He. Kurodar—she must mean Kurodar. You must learn what Kurodar does not know and face the horror Kurodar cannot face. Okay, but how could there be a horror in the Realm that Kurodar couldn’t face? The Realm was his place. It was made directly out of his imagination. It came straight out of his own brain . . .
Which reminded him of what his mother had said.
Don’t trust your own brain, Rick. Your brain can steer you wrong.
Maybe that’s what Baba Yaga was talking about. Maybe there was something in Kurodar’s brain—and therefore something in the Realm—that Kurodar couldn’t trust. Something that frightened him.
He can’t make me leave, much as he may want to.
Those were Baba Yaga’s words.
Even I’m his creature, poor soul that I am. But he can’t touch me. That’s what she said. He can’t make me leave . . .
Lying on his bed, his hands behind his head, Rick blinked up at the ceiling. He was feeling tired now, worn out by the night’s insane adventure. But oddly enough, as his mind began to grow fatigued, his thoughts began to flow more smoothly.
And it occurred to him: His dad was right. There really was some sort of sense to all this when you thought about it.
The Golden City was the source and battery of the MindWar Realm. It was the interface where Kurodar’s mind linked with his computers and sent out the energy and images that created the red plains and the blue forests and the yellow sky that served as pathways into American computer systems. The security bots, the fortresses, the airships—everything in the Realm came out of Kurodar’s mind by way of the Golden City.
So what if there were things in there—in Kurodar’s mind—that he didn’t want to have in there. Things he wished he could get rid of but could not.
Don’t trust your own brain.
He can’t make me leave, much as he may want to.
You must face the horror he cannot face.
Maybe the images in Baba Yaga’s crystal table were part of this horror Kurodar couldn’t get rid of. Maybe this was the horror Rick had to face.
So what was it? What were the images?
He had seen them. In the dream. He remembered. Baba Yaga had opened the vision of the table to him and he had stepped inside. What was there?
His mind began to drift backward as he tried to remember what had awakened him from his sleep in such terror. He tried to recall those images . . .
Then, suddenly, it was morning.
Startled, Rick realized he had fallen back to sleep. His mouth was dry. His head was muzzy. He couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking about. What was it . . .?
But before he could even start to look for the answer, there was a sharp knock at his door. The door came open and his father was there.
“Get dressed, son,” he said. “They need us. Let’s go.”
12. TRACE MEMORY
A LIGHT SNOW had fallen during the last watches of the night. The ground of the MindWar compound was covered by a patina of white that was already melting in the pale early morning sun. As Rick and his father walked across the open space shoulder to shoulder, Rick filled his dad in on what had happened during the night . . . or what he’d dreamed had happened . . . or what he had half dreamed and had half happened . . . whatever . . .
“You woke up in Mars’ office?” his father said, startled.
“And there was all this stuff on his computer. Something about a satellite. A weapon, it looked like. Battle Station SS-317—that’s what it was called. I don’t know what it was, but it looked like top secret stuff.”
“Why would a space weapon be in Mars’ computer? What’s it got to do with MindWar?”
Rick shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“Well, how? How’d you find it? How’d you even get into his machine? The flash drive I gave you is just a security override, not a hack. Mars’ keyboard won’t even unlock unless it’s his fingers that touch it.”
“I don’t remember what I did,” Rick said. “I just woke up and all this stuff was right there on the screen in front of me.”
The Traveler nodded thoughtfully as he walked. His spectacles frosted over as the mist from his breath rose up over them. With his watch cap pulled down over his bald head and his scarf pulled up to cover his chin, he looked kind of comical, Rick thought. Just a pair of misted-over glasses in a big overcoat. Like the Invisible Man or something. Even so, Rick could almost feel his dad’s powerful mind working through the problem.
“This is definitely worrying,” the Traveler said after a moment. “I think your theory that your dreams are giving you a glimpse inside Kurodar’s mind is a good one. Baba Yaga . . .”
“That witch woman.”
“Yeah—Baba Yaga is the name of a witch from old Russian fairy tales. What you may have been seeing is an image from a story that scared him when he was a child. Those images stick with you even if you don’t want them to.”
“Right, right,” said Rick eagerly. “Like that movie The Ring I talked you into letting me watch when I was, like, ten. I still have nightmares about that. Probably Kurodar heard some scary fairy tale when he was a kid and now Baba Yaga lives inside his brain.”
“She seems to act as the keeper of his secret thoughts. The things he remembers but doesn’t want to remember . . . Was that what she showed you?”
Rick blew out a long breath that sent the frost swirling up around his face. “I only remember some of it. Really ugly stuff. And it wasn’t just images either. It was like I was there.” He actually shuddered as he walked. “All around me, there were dead people. So many dead people, Dad . . . and they weren’t, like, soldiers from a war or anything either. They were just regular people, like us. Men, and women and children . . . just lying there on the ground like . . . like they’d been tossed away, you know? Like no one even cared about them. And the way their bodies looked. It was like they’d been starved to death. And tortured. And there were living people, too . . . guards. Standing around. Laughing. Laughing at the dead.” Rick shook his head, trying to clear the horrors from his mind. “The guards had caps on. Bars on their colors. One had a star on his chest, I remember . . .”
