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  The Traveler let out a long breath. Gently, he took hold of his son’s hand. He frowned as he turned Rick’s arm back and forth, examining the marks. “Tell me what you dreamed,” he said.

  Rick turned to look up at the guard tower booth again. The soldier inside looked out through the glass wall, then turned and paced away out of sight.

  “I dreamed about the Golden City,” said Rick.

  “The Realm’s battery,” his father murmured, studying his arm. “The place where Kurodar’s imagination enters the Realm and powers it.”

  “Right. In my dream, it was littered with dead security bots. Creatures Kurodar had imagined into being. He had withdrawn his energy from them, and their corpses were rotting. But when Kurodar sensed my presence, he brought them back to life and sent them after me. One of them—a dead Boar warrior—grabbed my arm. When I pulled away, his claws scratched my wrist.”

  Rick still didn’t turn back as his father examined the marks. He kept watching the booth. The soldier paced back into view through the glass.

  He could hear the concern in his father’s voice. “You dreamed that? And when you woke up . . .? These marks . . .?”

  Rick nodded, still without turning. “Yeah. When I woke up, the scratches were there.”

  The soldier in the booth looked out the glass for a moment, then turned and paced away out of sight.

  Rick glanced over at his father now. His dad’s cheeks expanded as he blew out another long, whistling breath.

  “What’s happening to me?” Rick asked him. He could hear his own voice trembling. It wasn’t just from the cold. It was fear too. He sounded like a little boy afraid of the dark.

  His father examined the wounds some more. He didn’t answer.

  “What did Mars mean about Mariel?” Rick asked. “That there is no Mariel. That’s true, isn’t it? Otherwise, why was her coffin empty except for that black box? What was that thing? Who is Mariel, Dad?”

  He had asked his father these questions before—after he had seen the empty coffin. But his father had put off answering them. He wasn’t sure, he said. He needed to get more information, he said. Rick had waited to hear what his dad had found out. But he couldn’t wait anymore. Everything was too confused. He was beginning to be unsure of what was real and what was not. In his life, in his mind, in his heart—everywhere.

  His father sighed and let go of Rick’s hand. As Rick slipped his arm back inside his overcoat, his dad said, “I’m still not sure. Mars is not exactly quick with a straight answer. He won’t tell me much, but I got some of it out of him and I think I can guess the rest.” Rick’s dad, quiet as he was, absentminded as he was, was also one of the strongest, most self-assured people Rick had ever met. It was his faith, Rick knew. His faith seemed to fill him up, from inside somehow, to keep him strong and tranquil no matter what was happening around him. Now his confidence gave Rick confidence too.

  Bundled up inside his overcoat again, Rick shoved his hands into his pockets and lifted his eyes to the guard tower, watching the soldier up there pace as he listened to his father speaking.

  “When I first stumbled upon Kurodar’s Realm,” the Traveler said, “I handed over much of my work to Leila Kent, and she passed it on to Mars. Included in that work were our BCI experiments, our attempts at full brain-computer interface. There were experimental files Professor Jameson and I had created in which we’d tried to download the minds of several hundred volunteers and translate them into a form that could be read by a computer. Connectomes, they’re called.”

  “Yeah, I remember. I was one of the volunteers. Most of my friends did it too. You made those things of all of us.”

  “That’s right. Just about everyone we knew helped out by hooking their brains up to our computers, and we made connectomes of them, or tried to. There were also plenty of strangers we just recruited for the experiment.”

  “Okay,” said Rick. “What happened then?”

  In the booth above the winter branches of the trees, the soldier paced out of sight again.

  “Mars acted too quickly,” the Traveler went on—and even without looking at him, Rick could hear the irritation in his voice. “He felt the security situation was urgent and he had to act. Even before I could fully complete programming a system that would safely immerse our MindWarriors into the Realm, Mars jumped the gun and sent three subjects in without my knowledge.”

  “Subjects . . . You mean people. MindWarriors like me. Mariel, Favian, and the other guy, the one I saw in the Spider-Snake tunnel.”

