Rick hobbled across the small space, leaned his crutches against the desk, and plopped down into the chair. He stared at his father’s empty desktop. The laptop that had been on the desk was now gone. So was the framed family photograph—the only photograph in the room. So was the cross that had hung on the wall—the only decoration. His father must have taken that stuff with him when he left.
Rick took a deep breath of the musty air, trying to feel his father’s presence, trying to touch his dad’s mind with his own.
Where did you go? Why did you leave us? What does it have to do with the MindWar?
He was so intent on his own thoughts that he was startled when he looked up and saw his mother standing in the doorway.
Without a word, she came in and closed the door behind her.
It struck him again how bad his mom looked, how worn and weary. No makeup on. Her blond-and-silver hair pulled back sloppily off a face that looked as if it had aged ten years in the last few months. She leaned against the door and looked at Rick—and still, she didn’t say a thing.
Rick finally felt compelled to say . . . something. Something to fill up the silence. So he said, “I have to go out tonight.”
His mom nodded. Still silent.
It struck Rick full force now how strange this was: her silence. How strange her silence had been these last four months. As strange as his father walking out on them and leaving nothing more than a note.
“How come you’re not saying anything?” Rick asked her.
“What do you want me to say?” she said.
“I don’t know. You could say, ‘You’ve been acting strangely, Rick.’ Or ‘How come suddenly you disappear for hours on end and come home all beat up?’ Or ‘How come gunmen break into our house in the middle of the night?’ Ever since Dad left, you hardly ask me anything.”
She shrugged. “I trust you. I know you’ll tell me if you want to.”
Rick tried to meet her tired, steady gaze, but he couldn’t. He looked down at the empty desktop. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”
“I know that, too,” said his mother. “That’s why I didn’t bother to ask.”
He looked up at her again, surprised. She knew? How much did she know, exactly? Her face was impassive. It gave nothing away. But as he continued to stare at her, her eyes shifted, just a little. She glanced at the desktop. The slightest smile played at the corner of her mouth.
What was she looking at? Rick followed her eyes to the spot. She was looking at the corner of the desk where the photograph had always stood. It had been a framed snapshot of the four of them—Dad, Mom, Rick, Raider. They were standing in front of the gigantic Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center during last year’s trip down to New York City. A police officer had been kind enough to take the photo for them. Rick remembered it. In the snapshot, Raider was doing his funny skeleton grin, and Rick was rolling his eyes and laughing in spite of himself. Dad had his arm around Mom. She had put her head on his shoulder and he had turned his face toward her slightly as if to kiss her hair . . .
Rick’s lips parted as a thought came suddenly into his head. He stared at his mother.
“He took the picture with him,” he said.
His mother went on smiling. She nodded, as if she had been waiting for Rick to notice this very thing. “He did.”
“If you’re running away with another woman,” Rick went on, “you don’t take a picture of your family with you—”
She cut him off, putting her finger to her lips. “Raider’s still awake,” she said softly.
She came across the room then. She sat on the edge of the desk, looking down at Rick. She seemed to take a moment to gather her thoughts, to figure out exactly what she wanted to say.
“Your father is a funny kind of a man,” she said. “He has a very complicated mind, but a very simple soul. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Rick thought it over. “Sort of. I remember how he was always forgetting things . . .”
“He once walked out in the middle of a blizzard without his shoes on.”
Rick smiled. “You had to run after him almost every morning. It was like he never left the house without forgetting something. His glasses. His briefcase. His coat. Something.”
“For the longest time after we moved here, he used to forget our address and get lost coming home. He’d have to phone me and I’d give him directions. Then, one time, he forgot his phone. A policeman found him wandering around aimlessly and had to bring him back in his patrol car.”
Rick laughed—and then he stopped laughing and his voice choked up, his eyes filling with tears. He had forced himself to forget how much he missed his father, but now it hit him hard. “He’s really absentminded,” he said hoarsely. “I guess he’s always thinking about his work and stuff.”
His mother looked away to give Rick a chance to discreetly wipe his eyes with his hand. “It isn’t always easy living with a man like that. Taking care of him is a lot of work. Throw in a couple of kids, and it’s more than a full-time job.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Rick.
“Dad’s old girlfriend understood that. The girl he was with in college, I mean: a woman named Leila Kent.”
Rick didn’t answer. He and his mother both knew, of course: this was the woman in his father’s note, the woman he said he’d run off with.
“Leila was a really nice girl,” his mother went on. “Incredibly smart. And very, very ambitious. She had big plans—very big plans—for her career. And she knew that she was going to have to choose between her work and your dad. She understood that both of them were going to
need all her time and attention. And in the end? Well, I guess she decided she didn’t want to spend her life making sure that Dad was wearing shoes when he walked out into the snow. So they broke up. But they stayed friends. In fact, Leila came to our wedding.”
“She did?” said Rick, surprised.
“Sure. After the ceremony—and a couple of glasses of champagne—she told me that she sometimes wished she could’ve been more like me, the kind of girl Dad needed, but . . . She was who she was. And she went on to have a very important, high-level career in government. As I understand it, she helps coordinate between the State Department and our intelligence agencies, the spy guys. She helps the country defend itself against terrorists. Very secret, high-security stuff.”