His father’s voice came amid a puff of frost over his scarf, under his misted glasses: “Must’ve been the gulags—the prisons in the Soviet Union. The Communists slaughtered their own people in the tens of millions. Starved them. Tortured them. Enslaved them. And Kurodar’s father was one of their key officials. A KGB agent rounding up anyone who might criticize the regime. He must’ve been particularly brutal. When the Soviet Union fell, Kurodar watched as an angry mob beat his father to death.”
“Wow,” said Rick. “I get it. So it’s, like, maybe Kurodar keeps these images hidden down inside Baba Yaga’s table so he doesn’t have to think about what his father was.”
“Yes. And what his country was.”
“Yeah,” said Rick. “I wouldn’t want to think about that either.”
They were approaching the building that housed the entrance to the underground facilities. The horrifying images were still floating through Rick’s mind, as real as reality. He stopped outside the building and his father stopped. Rick turned to the older man—looked at that comical pair of misted glasses between the watch cap and the scarf.
“Why’d they do it?” Rick asked him. His voice was hoarse and soft. “To their own people. Why’d they do it, Dad?”
His father tugged the scarf down onto his chin so he could speak more clearly. His voice was, as it almost always was, calm and clear. “They wanted to make the world a paradise,” he said.
Rick was about to answer. He was about to say: “It wasn’t paradise. It was hell . . .”
But before he could, the door came open. Miss Ferris was standing there. Her expression—if you could call it an expression—was the same as always: no expression at all.
“It’s about time you go
t here,” she said in that flat, toneless voice of hers. “Get inside. This is an emergency.”
13. EMERGENCY
“WHAT’S GOING ON?”
As they traveled down in the elevator, Rick’s father took off his watch cap and stuffed it into his overcoat pocket. He pulled his scarf down and started to unbutton his coat. His glasses cleared. He looked like himself again: an absentminded egghead. He looked at Miss Ferris, waiting for an answer.
The small, tense, compact woman stared at the door blankly, her lips pressed together to make a thin line. It was odd, thought Rick, stealing a glance at her. Somehow, he had come to like this woman. When he had first become a MindWarrior, he had thought she had no emotions, that she was cold and uncaring. Now, though, he was no longer sure. He thought maybe the truth was: she forced her emotions down so she could do the difficult things she had to do. It wasn’t that she didn’t care whether or not Rick died in the Realm. It was that she cared so much she couldn’t show it, not even to herself.
That was his guess, anyway.
“There was a major breach in our security last night,” she said. She spoke with as much emotion as the lady in a GPS when she tells you to turn left. “Someone hacked their way into Commander Mars’ computer.”
Rick and his father exchanged a quick, secret glance. That was Rick! Rick was the emergency! Rick’s lips parted. He was about to admit the truth. But his father gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head: Wait. They still didn’t know whom to trust around here. Rick kept silent.
“No one could have gotten in there without setting off alarms in the compound,” Miss Ferris went on. “And no one should have been able to get into the computer itself. That means it must’ve been Kurodar. If Kurodar’s mind has somehow gotten into our compound . . .” She let the sentence trail off, then in the same flat tone, she said: “Well, it would be a disaster.”
Again Rick met his father’s eyes behind Miss Ferris’s back. He didn’t want the whole compound to go on red alert because of him. But he could tell by the expression in his father’s eyes that he wanted him to keep quiet, so he did.
“So what are we going to do about it?” was all he said.
Miss Ferris gave him a brief, blank glance over her shoulder. “We’re sending you back into the Realm to see what you can find out.”
The elevator touched down. Miss Ferris strode out and headed down the hall. Rick and his father had to hurry to keep up. She was a small woman, but she took long strides.
“I thought Mars was reluctant to send Rick back in,” the Traveler said to her back. “I thought he was afraid Rick’s mind may have been compromised somehow when he ran through the Breach.”
“It’s a chance we have to take,” she said, marching ahead.
They came into the Portal Room. The techies were already there, four men and two women, each in his or her seat, before his or her screen and keyboard. They all looked like they’d been dragged out of bed to be here. Hair uncombed. One guy with his shirt buttoned wrong. All of them blinking at their machines as if they were dazed.
In the wall at the head of the room was the device Rick always thought of as the glass coffin: the portal into the MindWar Realm. It was a box with a transparent lid, the insides lined with a kind of thin metal. When Rick lay down in the box, the metal wrapped itself around him, and he felt all these pinpricks as the device plugged him into the MindWar system. He hated it. He hated getting in there. It made him claustrophobic. It made him sweat.
Next to the coffin, there was a small set of steps. Next to the steps was Juliet Seven. Juliet Seven was a security guy like Victor One, the only difference being that Victor One was a human being, whereas Rick suspected Juliet Seven might be a cartoon character. He looked like one, anyway. He was so huge and so muscular, he looked as if he were a bunch of gigantic squares and rectangles somehow welded together. Rectangle arms crossed over a square chest under a square head and all of it held up by two legs that looked like cement rectangles. He looked as if he were so strong he could pound you into the ground with a single blow to the top of your head. Which was why Rick never made fun of him for getting stuck with the code name Juliet.
“Let’s do this!”
The voice came from behind them, and Rick turned to see Mars enter the room. Rick stopped in his tracks, staring. It had been only a day since he’d last seen Mars, but he’d changed. He’d changed completely.
His solid, angry aspect was gone. He looked disheveled. He looked . . . well, he looked terrified. Instead of his usual crisp dress, he was wearing wrinkled slacks and a wrinkled white shirt, no tie. His silver hair (which Rick sometimes thought was made of steel) was all out of place. And those deep-set glaring eyes of his were staring out at them like the eyes of a hunted animal hiding in a dark cave.
Up until that moment, Rick had not imagined Mars could even feel an emotion like fear. But Rick could see it was worse than that. Mars wasn’t just afraid. He was in a complete panic. Totally messed up.
Why? Rick wondered. What’s he so scared about? Is it because I got into his computer?
And his father’s questions came back to him: Why would a space weapon be in Mars’ computer. What’s that got to do with MindWar?
Something was wrong here, Rick sensed. Something was terribly wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t get in the coffin. Maybe he shouldn’t do what Mars and Miss Ferris wanted him to do.
“We’re sending you back to your last location,” said Miss Ferris. She pressed a button and the lid of the glass coffin opened.
Rick turned to look at the opening box. Maybe . . .
“We need to find out what’s happening,” Mars said. “We need to find out how Kurodar is getting into our systems. Sending security bots through cyberspace into reality. Hacking our computers . . .”
Mars’s words tumbled together as he spoke. He was so panicked he couldn’t even speak right.
Miss Ferris was gesturing at him to climb the stairs, to get into the box, the portal into the Realm. Rick hesitated another moment. He wasn’t sure what to do.
He glanced at his father. The Traveler took a breath. “Maybe we need to think about this,” he said quietly.
Mars took a threatening step toward him. “You don’t have a say in this, Dial. Your country’s safety is at stake. More than that: the world’s safety. We have no time to stand here and talk about it.”
The commander and the Traveler locked eyes, Mars’s furious glare meeting Dial’s steady gaze.
Then, after a moment, Rick’s father turned to him. “It’s your decision,” he said.
Mars looked at him too. So did Miss Ferris.
Rick nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll go.”
Mars was right. The Boar Soldier in the tower. The hack of Mars’s computer. Something was going on. And if he could enter the Realm and find out what Kurodar was up to . . .
“Let’s do it,” he said.
He climbed up the steps into the portal box and lay down without saying another word.
Immediately, Miss Ferris pressed the button that closed the box’s lid. Even before the metal lining began to wrap around him, Rick started to sweat with claustrophobic panic. He felt the pinpricks as his nervous system was plugged into the computers. Soon, the familiar floating feeling came over him. Darkness surrounded him. A portal of light formed above him.
Here we go, he thought.
He focused his mind on the portal of light and . . .
Like water slipping through a straw, he was through.
He was through—and, the very next instant, he was being hurled into infinite blackness, heading for death so quickly there was no time to stop it, no time at all.
14. DEAD SPACE
TERROR GRIPPED HIS heart. Wild, unreasoning terror flashing through every nerve ending. He fell and fell through nothing, total nothing, with nothing to stop him, nothing to reach for or hold on to, nothing to keep him f
rom hurtling forever through this nightmare of absolute emptiness.
He understood at once what was happening. It was the darkness inside the sarcophagus. It was the darkness that Favian had told him about.
The darkness spread over everything everywhere. The Scarlet Plain. The Blue Wood. The Golden City is all that’s left of MindWar.
It was true. The church sarcophagus had afforded a glimpse of all that was left of the MindWar Realm. Beyond the Golden City and its dead, there was nothing but this. This utter nothingness. And he was falling into the heart of it.
As he fell, even as he fell, he felt as if he were being crushed and suffocated by the unending night. Somehow, the blackness was a living thing, closing on him, devouring him with malice, with relish.
Rick understood this too. The darkness was not just darkness. It came out of Kurodar’s mind. It was the very hell of the terrorist’s heart, the evil at the center of it.
And it was eating him alive!
Down and down and down he went. The agony, the terror, the whirling rush to death—there was no stopping it!
Never in his life had Rick felt so helpless, so hopeless, and so afraid. The rush, the blackness, the living evil. Falling into nothing, nothing, nothing!
His mind began to fade. His thinking grew dim and distant. His very consciousness was fading. Life itself . . .
He knew what would happen if he died in the Realm. The long, horrifying living decay . . . He’d seen it. Desperate, he tried to come up with a way to stop himself. But . . .
There’s nothing . . ., he thought in a panic. It’s all blackness. There’s nothing anywhere to use or grab or cling to . . . There’s nothing here at all!
But no, wait. Wait, that wasn’t right, was it? There was something, he realized. There was him. There was still him. He was still thinking, right? So he was still here. And Mariel had taught him that by focusing the power of his spirit, he could change the very substance of the Realm.
He tried it. He tried to focus his spirit on the blackness . . .