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  So he’d met Mariel . . . and then he saw Molly again . . . and some of his old feelings for her had started coming back . . . and now, he saw her with Victor One, smiling down at Victor One, him smiling back up at her . . .

  Confusing, confusing, confusing . . . especially after what he’d discovered in the hidden room in the underground corridors of the compound . . . the two glass coffins down there . . . the weirdest thing . . .

  Rick put something like an easygoing expression on his face and strolled into the hospital room looking as if Victor One and Molly could get married on the spot without causing him a care in the world.

  “Hey,” said Victor One, his voice hoarse. He lifted a hand weakly in greeting. “There’s the hero of the hour.”

  Molly stood up from the bed quickly, as if Rick had caught her doing something wrong. Her cheeks flushed red.

  Rick thought, Hey, no worries. If you’re into Victor One, you’re into him, no big deal, no reason to get all blushy about it.

  That’s what he thought, not what he felt. What he felt was . . . confusing . . .

  “Hey, Mol,” he said casually—and then he quickly looked away from her to give her a chance to recover her composure. “How you feeling, V-One?”

  “Like some clown shot me in the chest. How ’bout you? How’re you feeling?”

  “Like some gigantic flying octopus chased me through space while enemy fighters tried to ray-gun me to death. Otherwise, great.”

  “We can compare scars,” said Victor One with something between a cough and a laugh.

  Molly now spoke up. “Victor has been using his downtime to do some really interesting research.”

  She sounded proud of him. Rick didn’t like the sound. “Oh yeah?” he said as cheerfully as he could. “What’ve you found out?”

  “Well, lying around bleeding all day gave me a lot of time to think,” V-One said softly. “I’ve been worried that there may be a traitor in the MindWar Project.”

  Rick nodded. They were all worried about that.

  Victor One continued, “So it occurred to me to wonder: that house in the woods where the kidnappers imprisoned Molly . . . that barn where Kurodar hid the Breach into the Realm . . . all those acres of swamp and forest where everything was so well hidden . . . Who owned that land?”

  Rick tilted his head. He had to admit it was a good question. Victor One wasn’t just tough and brave (and ruggedly handsome), he was also smart.

  So what? he thought. If she’s into him, she’s into him . . . I’ll always have my computerized dream girl who’s probably not even real . . .

  “I linked up with some of my military intelligence pals,” the bodyguard continued. “The land ownership was well hidden behind a lot of dummy companies, but we finally traced it to a dude named Theodore Moros. Greek-American businessman in his seventies. Made, like, a gazillion dollars in the aerospace industry. Now gives it away to a lot of supposedly good causes.”

  “Like Kurodar trying to blow up America?” Rick said.

  “Yeah, that didn’t strike me as such a good cause either. I’m thinking if my intelligence pal can help me get inside Mr. Moros’s computers, I might be able to find out what else he’s been spending his money on. I might even make a little unexpected visit to Mr. Moros’s mansion on this Caribbean island he owns . . .”

  “There is no way you are getting out of that bed until you’re completely better,” said Molly.

  And the way she said it—like a tender, caring girlfriend—made Rick glad that his hair couldn’t actually spontaneously burst into flames—because if it could have, it would have, which would have been very difficult to explain.

  Well, here was the thing (so Rick told himself): if Molly was in love with V-One now, Rick had no business complaining about it or getting jealous about it or anything like that. He had avoided Molly. Ignored her. And he’d gotten all . . . let’s say fascinated . . . He’d gotten all fascinated with the beautiful Mariel. And it wasn’t Molly’s fault if Mariel had turned out to be . . .

  What exactly had Mariel turned out to be? That was the question that had been bedeviling Rick ever since he found those glass coffins. Mariel had been so much to him, meant so much to him, but now . . . now that he’d seen what was in the coffins . . .

  Rick had only recently found out about the three MindWarriors who’d been sent into the Realm before him. One of them had died in Kurodar’s weird world. Rick had seen the poor guy’s Realm self rotting in the Spider-Snake tunnels beneath the Scarlet Plain. The other two—so Rick now believed—were Favian and Mariel.

  When Rick had returned from his last Realm immersion, he had gone in search of the truth. He’d used a flash drive his father had given him to override the MindWar compound’s security. He had made his way through the maze-like tunnels of the compound. He had come to a secret room at the compound’s center. And that’s where he had found the two glass coffins, foggy inside with refrigeration mist.

  In one of those coffins, he had discovered the body of a short, stocky black man. The man was lying in suspended animation, but still breathing. Peering through the mist, Rick recognized him immediately as the RL version of the blue sprite Favian. Which meant that the other coffin . . .

  The other coffin held Mariel. His heart had sped up as he moved to the edge of the box. What would her RL self look like? Would she be as beautiful as she was in the Realm? Would she be older? Younger? Would there be a wedding band on her finger?

  He came to the edge of the coffin and looked inside. His breath caught. His eyes went wide.

  There was nothing there. Nothing except a box. It was a plastic black box. It had blue lights that flashed dimly beneath its shiny surface. It seemed to be some kind of computerized device or something.

