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  Then he grabbed his sword and went running after his friend.

  10. WITCH’S WORKSHOP

  RICK AND FAVIAN hurried down the winding stairs. They were surrounded by deep shadows. Only a low blue glow emanating from Favian’s palm lit their descent. Holding his sword in one hand, Rick reached out with the other to steady himself against the wall. He felt the pebbly mosaic there under his fingertips. Now and then, when Favian’s glow hit the wall just right, Rick caught a glimpse of some mosaic face staring at him. He knew these were the faces of saints and apostles, but they didn’t look very saintly or holy. They just seemed grim, condemnatory, and basically kind of spooky.

  Favian flashed ahead only a little at a time. He didn’t want to leave Rick in utter blackness. Also, he was scared to be alone in this place. He would zip down a couple of steps and then wait to allow Rick to catch up and then flash away again.

  “Where are we going?” Rick said breathlessly.

  “I was just going to ask you the same question,” said Favian, flashing away.

  Rick caught up with him and said, “I don’t even know how I got here in the first place. I don’t remember coming through the portal into the Realm. I’m thinking maybe this is just a dream.”

  “Well, I hope not. If it is, then I’m just a dream too,” said Favian, and he flashed around the curve of the spiral stairs out of sight.

  Rick turned the corner and the sprite came into view again. “You’re not a dream,” said Rick. And then he remembered something else: “You’re an Army clerk named Fabian Child.”

  Favian looked like he was about to flash away again, but Rick’s words stopped him. “Wait, what? I’m who? What?”

  “An Army . . .”

  “Clerk. Yes. That’s right!” Favian’s eyes grew bright as the memories flooded back to him. “My dad wanted me to be a soldier! Like he was. So I joined the military, but instead of sending me into any war zones, they just put me in an office because I knew how to use a computer. Which was fine with me. I was never much good at fighting except in . . .”

  “. . . video games,” said Rick.

  Just then, there was a loud bang above them. The dead had found the stairwell door and were pounding against it, trying to break through.

  “It’s all coming back to me,” said Favian softly. “I joined the military so I could show my dad I wasn’t a coward. The only problem is I actually am a coward!”

  Another bang from above. Rick looked over his shoulder, up the stairs. They had to get out of here before the dead broke through.

  “You’re no coward,” Rick said quickly. “You’re just a nervous type of guy. That’s all. You’ve got courage to burn when you need it. But you know what? There are times when acting like a coward is the smart move.”

  “Really? Like when?”

  “Like now. We’ve gotta get out of here.”

  “Oh . . . oh, right . . .” But Favian paused for one more second and murmured almost in wonder: “An Army clerk who played video games. I remember.” Rick could make out his friend’s glowing face only dimly, but he could see, even in the shadows, that the guy was delighted to have his identity back after all this time.

  Then Favian flashed away, and Rick continued down the spiral stairs after him.

  Rick came around another curve. The pounding of the dead against the door echoed above them. Favian was ready to flash away . . .

  “Wait. Stop. Look,” said Rick.

  The two stood together and stared down into the shadows.

  There was a faint line of light off to one side.

  “A door, I think,” said Rick.

  “An exit maybe,” said Favian hopefully.

  “But an exit to where?” said Rick.

  “Right,” said Favian, not so hopefully.

  Rick continued his descent toward the light—and Favian (who really could be sort of a coward sometimes) let him go ahead, hanging back fearfully behind him. Every now and then, the blue sprite would flash forward to catch up, but never so far forward that he got in front of Rick. So it was Rick who reached the dim light first.

  He found a platform just off the stairs, and yes, sure enough, there was a door. Rick moved close to it, listening for any noises that might let him know what was behind it. After a few seconds, he heard something. It sounded like . . . what? . . . a high-pitched cackling laugh.

  “What is that?” Favian breathed in his ear. He had come flashing up stealthily behind him again.

  Rick shook his head. “Sounds like an old woman . . .”

