“Tell you what,” Aja said. “I’ll prove it to you. Let’s do the final test. Right here, right now.”
“Test?” I asked nervously.
“Your control bracelet,” she said. “Remember the middle button?”
I lifted my arm to see that the silver band with the three buttons had reappeared. “The middle button alters the jump, right?”
“Exactly. Press the button. Let’s see what happens.”
“Are you crazy?” I shouted, jumping to my feet. “What if things go wacky?”
“I hope they do,” Aja countered. “It’ll be the only way I can prove to you that no matter how wrong a jump goes, all we have to do is end it and everything will be fine.”
I shook my head and paced. This was getting scary.
“This is the final test, Pendragon. Pressing that button is the first thing the jumpers will do when their jumps go bad. They’re all going to try and change their fantasy. Let’s see what will happen when they do.”
“What do you think will happen?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It all depends on you.”
Truth be told, I was scared to death of what might happen. What if a fire broke out? Or an earthquake hit? I didn’t want to have to go through that kind of mayhem, even if it was just a fantasy. My nose hurt bad enough.
“C’mon, Pendragon,” she cajoled. “You’re the big brave Traveler who beat Saint Dane all those times. Be the hero again. Push the button. Let’s prove the Reality Bug works once and for all.”
“You promise we can end the jump right away? I mean, all I have to do is say‘Stop!’and you can make all of this go away?”
“You can end it yourself, remember?” she said, pointing to my control bracelet. “Just press the right button. That ends the jump. Everything should work exactly as normal, except the Reality Bug will alter the fantasy.”
Aja seemed to have found the solution to the turning point on Veelox. If her Reality Bug worked, it would force people to live in the real world again. The Travelers would have beaten Saint Dane and set the territory back on the right path. If all that was left to do was test the middle button, we had to do it.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“You already asked me that,” she answered impatiently. “Haven’t I impressed you yet?”
Okay, she had. I took a deep breath, raised my arm, and put my finger over the middle button on the silver control bracelet.
“Ready?” I asked her.
“Always,” she answered.
I pushed the button. It glowed red for a moment and then …
Nothing happened. The ground didn’t shake, the roof didn’t collapse. We stood there like a couple of dopes.
“Nothing changed,” I said. “Maybe it didn’t—”
Then it all hit the fan.
Aja lifted her arm with the large, silver control bracelet. “My controller,” she said with surprise. “It’s activating.”
“What does that mean?”
A second later a beam of light shot out of the wrist controller and projected a holographic image. If the idea of the Reality Bug was to dig into my subconscious and pull out all my fears, it did a very good job. Because standing in front of us in that locker room was the one thing I feared most.
Saint Dane.
“Checkmate!” the demon laughed.
“Is this my fantasy?” I asked Aja, stunned.
“No!” Aja answered with a shaky voice. “Your jump isn’t tied into my controller. This is real. It’s a recording.”
“Aja, you sweet thing,” the image of Saint Dane said. “Did you really think I’d let you sabotage Lifelight? I worked too hard for too many years helping those programmers create Lifelight to allow you to destroy it with a simple computer virus.”
Aja shot me a look. This wasn’t my horror fantasy.
It was hers.
“Sweet, little Aja,” Saint Dane’s image said. “I’ve watched you from the day you were born. I made sure the directors picked you for the phader program; I saw you grow into an arrogant little Traveler; and I even helped you program your nasty little bug. I’m sure Pendragon has told you I’m always around. I’ll bet you didn’t believe him.”
She didn’t. But she was beginning to.
“You see, dear girl,” Saint Dane continued, “you’re my back-up plan. If Veelox didn’t crumble from neglect, then I wanted to make sure your Reality Bug worked far better than you could imagine. And it will!”
Saint Dane laughed. It was chilling.
“Either way, I win,” he continued. “Thank you so much for all your help, Aja. You’ve made destroying Veelox such a pleasure! Give my regards to young Pendragon.”
The recorded image disappeared and Saint Dane was gone. Aja looked like she was about to faint. None of this made sense to her. Unfortunately it made a whole bunch of sense to me. Saint Dane knew exactly what was going on from the beginning. He was in total control. Just like always.
“He’s lying,” Aja said. “The Reality Bug won’t fail.”
“I think that’s the problem,” I said. “He’s saying it’s going to work better than you planned.”
“How could he know that?”
“I’ve been telling you from the start, Aja!” I shouted. “That’s what he does. He works people, pushing them toward answers they think they want, but it leads them to disaster. You don’t see him coming until it’s too late. You’re smart, Aja. But you made a huge mistake. You thought you were smarter than Saint Dane.”
Aja shot me a look full of hurt and anger. But it was the truth. Just when you think you’ve gotten the better of Saint Dane, he comes back to bite you in the butt. And right now, our butts were stinging.
“Aja? You in there?” came a voice from outside the locker room.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“It’s Alex,” Aja answered with surprise.