  Rick wasn’t sure what it was, but he had to wonder: was that machine the real Mariel? Was that all she was: a computer-generated image of a human being? Had Rick formed an infatuation with an illusion? Had he given up Molly—the real, warm, human Molly—for someone who wasn’t even there?

  Rick turned to Molly now. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her, but he felt that he had to say something, something to let her know it was okay if she was in love with Victor One, that whatever happened, he just wanted her to be happy. He wanted to make sure she knew that. Even though it wasn’t true.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but he never found out what he was going to say. Before a word could cross his lips, there were two sharp raps on the door.

  Rick looked over his shoulder and saw his father standing there, Jameson hovering just behind him.

  “Mars wants us,” the Traveler said. “We’ve got to go.”

  4. MARS

  THE BEAST WAS huge and hideous. Thrashing tentacles that seemed to reach for miles across the blackness. A single eye glaring from the end of each tentacle. And above them all, a tremendous globular head, its enormous eyes so full of hatred and rage they seemed to burn with a white fire.

  It had been little more than a week since Rick had killed the Octo-Guardian, but already he had forgotten just how horrible a creature it was. Seeing it now again in the 3-D holographic theater in the compound’s underground auditorium made his throat feel tight with disgust. The thing looked as if it were right there in front of him.

  He watched as his own image—a 3-D image of himself closed inside the cockpit of a small fighter plane—charged directly at the Octo-Guardian’s head, firing at the beast’s raging eyes. He could almost feel the auditorium shake around him as the monster keeled over sideways in space and went crashing down to the Realm’s surface far below.

  Then, as Rick continued watching, his holographic self turned his aircraft toward the Breach: an opening Kurodar had created between the Realm and RL. Through that opening, Rick could see where Molly and Victor One were huddled together in the woods, a circle of armed men closing in on them, ready to wipe them out. In another moment, Rick
knew, his hologram would fly his aircraft straight into the Breach and burst impossibly out of MindWar and into reality in order to pull Molly and V-One from the gunmen’s clutches . . .

  But before that could happen, the three-dimensional picture froze. It just stopped moving completely. A moment later, the lights of the auditorium came up, and there on the stage stood the director of the MindWar Project, Commander Jonathan Mars. Mars was looking directly at Rick, and his eyes were nearly as full of rage as the Octo-Guardian’s had been.

  Mars was a forbidding figure at the best of times. He was in his fifties, with a face that looked like it was carved out of rock then decorated with iron. He had craggy features under silver-gray hair, deep-set humorless eyes under bushy silver-gray eyebrows, and a mouth that seemed to have been chiseled into the space above his chin in a permanent frown.

  “I’m not going to ask you what you were thinking,” he said. “Because I already know.” His grumbling voice was quiet, but Rick could hear the fury in it all the same. “You were thinking you would be a hero. You were thinking you would save the day.”

  “I was thinking my friends were about to be killed . . .”

  “You were thinking like a child,” Mars said right over him. “Hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake here—millions of lives! The security of your country. The security of weapons systems that could virtually wipe out life on earth if they fell into the wrong hands. And you violated every protocol we have in order to save two people. Your friends!”

  Rick was about to answer, but the words died on his lips. It did sound pretty stupid when Mars put it that way. He supposed he ought to say he was sorry he’d done it. But he wasn’t sorry. Given the same situation, he’d do it again. So there was not much point in saying sorry, was there?

  “Do you have any idea the risk you took?” Mars went on, glaring at him from under those impressive eyebrows.

  Rick shrugged. He had flown his Realm craft into the face of a bunch of machine gun–toting thugs, so yes, he was pretty well aware of the risk. “I’ve been back more than a week. Why are you bringing this up now?”

  Mars didn’t answer. He shook his head. He said, “You’re the only MindWarrior we have left. That makes you the only chance we’ve got to stop Kurodar before he strikes full force. If we lose you, we lose everything . . .”

  “Look, I know—”

  “You don’t know,” Mars said, cutting him off. “You can’t know because nobody knows. Nobody knows the long-term effects of being immersed in the Realm. That’s bad enough. But the moment you rode that ship through the Breach . . .” Mars fell silent and shook his head.

  “What?” said Rick. He felt his stomach tighten at Mars’s unfinished sentence. The headaches that were getting so bad . . . the dreams that were getting so real . . . Had flying through the Breach made them worse? Had that somehow amped up the side effects of long-term exposure to the Realm? “The moment I rode my ship through the Breach—what?” he asked again.

  Mars kept shaking his head. “I don’t know. Like I said. No one knows. Kurodar built the MindWar Realm to allow him to imagine himself into our computer systems. His brain, your brain, the computers, they’re all linked together when you’re in there. When you went through the Breach, for that one second, you and Kurodar were completely linked together . . .”

  “All right,” said Rick’s dad quietly. “That’s enough.” The man code-named the Traveler was sitting in the chair next to Rick. He was watching Commander Mars with a mild expression, his calm eyes blinking occasionally behind his glasses, giving no emotion away. Rick knew his dad and Mars did not get along very well. As in not at all. “There’s no point in scaring him,” his dad went on. “We’ve spent the last week scanning his brain for any abnormalities. There aren’t any.”