  “The man you call Favian was a young man named Fabian Child, an Army clerk who happened to have tremendous gaming skills. Mars thought he might be able to help even though he wasn’t really a warrior. He wasn’t even very courageous . . .”

  “No, I know,” said Rick with a little smile, thinking of Favian’s perpetually worried look. “But he’s courageous enough, it turns out. More than he thinks, anyway.” He kept gazing up at the glass booth at the top of the tower. And the soldier kept pacing back and forth within.

  “The other man was a United States Marine sergeant named James Posner. A decorated combat veteran, plenty tough and plenty brave, but not much of a gamer.”

  “What about Mariel?” said Rick. “Tell me about Mariel.” He actually held his breath, waiting for his father’s reply.

  “Mariel,” his father said slowly, “was not a person at all. She was a program. I’m not sure whether Mars used one of our connectomes or whether he combined two or several of them together. He won’t tell me. But the mission was so dangerous, Mars wanted to experiment with sending in a connectome rather than a real person. If he could stop Kurodar with programs instead of people, he thought he could reduce the risk of casualties. You can’t blame him for that. He was looking to save lives.”

  “No, you can’t blame him,” Rick tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. He could barely speak. He could barely take in the information. His head felt like it was filled with mist. Mariel. A program. A “connectome.” Not a real woman. Not an actual person at all. Which meant that all those feelings he had for her . . .

  “The mission was a disaster,” his father went on. “The MindWarriors were immersed without full security. They’d barely traveled ten yards from the portal when one of Kurodar’s security bots spotted them and attacked.”

  “The Spider-Snake,” Rick whispered hoarsely. He—who had twice the gaming skills of Fabian Child combined with at least some of the courage of Marine sergeant James Posner—had only just barely outrun the thing and defeated it . . . and even then, he had needed Mariel’s and Favian’s help.

  “Sergeant Posner was killed trying to defend the others from the Spider-Snake,” his father said. “And Mariel and Favian were wounded so badly, their minds were cut off from their portals. Mars lost connection with them and there’s been no way to extract them.”

  Rick nodded dumbly. He had seen Posner in the tunnel . . . or what was left of him. And as for Favian and Mariel . . . “They’re getting weaker every day,” he said. “They don’t even remember who they are . . .” The words brought a new thought into his mind. A new thought with new pain. “Mariel doesn’t know,” he whispered. He stared up through the branches at the soldier pacing in the guard tower booth. “She doesn’t know she’s not real, does she? She doesn’t know she’s just a computer download.” The idea was a special agony to him. The image of Mariel rose in his mind: her warmth, her grace, her strength, her beauty. “She thinks she’s a human being,” he said. “She thinks I’m going to save her and reconnect her to her body and . . .”

  Standing beside him, his father shook his head sadly. “I don’t know. Probably. That’s probably what she thinks.”

  Rick had to pause a few moments to subdue the waves of sorrow that were washing over him. Ever since Mariel and Favian had been injured, their energy had been slowly bleeding out of them, their Realm selves aging quickly toward a
horrible living death. But Mariel had hope. Her hope was Rick. She believed he was a hero who had come to save her. She believed he had been sent to rescue her from her dying Realm life. She didn’t realize that her Realm life was the only life she had ever had, the only life she was ever going to have. Bring her out of the Realm, and Mariel would be nothing, some electronic impulses, some numbers flashing in a box. Nothing.

  Rick went on gazing up at the guard tower. He didn’t want to face his father. He didn’t want his father to see the pain and misery in his eyes. He gazed up at the guard tower, and slowly, something occurred to him . . .

  The soldier. The pacing soldier. He had come to the glass window again a few moments ago. He had looked out and paced away again out of sight . . . and he had stayed out of sight. He had been gone a long time now. Too long. Rick kept looking up there, waiting for him to pace back into view, and he didn’t. Seconds went by and more seconds, and he didn’t reappear. Rick murmured, “Where is he?”

  He heard his father say, “What?”

