Headmistress Nilssin raised her hand sharply. “Go to class. Follow your normal routine. And needless to say, don’t even think about trying to go over to the Lifelight pyramid.”
“Headmistress Nilssin, look—”
“We’ll talk later.” Headmistress Nilssin walked swiftly away.
Aja went back in her room and gently closed the door. She felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. The fact that the Lifelight directors had personally acted to suspend her privileges—well, there were just no words to express how sick she felt. What was wrong with these people? It wasn’t fair. Why didn’t they believe her? She was arguably the best student the academy had ever had. Not once had she ever broken a rule, ever cheated on an exam, or ever been a behavior problem. Not once!
Her mind began clicking through the alternatives. Nak was smart. There was no doubt about that. Smarter than she’d given him credit for. If he had done things right, it might literally be impossible for her to prove she had nothing to do with the program.
In which case, she only had one alternative: finish the game. And win it!
She picked up her communicator, called Nak. “It’s me,” she said. “Lifelight Services has suspended my privileges. Can you get me into Lifelight?”
Nak started laughing. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
Within minutes they were inside the huge Lifelight pyramid, heading down into the old research wing. Nak had all kinds of tricks up his sleeve—fake ID chips, bogus passwords, and an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the architecture of the building. As they were walking down the hallway, she noticed a pair of green shoes still sticking out of the same jump tube.
“That kid’s still here,” she said. “I wonder who he is.”
She started to poke her head into the station to look into the tube at the boy’s face.
Nak grabbed her arm. “You want to play the game or not?” he said sharply.
“Okay, okay,” she said.
“Here,” Nak said. “Your tube’s ready. This time there’s no way they’ll find you. I took extra precautions.”
She looked him in the eye. “You sure?”
He nodded.
She walked in and lay down on the jump table.
“Go save Prince Norvall, Aja,” Nak said as he leaned over her to plug in the neural connection wires. Then he smiled coldly. “If you can…”
EIGHT
She entered the jump in the tight rock shaft again, the cold walls pressing against her. It was completely dark. Aja felt her skin crawl. Even though she knew it was just a jump, she still felt claustrophobic.
As she tried to calm herself down, she could hear breathing across from her. She’d forgotten all about that. She’d been trapped in here with a man. A man who’d said his name was Press.
“Ah,” the man named Press said. “There you are. We had a bit of an interruption.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d notice,” she said.
“I’m not part of Nak’s game,” the man said. “I’m like you. I tandemed into his jump. The difference is, Nak doesn’t know I’m here.”
“What?” Aja said. “How’s that possible?”
“That’s not important,” the man named Press said. “We don’t have much time. So listen carefully.”
“Okay.” She cleared her throat. The sound was flat and compressed inside the rock tomb. She tried to breathe slowly. But her skin was clammy, and she felt a little light-headed. “So why are you in Nak’s game?”
“I came to tell you about your destiny.”
Okay, this was getting more strange and improbable by the moment. “My destiny?”
What was he getting at? She tried to focus on what he was saying, tried to push aside the fact that she was entombed in a coffin-size slab of rock.
“You and I are what’s known as Travelers,” the man named Press said. “We are engaged in a great battle against forces that seek to destroy Veelox. But not just Veelox. There are other worlds similar to Veelox. Their fate hangs in the balance.”
“Okay, okay, hold on,” Aja said. “You said you’re not part of Nak’s game.”
“Correct.”
“So this stuff you’re telling me—”
“Also has nothing to do with Nak’s game. Nothing directly.”
“Then, uh…why not just come talk to me at the academy or something?”
“Saint Dane is very powerful on Veelox. The academy is part of his strategy here. He’s watching it very closely.”
“Saint Who?”
“I’m sorry. Saint Dane is the adversary of the Travelers. You’ll know him as a tall thin man with long black hair.”
“That sounds like King Hruth.”
“For the purposes of Nak’s game, yes. In real life he’s taken the identity of the man you saw talking to Nak the other day, a man name Allik Worthintin. He’s a director of Lifelight.”
“But…how…”
“We don’t have much time. Save your questions. All I can tell you is that you’ll soon be ready to assume your responsibilities as a Traveler. Other Travelers may come to visit you. When they do, protect them from Saint Dane.”
Something in the back of Aja’s mind said, This whole thing is totally ridiculous. And, despite what Press is saying, he’s probably just another trick in Nak’s nasty little game. But the good thing was that his calm voice was keeping her claustrophobia at bay.
“Now, it’s time for you to go.”
“But, I need more answers to—”
“We’re in a shaft. If you climb up my chains, you’ll find a ladder cut into the rock. Climb up to the top of the shaft. When you get there—”
“But what about you?”
“As long as you win the game, I’ll be fine. My jump will terminate, and I’ll flume off to some other territory, happy as a clam.”
Flume? What was he talking about? What was a flume?
“Well, what if I don’t win? What if the Beast catches me?”
“Don’t think about that.”
There was a brief silence. Aja was putting things together, little slivers of evidence that had been assembling and reassembling in her head.
