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  But he could tell at once: it was no good. The blackness was too deep, too complete, too all-encompassing. It had no substance. There was nothing he could focus on, nothing he could change, and even if there were, his spirit was not large enough, strong enough to affect that seemingly infinite abyss . . .

  It was hopeless. He fell and fell and the devouring night was endless. Nothing but blackness. Blackness and his own fading spirit . . .

  But then . . . another thought . . . another idea . . . If he was here . . . If he was still here . . .

  In the midst of that dying rush of terror, he heard his mother’s voice.

  You’ll never go anywhere alone. I promise.

  If he was still here . . . and if he was not alone . . . if he was never alone . . .

  The logic of it clicked into place and suddenly, almost magically, Rick was himself again. His despair vanished—evenhisterrordulled—andhewasallaction:thequarterback, Number 12, the guy who never cracked or gave up under pressure. Never. Not even now. Not even here.

  The living blackness was too powerful for him to change. So he focused his spirit beyond the blackness . . . beyond nothing . . . beyond even his own death . . .

  And at once, he could feel it. His mother was right. He was not alone.

  Rick steadied himself. He focused beyond the darkness of Kurodar’s heart, beyond the darkness of his own destruction. Without his even thinking about it, the focus of his spirit changed. The focus turned into prayer. But it was no ordinary prayer. There were no words in it. It was instead a prayer he made with his whole self, the deepest self of himself. His very spirit reached across the seemingly endless blackness to the place where the blackness ended, where the endlessness itself ended, to the Spirit from which his own spirit had its source. He could not see this Spirit—he could not even sense the hundreth part of its eternal vastness—but he recognized it. He knew it all the same. His father had been teaching him about it since he was a little boy . . .

  So he prayed—prayed in that wordless way with his entire being.

  And the darkness tore. It ripped apart like paper.

  Light.

  A portal.

  Rick did not say thank you. He did not have to. His whole spirit had turned to gratitude.

  He went into the light.

  15. BETRAYAL

  RICK AWOKE IN the glass coffin and started screaming. The coffin lid was shut, its surface inches from his face. The metal foil was still wrapped tightly around him, holding him close like a cocoon. He could still feel the million tiny pinpricks going into his flesh.

  The claustrophobia was overwhelming. He needed to get out of here. Like, now.

  He yelled and struggled, his powerful arms pushing against the metal, bending it out of shape.

  “Get me out of here! Get me out!” he shouted.

  He felt as if at any moment the blackness would surround him again. He was terrified he might be sucked back into the Realm, sent hurtling, whirling, back into that animate nothingness.

  “Help! Get me out!”

  Over his own screams, he heard a sort of chuck sound and then a hiss. The glass lid of the coffin started rising. Rick continued to thrash and push against the metal that held him.

  The next moment, Miss Ferris was there, bending over him. She spoke in that same monotone as always, but even in his panic, Rick could see the warmth of concern in her eyes.

  “Hold still. Hold still, Rick,” she said. “You’ll hurt yourself. You’ll be out in a second.”

  Panting with panic, Rick forced himself to hold still. Sure enough, the metal wrapping began to open. He could barely wait for it to free him. As soon as he was able, he pushed out, reaching for the edges of the coffin to pull himself free. Miss Ferris tried to help him, but he was too big for her. She stepped aside. The next moment, Juliet Seven was there. The massive cartoon character of a man clamped a square hand around Rick’s arm and practically hoisted him out of the box.

  Rick nearly fell down the stairs to the Portal Room floor. He dropped to his knees. The room seemed to spin around him. He gagged. He felt like he was going to throw up.

  That blackness . . . that awful living evil blackness . . . He had been sure it was going to devour him. He didn’t know why it hadn’t. There’d been nothing to stop his fall. Nothing to hold on to. In the fog of the present moment, in the daze of his return, in his sickness, he could not remember how in the world he’d gotten out of there.

  Now he was aware that his father was at his side, kneeling next to him, a hand on his shoulder.

