by Stan Lee
Six’s eyes fly open as he shrieks in pain.
That’s more like it.
Xal shrieks back with laughter, intoxicated by the man’s helplessness. But she’ll finish it now; after all, this isn’t what she came for. It’s just a bit of fun. She clambers over the man’s prone body, straddles his chest, and unhinges her jaw, wide, wider, the skin stretching painfully as a full eight inches of space opens between her lips. The venom from the monster isn’t lethal to human beings under most circumstances, but Xal is sure it’ll do the job if she injects it directly into his eyes. And after what the man said he was going to do to her, wouldn’t that be . . . What’s the word? She digs through Kapur’s memories again and finds it.
Poetic.
It would be poetic.
She leans in, her mouth agape like a caricature of surprise, and prepares to sink her elongated canines into Six’s fluttering eyes.
This time, there’s no warning—no chance to dodge.
The knife sinks expertly into the soft cartilage of her wrist, and twists; once, and once more.
When she yanks her arm away, her severed hand remains on the floor.
Xal rears back and howls, pulling the stump of her arm toward her face, and then shrieks again when the arterial spray blasts her own blood into her eyes. She scrabbles away on all fours, elbows and knees skidding underneath her, as Six comes up with the knife in one hand and the ax in the other.
He’s smiling at her.
Xal doesn’t like it. Not one bit.
“Oh, you’re something special, all right,” he says. His eyes are on her wrist—where small pink strands of tissue are already beginning to regenerate. “Nadia, you’re one of a kind.”
Xal doesn’t reply.
This isn’t what she came for.
She turns.
She runs.
She survives.
23
The Other Side
of the Door
OUTGOING MESSAGE FROM CAMERON, 11:03PM
Nia, are you okay? I’m okay. Dr. Kapur rescued me. So weird. Where are you?
11:06PM
Hey, I’m freaking out. Please tell me you’re okay.
Nia? It’s really messed up that you’re not answering me.
11:09PM
HELLO?
11:10PM
WTF WHERE ARE YOU
11:15PM
Wow I guess you really don’t even care that I got straight kidnapped huh
11:15PM
Thanks for trying to help by the way
11:16PM
P.S. I didn’t tell them anything about you even though you were the one they were looking for and this creepy motherfucker strapped electrodes to my head and interrogated me, YOU’RE WELCOME ASSHOLE
11:19PM
Nia please please please answer me I’m sorry just please where are you?????
* * *
CAMERON BITES DOWN HARD on his lip and swipes furiously at his eyes, fighting back tears of impotent rage. It’s not just the helplessness of having been taken by Olivia Park and her goons, or his lingering frustration at the way she taunted him with her knowledge about his father. Tonight has robbed him of the illusion that he and Nia ever made a difference. We could have another Daggett Smith on the air tomorrow—that’s what the creepy doctor had said, and Cameron’s heart is heavy with the knowledge that it’s true. It was all for nothing. OPTIC is bigger and more powerful, an unstoppable tide; no matter what he and Nia do, it could never be enough.
And he’s furious at Nia for not even trying to help him escape—except that he’s deeply afraid for her, which just makes this whole thing worse. The first thing he’d done, after an unsuccessful attempt at emergency parental damage control that ended with his mom declaring him grounded “for-fucking-EVER,” was to rummage for an old phone so that he could reconnect with her. He’d felt a surge of hope when the device lit up with messages—only none was from Nia. There were angry, worried voicemails from Mom, a slew of confused comments from his YouTube subscribers, and one curious text from Juaquo (“What’s with the low-rent Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. rip-off?”), but not a single text from the one person who should’ve been the most concerned. Where was she? Why wasn’t she responding? Was she in hiding, afraid of meeting the same fate he had, or—his guts twist as he considers this—did Olivia and OPTIC take her, too? Were they only pretending not to know who Nia was, to manipulate him into giving something up? He doesn’t think so, but he also doesn’t know for sure, and the possibility that she’s in trouble eats at him as the minutes tick by. It’s been six hours since OPTIC torched his devices and took him in for questioning. Six hours. In the time he’s known Nia, they’ve rarely gone even half that much time without messaging each other. The realization fills him with dread.
