Hostage Run

  Rick ran—ran across the open plain. It was the oddest thing. As he left the ruins behind, the world around him became more colorful. It was like running out of one of those old black-and-white movies they show on TV and into a modern color movie. As he put some distance between himself and the ruined fortress, the ashen grass beneath his feet turned a richer and richer red. The jaundiced sky became brighter, a yellow more like butter than sickness. He caught sight of blue tree lines off in the distance to his left, and the gold of the faraway city before him winked and glittered in the Realm’s strange, sourceless light.

  Rick ran faster. The ground rose up in front of him. He didn’t let it slow him. Even as he climbed the little hill, he managed to pour on speed.

  He looked back over his shoulder. The wraiths were following him, but they were losing ground, falling away behind him. He was escaping. He laughed out loud in triumph.

  Then he looked forward. Just in time. Just in time to stop himself from falling off a sheer cliff into . . .

  . . . into nothingness.

  He had reached the end of the world. There was nothing but black space in front of him.

  The wraiths were closing in behind him, and there was nowhere left to run.

  11. DARK FALL

  EVERYTHING INSIDE RICK—heartbeat, breath, thoughts—stopped cold. He felt as if he were suspended, lifeless, on the very brink of reality. Well, in fact, he was.

  The red grass ended at the tip of his toes—ended in an unnaturally straight line. Beyond that spot, between him and the distance, there was nothing. Just nothing. The incline in the earth had hidden the drop from view as he was approaching it, but now he saw the place where the world suddenly ended, and beyond that place: blackness. There was a broad canyon of absolute blackness, with red grass far, far away on the other side.

  Rick had just barely managed to bring himself to a halt before he flew off the precipice into the abyss. He tottered there for a second before he was able to regain his balance and pull himself back. He stared down into the unimaginably black blackness, and the wind rose behind him, and the song of the wraiths rose, too.

  He looked over his shoulder. Oh yes, they were still coming, relentless. And so many of them. They had joined together now into a single legion, an army of glowing white blobs with red eyes and dripping teeth, sweeping up the hillside to overwhelm him.

  Funny: it was just like the test they had given him back at the MindWar compound. The oncoming demon army. The cliff. Except here there was no bomb and no flying demon to help him destroy his enemies and escape. Here there was a riddle that might not have an answer—or whose only answer might be Rick’s destruction. Well, maybe funny wasn’t exactly the word to describe it!

  Rick stared down at the oncoming wraiths, turned and stared down into the Canyon of Nothingness. The emptiness of that canyon was so complete that it overwhelmed his imagination. He could hardly stand to think about it, hardly look at it for more than a moment.

  He raised his eyes to the red grass on the other side. About a hundred and fifty yards away, it looked like to him: a football field and a half. As the song of the onrushing wraiths grew louder and louder, as their high-pitched hunger began to jangle inside his head again, he stared across that black distance. With a hollow feeling at the pit of his stomach, he saw a small purple glow over there. Another portal point. A way out, back to RL. But what good did it do him? There was no way to get to it. No way across the black canyon.

  He turned his back on the dark. He gripped all that was left of Mariel’s sword. Instantly, he felt her spirit rush up his arm and spread all through him. He drew the weapon from his belt again. He stared down at the onrushing wraiths. Their song swirled around him, filling the air, filling his mind.

  After he had taken the MindWar test and escaped the demon army, his father told him that some of the others who had taken the test, some of those who had taken it and failed, had done just what he was doing now. The soldiers especially. They had stood and turned and faced the demons head-on, and they had been swept away and died. He knew that was going to happen to him here and now. He was going to be overwhelmed by the wraiths, drained to a death that was worse than death itself.

  He knew. And yet he could think of nothing else to do.

  The sword hilt seemed to radiate courage into him. More than courage: faith. It was Mariel’s faith, steadfast, unwavering. But somehow, as he stood there, it became his faith, too.

  Some stories have no happy ending, he thought. In the Realm, just as in RL, sometimes it’s all about having the courage to face whatever comes.

