“Yes, they do.”
“And I guess maybe from God’s point of view, it’s not so important how things go, it’s more about the right and wrong of it: what you do, who you are . . . that you try to follow the good way no matter what’s happening. Something like that, anyway.”
“Uh-huh,” his mom said. “It sounds to me like you lost your boy faith, and now you’re starting to find your man faith.”
Rick’s lips parted but no words came out. He hadn’t thought about it like that, but now that she said it . . .
But before any words came to him, he heard the front door open. He heard his father’s footsteps in the hall. The next moment, the small man was standing in the doorway. His cheeks were white with cold and his watch cap was in his hand.
Rick watched his mother carefully as she looked up at her husband. Her face lit up with a warm smile. Because she believed in him, Rick thought. She believed in him and she wasn’t afraid of Leila Kent. She believed, and she wasn’t afraid of anything.
“You look like you’re frozen solid,” she said with a laugh, just as if there had been no blond beauty fawning over him out there under the trees.
“It’s cold, all right,” said the Traveler. “If you hadn’t reminded me to take my hat . . .”
“And your coat,” his wife added. “And your shoes.”
Even Rick laughed at that.
“Well, sit down now,” his mom told his dad. “Have some coffee and warm yourself up.”
Lawrence Dial returned his wife’s smile, and Rick realized it was as easy to see that he was in love with her as it was to see that Leila Kent was in love with him.
But he said, “I wish I could, but I don’t have time right now.” Then he turned to Rick and said: “You and I—we have to talk.”
20. FOREST SURVIVAL
MOLLY RAN THROUGH the winter forest. She ran and ran and ran, but she seemed to get nowhere. It was as if the woods went on forever. The dead trees on every side of her grew denser. The ground beneath her feet grew wetter, swampier. The branches scratched and tore at her face and arms. The earth turned soft and muddy beneath her sneakers. She stumbled and fell, and when she rose again, the knees of her jogging pants were soaked through. She felt as if the forest were pressing down on her from above and trying to swallow her from below.
And every time she stopped—to catch her breath, to find her footing, to look for a way out—she heard them. The killers. Their voices called to one another through the woods. Their footsteps tromped through the brush. All around her. Everywhere. Hunting her. Getting closer. No matter how fast she ran, she could not escape them.
She ran and ran until, finally, she was exhausted. She tumbled into a thick patch of weeds. She lay on her back, breathing hard. For a moment, she thought maybe—maybe—she had lost her pursuers. She held her breath and listened . . . listened . . . No, there they were. She could see them. They were still far enough away to be hidden by the dense jumble of tree branches—as she was hidden from them. But she could hear their voices through the trees.
“Spread out this way . . .”
“Keep moving together. She can’t get past us.”
“Stay in line. We’ll get her.”
“Keep looking left and right.”
Lying there, staring up through the branches at the sky, Molly began to weep with weariness and frustration. Her body trembled as tears spilled over her temples into her hair. She prayed wildly, Please, please . . .
But the voices of the killers kept getting louder. The footsteps kept getting closer, crunching on the forest duff. Soon, very soon, they would be able to see her through the forest. She knew what they would do if they caught her. But how could she lose them? How could she escape?
She rose to her knees. She choked down her tears. Dragged a sleeve across her face to dry her eyes and wipe her nose.
Crying time was over.
She looked around her. She had no idea where she was. No idea how far she’d come from her prison or in what direction. She’d dashed out in such a panic that she hadn’t paid any attention. All she knew at first was that the gunmen were behind her, the bullets whizzing past her through the branches: she had to keep moving.
She scanned the distant trees. They were blurry with her tears. Still, she saw pale winter light cutting in through the low branches. Something soured inside her as she realized: the sun was getting low. Night was falling. Soon the forest would be dark.
It would be cold, too. It was already cold and it was getting colder. She hadn’t noticed it so much when she was on the move. But now that she had paused here, the damp chill closed over her skin, rose through her damp pants, ate into her. Her breath misted and vanished in the thickening air.
And the voices were getting very close. Any minute now, the hunters would be within sight.
“Keep together. Don’t give her a chance to slip past.” That was Smiley McDeath. She knew his raspy high-pitched voice well by now. “Count ’em out,” he shouted.
“Here,” came the answer.
“Walking here.”
“Here.”
“Over here.”
She understood what they were doing. They were steadily marching toward her in a disciplined line. Five of them it sounded like. Spaced far enough apart to cut off her escape, but close enough together to spot her if she tried to sneak back between them. They sounded very confident, she thought. They sounded as if they didn’t care which direction she went, how fast she ran, how cleverly she tried to evade them. Their confidence made her feel so hopeless she wanted to start weeping again.
But she didn’t. She gulped down a deep breath. She climbed painfully to her feet. She started moving.
“I heard her!” one of the men shouted. “I heard her footsteps.”
“There she is!”
“That way!”
“Keep together.”
“Don’t let her get away.”
Molly ran.
21. HISTORY
“WE DON’T HAVE much time,” Rick’s father said. “They’re going to want you to go back into the Realm soon.”