Rick opened his mouth, but at first he couldn’t speak. It was a long moment before he said, “And all this time . . . you trusted him. Dad. He didn’t tell you anything. You didn’t hear anything. You just . . . You read his note, and you trusted him anyway.”
“Him,” his mother said. “And you, Rick.” And she leaned toward him as if she were about to tell him a secret, and she whispered, “And it’s been really, really hard.”
She gave a quick, tired smile. She got off the desk. She walked to the door.
The pain in Rick’s legs was nothing compared to the pain he felt in his heart just then. As his mother’s hand moved to open the door, he cried out to her in a lost small voice, sounding almost as if he were still just a kid. “Ma!” he said. “I’ve messed up everything! Ever since he left. Ever since the accident. I didn’t trust anything! I didn’t have faith in anything! I made it so much tougher on you. It was like a test and I failed it!”
He was glad his mother didn’t turn around. He was glad she didn’t see his face. She kept looking at the door.
“You just got knocked down, Rick,” she told him. “And now—you’re getting back up.”
She pulled the door open. She glanced back at him where he sat with his hand covering his eyes.
“Wherever you go tonight,” she said, “be careful.”
29. ENDGAME
“THIS IS GOING to be the most dangerous immersion yet,” said Miss Ferris.
They were the first words she spoke to him when Juliet Seven escorted him into the Portal Room at ten minutes to midnight. She didn’t even say hello.
All around the room, at every workstation, from every monitor and flashing graph, from every keyboard and control panel, the MindWar workers turned to look up at him, the lights from the machinery playing on their faces. The mood in the room was solemn and heavy. The workers offered smiles of encouragement, but their eyes showed anxiety and even pity.
Not Miss Ferris. She was as blank-faced and cold as ever, her voice just as impassive and expressionless.
“It’s good to see you, too,” Rick said to her.
“We don’t have time for joking; just listen,” she said. She walked beside him toward the glass box embedded in the far wall. “Our instruments show that almost all the energy in the Realm is being channeled into Kurodar’s fortress now. Whatever he’s planning, we know it’s going to happen soon, probably tonight. Somehow, you’ve got to get inside that fortress. You’ve got to see what he’s up to and get back in time to tell us. If we know where he’s going to strike, then at least we have a chance to defend against it. If not . . .”
“I’ll get inside,” said Rick. “Don’t worry about that. But what am I going to do about Mariel and Favian?”
Miss Ferris took a deep breath. “The truth is, right now, we don’t have the technology to extract them,” she said.
Rick stopped in his tracks, leaning on his crutches. “That’s not good enough. They can’t last much longer in there. They’re going . . .”
“We’re working on it—”
“You keep saying that, but—”
Miss Ferris cut him off. “Until we can get them out, we’ve come up with a stopgap. When you arrive, you’ll find a new program embedded in your left hand, the same way the clock is embedded in your right. Show it to Mariel. She’ll know how to use it. It won’t save them, but it should buy her and Favian both some time.”
Rick took a breath, trying to calm himself. “You promise?” he said.
“No,” said Miss Ferris. “But it’s the best I can do.”
She turned away and continued marching toward the glass coffin. Rick had no choice. He followed her.
Rick looked up at the coffin and drew his breath. He wondered if he’d ever see the real world again. Then he forced himself to stop wondering. What did his dad always tell him? Don’t worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will worry about itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
He took his crutches out from underneath his arms and handed them to Miss Ferris. Juliet Seven stepped forward and took his elbow to help him up the stairs. Rick grabbed hold of the edge of the portal and coffin (he really wished it didn’t look so much like a coffin!) and lowered himself in.
As always, Miss Ferris climbed up to lean over him and recite her final instructions in her robotic voice.
“We’ve given you ninety minutes this time . . .”
He blinked up at her. “But I barely lasted seventy-five minutes last time.”
For a moment, she didn’t answer. Then, brusquely, coldly, she told him, “It was Commander Mars’s order. But . . . you’re right. We’re pushing it. You’re going back in after the minimum amount of rest, after a very stressful immersion.” She drew a deep breath as if she needed strength. Then—still without any expression—she said, “Stay on the safe side, Rick. Come back as soon as you can.”
Rick gave a small snort. “I guess if I were gonna stay on the safe side, Ferris, I wouldn’t go in there at all.”
Miss Ferris didn’t even crack a smile. She just continued: “Be prepared. Kurodar’s guards could be watching the portal. Get out of sight quickly, the moment you arrive. We suggest you go into the moat.”
The lining of the glass portal box was beginning to wrap itself around Rick now in that almost living way it had before. He began to feel the familiar prickling sensation in his scalp.
“The moat?” he said.
“Yes. Our instruments show it flows into the base of the fortress. That may be your way inside.”
“Yeah, but Favian said there are guardian bots in there. Like the spider-snake and the dragons, only for water.”
Miss Ferris nodded, completely blank-faced. “That’s probably true. Try not to let them kill you.”
“Thanks. You’re a big help.”
She pressed the box’s lid and it swung shut over him.
The lining of the portal continued to tighten. The prickling in his scalp grew sharper and more painful. As the lid sealed, Rick peered up into the fogging glass. He peered beyond the fog.
He thought: Hey. I’m still here. Please be with me. Even in the Realm.
And one more time, the darkness surrounded him, and the white cylinder opened . . .
BOSS LEVEL:
REZA
30. FORTRESS
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 se
nse 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.”
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