  “What happened?” the Traveler said. “What did you see?”

  Rick gagged again. “It was awful,” he said, still panting. “It was worse than awful. It was, like, the worst thing that ever happened . . .”

  But before he could finish, things got even worse.

  As Rick remained on his knees, sick and panting—as his father kneeled beside him, holding his arm, blinking with concern behind his round glasses—the door to the Portal Room hissed open and two security guards charged in. They were big men with big rifles strapped over their shoulders. They looked ready for unpleasant business.

  In confusion, Rick looked up and saw Commander Mars stepping toward the soldiers. Rick could tell that Mars had been expecting them, that he’d known they were coming. The thought flashed through his mind: He must’ve called them.

  It was true. Frowning grimly, Mars pointed down at where Rick’s father knelt beside him.

  He said, “Put this man under arrest.”

  Before anyone could react, the two guards grabbed Lawrence Dial under his arms and hauled him to his feet.

  “What?” said Rick. He could still just barely think. “What are you doing?”

  But his father remained calm even now. Held captive by the soldiers, he merely turned to Mars with a quiet look and a slight smile.

  “Even you must know this is a mistake, Mars,” he said.

  Mars took another step. He leaned in close to the Traveler’s face and peered into his glasses, his expression triumphant.

  “You’re under arrest for treason, Dial,” Mars said. “I’ll see to it you go to prison for life. In fact, you’re lucky I don’t just have you shot.” Then to the guards he said, “Get him out of here. Jail him in the hospital secure room.”

  The guards began to drag the Traveler to the door. Rage swept over Rick. Weak as he was, he leapt to his feet. He began to charge at Commander Mars. He had some crazy idea of tackling him, driving him into the floor. Not that that would have changed anything, but Rick could be a hotheaded guy at times and this was definitely one of those times.

  He meant to charge at Mars, but he never took a single step. Before he could move, Juliet Seven grabbed his arms from behind, locked his elbows in a grip like steel. Rick struggled against him, but even a big man like Number 12 was no match for Juliet Seven.

  Mars sneered at him. “If you’re not careful, you’ll be next.”

  Rick watched helplessly as the soldiers marched Lawrence Dial out of the room. Mars followed after them. And the Portal Room door hissed shut behind them all.

  LEVEL THREE:

  THE DEAD ATTACK

  16. MINDJACK

  KURODAR HOWLED IN pain. The cry was so loud even his workers heard it outside. The workers paused with their shovels in the air and raised their heads to listen. The howl went on a long time, like the cry of a wolf greeting the moon. Then it faded away. The sounds of the surrounding jungle closed in again. After a moment or two, the workers went back to what they had been doing: tossing the last dirt over the grave of the assassin—Harold Hepplewhite—whom their master had destroyed as if by some kind of bizarre and terrifying magic.

  None of the workers in Kurodar’s jungle outpost knew exactly how it had happened. The hitman Hepplewhite had been their last hope of getting free of this place. They had prayed he would kill Kurodar so they could leave. B
ut somehow Kurodar seemed to have eliminated the assassin with nothing more than a thought. That was the end of all their hopes. The workers knew they would be too afraid to try to escape now. Such power as Kurodar’s could reach them anywhere, kill them anywhere, them and their families. They had begun to believe Kurodar was some sort of demon. They had begun to feel they were trapped in a kind of hell.

  But Kurodar was not a demon. Nor was he, as he had sometimes thought himself, any kind of a god. He was just a man—a brilliant man, but still just a man—a sick man attached to a machine that gave him power. And right this moment, that machine was causing him unbelievable agony.

  It happened when the boy Dial had reentered the Realm. Kurodar had been hoping this would happen. He had been waiting for it like a spider waiting on his web. The moment the Traveler’s son attempted to return to the blackness of his inner space, he was planning to devour him, to take the young Dial’s mind into himself and digest everything the boy knew and everything he was. He would have stolen his secrets and transformed the big, handsome hero into a shriveled shell, interminably decaying into death. The very thought delighted him.