“I’m ready to go back in now,” Rick told him.
“No, you’re not,” his father said. “You’re having headaches. Bad ones. And bad dreams, too, I’ll bet.”
Startled, Rick turned to his father. Was he a mind reader, too, like his mom? “How do you know that?”
They were walking by the compound’s barbed-wire perimeter fence, strolling shoulder to shoulder, both wearing woolen watch caps, both with their hands pressed into the pockets of their fleeces to keep warm in the fading day. Rick couldn’t help but notice the way his father’s eyes kept moving. He kept glancing back over his shoulder, looking all around him. Making sure no one was near them, no one was listening in. Who was he afraid of? Rick wondered. Weren’t they in a guarded, secret compound surrounded by good guys? Weren’t the bad guys being kept out? Wasn’t that why they were here in the first place?
“How’d you know about the headaches and the bad dreams?” he asked again.
His father’s narrow shoulders lifted in a brief shrug. “I’ve been studying the MindWar Realm a long time. I don’t understand all of it yet. But I’m beginning to think that the barrier between the mind and reality, between the Realm and Real Life, is porous.”
“Porous?”
“Things can pass through from one side to the other. The way we think about the world in our minds changes the world in fact.”
“I’ve seen that in the Realm,” Rick said. “You can change reality there if you focus your spirit.”
His father nodded. “That’s true here, too, to some extent. If you let your spirit get poisoned and dark, the world gets poisoned and dark with it. Keep your spirit bright, the world gets brighter.”
“No matter what happens,” Rick murmured, thinking about his conversation with his mother.
“So as for your headaches and bad dreams . . . Well, when you go into the Realm, in effect you’re en
tering Kurodar’s imagination. I’d guess that’s a pretty dark place. And like all darkness, it wants to turn you into itself.”
Rick’s lips parted in surprise. He hadn’t even told his father about the Canyon of Nothingness yet. “You mean you think the darkness is getting inside me. You think that’s where the nightmares are coming from.”
“Well, that’s not a very scientific way of putting it, but . . . Yes. Something like that. It’s as if you were becoming part of the Realm yourself. As if Kurodar’s imagination were somehow connecting to yours.”
The idea gave Rick a little twinge of nausea. If there was one thing in this world he didn’t want living in his imagination, it was the blackness of the Realm.
“I saw something in there,” he said. “While I was immersed, I saw something that makes me think you’re right: there is a connection between the Realm and RL. There was this monster. Like a giant octopus. Only it had a person’s face. And I’m pretty sure the face was the face of the guy from the video. That troll guy on the video about Molly.”
His father was still looking around him, his eyes moving this way and that as if to make sure no one was trying to listen in on their conversation. But when he heard this, he stopped and fixed his gaze on Rick.
“Really? That’s interesting,” he said softly. It was typical of him: he sounded like he was considering some sort of mathematical equation in his absentminded-professor way. “With these drones disappearing the way they have, I’ve been worried that Kurodar may have found a way to bridge the Realm-RL divide directly, a way to reach into Real Life even without the Internet. It would give him a lot of power. An amazing amount of power.”
“I was thinking if I could get to this monster, maybe I could make him tell us where Molly is.”
His father went on gazing at him, but Rick could tell his mind had gone off on some other tangent somewhere. Then he blinked as if he were waking up. And he said, “Hmm? Oh. Yes, maybe.”
“Have you heard anything about her?” Rick asked. “Has Victor One found her? Is she all right?”
His father shook his head. He started looking around again as they walked together by the barbed wire. “Victor One has purposely severed all communications with me. With anyone. We don’t want Kurodar tracking him. We don’t want Mars tracking him either, if it comes to that.”
Rick was struck by the steadiness in his dad’s eyes as he spoke about all this. Whatever he was feeling, whatever was worrying him, he didn’t show it. He wasn’t unemotional like Miss Ferris. He was just . . . well, weirdly calm. But then he’d always been like that, even when Rick was little. No matter what happened, no matter what nonsense Rick got up to (and Rick had pulled off one or two historic feats of mischief in his time), his father never lost his temper, never raised his voice. Even when he had punished Rick (like after that time Rick had stuck a potato in the exhaust pipe of his chemistry teacher’s car and nearly gassed the man to death), he had delivered the sentence with the quiet objectivity of a judge and with no apparent anger at all. Rick had always admired that about his dad. He had always wished he could be that calm, that cool, instead of being the hothead he often was.
“You don’t like Commander Mars much, do you?” Rick asked him now.
“It’s not that I don’t like him,” his father said. “It’s not really a question of whether I like him or not. Mars is a powerful man, that’s all. And people who have power may start out thinking they’re going to help other people, but far too often they end up trying to control them, trying to tell them what’s best for them, trying to keep secrets from them in order to protect them . . . It’s hard to find a powerful man who’s a friend to freedom. And I think God made us to be free. That’s why I’m fighting Kurodar. But I’ll fight Mars, too, if I have to, if he becomes a danger.”