  “That soldier,” Rick said, his voice still low. He was thinking—thinking fast—trying to figure it out. Maybe it was a change of shift or something. Or maybe the guy had paused to get a drink of water or a snack. But something deep down inside him told him it wasn’t that. It was something else. Something wrong . . .

  “What’s the matter?” his father asked him, following his gaze to look up at the tower.

  Rick shook his head a little. “Nothing, I . . .”

  Before he could finish, he saw a movement in the high booth. A reflection on the glass. The soldier was moving back into position.

  There he is! Rick thought with relief.

  The soldier came into full view, looking out through the glass of the booth. And all of Rick’s relief vanished.

  Because it was not the soldier anymore. It was not even a human being!

  It was a giant humanoid Boar! It was one of the soldier Boars from the Realm, a great hairy, tusked pig standing tall on two legs. And dead. He was dead, like the Boars in Rick’s dream. A dead soldier Boar from the Golden City, his pig face half rotted away to reveal the skull beneath.

  Rick stared up at the tower booth, thunderstruck. The dead Boar peered out at the compound through the glass, grinning its skull grin. Then it lowered its eyes. It looked down. It looked directly at Rick. Its grin grew even wider.

  Then it vanished. Melted into air. Gone.

  “Did you see that . . .?” Rick’s father began to say.

  But Rick was already running past the trees toward the tower.

  His mind was racing as he ran. His sneakers smacked the frozen earth as he broke out of the low branches and headed for the tower base. Images from his nightmare rose up before him. The Golden City. The Boar Soldiers coming to life. The skeleton Cobra Guards rising up to bare their fangs. The rotting Harpies swooping down on him from above . . .

  Was this a dream too? Was he in a nightmare right now? Or had his nightmares invaded reality?

  He reached the base of the tower. He reached the door. He grabbed the handle, pulled it open.

  He froze when he saw the rifleman standing just inside. Another Boar?

  No, a soldier. Assigned to guard the tower elevator and staircase, the soldier also started in surprise when he saw Rick. He clutched his rifle more tightly, butt and barrel. But his eyes were not afraid. Like everyone else in the compound, he knew Rick. He recognized him.

  “What?” he said, confused. “What do you want?”

  “There’s something wrong in the booth,” Rick said breathlessly. “There’s someone up there who shouldn’t be.”

  The soldier shook his head, uncertain. “That’s impossible. I’ve been here the whole time. No one could’ve come in without my seeing them.”

  Rick didn’t wait around to argue. Quickly, he pushed past the guard to the elevator. He pushed the button. The elevator buzzed to life. But the box was up top, in the booth. It started to descend slowly. Rick couldn’t wait. He rushed to the stairs.

  The stairs wound up above him a long way. Rick had been working out hard for months, bringing his legs back into shape, but they weren’t wholly healed. They still hurt when he pushed too far. They hurt now—hurt like fire—as he bounded up the stairs. He was breathing hard by the time he was halfway to the top. He was clinging to the banister, pulling himself onward despite the pain.

  Now the booth door appeared before him. He was gasping for breath. The pain lanced through his legs with every step he took. He didn’t care. He still had the heart of a football hero, passionate, indomitable. He had woken in agony after some games—lots of games—games in which he’d been tackled hard and driven to the ground again and again. He had woken in agony and gone right back into training. That was who he was. That was what he was like. He was not going to let a little searing physical torture slow him down. He never had before.

  He reached the door. He pushed it open. He saw the soldier at once, lying facedown on the floor in a pool of his own blood. The room was filled with a weird smell, not a human smell, a smell like lightning, air on fire, ozone burning.

  Rick rushed across the booth to the fallen man. He knelt down beside him. He turned him over.

  Dead. A young man, only a little older than Rick. Short, cropped blond hair, blue eyes, open, staring. There was a single wound in his chest. Not a bullet wound. Rick recognized it. He’d seen such wounds before. It was a wound from a sword.