She ran for the locker room door. I was right after her. The door led to a short corridor that led to the gym. We stopped, still inside the locker room, when we saw that standing outside in the empty gym was Alex, our phader. We stood on either end of the short corridor, Aja and I in the locker room, Alex in the gym. He was nervously punching buttons on his wrist controller.
“Aja, what’s going on?” he called to us.
“What do you mean?” Aja shot back.
“I’m losing control of the jumps,” he whined. “A surge of data shot through the grid in my quadrant, and I traced the source to you!”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Aja answered, trying to stay in control. “It could mean the Reality Bug has activated.”
“I thought it was already activated?” I asked, rubbing my stinging nose.
“Not fully. I had it isolated to our jump,” Aja answered. “But it’s programmed to spread through the entire grid once I give the command.”
“I think that command was just given,” I said soberly. “Saint Dane took care of that.”
“Reality Bug?” Alex called to us. “What is that?”
“End the jump,” she ordered me. “We’ve got to get back to the core.”
I quickly hit the jump-ending button on my control bracelet.
Nothing happened.
“Why are we still here?” I asked.
“I’ll override you and end it myself,” Aja said. She hit a few buttons on her wrist controller, and frowned.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s not responding.”
“Not responding?” I yelled. I hit the right button on my controller a dozen more times. It still didn’t work. Aja’s fingers sped over the silver buttons on her wrist controller, trying to find the right combination that would put her back in control. She didn’t find it.
“Alex!” Aja yelled out to the phader, who was still standing on the opposite end of the corridor, working his wrist controller. “Get back to the core and jam a shutdown. Get us out of here!
”
“Are you sure?” Alex called back. “What if—”
Grrrrrr.
The sound came from out in the gym, where Alex was.
“What was that?” Aja asked. She started to walk curiously toward the corridor that led to the gym, but I grabbed her arm to stop her.
“I don’t know,” I answered. But the truth was, it sounded familiar.
“Alex,” I shouted, “is something out there?”
The phader looked around the gym and shrugged. “I don’t see anything.”
GRRRRRRRR …
There was something out there all right, and it was getting closer.
“We gotta get outta here, Aja,” I insisted.
“I’m trying!” she said while pounding out buttons on her useless controller.
I then heard what sounded like a scraping sound, as if something sharp were being dragged over a hard surface. I knew that sound. It felt so familiar, yet I couldn’t place it. What was it?
A second later it hit me. But it was impossible. Not here. Not on Veelox. Or on a fantasy version of Second Earth for that matter. Or wherever we were. There was only one other place where I had heard a sound like that. It was on a territory far from here. The sound brought back horrible memories from a place I would never forget.
Denduron.
“Hey!” shouted Alex with surprise.
Aja and I both looked up. We saw the phader framed in the doorway to the gym. He was now looking off to his right … and he looked scared.
“Who thought this thing up?” he asked with a shaky voice.
“What is it, Alex?” Aja asked.
Alex took two steps back, the fear showing in his eyes. “I’m gonna get back to the—”
He never finished his sentence, because a set of strong jaws closed around his throat. Aja screamed. I took a step back in surprise. The beast had appeared from nowhere. It leaped at Alex, knocking him down.
“How could that happen? I thought the phaders aren’t really here?” I yelled, trying to keep my head together.
“They aren’t!” Aja screamed. “This is our jump. He’s not part of this.”
“Yeah?” I cried. “Tell that to Alex … and the quig that just killed him.”
At that moment the beast looked up from its victim and stared down the corridor at us. The sight of blood dripping from its teeth was all too familiar. It was a quig from Denduron. It was in my high school gym, in my fantasy …
And it had just set its sights on us.
A nightmare from my past had just sprung out of my brain and was standing in front of us. In the flesh.
Somehow Aja’s Reality Bug had found it in my memory and brought it to life. It was impossible, yet here it was. The quig looked exactly as it had on Denduron. It was like a prehistoric bear with an oversize head that was mostly jaws. It had big sharp teeth on both top and bottom that jutted out like a wild boar’s. Its body was covered with dirty-gray fur. Yellow spikes of bone ran down its spine. Its paws were huge and strong, with knife-sharp claws. But the thing I remember most about these quigs, like all the quigs from all the territories, were its eyes. They were yellow and angry and focused….
On us.
This one was smaller than the ones I remembered, about the size of a grizzly bear. But that was bad news because it was small enough to move through doors. We were only a doorway and a short corridor away from being eaten. The quig stepped over Alex’s lifeless body, stalking toward the locker room … and us. There was only one thing I could think of doing.
I closed the door on our end of the corridor.
Just in time too. A second later I heard the quig smash against the door with a sickening thud. I knew the beast wasn’t smart enough to open a door latch, so I didn’t worry about locking it. The only thing I could hope was that the door would hold if it tried to bash it down.
Aja was frozen in shock. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
“Where did that come from?” I demanded.