Rick remembered now why he admired his dad, why he was so disappointed when he thought his dad had betrayed the family. Because his dad was like this.
They continued strolling around the fence together, as if they were just a pop and his son out for a walk. But as Rick watched, his dad did that thing again: looking back over his shoulder, moving his eyes around to make sure no one was near.
“Why do you keep doing that?” Rick asked. “Looking around like that? Aren’t we supposed to be among friends here?”
His father took a deep breath. “I got a visit this afternoon.”
“From Leila Kent,” said Rick. The name came out of him in a curt, sarcastic drawl. He couldn’t help it.
One corner of his father’s mouth lifted. He heard the tone all right, but he didn’t respond to it. He simply said, “When she was helping to transfer me here from my hiding place, we were attacked on the road by a couple of gunmen. I hadn’t used the Internet in months. There was no way Kurodar could have tracked me to that cabin in the woods. Leila thinks someone told the Axis where we were.”
“A traitor? Like who?”
“There weren’t that many people who knew where I was. Mars. Miss Ferris. Victor One. Leila herself. That’s exactly why I did what I did. Why I left you all like that. So no one would know my location—and no one would think you knew it.”
Just the mention of this made Rick’s old anger flare. He turned away, trying not to let it show. When he turned back, he found his father had stopped walking, was simply standing there a few feet behind him. Rick stopped too. He turned and faced him.
“I’m sorry, son,” his dad said quietly. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it did. Mars was supposed to protect you. He was supposed to keep you out of it. He brought you into the project without telling me.”
Rick nodded and looked away. He wanted to tell his father he forgave him, but he couldn’t make the words come out. “I guess we all have to make tough decisions in an emergency.”
“That’s it,” his father said. “There was an emergency. Something went very wrong with the MindWar Project. That’s why they brought you into it on such short notice. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know the whole story. All I know is this: you’re not the first MindWarrior.”
Rick’s lips parted, but all that came out was a frosty puff of breath. He had known this. Somewhere inside. Things Miss Ferris had said, and his own intuitions, had planted the suspicion beneath the surface of his brain. There had been MindWarriors before him. Other human beings who had gone into the MindWar Realm . . .
“The others didn’t make it out,” he said aloud.
His father shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. No one will tell me.”
“It was Mariel, wasn’t it? Mariel and Favian and . . . that other guy. The guy in the Spider-Snake tunnel. The guy who died. They all got stuck in there, and now they’re all dying, and no one’s doing anything about it.”
“I don’t know . . .,” his father began.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“Calm down. Listen to me.”
Rick tried. He tried to calm down. He’d never been very good at it.
His father went on. “I stumbled upon the Realm by accident. I was doing experiments with Professor Jameson.”
“Molly’s dad?”
“That’s right. We were working together on computer-brain interfaces, trying to develop methods of downloading portions of the human mind into computers and vice versa.”
“Yeah,” said Rick. “I remember that. You did some of that with me and Molly. You had us wear those helmets on our heads and we played video games just by thinking about them. It was cool.”
“That’s right. We did that with a lot of different subjects. And while you were playing the games, we translated portions of your minds into computer code: an experiment in transporting the human spirit into cyberspace, as Kurodar has done in the Realm. It’s while I was studying that, that I discovered Kurodar’s interface: the MindWar. I realized the danger at once. I thought it unwise to tell anyone, even Jameson. Instead, I conta
cted Leila, the one person in the government I knew I could trust because of our . . . old association. Leila passed my work on to Mars and . . . well, I’m not sure, but I think he may have used it without telling me. He may have enlisted some of my subjects and sent them into the Realm.”
Rick had managed to keep his temper until now. But when he thought this might be the key, the secret that would help him rescue Mariel and Favian, he blurted out, “Well, where are they? How can we get them out?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” his father said. “We had so many subjects. Students, soldiers, volunteers. I don’t know which ones they used or if they used my methods on others or . . . any of it. Neither Mars nor Miss Ferris will tell me. And Leila doesn’t know. They’re all so obsessed with their blessed secrecy around here . . . If I knew who was in there, if I had their mind scans—and of course their bodies—it’s possible I could create programs that could extract them, bring them back.”
Rick was no science guy. He could not begin to understand the details of what his father was trying to tell him. But he did get the general idea.
“So we’ve got to find out who they are,” he said. “And find where Mars is keeping their bodies. We’ve got to. Mariel’s dying, Dad. And Favian too. They’re dying. Even the energy you sent them isn’t enough to . . .”
“Give me your hand,” his father said. His voice was low, but sharp and urgent.
Rick hesitated only a second, then he lifted his hand out of his fleece pocket, held it in the air in front of him. At once, his father clasped the hand in his own. He put his other hand on Rick’s shoulder and gave him what would look to anyone like a fatherly embrace. As they were close together, he murmured in Rick’s ear: “This will help you find the answers.”
When his father stepped back, there was a flash drive in Rick’s hand.
“What’s on it?” he asked.
But before his father could answer, there was a call: