The man bled until his body was empty, then vanished.
A quick but thorough search of the trench revealed that once again Michael had struck out. Three down, dozens to go. He groaned.
“Not happy down there?”
He glanced up to see a man and a woman standing directly above him, right on the edge of the trench. The woman was bouncing a grenade from hand to hand.
“Um, no, I’m just taking a breather is all.” Thankfully his clothes were now dirty and smeared with blood. He fit in much better, looked like he belonged.
“Nothing but a dumb kid,” the man said to the woman. “Think you’re going to get away with using code from other games? And there’s no doubt you’re a rookie.”
Michael narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Because you haven’t turned to run yet. You’re probably pretty sure this grenade doesn’t work.”
Michael started to answer, but before he could get a word out the woman pulled the pin and tossed the grenade. It landed with a wet thunk in the slush at Michael’s feet. He looked at the pair of soldiers with defiance. They turned and ran.
When the grenade blew, Michael felt it. This time there was a brilliant explosion of pain so acute and short he didn’t even have time to scream. Then came the void of dark space that they called death.
7
He woke up back at the beginning, in the icy tunnel. Bryson was sitting there and didn’t seem the least bit surprised when Michael appeared before him.
“Sucks being killed out there,” Bryson said. “I hurt.” He paused. “All over.”
“Yeah, me too.” Michael stood up and stretched, felt the lingering aches and pains from his two deaths. They weren’t quite the same as real injuries—the Coffin stimulated nerves for physical reactions—but enough to ensure you wouldn’t forget too quickly.
“How’s Sarah doing?” he asked.
Bryson shrugged. “I don’t know. We got separated.”
“How many trenches have you seen?”
Bryson held up two gloved fingers. “But nothing yet.”
“Man,” Michael groaned. “This is gonna take years.”
“Nah, we’ll be fine,” Bryson answered, climbing to his feet to join him. “Having fun?”
Michael looked at him for a second. “No, I hate every minute of it,” he finally said, then held up his knife. “I ended up borrowing a little something from Dungeons of Delmar.”
“Yeah,” Bryson replied absently, his face screwed up in a grimace. “It’s weird how these old geezers like to kill—like they’re animals. I need to program myself a little help.”
Michael nodded. “Let’s just find that stupid Portal.”
Out the door they went.
8
The next couple of days were pure hell for Michael.
He died twenty-seven times, in every way imaginable, within the borders of that brutal, icy arena. Some deaths were worse than others, but somehow he kept going back out there. His knife trick helped a few times, and he tried other things like a special leaping ability from the Canyon Jumpers game and enhanced speed from Running with Ragers. They were hard to isolate and program, and ended up only delaying his inevitable doom.
But he pressed on.
Oddly, every day a horn blew at dusk, and the battles ceased immediately. People who’d been going at it like lions were suddenly pals, walking—often limping—toward huge dinner tables with arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing.
Michael and his friends joined them to eat, then headed toward a place where warming lamps and sleeping bags had been laid out. The first night, they’d tried to sneak toward the trenches to search, but they’d come across a temporary firewall and were all too tired to hack it. The security programming in the frigid place was definitely above average.
The next morning it all started up again. Kill, kill, get killed. Pain and suffering. Kill some more, get killed some more. For the first time in his life, Michael understood why real soldiers coming back from real wars often had a hard time getting over the things they’d seen and done. And had done to them. If Michael had a soul, it was starting to leak out of his pores.
The one solace he had was that he and his friends were together. They didn’t say much—or have time to—but at least they were together.
In the late afternoon of the third day, Sarah found the Portal.
CHAPTER 12
A DIRE WARNING
1
Michael had just been killed again by a working grenade. If he’d learned anything in Devils of Destruction, it was that no matter how many times your body exploded, it never got any easier.
Sarah was waiting for him back in the tunnel. She was sitting on the ground, back to the wall, legs folded underneath her, and she looked exhausted. Michael sat down across from her, and she told him.
“I found it,” she said softly. Her voice sounded dead. Michael felt just as empty, and he thought he knew why: they’d paid too heavy a price. He knew he’d never be the same.
He did feel some sense of relief, though. “Where?” he finally asked, and the way Sarah looked at him, he knew she was just as relieved as he was.
“It’s five trenches in from the tents, near the middle, on the left side. There are five or six people inside, who knows what kinds of weapons. I barely detected the Portal before they killed me.”