  He had almost succeeded at it too. Everything was going exactly as he’d wanted. He had the boy in the heart of his darkness and was on the verge of obliterating him, making him part of that dark and then . . . and then—somehow—suddenly—

  Suddenly, a pain like nothing he had ever felt before went through Kurodar’s very core. Something deep in his spirit—something deep and essential—tore open. That’s what it felt like. Like his soul was a piece of canvas and someone had ripped a hole right through the center of it. Strapped to his machines in the cellar of his jungle outpost, Kurodar howled and howled—sending up that noise that had made the gravediggers stop their work to listen.

  And when he stopped howling, the boy—this Rick Dial, who had plagued him past tolerance—was gone.

  Well, maybe not gone. No, not gone entirely. The connection between Kurodar and the Dial boy was still in place. Kurodar could still get to him, get through him, get what he needed. But it wasn’t going to be as simple as devouring him whole. It was going to take a tremendous effort. And it was going to take time.

  Ever since Rick had gone through Kurodar’s Breach, Kurodar’s mind and Kurodar’s circuits and the circuits of Rick’s mind had all become interconnected. Ever since that one moment when Rick passed through the border between the Realm and RL, Kurodar had had a presence in Rick’s consciousness. It had been a small presence at first—very small—but Kurodar had understood at once that it might be just what he needed to get behind the enemy’s defenses. He had immediately gone to work making his small presence larger.

  In order to do this, Kurodar had begun to concentrate his energies. Rick had destroyed his fortress. He had brought down his WarCraft. The Axis Assembly had withdrawn its funding. Kurodar needed to focus all his power for one final attack. It was with great sorrow he let the beautiful Realm he had painstakingly created fall back into the shadow of nothingness, but it had to be done. Instead, he had condensed all the power of his mind and his machinery on the Golden City, his interface with cyberspace. From the Golden City, he was now able to unleash a massive effort of will. With that effort, he was able to build a new outpost, not in a computer this time but in Rick Dial’s brain.

  The results had been wonderful, almost miraculous. Whenever Rick slept, whenever his consciousness relaxed, Kurodar could enter his mind and work on building his presence. His outpost in Rick had grown so strong, he had actually been able to send one of his security bots through it—straight out of the Realm and through Rick’s consciousness and directly into RL to kill one of the compound’s guards. That had been a neat trick—but neater still, Kurodar had been able to control Rick himself. While Rick slept, Kurodar had used Rick’s own knowledge to send the boy into the MindWar compound’s underground complex. He used Rick’s own mind to project himself into Mars’s computer, hacking through its security. And there he had found exactly what he suspected he would. Exactly what he needed.

  The Battle Station! His rivals in the Axis Assembly had thought they could hide this from him, but of course they could hide nothing. Commander Mars had been using the Traveler’s MindWar defense technology to hack the most secure U.S. government systems and smuggle out specs and codes to the greatest American weapons system ever devised. Now Kurodar had used Rick Dial to access those specs and codes. If he could just finish reading the designs out of Rick’s consciousness, he would be in possession of a weapon with destructive power beyond imagining. The Axis thought they could get hold of this machine through the usual clunky human means: treachery and greed. But Kurodar would show them that the Realm machinery was a far better tool than mere unreliable humanity.

  The Battle Station, he now knew, was a top secret weapon launched into space by the United States about a year and a half ago. It had been sent up disguised as a weather satellite, but it was not that, nothing like it. It was in fact a hugely powerful device that could soak up the energy of the sun, concentrate it in a single blast, and direct that blast at the earth for a sustained period. Used properly, the device could draw a massive swath of fire and death across an entire continent. With the Battle Station under his control, Kurodar would be able to literally set the United States ablaze.

  If Kurodar could just digest the inside of Rick Dial’s mind, he would have the codes and signals he needed to take control of the Battle Station and set it into motion. But he had to act fast. He had to act before the Axis got hold of the codes themselves through their own transaction with the MindWar compound.