  He felt something let go inside him, something he had been holding on to tightly, some sense of control. He released it, and he knew, without really putting it into words, that he was giving himself over to God.

  He braced himself for the final attack. The wraiths came closer. Their song grew overwhelmingly loud—so loud, he almost didn’t hear that other voice—that familiar hollow echoing voice that had been calling to him for the last few moments.

  “Rick! Rick! Rick Dial! Over here!”

  The wraiths—and death—were less than thirty yards away when the voice finally broke through to him. He turned. He stared across the Canyon of Nothingness.

  He saw Favian on the far side.

  He could barely make out the sparkling figure at that distance, but really, how could he mistake him? The gangly, anxious sprite was made of shifting light and energy: who else was like him?

  A starburst of fresh hope exploded in Rick’s core. Was there some way . . .?

  And yes. As he stared across the black canyon at his old friend, Favian extended one hand to the drifting, glowing purple diamond of the energy portal beside him. Rick saw the purple lightning as Favian drew the portal’s energy into himself. Then Favian extended his other hand toward Rick. There was a bright, dragon-toothed burst of violet light and a narrow band of energy shot from Favian’s extended hand across the canyon, shot all the way from where Favian stood to the cliff’s edge at Rick’s feet.

  A bridge! A thin purple, wavering bridge of energy now lay across the Canyon of Nothingness.

  “Hurry!” Favian shouted. His hollow voice carried to Rick like a distant echo. “I can’t hold it for long!”

  Rick took one last glance back at the wraiths. They were so close now their red eyes seemed bright as fires. Their song was so loud it seemed to obliterate everything else.

  Rick knew what he had to do. He slipped his broken sword back into his belt. He faced forward. He tried to test the energy bridge. He tapped the sole of his right foot gingerly on the fizzing line of purple light. He felt nothing. It had no substance. Everything inside him told him he would fall through it. And the prospect was more terrifying than falling from a height to certain death on the earth below. To fall into this canyon where reality itself came to an end, to fall and fall into an eternal darkness: the thought turned his very cells to ice.

  “Hurry!” Favian shouted—even at this distance, Rick could hear the strain of effort in his friend’s voice.

  The wraiths sang louder as their attack came on.

  Rick held his breath and stepped off the edge of the world.

  He set his right foot down. Somehow, miraculously, the bridge held him. Without thinking—if he had thought about it, he would never have been able to do it—he put his left foot directly out in front of the right. And now he was on the bridge with death behind him and all the world before—and nothing, nothing at all, below.

  And yet the bridge did hold him. It was narrow, chillingly narrow. Almost like a tightrope. As he began the slow walk forward, he had to set the heel of each foot smack in front of the other’s toe, and then quickly bring the next out in front of the first. He had to stretch his arms to either side to keep his balance. And most of all, he had to keep himself from looking down. Even the slightest glance into that blackest of all blacknesses took the heart out of him, made him quail at the sheer impossibility of what he was trying to do.
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  He went forward, one step on the thin energy bridge, then another. Already he was too far to turn back and yet so far from the other side, he felt he could never make it. And now, too, the wraith-song washed over him. Were the creatures following him? Were they going to swarm him even here, on the bridge? How would he fight them then? He didn’t dare look back to check. His balance was too uncertain. The move would’ve sent him reeling over the edge.

  He forced himself to train his eyes on the red grass in the distance, on the glowing blue man with his hand outstretched.

  “Come on!” Favian cried to him.

  But he was going as fast as he could on that staticky, narrow strip.

  Suddenly, behind him, one of the wraiths let out an ear-blasting scream—that shriek of attack Rick remembered too well. It was so close to him that he couldn’t help himself. Instinctively, he twisted in fear to look back over his shoulder.

  It was a terrible mistake. He caught one glimpse of the cliff behind him, that shore of reality at the edge of this sea of emptiness. He saw the wraiths gathered there at the edge, straining helplessly in their desire to come after him and feed on his life. The one who had screamed had tried to do it. Rick just had time to see the thing sucked down into the blackness, swiftly down and down, shrieking into that unimaginable nothing, until it was gone.

