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  Then Favian moved like a flash. He always moved like that: like a flash of sparkling blue light, barely substantial. He flashed away through the building’s half-open door. And Rick, as he so often did, as he so often had to do to keep from getting himself killed, followed after him.

  He was inside. The blue streak of Favian shut the building’s door behind him. The cries of the dead outside instantly grew dim. The bright-yellow light of the sky was extinguished. For a few seconds, before his eyes adjusted, Rick couldn’t see. The shadows of the interior obscured everything.

  Then his vision cleared.

  He was in a church, a strange and beautiful church with colorful mosaics covering every inch of the walls. A dark, sad-eyed Virgin Mary gazed at him from a framed painting on one side of him. A sternly frowning Christ peered down at him from the ceiling above.

  The main portion of the church—the nave—was open. There were no pews, no statues, only a large floor, which, like the walls, was covered with richly complex and colorful mosaic tiles.

  There was nothing else there. Except the sarcophagus.

  More dead, thought Rick.

  Indeed, the sarcophagus could have held half a dozen corpses. It was a huge coffin, its sides covered with elaborate mosaics like the ceiling, walls, and floor. It was surrounded by four stout and towering columns, also covered with mosaics. And it was open—the coffin had no lid.

  Rick glanced at Favian—Favian, whose face was always pinched with worry and fear. “What is this place?” he asked him. “This city? How did we get here? I can’t remember . . .”

  Favian’s figure of fluctuating blue light shimmered. “Mariel and I had to sneak in when the darkness spread.”

  “The darkness?”

  “It spread over everything everywhere,” Favian told him. “The Scarlet Plain. The Blue Wood. The Ruins. Everything. This is all that’s left: the Golden City. It’s all that’s left of MindWar.”

  “The Golden City,” Rick murmured. The heart of MindWar, the battery that fed the place with energy. But why was it full of dead creatures? And what was this darkness Favian was talking about?

  He did not really understand, but he turned away from Favian, back to the sarcophagus. He had the powerful sense that he should look inside, that he had to look inside—and at the same time, he knew that he very much did not want to look inside, not ever. He felt as if he were in one of those dreams where you have to do what you know you shouldn’t do.

  He took a long breath. He could still hear dead things outside the church. They were pounding on the great wooden door, crying for his blood. He ignored them. He stepped deeper into the building, deeper into the shadow, closer to the sarcophagus.

  Favian flashed along by his side.

  “I don’t think you should do that,” he said. “Really. Don’t look in there.”

  Rick ignored him. He kept moving toward the enormous coffin.

  “This place, this church. It’s so strange,” said Favian, worried. “Like a ghost church or something . . .”

  Rick still didn’t answer. All his attention was focused on the sarcophagus. It was drawing him, pulling him to it.

  He reached it now. Holding his sword in one hand, he put his other hand on the edge and leaned over the side to take a look.

  He gasped at what he saw. He could barely comprehend.

  The sarcophagus was full . . . of nothingness. An impenetrable, incomprehensible darkness. A darkness that went down and down forever, deeper than death itself.

  Rick stood staring into it as if hypnotized. He felt something inside him drop open like a trapdoor, all his courage falling through it into that eternal nothingness.

  And suddenly, like a great wave, the dark swarmed up out of the coffin and seized him.

  2. THE AWAKENED

  RICK’S EYES FLASHED open and he started screaming. He reached out frantically in a panic. Was he being swallowed by the darkness? Had the nothingness claimed him forever? Was he dead? Was he in hell?

  He fought off the panic. He touched his chest with his hands. He felt his heart pounding, his lungs heaving as he gasped for breath.

  Alive! he thought. I’m still alive!

  He lifted himself up on one elbow and looked around him. He saw his desk, his laptop. His jeans and sweatshirt crumpled on the floor. He saw his football posters and football calendar tacked onto the wall. The harsh glare of sunlight was breaking through the parting of the curtains over his window.