Something is wrong. If not OPTIC, then something else.
He grits his teeth in frustration, overwhelmed once again by the realization he first had tonight, when Six was questioning him—that as intimately as he knows Nia, he also knows almost nothing about her. Not her address or birthdate, not even her last name. If something happened to her, he would be useless, helpless, unable even to tell the cops who they should be looking for. Nia had made sure of that from the moment they’d met, when he went looking for clues to her identity and she scolded him for snooping.
Cameron sits bolt upright in his chair.
I don’t know, he thinks, because I stopped looking.
He turns toward his computer, the screen coming alive as he looks at it. He concentrates, letting his consciousness flow inward and then out into virtual space, slipping into their private world.
He opens the door and walks in.
The fat brown and white dog is still there, sitting right where they left him. He glances lazily at Cameron but doesn’t greet him. The seat of the sofa is still thick with petals. Everything is as it was; nothing has been disturbed. Nia hasn’t been here, then—but from this place, Cameron can go to her. He crosses the room, the flowers tangling under his feet, and rests his hand on the opposite wall. It shimmers as he touches it, a sculpted glass handle rising out to meet his hand.
“That’s not your door,” says the dog, and Cameron jumps involuntarily. Oh, right, the dog can talk. That was Nia’s doing; after all, she kept saying, wasn’t the whole point of a virtual world that they could make any rules they wanted? But it still freaks him out every time.
“I’m going to look for her,” Cameron says, and then feels a surge of embarrassment. Why am I explaining myself to a digital talking dog?
“That’s not your door,” the dog says again.
“Shut your mouth, Dogue, or I’ll delete you and replace you with a thousand guinea pigs,” says Cameron. The dog doesn’t reply. He opens the door and steps through.
This is Nia’s portal, the entrance Cameron made just for her so that she could come and go as she pleased. She would have passed this way earlier today, when she left their virtual treehouse; even if she used a masking program to bounce through multiple servers before landing here, he should be able to follow her digital tracks back to wherever she originally came from—to at least get a rough geolocation, or find out who her IP is registered to. But as soon as he’s on the other side of the door, Cameron stops, stunned. There is no pathway, no trail of breadcrumbs. Nia’s entrance into their world is like a long hallway where someone has painted all the doors shut and turned out the lights. There’s nothing here.
He turns back.
That’s when he sees it.
There’s a message scrawled roughly, faintly, on Nia’s side of the door. A message meant for him, trapped here when somebody cut its connection—here, in a place where only one person could have left it and where only Cameron could find it.
The first line is a desperate cry for help.
The second is horrifyingly familiar.
PLEASE COME BEFORE HE HURTS ME.
41°54´37.8˝N 81°40´02.1˝W.
* * *
Cameron opens his eye
s with a gasp. On the table next to him, his old AR navigation visor springs to life, the cracked display emitting a faint glow as it recalibrates.
Nia has sent him her coordinates, but he doesn’t need to plug them in. The location is one he knows by heart.
He’s been there before.
Alone, trapped in a storm, and struck by lightning.
24
Into the Storm
The city marina is eerily silent, the only sound the soft lapping of waves, as Juaquo pulls his Impala up to the gate. Beyond it, the moored boats bob gently on the dark, cold water, the docks between them pale and deserted in the glow of the security lights. Juaquo puts the car in park and turns to look at Cameron.
“I gotta say it one last time. Let the record show that I do not understand why we’re about to go on a midnight boating expedition right now instead of calling the cops.”
Cameron doesn’t answer. He’s already out the door, moving as fast as he can toward the docks. Juaquo sighs and follows, pocketing the keys, looking back over his shoulder at the car. The hood art, an elaborate painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by plump, pink roses, is so vibrant in the warm halogen glow from the streetlight that it looks practically alive.