  He saw all this in a single second. Then he lost his balance and fell.

  There was a dreadful moment when he tried to stay steady, when he wobbled this way and that, fighting to regain his equilibrium with his outstretched arms. Then there was a moment more horrible still when he realized it wasn’t going to happen.

  Then the energy bridge slipped out from underneath his sneaker soles and he plummeted down with mind-boggling speed.

  “Rick!” Favian cried out, his hollow voice echoing in the darkness.

  With a short, high, despairing cry, Rick threw his hand out to the purple line of energy and tried to grab it. He missed—or he thought he missed, because he felt nothing against his palm, because the bridge seemed to have no substance to it at all. And yet the next thing he knew, he was hanging there, dangling there, gripping the bridge with one hand, his feet swinging dangerously above the blackness below. He had done it. He had caught hold of the narrow bridge.

  But his hand was slipping—no, it was being pulled off. He was being sucked down. It was only now that he realized: that blackness, that emptiness, that nothingness below him—it was alive somehow! It had a will. It wanted him! It was pulling him into itself.

  Strangely—luckily!—that fact—the living pull of nothingness, its hunger to consume him—sent such a burst of terror through Rick’s heart that it gave him an instant of unnatural strength. Before he could even think about it, he had pulled himself back up toward the bridge. He got his other hand on it. He chinned himself up until he could get his knee on it, too. Slowly, perilously, he rose to his feet again, balancing once more above the hungry maw of sheer emptiness.

  He heard Favian cry out again. No words this time. Just a grunt of effort as he tried to keep the energy bridge flowing. Rick knew that Favian’s energy, like Mariel’s, was slowly draining out of him. He knew that every time he drew energy from the portals and expended it like this, he grew weaker than he was before. He knew there wasn’t much time before his friend’s strength gave out and the bridge vanished from beneath his feet.

  So, shaken as he was from that near fall, he immediately started moving forward again.

  Step-by-step, inch-by-inch, the red grass on the far side of the gap grew brighter, clearer, closer. Step-by-step, Favian’s form grew more distinct. Rick could now make out Favian’s long, lanky body. He could make out the twisted expression of effort on the boyish, innocent face beneath the close-cropped hair. Soon, he could even see the shifting light particles of which the man was made, the stuff that gave him his weird, sparkling, almost magical aura.

  A few more steps. A few more. He was almost there.

  “I can’t . . .,” said Favian, straining. “I can’t hold on . . .”

  Rick was close enough now to see his friend’s gritted teeth, his eyes narrowed with effort. He was close enough to see that Favian was almost out of strength.

  “I . . .,” Favian said.

  Rick forgot caution and rushed forward. He crossed the last few yards of the bridge in a quirky, balletic heel-to-toe run. He was one last step from the edge when Favian lost it. The sparkling blue man cried out one more time and tumbled backward onto the red grass.

  Rick didn’t have to look behind him to know that the energy bridge was snapping and sizzling back across the canyon into Favian’s hand with lightning speed. He didn’t wait for it to happen. He leapt.

  The next second, he was tumbling, falling to the earth, rolling across the red grass, sending a heartfelt Thank you! up to heaven as he came to rest right beside the fallen Favian.

  He lifted himself up on one elbow. He looked back over the Canyon of Nothingness. On the far side, he saw the army of wraiths beginning to give up on their prey. They were drifting back toward the ruins that rose darkly against the sickly yellow sky.

  Exhausted, Rick toppled back down to the grass.

  Exhausted, his sparkling blue friend rolled toward him and gazed at him with the worried expression that Rick remembered well.

  Favian gave a little gasp, and then a little laugh, and in a voice barely louder than a whisper he said, “Welcome back to the Realm.”

  12. LORDS OF THE REALM

  “SOMETHING IS GOING on in the ruins.”

  Kurodar paused in his latest act of creation, annoyed at the interruption. “What is it?” he said, speaking English in his thick Russian accent.