  He was in his bedroom. In his family’s house. In the MindWar compound. Safe. Alive.

  His heart slowing, he sat up on the edge of his bed.

  Another dream, he thought.

  The dreams came every night now, every night since his return from MindWar. Each one of them was more realistic than the last. Each time he woke it was more impossible to believe it had not been real, that he had not been somehow swept into the MindWar Realm again without using the portal. Which was impossible. So yeah, it had to be a dream. But it sure did seem like the real deal.

  Now the headache hit. Of course. Like the dreams, they were coming every day, more powerful each time. This one felt like someone had stuck his thumbs into his eyes and ripped his skull open. Rick sucked in a breath through his clenched teeth. He pressed his temples with his thumbs. Closed his eyes. Massaged his brow with his fingers.

  He knew the headache would pass. He knew the dream would fade too. But they would both come back, stronger and more real than ever.

  Because of the Realm. Because he had spent too much time in the MindWar Realm, a computerized world created by a terrorist named Kurodar, built out of a link between Kurodar’s mind and a bank of supercomputers, a way for the killer to imagine himself into any computer system on the planet and take it over. Unless Rick could stop him.

  The Realm had infected Rick’s brain somehow, causing these dreams, these headaches. And the infection was getting worse.

  That thought made something curdle in the pit of Rick’s stomach. If there was one thing in this world he didn’t want, it was Kurodar’s sick imagination poisoning his own. Not much was known about the terrorist, but they knew this: he was a highly not-nice person. He had already tried to crash several jets into a city, kidnap Rick’s father, and blow up Washington, DC. And for Rick, the idea of having the imagination of a guy like that digging like a worm inside his own brain was sickening.

  He didn’t want to tell anyone what was happening to him. He was afraid Commander Mars, or his lieutenant, Miss Ferris, would take him out of the fight, forbid him to return to the Realm. Rick’s father—the physicist code-named “Traveler”—had guessed the truth and was looking for a cure. In the meantime, Rick could only hope the symptoms would pass and he would recover over time.

  For the moment, anyway, the throbbing pain inside his head was beginning to recede a little. Rick thought he might be able to get up, wash up, get dressed, go outside, and join Mom and Raider for breakfast.

  He began to lower his hands from his head . . . And as he did, his mouth opened and he stopped breathing as a new sickness of fear filled him.

  “What?” he whispered. “What???”

  His wrist! His right wrist! There were marks on it. Four lines of red, with purple bruising already staining the skin around them.

  The second he saw them, Rick knew what those marks were. He remembered the dead Boar Soldier in his dream, the one who had grabbed him, the one who had torn his flesh as he broke free of its grip . . .

  Those were its marks. Its claw marks on Rick’s wrist.

  Rick touched the marks with his fingertips. He felt the ridges of his scraped flesh. He felt the pain. It was impossible but true: The marks were there. They were real.

  And this was no dream!

  3. ARCANE HEARTS

  RICK ALWAYS TRIED to show a cheerful face to his brother. Nine-year-old Raider was so relentlessly upbeat and energetic himself that Rick sim
ply didn’t have the heart to bring him down. The kid had a beaming, freckled, pie plate of a face, with dark hair spilling sloppily down over his forehead, and a mouth that never seemed to stop moving—especially now, as he ate and yammered at the same time.

  “So if I get the new box for Christmas, I’m thinking we should be able to spend about a week just totally destroying the latest Luigi Haunted House, which is supposed to be completely epic, and I read in Game Master that they may even reboot the old Mario Newsman series, which would be awesome times ten, and then we could . . .”

  This went on and on as Raider sat at the breakfast table and shoveled cereal into his maw, somehow managing to talk, chew, and swallow all at once without ever interrupting one to do the other.

  Rick sat across from him, moving his fork listlessly through the scrambled eggs on his plate. He was trying to stop thinking about those scratch marks on his arm. Those scratch marks hidden underneath his sweatshirt sleeve. Those impossible scratch marks. From a living dead Boar Soldier. Who couldn’t exist outside the Realm. Who had only been in a dream. Who had left marks on his arm . . .