“We’ll be fine,” Michael told her. “We’ll wait for Bryson, and we’ll come up with a plan. Maybe we can even do it without jumping in there and going medieval on everybody.”
She gave him a smile. It was weak and small, but it lifted him up a little. “At least we know where it is. I don’t think I could’ve lasted much longer out there, running from one trench to the next, wondering what joyful way I’d die next.”
“I’ll take a nice trip through space killing aliens with lasers anytime over this.”
Sarah’s eyes met Michael’s and stayed there, both of them silent, sharing the experience they’d just endured. Then pain exploded inside his head.
2
Michael collapsed to the cold floor and curled up into a ball, barely aware of Sarah by his side, leaning over his shoulder, yelling at him to tell her what was wrong. He couldn’t form words. He gripped his head, rocking back and forth as the pain pounded inside his skull. He was aware enough of what had happened to him in the alley back home that he refused to open his eyes.
The visions. Those creepy, terrifying visions. He didn’t know if the effects on his mind would be the same in the VirtNet as they were back in the Wake, but he didn’t want to find out. He kept his eyes squeezed shut and waited for the pain to fade.
Finally, just like before, it vanished in an instant. No slow recovery, no lingering ache. He was in agony one second, totally fine the next. Though he thought he’d heard a voice.…
According to Sarah, the episode had lasted three minutes—it could’ve been an hour for all Michael could tell. She put her arm around his shoulder and helped him sit up. He leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. What a splendid week he’d had.
“You okay now?” Sarah asked.
Michael turned to look at her. “Yeah. When it ends, it totally ends. Doesn’t even hurt right now at all.” But he was exhausted and sick with fear—he hadn’t had an attack in a few days, and he’d been hoping that maybe they’d stopped.
She ran her fingers through his hair. “What did that monster do to you?” she murmured.
He shrugged—he assumed she meant the KillSim. “I don’t know. I just remember it felt like it was sucking my brain out. Maybe it did—part of it, anyway.”
“At least you went a while without an attack, right? Let’s just hope it happens less and less frequently. Maybe it’ll eventually stop altogether.”
Bryson appeared back from the game then, a look of pride brightening his face, and Sarah dropped her hand from Michael’s head.
“Hey, I found it!” Bryson called. “I found the Portal.”
/> Sarah smirked. “Big deal,” she said. “I beat you to it, slowpoke.”
But her face filled with a genuine smile. Michael’s heart felt a bit less empty, though he was still concerned. He hoped it had just been the delusion of his attack, but he could’ve sworn he’d heard a voice, whispering a phrase inside his mind.
You’re doing well, Michael.
3
Bryson described which trench he was talking about, and it was indeed the same one Sarah had found. Michael and his friends racked their tired brains to come up with a plan. They had to get close enough, and have enough time, to probe the Portal and hack their way through its code. But jumping inside that ditch, knives and fists first, was the last thing any of them would ever want to do again.
Which is what made Michael think of grenades. He’d been killed by them three or four times, so he knew they were effective. And he’d be lying if he said he didn’t want the tiniest bit of revenge.
When he suggested it, Bryson said, “Well, it sounds good, but we’ll need something extra to make sure they go off.”
Sarah answered, “We’ll just bring a whole bunch and start tossing them. I’ll program a Spectacular Spark from the Munitions Maniacs game and hope it triggers them.”
Michael grabbed his backpack and unzipped it, then took everything out. “Let’s start stuffing.”
4
Once everyone’s backpack was full, they hitched them over their shoulders, got gloves and hats, then headed back out the door into the wintry air.
Michael and Sarah followed Bryson around the left side of the valley, careful to stay below the ridgeline, out of sight. When they got to the rise, they dropped to their stomachs and crawled to the top.
Then it hit Michael. “What if we just wait until morning and try to get there before anyone else?” What he really wanted to say was, Please don’t make me run down there into that mayhem again. He didn’t know how much more of it he could take.
“I’m dreading this, too,” Bryson said. “But we can’t afford to lose another night. Let’s just try this thing. Guards or no guards.”
“Okay,” Michael grumbled. “But remember—either we all get through or none of us do. We can’t go through the Portal alone or we might never hook back up.”
“Fine,” Bryson said. “And how about we don’t get killed? We’re forming bad habits.”
“Amen,” Michael responded. “Dying is my new least favorite thing.”