  “Like a witch, you mean,” said Favian. “Like a witch in one of those fairy tales who lures you into her lair then cooks and eats you.”

  Rick gave him a look: Favian would think of something scary like that. It wasn’t helpful. And even worse, it was kind of true. It did sound like there was a cackling witch behind the door.

  The cackling came again—but it was almost immediately drowned out by a fresh series of echoing bangs from the door upstairs. The pounding was accompanied by a noise like wood splintering. The plank that Rick had used to bar the door was beginning to give way. Another few tries and the dead monsters would break through the door and come pouring down the spiral stairs like a flood of . . . well, like a flood of dead monsters.

  Rick glanced quickly down the stairs. Nothing he could see down there but more blackness. There was no choice. He reached for the door.

  “What are you doing?” said Favian. “We could get lured in and cooked and eaten.”

  “Maybe,” said Rick. In this crazy place, he wasn’t sure Favian was wrong. “But we’ve gotta try it. We’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  He reached out and pushed the big door. It creaked as it swung open like a door in a ghost house. The dim light grew brighter and spilled out onto the platform where Rick and Favian were standing. The door swung open farther and they saw where the light was coming from.

  “Whoa!” said Favian. His amazement almost overcame his fear.

  Rick didn’t blame him. He was also amazed. He felt the breath come streaming out of him as he stared into the light.

  Through the door was a cramped room with a low ceiling. There were no mosaics here, only naked wood. The room was windowless and empty . . .

  Empty, that is, except for the witch and her crystal table.

  She sure looked like a witch, anyway. In fact, she looked almost exactly like a witch from a storybook or cartoon. She had greenish skin and thick white hair that fell heavily out of the red bandanna tied around her forehead. Her face was deeply wrinkled and spotted with thick warts. Her nose was warty, too, and sharp and bent. Her grinning mouth was almost toothless. And her pale eyes, despite the grin on her mouth, were full of malevolence. She actually did look like the sort of creature who would cook and eat children.

  The witch went on cackling, moving her hands in mystic gestures over the table in front of her. It was the table that was giving off the light. It was a round table made of some sort of clear, crystal-like material. It looked almost like a gigantic diamond. The white light was coming out of it from who knew where. It was shining brighter and then dimmer in a pulsing rhythm. The light rose and bathed the witch’s face and made her look more terrible still. It spread across the room, striking the heavy ceiling beams above and throwing black shadows across the floor below.

  The witch continued to gaze into the light. She did not look up at Rick and Favian. But after a moment, as they stood in the doorway gaping at her, she beckoned them with a rolling motion of one stick-like finger.

  “Come in, come in, boys, and meet Baba Yaga,” she said in a high witchy singsong. “She’ll show you visions of what has been and what will be—and all will become clear to you.”

  Rick and Favian glanced at each other. They heard more pounding and splintering from the door upstairs. Rick shrugged. Might as well get killed and eaten by a witch as by a raving swarm of half-dec
ayed monsters. He stepped into the room. Favian followed. Rick pushed the door shut behind him, hoping the dead monsters would pass down the spiral stairs without noticing it was there.

  “Oh, don’t worry. They can’t reach you here,” said the witch, as if reading Rick’s mind. “Baba Yaga’s room is the one room in the Golden City that no one can enter.”

  “But . . . but we just did enter it,” said Favian nervously.

  For the first time, the witch—this Baba Yaga—lifted her face to them and caught them in the glare of her sinister eyes. “You, yes,” she said with another cackle. “Because you’re in the Realm but not of it. You are free agents—you and the water woman. The only free agents here. The rest are his creatures.”

  “Kurodar’s?” asked Rick.

  But the witch just continued in a low throaty mutter, “Even I’m his creature, poor soul that I am. But he can’t touch me. He can’t make me leave, much as he may want to.”