  He wasn’t doing a very good job of not thinking about it.

  His mom was standing at the sink, the morning light from the window turning her straw-colored hair into a kind of Mom Halo. She was rinsing the dishes off to put in the dishwasher and had her back to the table. But now and then she would glance over her shoulder at Rick and smile a little at the way he patiently absorbed Raider’s constant chatter. This time, though, when she looked back, she saw Rick toying with his food and silently lifted her chin at his plate: Eat something.

  Rick took a forkful of eggs and stuck it in his mouth, swallowing without tasting it, for her sake. But the sight of those marks on his arm . . . It had killed his appetite. The Boar Soldier was dead. He was in a dream! How could he leave scratches on his wrist? How could it happen? What could it mean?

  He had to talk to his dad. His dad was the only person who might have some clue what was happening.

  He quickly swallowed a few more forkfuls of eggs, then pushed back his chair and got up from the table. Raider was still talking. Rick thumped him on top of the head with his fist, thump, thump, thump.

  “Yo. Earth to Raider. I gotta go save the world. Hold that thought.”

  The idea that Raider could hold that, or any, thought without releasing it through his mouth was ridiculous. But Rick knew he could come back hours from now and pick up the same sentence at a later stage and get the general idea of what the kid was thinking about.

  Which would be Christmas, of course. Because while in MindWar, everything was bizarreness and danger 24/7, here in RL—Real Life—Christmas was only a week and a half away. The thought of the presents and the food, not to mention the food and the presents, pretty much dominated every second of Raider’s waking consciousness.

  Mom had done everything she could to keep RL as normal as possible. As soon as they’d moved into their little green-and-white barracks house in the MindWar compound, she hurried to decorate it with family photos and homey furniture to make it look like their old house back in Putnam Hills. Now, too, she had somehow managed to put out their usual Christmas decorations: the white fairy lights around the windows, the frosted angels on the glass, the manger scene on the lampstand in the living room, and, of course, the tree, which Rick, Raider, and Dad had cut down in the surrounding forest and which now stood in the living room corner. After Rick had managed—just barely—to escape the Realm last time, they had all celebrated by breaking out their boxes of old ornaments and hanging them from the branches. Even Rick himself had to admit the decorated tree achieved a high level of Christmas awesomeness.

  But the moment Rick stepped out of the house, this homey atmosphere vanished. The MindWar compound was a secret military installation hidden in a vast, dense forest owned by the federal government. On the surface, it was a collection of barracks surrounded by barbed wire, with guard towers here and there, armed guards inside the glassed cubicles on top. It looked pretty much like any Army camp and about as un-Christmassy as you could get. But that was only on the surface. Most of the place was underground and even less Christmassy, if that was possible: just a vast network of buried windowless corridors and rooms housing the people and technology required to send MindWarriors into Kurodar’s universe.

  Or MindWarrior, singular. Rick was now the only one. But there had been three others before him, as he’d now discovered . . . and that was the other thing on his mind, the other thing he needed to talk to his dad about.

  So he headed for the infirmary.

  It was cold outside now, really cold. The sky was uniformly gray and there were flurries of snow in the air. The surrounding forest was pale green, the leafless trees sapping the color from the interspersed firs and hemlocks and pines. The usual security teams stationed outside some of the more important buildings had gone indoors. Only the tower guards and the guards around the perimeter remained visible.

  The infirmary was a large barracks against the fence on one side of the compound. It looked the same as most of the other barracks except it was painted light red instead of green and white and there was a red cross over the entrance. The guards now stationed just within the door did not even flinch as Rick walked by them. Everyone knew him here. In a way, he was the reason why the entire camp existed.

  With a nod to the receptionist at the front desk, he continued down the narrow hallway to the Recovery Wing. His father was already there, in the waiting area outside the last room in the barracks. Rick had expected that. But he had not expected to see Professor Jameson with him.