  “That we know of,” muttered Mars.

  “That’s right. So we have no reason to think there’ll be any problem at all. Rick risked his life to save two friends. That’s the sort of person he is. If he weren’t that sort of person, it wouldn’t have been worth sending him into the Realm in the first place.”

  Rick watched as the corners of Mars’s lips pulled down in a spasm of barely controlled anger. He was not a man who liked to be challenged, especially not by some nerdy computer geek like the Traveler. Mars thought he knew what was best—for the project, for his staff, even for the country. In some ways, he thought he was the country, that to stand up against him was to stand against America itself. Just then, Rick thought if Mars could have shot his dad dead, he might’ve done it. It wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. Mars had already pulled a gun on the Traveler once before.

  All the same, Mars dropped the subject now and moved on to the real subject of the meeting. “Anyway, that’s not the reason I called you here. We’re expecting another attack.”

  Rick sat up straight, surprised. That explained why Mars’s always-simmering anger had suddenly flared like this. “Another attack already?” he said. “I just delivered Kurodar a major fail . . .”

  “That’s the problem apparently. Our spies in the Axis are telling us that Kurodar is getting desperate. Rick blew up his fortress . . . downed his WarCraft . . . and now the Axis Assembly has decided to pull their funding for the MindWar. They’re tired of pouring money into something that doesn’t work.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, right?” Rick said with what he hoped was an annoying shrug.

  “It could be,” Mars replied through gritted teeth. “But Kurodar says he doesn’t need the Assembly anymore. He says he has a secret weapon that will allow him to act on his own.”

  “What sort of weapon?” said the Traveler, and while his eyes remained calm, he leaned forward slightly in his seat.

  “We don’t know,” said Mars. “Kurodar apparently swore to the Assembly he would prove the effectiveness of the MindWar Realm by pulling off an attack on our country all by himself—an attack so vast, so destructive, he said, that the Assembly would see once and for all that MindWar is the way to bring us to our knees.”

  Rick wasn’t sure why, but when he heard this, Favian’s voice seemed to speak into his mind.

  The darkness spread over everything everywhere. The Scarlet Plain. The Blue Wood. The Ruins. The Golden City is all that’s left of MindWar.

  That’s what Favian had said in his dream. But so what? What did it have to do with this new attack Mars was talking about? And anyway, it was just a dream. Wasn’t it? Rick rubbed the sleeve of his sweatshirt, feeling the scratches on his wrist underneath.

  “So you have to send me back in,” he said.

  Mars glared at him—it reminded Rick of the way the Octo-Guardian glared at him. “If we can trust you,” he said.

  A flash of anger went through Rick. He was never very good at controlling his temper, especially around pompous authority figures like Mars. He jumped to his feet, ignoring the dull ache that still went through his legs sometimes, especially when he moved too quickly. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

  “We’re still trying to assess the damage that’s been done to your brain . . .”

  “There is no damage,” Rick said—though he was nowhere near sure of that. “You have to send me back in.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” said Mars. “If your mind was somehow altered by going through the Breach, sending you back could cause more damage than it prevents.”

  “I need to get back into the Realm,” said Rick. His heart felt like a clenched fist in his chest. “I won’t leave Favian and Mariel to die in there. I can’t. I’ve got to find a way to get them out.”

  Mars gave a rough snort. “More friends.”

  “That’s right. And I promised Mariel—”

  “Ah, Mariel!” Mars cut him off dismissively. His permanent frown seemed to turn upward in a chiseled sneer. “Don’t you understand? There is no Mariel. There never was.”

  With that, Mars turned on his h
eel and stormed out of the auditorium.

  5. GLASS TOWER

  THERE WAS A little grove of trees planted outside the Dials’ house, a small cluster of oaks and elms and maples that had been set there to enhance the view from inside. When the Dials were in the house, they could look out, and the trees’ branches partially blocked the sight of the barbed wire and the guard towers that surrounded them. It was a nice effect. It made the family feel less like prisoners of the MindWar Project.

  Now Rick was standing under the trees with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the cold. The temperature was dropping steadily as the sun was dropping toward the western horizon. Rick shivered a little, his breath misting in front of him. Lost in thought, he watched the guard tower through the branches, his eyes on the glassed-in booth at the top. Inside the booth, Rick could see the guard pacing back and forth. He would come to the glass wall nearest Rick and look out over the compound, then he would move off to the other side of the booth, out of Rick’s line of sight. A few moments would pass. After presumably scanning the forest outside the barbed wire, the guard would come pacing back into view again.

  “Mars is right, isn’t he?” the Traveler said. “Your symptoms—your headaches—they’ve gotten worse since you went through the Breach, haven’t they?”

  Rick barely nodded in answer.

  “And the nightmares—do they still seem real?”

  Slowly, Rick turned to him. His father was hunkered inside a blue overcoat. He had a black woolen watch cap pulled down over his bald head. The little puffs of frost that came out of his mouth as he breathed rose up and fogged his glasses.

  Without answering him, Rick opened his own overcoat and pulled his arm out of the sleeve. He rolled up his sweatshirt sleeve and held out his bared wrist so his father could see the scratches there.