“I noticed something strange the last time I finished my jump,” she said. “It was cold in King Hruth’s castle. After I finished the jump, I kept shivering. That’s not supposed to happen.”
“As you know, Aja, there is an intimate neural connection between your brain and your body. Lifelight taps into that connection. As far as your brain knows, Lifelight is reality. Back when Dr. Zetlin designed Lifelight, one of the biggest hurdles he had to get over was the feedback loop between the body and the mind. If somebody tripped and fell in Lifelight, their leg would hurt when they finished the jump.”
“That happened to me this morning!” Aja said. “I hurt my ankle in the jump. When I got out, I was limping.”
“Sure. But it can be a lot worse. Back when Dr. Zetlin was first testing Lifelight, several people actually died. There was some debate about the cause. But it was suspected that it had something to do with the neural feedback loop. So he tested it himself. He went on a jump in which he crashed a vehicle into a wall. He almost died. His heart stopped, and he spent a week in the hospital.”
“Okay, but they solved all those problems,” Aja said. “There’s a damping program in the origin code that cuts the neural feedback loop when anything happens that would hurt your body. Lifelight’s a hundred percent safe.”
“Unless…”
Aja gasped. “Are you saying that Nak interfered with the neural damping protocols?”
Press didn’t answer.
“Oh my god!” she said. “But—”
“Right now all the modifications he’s made to the origin code only apply inside his game. But if the program succeeds in taking over the core…”
Aja felt her eyes widen. “You’re saying—”
“That’s right. Every single jumper in a Lifelight pyramid would be at risk.”
&n
bsp; “But…that’s like half the people in Rubic City!”
Press said nothing.
Once again, Aja was aware of the walls around her, the oppressive silence, the darkness. She shivered.
And then something else struck her. The pair of green sport shoes sticking out of the jump tube. The bare legs of the boy in the tube had been freckled. Like a red-haired boy’s would be. And when they’d shown the hologram of Omni Cader during assembly, he’d been wearing red shoes. She hadn’t made the connection until just now.
“Prince Norvall,” she said. “The point of the game is to save Prince Norvall. I thought that Nak had just harvested his image. But he didn’t, did he?”
“No,” Press said.
“Omni Cader’s in this jump too, isn’t he? He’s trapped in the game.”
“That’s right. And if you don’t save him, he’ll be its first casualty.”
For a moment, dread sluiced through her. But then she took a deep breath. She wouldn’t let Nak get away with this. “I’ll figure it out,” she said firmly. “Nak can’t beat me. I’m smarter than he is.”
“True.” She sensed that Press was smiling at her. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll beat him.”
Aja’s breathing quickened. “This game is a puzzle. Nak told me there’s a way out. He’s too vain to have lied to me about that. There has to be a solution. A clear, logical solution.”
Press didn’t say anything. But she got the impression he was laughing silently.
“What!” she said angrily.
Before he could answer, the grinding noise began again. She felt the vibration running through the rock.
“What are you laughing about?” she said. “This isn’t funny.”
“Sometimes the solution to a problem is that there is no solution,” he said.
“That doesn’t make sense!” Aja said. “Every problem has a logical solution.”
“Now’s not the time for philosophical debate,” Press said. “Go!”
The grinding was getting louder. She could feel the vibration through the rock. She felt in front of her until her fingers closed around the chain.
“Just step on me,” Press said. He must have felt her hesitate, because he added, “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been through lots worse stuff than being walked on.” Then he laughed loudly. There was something reassuring about him, something that made her feel safe.
She put one foot on the chain around his wrist. Press grunted. It was obviously a little painful. But then she felt him lifting her into the air. She slid her hands up the shaft until she found a slot like the bottom rung of a ladder. She hauled herself up and began climbing.
“Remember.” Press’s voice echoed up toward her. “You are a Traveler. You’re destined for this.”
She kept climbing until she felt her head bang against the ceiling.
“Ow!” she said.
Then the grinding stopped. She felt behind her. The shaft had disappeared. She was in another room. From the way sound echoed in the chamber, she was sure it was quite large.
It was also pitch black. She began feeling her way along the hard stone, moving farther into the large room. As she moved, she felt objects on the floor. Some were hard and metallic. And some were rounded and softer. Wood, maybe.
They clattered as she moved over them.
And then she realized, as her fingers brushed over a large round object with several holes in it…No, not wood.
Bone. It was a skull.
She was crawling over bones. Bones and armor and shields.
Her blood ran cold for a moment. She paused. What was this place? And then she heard it. Somewhere in the distance, a soft snuffling sound. Then a dragging sound, like a bag full of rocks being hauled across a floor.
The Beast. Somewhere out in the darkness was the Beast.
How far away was it?
Close enough. Close enough that it would find her. Maybe if she crawled back down the shaft. She felt the wall behind her. The shaft was gone! The wall was completely smooth—other than a row of small holes.
What could she do? How could she get away if she couldn’t even see? She felt blindly around her. Maybe there was another passage somewhere!