  Jameson, his dad’s old friend, had been the head of the Physics Department at Putnam Hills University where his dad had worked. The two scientists had been working on CBI—computer-brain interface—the possibilities of linking the human imagination with computers. It was during that work that Rick’s dad stumbled on Kurodar’s Realm. Having alerted his old college girlfriend Leila Kent, now an intelligence officer in the State Department, the Traveler had gone underground to invent the technology needed to invade the Realm and wage MindWar.

  So that’s who Professor Jameson was. But more importantly, he was also Molly’s father. And if he was here, then Molly was probably here as well.

  Jameson and Rick’s dad saw Rick coming and quickly stopped talking. They turned to greet him with bright smiles. The Traveler was the smaller of the two, a short, narrow man, bald, with thick glasses—very unlike his broad, tall, athletic son. Jameson was bigger and more disheveled. He could never keep his last few strands of hair properly combed or keep his shirt from coming untucked around his paunch. A big, slouched, sloppy St. Bernard of a man.

  Professor Jameson reached out and shook Rick’s hand in both of his, meeting his eyes with a meaningful look. Rick had saved his daughter’s life barely a week ago—shattered the very boundaries of the Realm to sweep her out of a closing ring of enemy gunmen. Rick wasn’t sure how much the professor had been told about the adventure, but it seemed he’d been told something, judging by the look of affection and gratitude in his eyes.

  Rick shook hands with him and turned to his father. “How’s Victor One doing?” he asked.

  “Better,” said the Traveler. “They’re in there.”

  They? thought Rick, and an unpleasant feeling fanned out over his chest. He didn’t want to admit to himself what the feeling was, but it was hard to avoid the truth: it was jealousy. He turned and looked through the doorway and . . . yup, it was jealousy all right. Now he was sure.

  Victor One, the Traveler’s personal bodyguard, had heroically gone in search of Molly when she’d been kidnapped by Kurodar’s operatives. The two of them had fought side by side in a desperate battle to survive. Victor One was a cool, tough, ex-military man. Not to mention craggily handsome. Also not to mention relaxed and witty in a way the intense, passionately competitive Rick could never hope to be. Rick had brought b
oth Molly and Victor One to safety in the end, but not before the bodyguard had taken a bullet in the chest, about two inches from his heart. A bad injury. If Victor One had come any closer to dying, he’d have to buy a harp. But now, only a week later, he was starting to mend. He lay on the narrow hospital bed, pale but awake and alert. He had a half smile on his rugged face. And his humorous blue eyes were trained on Molly.

  Molly was sitting at the foot of the bed, smiling down at him, talking softly. She looked good—to Rick, she always looked good. She was tall, nearly six feet, and had a powerful athlete’s build. But her face was delicate and pretty, with soft brown eyes and a small nose peppered with faint freckles. She was wearing a purple-pink sweater and white jeans, which struck Rick as appealingly girly—and made him more jealous still. In fact, the sight of her—the sight of her there with Victor One—hit Rick hard in all kinds of ways he didn’t want to think about.

  There had been a moment before all this crazy MindWar stuff happened . . . a moment when Rick, to his own surprise, had found himself kissing Molly, their long friendship suddenly melding into something else, something more. But whatever their relationship was and whatever it was about to become, it all pretty much ended when his legs were shattered. After that, after he lost his football life, he didn’t want to see Molly at all. Or, that is, he didn’t think Molly would be interested in him. And he didn’t want her pity, that was for sure.

  And then, in the Realm, he met Mariel.

  There was nothing like Mariel in RL. The majestic, beautiful silver spirit who gave him strength and weapons when he needed them, who taught him how to use his spirit to manipulate and transform the Realm’s substance . . . Rick’s feelings for Mariel were incredibly powerful—but what were those feelings exactly? Every time he saw her, his heart filled up—but with what? Was it love? Could you even love a computer-world water spirit? Could he ever bring her back with him into RL?