  He understood. The man—the soldier—this RL man—had been struck down by a soldier Boar—a creature from the Realm.

  But how?

  Rick knelt there staring into the soldier’s staring dead eyes.

  Is this a dream?

  It wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t.

  What is going on? he thought. What in the world is happening?

  LEVEL TWO:

  BABA YAGA’S TABLE

  6. CONTRACT KILLER

  HAROLD HEPPLEWHITE, A professional murderer, stepped out of his car into a ghost town. Not long ago—not long ago at all—this had been a working facility, a secret high-tech outpost surrounded by an enclosure that was almost the dark mirror image of the MindWar compound: barbed wire, guard towers, soldiers with machine guns standing watch.

  This, however, was Kurodar’s headquarters, a secret station hidden in deep jungle on a deserted island off the coast of Africa. This was where the Realm was created, where it sprang out of the terrorist’s imagination and spread through cyberspace.

  Hepplewhite looked around him. The once busy compound was all but abandoned now. The barracks were dark and empty. Windows broken. Doors banging in slowly rising wind. The soldiers were gone, the guard towers unmanned. Only a few local men and women wandered here and there. South African natives from poverty-stricken villages, they had been shipped over to the island to do the outpost’s cooking and cleaning. Hepplewhite spotted one of them—a very dark-skinned woman in khaki rags—carrying a pot of some sort of steaming food across the empty area to the large building at the center of the place.

  It was an odd building, this central one. A white, modern, faceless tower without windows. To Hepplewhite, it looked less like a building than some kind of bizarre machine. But there was a door set in the ground floor. As he watched, the woman with the pot disappeared through it.

  Hepplewhite left his car behind and headed after her.

  Harold Hepplewhite was a slender man of medium height with the narrow, intelligent face of a librarian. Oily black hair, slicked back. Mild eyes blinking behind round wire-rimmed glasses. Thin lips decorated with an even thinner mustache. He wore white linen pants and a white linen jacket over a paisley shirt open at the throat. He didn’t look at all like the sort of man who would kill you, but in fact he would kill you without hesitation and never think much about it afterward. He had murdered people with guns, knives, garrotes, and other assorted tools too gruesome to mention. He’d even shot a g
uy with an arrow once. He was not a freelancer. This was his steady job. The Axis Assembly kept him on retainer, and he was always ready to go to work. When someone became a problem for the Assembly, it was Hepplewhite’s job to make him stop being a problem—in other words, to make him dead.

  Now it was Kurodar who had become a problem for the Assembly and Hepplewhite’s assignment was to deal with him—which was to say, kill him.

  Hepplewhite reached inside his jacket. His hand brushed the butt of the pistol in the holster under his arm. It was a custom-made .22 with a built-in sound suppressor. It fired almost silently, and its small bullets were hollow and contained a poison that would kill a man almost instantly if the bullet itself didn’t do the job. But Hepplewhite did not draw the weapon. Instead he reached for the smart phone in his shirt pocket. He drew it out. Pressed one button. Spoke two words: “I’m here.” And slipped the phone back into his shirt.

  Then he put his hands in the pockets of his slacks and began to stroll slowly across the compound toward the white building. He glanced around casually as he walked, but there was nothing to worry about that he could see. There were no gunmen, no guards. They had all run away the moment they heard the Assembly was abandoning the MindWar Project. They all knew what that meant. They all knew what would come next: Harold Hepplewhite. And Death.

  With no one to stop him or question him, Hepplewhite reached the door of the building, pulled it open, and went inside.

  It was downright eerie in here. An enormous lobby like the lobby on the ground floor of a New York City office tower. But no one around. No one at all. No noise. No motion. An empty chair behind the reception desk. No lights on. The security terminals all dark.

  Hepplewhite’s footsteps echoed on the tiled floor, ghostly, as he passed through.

  The elevator wasn’t working, but the door to the stairwell was ajar. As he stood at the top of the stairwell, Hepplewhite could hear the footsteps of the woman with the food descending to the bottom. Still moving slowly and casually, he followed her down.