“You stay safe out here,” he says.
“What?” Cameron yells.
“I was talking to the car.”
The yacht club is closed off behind a sturdy iron security gate with a keypad entry system—but as Juaquo looks at it, there’s a click and a creak as the lock disengages.
“That’s weird—” he starts to say, but Cameron hurries through, offering no explanation. The piers groan under their feet as they make their way through the maze of boats, their shadows lengthening out ahead of them. Cameron keeps turning his head this way and that, like he’s trying to catch a scent in the air, until Juaquo finally says, “You look like a nervous squirrel. What are you doing?”
Cameron mutters, “Looking for the boat.”
“Um,” says Juaquo. “Isn’t your boat in several pieces?”
“Not my boat,” Cameron says, and points. “That boat.” Juaquo looks, and gapes. Sitting in a nearby slip is a sleek black watercraft, the kind a nerdy billionaire buys because it’s the closest thing there is to an earthbound space pod. It’s a boat worth way more than his house and his car put together; it’s definitely not a boat that the Ackerson family could afford. But Cameron is walking purposefully toward it, and as he does, the vessel springs to life; the motor burbles, the instrument panel chirps, and the interior glows a vibrant purple.
“I know you said there was no time to explain,” says Juaquo. “But, bro, you’ve gotta at least explain this. You tell me you need a ride to the yacht club—okay. You want me to come out in the middle of the night and fight your girlfriend’s dad—that’s weird, but okay! I got you. But there’s a line, and for me, it’s getting on the fancy million-dollar boat that doesn’t belong to you and looks like a spaceship and also appears to be haunted.”
Cameron steps onto the boat and turns toward Juaquo, pointing a finger at the AR lens in his own eye.
“It’s not haunted. It’s smart.” He gestures at the instrument panel. “Keyless ignition, digital navigation.” When Juaquo doesn’t move, Cameron rolls his eyes. “Do you get what I’m saying? It’s smart, and if it’s smart, it can be hacked. It’s not ghosts, man. It’s just me.”
“You hacked the boat.”
“Yes. Will you get on now?”
“How did you hack the boat?”
“We don’t have time to—”
“DUDE!”
“Fine!” Cameron yells. “I’ll explain, but on the way. All right? This is urgent, and I’m leaving right now, with or without you. Are you coming?”
Juaquo scowls and grumbles, but he unties the boat from its mooring and climbs aboard, taking his place next to Cameron at the controls. The sound of the motor climbs in pitch, from a burble to a purr, as the glow of the skyline fades away behind them, and the vast, starlit darkness of the lake opens up ahead.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Juaquo sits down heavily and presses his hands against his temples.
“That’s the nerdiest superpower I’ve ever heard of in my life,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the wind and waves. The boat is a lonely island in the dark, its headlights illuminating nothing but endless, churning water in every direction. “You can hack things with your mind? How does that even work?”
“I don’t know how, I just know it happens. I can plug myself in to the system, look at files, run programs, even recode it from the inside. It’s like having a conversation. Any device with a software network—”
Juaquo digs into his pocket, pulling out his phone. “Including this?”
“Yeah, including that. I told you, phones, laptops, security systems, robot vacuum cleaners—”
“You had a conversation with a vacuum cleaner?”
“I’m saying, if it’s got software to interface with, I can communicate with it,” Cameron says, exasperated. “It’s not like I’m hanging out in my room having a heart-to-heart with the Roomba, for Christ’s sake. But I could reprogram it to, I don’t know, chase the cat around or write messages into the carpet or whatever. It’s not witchcraft. Some of this stuff, I could’ve probably done before, if I had a crazy good computing system and unlimited time to work on it. But now it’s, like, organic. And instantaneous. I don’t need time or tools, it just happens.”
Juaquo raises his eyebrows. “So, you used to be a regular nerd, and now you’re enhanced. You’re Super Nerd.”