Her hands closed around something. A thigh bone? Wait…no. It was the handle of an old spear. She felt her way up to the top until she reached the point. It was still sharp. A spear!
The snuffling stopped. Then the Beast screamed once. It knew she was there, Aja was sure of it.
Suddenly she had a thought.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Come on! Come and get me!”
There was a brief moment of silence. Then she heard it. The Beast was coming for her, charging through the dark. Aja felt behind her. The holes! Where were they?
Finally she found one. It was chest high. She thrust the hilt of the spear into it so it stuck straight out from the wall.
Footsteps thudded toward her. How far away was the charging Beast now? She couldn’t tell. Close. Very close.
“Come on!” she shouted. “Come get me!”
Closer. Closer.
Just as she felt that the Beast was on her, she dove to her right.
As she smashed painfully into the unforgiving rock floor, she heard a massive impact. The Beast had hit the wall. And if her plan had worked, it had impaled itself on the spear.
On cue the Beast screamed. This time it was not a scream of anger. It was a scream of pain.
Perfect! She’d skewered the Beast. Or, more accurately, it had skewered itself. The question was, how badly. Aja decided there was no point in sitting around waiting to find out. She started running as fast as she could. She figured if she slammed into something or tripped over something—hey, that was better than getting eaten by the Beast.
Behind her she heard the Beast thrashing wildly.
The Beast screamed again. She tripped, righted herself, tripped again, then continued on. And as she did, she heard footsteps. The Beast was following her. It was hurt. But by no means was it dead.
She ran as fast as she dared.
But the Beast ran faster. She could hear it, getting closer and closer.
I’m not gonna make it! Aja thought.
She literally felt its breath on her neck.
Oh, well, she thought.
And then suddenly she was airborne, falling through some kind of hole, out into space.
She hit the hard ground with a painful thud. She somersaulted to her feet. What now? she thought.
The answer came before she had a chance to decide for herself. The great horrible grinding noise had begun again. And as it did, light flooded into the chamber. She could still see up into the chamber above. The dying Beast was thrashing and rolling in pain. It stopped moving just as the door to the upper chamber slammed shut.
Yes! I’ve done it! I’ve killed the Beast. For a moment she felt triumphant. But then she realized that killing the Beast was only the first step in winning the game. She still had to find Omni Cader…and then escape the maze.
A light shone from a hole in the ceiling, beaming directly on a symbol carved into the wall. There had been symbols like this in every chamber. They looked like mathematical symbols, but they weren’t any kind of symbol she recognized.
Mathematical symbols. Something was tugging at the back of her mind. Mathematical symbols. Why was she thinking about mathematical symbols when—
Again, the grinding noise. Again, the walls began to move…revealing a passage much like the first one she had entered when she was thrown down here. She began running down the passage. Now that the Beast was no longer a threat, she didn’t care how much noise she made.
“Omni!” she called. “Omni, where are you?”
For what seemed like hours, she ran through the ever-shifting maze, calling and calling. Just when she had despaired of finding the boy, she heard a high, thin voice.
“Hey! Over here!”
Where “over here” was, Aja wasn’t quite sure. She blundered thro
ugh the maze. And then the walls moved again.
And then…there he was. Not fifty feet away from her.
Omni Cader sat in a heap, pale face smudged with dirt, his red hair a mess. He looked scared out of his mind. A single thin chain of gleaming steel led from his ankle to an iron stud driven into the wall. “Aja? Is that you? Aja Killian?”
She nodded.
“What’s happened to me?” he shouted. “I can’t get out of Nak’s jump. My bracelet isn’t working!” He held up his arm.
“Don’t worry!” she shouted back. “I’m getting you out.”
She ran toward him.
“No!” the boy screamed. “Not yet!”
Aja halted about twenty feet from the boy. He was in a small chamber just tall enough to lie down in. The door was open…but Omni didn’t come out.
“What’s wrong?” Aja said.
“The door shuts really fast. If you don’t time it right, it’ll—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the door to the chamber slammed down. It was a massive slab of rock. If she’d been standing there, it would have squashed her like a bug.
In the center of the rock was a large symbol, similar to the others she’d seen in the maze.
After a moment the entire passage began to move, squeezing shut. She dove backward until she reached another passage. Soon the passage to Omni’s cell was gone completely.
What was she going to do? She looked around. Symbols on the walls again. What was it about—
Suddenly it hit her. Math! That was the trick. The maze was a mathematical puzzle. Lifelight was a computer. Computers ran on math. There were symbols on all the walls of the maze. But there was some kind of pattern to the way the walls moved here. Math was just patterns. Right? Maybe they weren’t mathematical symbols she’d learned in school. But that didn’t mean they weren’t part of a mathematical sequence. If she could figure out the pattern that controlled the walls, she could figure out how to get out of the maze.
On some level, the mathematical structure of the maze had to be connected to the structure of the program that Nak had sent to take over the core. By solving the puzzle—that is, by getting Omni Cader out of the maze—she’d shut down the program. And in so doing, she’d save the core. Along with the lives of hundreds—probably even thousands—of people.