“F-From your mind,” she stammered out. “I told you, it’ll find things in your memory that you fear.”
“But you said Lifelight can only use reality,” I shot back.
“Isn’t that thing real enough for you?”
As if in answer, the quig smashed against the door again.
“But those monsters don’t exist on Second Earth. It’s from a different territory. From Denduron.”
“That’s impossible!” Aja shouted. “Lifelight can’t do that!”
The quig slammed into the door again, letting out a bellow of pain and anger.
“Well, it can now!”
The door began to splinter. A couple more hits like that and it would be on us.
“C’mon!” I grabbed Aja’s hand and ran. I didn’t know where to go, but we couldn’t stay there. We found a door on the far side of the locker room and blasted through. The door led outside, but once we were out, we both froze in horror.
We were near the large, football practice field. But there were no players scrimmaging today. Instead, we were faced with more quigs! The grass was swarming with them. They were all sizes, too. Some were as big as the beasts that had fought in the Bedoowan stadium on Denduron, others were smaller than the one from the gym. A few quigs were battling each other, trying to tear into each other’s necks. I knew where that would lead. These quigs were cannibals. If one went down, the others would pounce and chow.
“The door!” I shouted.
It was closing behind us. If it locked, we were history. Aja reacted quickly and threw her foot out, wedging her shoe into the doorway just before it closed. If she had missed, we would have been quig lunch and I guarantee we were tastier than blue gloid.
I glanced back at the herd of quigs to see a few of them were lifting up their heads. They had caught our scent. In a few seconds they’d zero in on us and the dinner bell would ring.
“Back inside!” I shouted, and pulled the door open. After we ducked back in, I made sure to pull the door all the way shut. It was a good thing too, because a handful of quigs had spotted us and they were beginning to charge.
“Is there another way out of here?” Aja asked in desperation.
“I—I think so.”
We ran back through the locker room, past the door to the gym, just as … crash! The gym door smashed open and the quig stood there looking totally ticked off that he had to go through so much trouble to get lunch. Aja and I kept running through the locker room, headed for the door that connected it with the girls’locker room. The quig chased us, awkwardly smashing into lockers that gave off a hollow, metallic thunder each time the monster slammed into one.
The door to the girls’ locker room didn’t have a latch, but it opened toward us. That was a huge break. There was no way the quig could pull a door open. We shot through and into a mirror-image locker room on the other side. We were safe, but for how long?
“Get us outta this!” I screamed at Aja.
“This isn’t as bad as it seems, Pendragon,” she answered.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, this is a fantasy. Even if we got attacked and killed by one of those beasts, we’d just wake up inside the Lifelight pyramid.”
“No,” I said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to work! You said it’s impossible for those quigs to be here, but they are. And our control bracelets should work, but they don’t. And Alex shouldn’t be lying dead out there in the gym because he wasn’t part of this jump, but he looks pretty dead to me. There are too many impossible things happening for me to risk letting one of those monsters eat us back to reality!”
“But—”
“You heard Saint Dane. He knew what you were trying to do with the Reality Bug. He messed with your program. Who knows what it’s capable of now? We’ve got to get out of here alive and figure out what happened.”
Aja nodded. I was making sense to her, for a change.
“I have no idea how to get us out,” I added. “It’s up to you.”
I could tell the wheels were spinning in Aja’s head, trying to figure a way to escape from the jump. Finally she said, “Our controllers were somehow taken offline. Whatever Saint Dane did, it happened when you pushed the reset button.”
“Right, no more pushing the reset button,” I agreed.
“But Alex’s controller is tied into the general grid. It’s on a different string.”
“Can you use it to end our jump?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” she answered with authority. “If it still works.”
I knew what had to be done. We had to go back into the gym, get to Alex’s body, and get his wrist controller. No problem, right? Yeah, sure. We quickly found the door that led from this locker room back into the gym. Aja and I cautiously opened it a crack and peered out.
The big gym was eerily empty. Not long ago it had been full of screaming basketball fans. Now the only person left in the gym was Alex, and he wasn’t doing any screaming. Not anymore. Question was, where was the quig?
“You sure this is the only way out of the jump?” I asked Aja in a whisper.
“No, but it’s the only way I can think of.”
“Then we’ve gotta take the chance,” I said. “Wait here.”
I started into the gym, but Aja grabbed my arm.
“Where are you going?”
“To get the controller, where do you think?”
“You don’t know how to get it off his arm.”
Good point. We had to go together. Aja and I then shared eye contact in a way that hadn’t happened up until this point. Though we were both Travelers, our relationship had been a battle from the get-go. But now we were about to step into danger. The look between us said it all. We were in this together, like it or not. I gave her a quick nod, and the two of us stepped into the gym.
The distance to Alex was only about twenty yards, but it might as well have been a mile. If the quig caught us in the middle of the gym, there was nowhere for us to run. We started out by walking slowly, but I think we both realized the faster we did this the better, because with each step we picked up the pace.