  Rick took another tentative step toward the crystal table. He had to duck under the beam in the ceiling, it was so low. He kept moving. He was curious to see what was in that white light, what exactly the hideous old crone was looking at.

  “So,” she said with a canny glance up at him, “you want to see what Baba Yaga can show you. The past. The future. Your fate. Come. Come forward. Come and see.”

  Rick felt Favian’s touch—that buzzing, faintly electric touch—on his arm.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Favian whispered. “I’m not sure I want to know my fate. What if it’s bad?”

  Almost the minute he’d spoken, he let out a gasp as Baba Yaga startled them both with a loud, screeching laugh. “There’s a wise lad!” she cried. “Maybe you should listen to him.” She cocked a scraggly white eyebrow at Rick. “But you won’t, will you, my dear? You’re too curious, aren’t you? You have to know. You have to know!”

  “You said you could show me the past too,” said Rick—and he continued to edge toward the crystal table, his feet shuffling along the stone floor almost in spite of himself. “Can you show me how I got here? Can you tell me whether this is real or a dream? Can you tell me if Kurodar . . .?”

  “Come, come, come!” said the witch, making that rolling beckoning gesture with her warty hands again. “Come and see what Baba Yaga can show you.”

  Rick was nervous—even scared. The old woman’s malevolence was so obvious. It was obvious in her eyes . . . in her laugh. It was even obvious in her toothless grin. He didn’t trust her. He wasn’t sure he should even get this close to her. Maybe she really would grab him and devour him! She sure looked like she might.

  But it didn’t matter. Baba Yaga was right: He needed to see what she wanted to show him. He needed to know what she knew. How he got here. What was happening. What would happen next.

  Favian continued to hang back, but Rick stepped into the white glow surrounding the table. He held his sword down at his side, its tip screaking along the floor as he shuffled to the table’s edge. He squinted down into the brightness. It was so bright it hurt his eyes, made him squint. He could not see anything but the light coming up out of the core of the crystal.

  But the witch said, “Look . . . look . . .,” and once again she passed her bony hands over the surface of the table in weird, flowing patterns. As she did, the light began to grow softer. It seemed to spread out under Rick, almost as if it were drifting apart like clouds. Rick felt like he was falling, falling into the misty light. He felt as if it were surrounding him, taking him in. And yes . . . yes, he began to see . . . something . . . images . . . places . . . people . . . inside the light. He couldn’t quite make them out . . . He peered down more intently to try to get a better view.

  Suddenly, shockingly, the witch seemed to be talking directly into his ear. No, it was more than that. She seemed to be talking and cackling from inside his own head.

  “You must go into the belly of the beast, my dear! You must learn what he does not know. You must face the horror he cannot face. Look and see, Rick Dial! Look—and see.”

  The next thing Rick knew, the images in the crystal table seemed to rise up all around him, surrounding him, closing on him from every side and from above. They were so clear it was almost as if he were truly among them. As if he were one of the images himself.

  Rick stared. And now, finally, he saw clearly. The images came into focus, and his eyes went wide with horror. He opened up his mouth to shout in fear, but somehow he couldn’t. He couldn’t make a noise. He tried to cover his face with his arms. He tried to stop seeing the things he saw. And then . . .

  Then he woke up, his face drenched in sweat, his heart hammering. Panting for breath. He sat up, blinking, looking around him.

  But what he saw only made his heart hammer harder.

  “Where am I?” he gasped.

  11. THE OFFICE

  IT HAD BEEN a dream. Another dream. The fight in the church. The flight down the stairs. The witch in her chamber: Baba Yaga. All another dream.

  But he was awake now. He was sure of it. He was awake and wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt he’d gone to bed in . . .

  Only this—this was not his bedroom.

  Where was he? Where was he?