“I prefer ‘cyberkinetic,’” Cameron says, scowling.
“That’s exactly what a Super Nerd would s—” Juaquo’s words are lost in a screech of warning tones and a flash of light. The boat’s digital displays are going haywire, beeping and whirring, as a confused scroll of numbers flashes across its screens. Juaquo points at it and yells, “Are you doing that?”
Cameron shakes his head and gazes grimly out over the bow. His AR lenses, freshly charged and synced to his own old navigation system, are showing a precipitous drop in barometric pressure and scrolling a warning: ANOMALOUS ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY. The air around the boat is damp and thick and smells of ozone. He swallows, and his ears pop. He feels the dread unspooling like an icy snake in the pit of his stomach, and when he looks at Juaquo, he can see the fear in his friend’s eyes. Cameron grits his teeth and clenches his fists, bracing himself for what he knows is coming.
“You’re gonna want to hold on to something,” he says, as the first bolt of lightning splits the sky.
* * *
As the storm begins to build around them, Cameron wonders for the hundredth time whether Nia is all right—and why she would send him to the middle of Lake Erie in the middle of the night.
Then the world lights up with electricity and he doesn’t wonder about anything anymore. The storm erupts around them in an instant, a vast web of white-hot lightning engulfing the sky, the lake, the boat. As before, there’s no wind—and yet Cameron could swear that he hears an eerie howling, echoing overhead, a sound that’s somewhere between a woman’s sob and the scream of a caged animal. The crack and sizzle of lightning is everywhere, the blinding flares coming so fast that there’s no time even to breathe between them. Plumes of water explode upward as the bolts arc into the water, drenching the boat with freezing spray, shoving it roughly off-course so that Cameron has to strain to correct it. The headlight winks out with a flash; the violet interior lights stutter once and then do the same. The navigation system is useless, but the display of his visor still glows faintly, telling him they’re on the right track. He presses his face toward the windshield, craning his neck to see overhead. The sky is thick with whirling clouds, lit from the inside by fierce flashes of lightning, spiraling out from a single origin point that must be the eye of the storm. A small circle of star-flecked sky is visible there, at the center, the clouds whirling furiously around it.
“This is insane!” Juaquo screams from behind him. He’s crouched halfway back, gripping the sides of a table with built-in cupholders lining its edges. He’s already filled two of them with vomit and is working on a third. “We’re not gonna make it through this! We have to turn back!”
Cameron shakes his head, peering through the spray. They’re so close; he can feel it. And there, up ahead—did he just see something? He could swear, for just a moment—
“Dude!” Juaquo screams again. “Are you listening to me? We’re going to goddamn die out here—”
His voice booms in the sudden, empty silence.
The storm, the sky, the dazzling electric light, even the tossing lake itself, are gone. For a moment, the boat cuts blindly through the darkness, as soft and thick as velvet.
Then there’s a jolt, and Cameron and Juaquo are thrown to the floor as the boat scrapes to a hard stop against an unseen shore.
Groaning, Juaquo gets to his feet. He pulls his phone from his pocket; the flashlight illuminates, reflected back in the surrounding plexiglass. “What—” he starts to say, then stops, looking bewildered. “Where are we? What did we hit?”
“I don’t know,” Cameron says. He steps out onto the narrow bow, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. His navigation visor flashes a final message—DESTINATION REACHED—and cycles down. “But we’re here.”
“Where?”
“Where we’re supposed to be. Nia sent me coordinates, and this place is it.”
Cameron climbs over the prow of the boat, his foot reaching for the ground he can’t see but knows must be there. A moment later, the toe of his sneaker squeaks against it—a smooth surface, gently rounded. A man-made island? It’s not just the unnatural smoothness of the shore, which is made of a dark substance that’s neither earth nor rock, and where nothing seems to grow. Beneath his feet, Cameron can feel the presence of tech. Resonant, humming, and immensely powerful. Its voice is like a seductive purr inside his head.