  The thundering voice came back, echoing all around him. It was the voice of the Octo-Guardian who surrounded his WarCraft and kept watch over the Realm below.

  “A possible intrusion,” the Guardian told him. “The Energy Wraiths sensed fresh life. They chased . . . something—I’m not sure exactly what. They chased it to the edge of the protective barrier.”

  Kurodar felt a burst of anxiety. Was it the Dial boy? The Traveler’s son? Had he ignored the threats to their hostage and returned to the Realm? Kurodar tasted something coppery and sour inside him. He knew what it was. It was fear.

  In RL, the man known as Kurodar, though a brilliant scientist, was ugly. There was no other way to put it. His face, said those who had seen him up close, looked something like a cross between a skull and a toad. His father used to tease him about this. After a few glasses of vodka, his father used to sneer at him from the wing chair in their living room. He used to say, “You are lucky, Ivan (which was Kurodar’s name at the time). You will never be disappointed in your children as I am. You will never have children at all because you are so hideous to look at, no woman would ever come near you.”

  Kurodar knew this must be true because his father said it and, to him, his father seemed nearly godlike in his power and wisdom. A colonel in the Soviet Union’s secret police, the KGB, Kurodar’s dad was feared by everyone. Kurodar could remember walking with the old man through the streets of Moscow. He could remember how people dropped their eyes and stared at the pavement as they passed, afraid to even look the colonel in the face. They had good reason to be afraid, too. Kurodar’s father had only to say the word, and anyone he didn’t like would be dragged off to Lubyanka Prison in the middle of the night. And once there, they would vanish forever.

  This—his father’s power—the fear he caused in others—made young Kurodar very proud. All he wanted in life was to grow up to be like him.

  But when Kurodar was still a youth, the Soviet Union collapsed, destroyed by the stratagems of the Americans and the uprisings of the people the Soviets had conquered. What had happened to his father then . . . well, it was too awful for Kurodar to think about. Not just the way his father died, but the humiliation of it. This, Kurodar knew, was the price of failure.

  The MindWar, therefore, must not fail. Here, in
the MindWar Realm, Kurodar was as powerful as his father had ever been. Here, he was no longer ugly. In fact, he barely had a physical being at all. He was merely a presence, a sort of pink mist that contained his most powerful asset: his intelligence. It was with this intelligence that he was going to have his revenge on the Americans for what they had done. His only fear was that he would fail as his father had failed.

  This was why he was so afraid of Rick Dial.

  “Track it down,” he told the Octo-Guardian now. “Find out what it is. Destroy it if you find it. Whatever you do, don’t let it get away.”

  “As you wish,” the Guardian replied, his voice echoing all around the craft.

  “Meanwhile, I will communicate with RL,” said Kurodar. “We will make sure the Traveler understands we are serious. We will send him another video of the girl.”

  There was a pause before the Octo-Guardian spoke again. He didn’t like to contradict the Lord of the Realm and so he hesitated. But finally he said, “If the Traveler wasn’t discouraged by the first video, why should it be any different with a second?”

  If Kurodar had still had a face, he would have smiled.

  “Because in this video,” he said, “the girl will be screaming.”

  13. ESCAPE PLAN

  MOLLY WOKE UP. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Then, her heart sinking, she remembered.

  Her kidnappers had locked her in this room. A bare room. Wooden walls, barred windows. A splintery wooden floor of bare boards. Outside, through the bars on the windows, nothing but forest, naked trees in pale winter light, light already beginning to fade and fail.

  It had been hours since she’d seen anyone, days since anyone had spoken to her. It was two days ago, to be exact, when the kidnappers had come in here and forced her to appear on their stupid video. Incredibly humiliating. There had been four thugs in the room, watching her, grinning at her: Smiley McDeath, Thug One, the Nose Guy, and another thug, a giant, a huge muscleman who looked like he could crush her with a single blow. They had forced her to kneel on the floor. They had forced her to say she was scared, forced her to beg Rick and Professor Dial to do whatever they were told. They had hovered over her the whole time and bared their teeth as they laughed at her. It was awful.