  He turned his head, his heart beating hard, his eyes wide. Like Baba Yaga’s room, the room around him was small and cramped. Like Baba Yaga’s room, this room, too, was bathed in white light. But this was not Baba Yaga’s room any more than it was his. The white light was not coming from a crystal table. It was coming from a computer that sat on the desk in front of him. In the glow from the computer, Rick could make out a small, den-like office. There was a Persian rug on the floor, shelves of leather-bound books all around him, the studded leather swivel chair in which he was sitting . . .

  He knew this place. He’d been here before. He remembered it. It was Commander Mars’s office, his secret workplace hidden away deep in the underground heart of the MindWar compound. Besides Mars, Rick was the only person who could’ve gotten in here undetected. Anyone else would have set off every alarm in the compound. But Rick’s dad had given him a flash drive that overrode the underground security. Somehow, in his sleep, Rick had used that drive and snuck into this top secret place.

  Dazed, Rick looked down at his hand. Sure enough, the override flash drive was gripped in it, his fingers wrapped tightly around it.

  Rick shook his head, trying to clear his mind. How had this happened? How had he come here? And why? What was he looking for?

  He lifted his eyes to the computer. What was shown on the screen only confused him more. Numbers. Equations. Some sort of specifications. And diagrams of . . . something . . . something that looked like a satellite . . . a disk . . . a cannon emitting a beam of light. Words leapt out at him: “Strike capacity . . . kill zone . . . solar charge . . .” And the title of the page: “SS-317 Battle Station.”

  It all seemed very important—and very dangerous—but what exactly was it? All this math and diagram stuff . . . He was an athlete, not a scientist. He didn’t know how to read this kind of thing.

  His brain was swimming. The dream. The witch. Favian. Now this. Was it even real? Was he dreaming still? And if it was real, how . . .? And why . . .?

  He couldn’t figure it out, not any of it. All he knew for sure was that he had to get out of here before someone found him. He didn’t want to get into any more trouble with Mars than he was in already.

  Rick knew the way back. Into the air vents that piped oxygen through the underground chambers. Back to the compressor room. Up through the vent to the outside. The compressor room was just about the one place in the compound that was rarely guarded for the simple reason that no one could beat the surveillance system that would set off the alarm if you tried to enter. No one, that is, who didn’t happen to have the Traveler’s flash drive override.

  A few minutes later he was out of the underground, out in the night. Pebbles jabbed into the soles of
his bare feet as he snuck on tiptoe back to his house. The cold ate through his light clothes, making him shiver. There were soldiers everywhere around him in the darkness, and all of them were tense, watchful, on the lookout for whoever killed the guard in the tower. Several times as Rick hurried across the dirt he had to duck behind a barracks to avoid the flashlight beam of a patrol. Once he even had to hit the ground and hug the side of a latrine barracks, breathing in the sharp stink of ammonia from the toilets inside as a spotlight from one of the towers swept the area.

  But finally, he slipped back into his house. It was dark here, quiet. The only light was coming from the Christmas tree, which Mom liked to keep on. Its colored lights spattered the living room with cheerful spots of red and green and blue and yellow and white.

  Rick crept past the tree and headed back to his bedroom. He slipped quietly through the door. He lay back down on the bed again.

  He lay on his back, his hands behind his head. He figured he would try to think things through as he waited for morning. He wasn’t afraid of falling asleep again. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to sleep anymore tonight.

  So he lay there and he thought. And three words kept going around and around in his mind. Three words, one question.

  What. Just. Happened?

  Along with the words, there came images. The dead monsters charging at him horrifically across the church nave. The spiral stairs going down into darkness. The cackling witch and her crystal table. Mars’s office . . .

  What just happened?

  Had any of it been real? It all seemed impossible to him, and impossibly crazy. But he remembered his father’s words . . .

  I’m pretty sure it makes sense. We just don’t understand the sense it makes.

  So he told himself: Think. Work it. Figure it out. Figure out the sense it makes.

  What was it Baba Yaga had told him?

  You must go into the belly of the beast. You must learn what he does not know. You must face the horror he cannot face.