  He needed a delaying tactic. He needed to use Rick Dial’s mind as a portal again, to attack the MindWar compound and keep them busy while he took control of the Battle Station.

  There was only one problem. The link between Rick’s mind and Kurodar’s went both ways. As Kurodar had been working on Rick’s mind, Rick had been entering the Realm, albeit unconsciously, in his sleep. Kurodar could not let the Realm go undefended or Dial might go in there and destroy it. Given that Kurodar and the Realm were now utterly linked together, the destruction of the Realm would almost surely mean the destruction of Kurodar himself.

  So before he attacked the MindWar compound, Kurodar had to create a new defender for the Realm, someone who could stop Rick Dial if he dared to attack him, someone more powerful than the demon Reza and even greater than the Octo-Guardian.

  He knew just how to do it. Those other monsters—those had been creatures created out of the minds of other humans. But this monster, this greatest of all monsters, would come directly out of his own mind. This would be a product of his own darkest imagination.

  Kurodar knew where to find the template of the beast. He would make him in the image of his own father.

  Kurodar had loved his father. He had idolized him. Worshipped him as if he were a god. But he had also feared him. And with good reason. His father had been brutally cruel to him when he was a boy. He had beat him black-and-blue for the slightest disobedience. He had continually mocked him for his ugliness and his weakness. He had locked him away inside a closet, sometimes for days, to “teach him strength and discipline and manliness.” Kurodar knew why all the people were afraid of the KGB colonel. Wherever he went, terror and pain followed after.

  Kurodar had not blamed his father for this. Not at all. He knew his father was a great man and that he himself was, in fact, an ugly little child, unhealthy and intellectual, a great disappointment to his powerhouse of a dad. No, Kurodar had felt his father was right to abuse him. He felt he deserved to be ridiculed, deserved to be beaten, deserved to be locked away. After all, his father was like a god to him. He wouldn’t do anything wrong, would he?

  Now, as the dreadful agony of Rick Dial’s escape from the Realm began to subside, as the hole that had been torn in his spirit began to mend, as his mind began to clear, he turned his power of imagination back to the work of creation. He sa
w his father now. He pictured him in his mind’s eye. He imagined the KGB man as he had been before he died . . .

  Yes! he thought.

  He would bring him back to life now. He would recreate his father in cyber form and place him as a guardian over the last bastion of the Realm. He would resurrect him as the giant he was, the demigod he was. He would set him up as the master of the armies of the Golden City, the leader of its defenses. If Rick Dial, or anyone else, tried to invade Kurodar’s domain, they would find themselves doing battle against the most terrifying security bot anyone could imagine . . .

  Kurodar focused and worked the circuits. Deep in the heart of the Realm, in the center of the Golden City, a figure began to emerge into being.

  A beast from his worst nightmares.

  His father made monstrous.

  The King of the Dead.

  17. SPY HUNTER

  MOLLY SMILED TO herself as she finished packing. She worked carefully to fold a last sweater and lay it neatly in the small suitcase lying open on her bed, but her mind was far away. She was still thinking about last night, about Rick, about kissing Rick under the moonlit trees.

  There’s only you.

  These last few weeks—what a wild journey it had been. A crazy way to find the man of your dreams, that was for sure. Especially when it turned out the MOYD was one of your oldest friends. Other girls went to parties. Other girls went on dates. Other girls met their guys in all kinds of places. Molly? She’d been kidnapped, manhandled, chased by gunmen, nearly killed. She’d done hand-to-hand combat against thugs twice her size and killers with automatic weapons and flying drones that dealt death from the sky. She’d helped foil a plot to destroy the capital. And she’d been rescued from death by a guy driving a spaceship that seemed to have zipped right out of a video game and into real life. And all of it had finally brought her and Rick together.

  Not the usual How I Met Your Father scenario. She doubted her children would believe her when she told them!