Michael looked out over the open space again. They had to get past dozens of battles, as well as ten or so other trenches. The odds of making it to the Portal without getting pulled into some sort of fight weren’t good. And judging by the look on Sarah’s face, she thought the same thing.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly in charge. “I think we can get through, but you have to follow my lead. If one of us gets intercepted, we need to stay and fight.”
“We got it,” Bryson said. “Stick together. Now let’s get this over with.”
Michael’s heart pumped like pistons in a race car. “Yeah” was all he could get out.
“Come on.” Sarah climbed to her feet and was suddenly running down the icy hill. Michael and Bryson hurried to catch up.
5
It took an hour to make it to the trench, and they fought the whole way there. Sometimes it was a single man or woman—those were the easy ones. But they faced a few that were far more difficult—gangs of two, three, or four soldiers coming after their small alliance all at once. The only positive of having died so many times was that it gave Michael and his friends the experience—and a little help from their programming-boosted powers—to fend off those attackers.
They weren’t going to die this time. Michael swore it to himself over and over. He grew more exhausted by the minute, but his adrenaline was high, and his energy seemed to reignite with every new confrontation.
They finally found themselves just a few feet from the edge of the Portal trench. The group was bloodied and bruised, their clothes ripped. Bryson had lost his backpack, and they only had one knife. But for a brief moment, they were alone.
Sarah dropped to her knees and unzipped her pack, dumping her cache of grenades onto the frozen ground. Michael added his own as Bryson ran over to the edge to scout the guard situation. “Five or six of them,” he reported back, falling to his knees next to them to help. “Start pulling and chucking! They’re just sitting there with guns, smoking.”
Michael got right to work. He grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, then threw it into the long, narrow pit. He didn’t stop to see what happened; he took another one and repeated the process, throwing it at the same spot. Then another one. Another. Bryson and Sarah were just as fast, and in a matter of seconds they’d tossed more than a dozen into the trench.
Then Sarah closed her eyes—they flickered under her eyelids as she searched and manipulated the code. A bright flash of light flared up at her chest, brilliant enough to make Michael shield his eyes with his arm. He peeked and saw it whoosh away from her and shoot down into the trench like a fiery comet.
Michael noticed a man climbing up from the inside of the trench on the far side. He opened his mouth to warn his friends, but a deafening boom exploded from within the deep-cut ditch. Flashes of fire lit up the day, and metal shards flew in every direction.
“Let’s go!” Sarah yelled, already on her feet and moving toward the ladder. The man Michael had seen earlier was flat on his stomach at the very top, a huge gash sliced down the back of his coat. Nothing but red and ruin.
Michael ran after Sarah, Bryson by his side. They reached the edge of the trench. Michael ran alongside it, looking for survivors, but all he could see was death. He watched the bodies disappear one by one.
The three friends got to the ladder just as the man at the top rolled over onto his back. He wasn’t dead, but he was close, and the look on his face showed he knew.
Sarah started down the rungs, as did Bryson. Michael was right behind them when the man reached up and grabbed Michael’s arm, then spun him around. His strength was surprising for the condition he was in. Michael was able to pull himself free, but before he turned away, the man started mumbling something, his lips quivering with the effort, his whole body shaking.
Michael leaned in closer, thinking he’d heard his name. “What did you say?” he asked.
The soldier seemed to gather his strength for one last effort to speak. And then it came out in a short burst, and Michael heard every word.
“Be careful with Kaine. He’s not who you think.”
Then the man died, and his wrecked body vanished into the air.
CHAPTER 13
THE FLOATING DISK
1
“Get down here!” Sarah yelled from below.
Michael realized he was staring at the patch of bloody snow where the guy had been lying only seconds before. What was going on? The voice during his last attack that told him he was doing well, what this stranger had said about Kaine … What did it all mean?
Michael had a deep-down fear that Kaine knew exactly what they were doing and where they were. And he wondered if it could be possible—did the gamer want Michael to figure out where he was?
“Dude!”
Michael turned his attention back to the trench, and Bryson was staring up at him.
“What are you doing?” he yelled.
“Thinking,” Michael answered. He was fully aware of how stupid it sounded. “Sorry,” he added. People were charging in from all directions as he scrambled down into the slushy pit with his friends.
Bryson shook his head. “We really can’t take you anywhere.”
“Did that guy say something to you?” Sarah asked.
Michael nodded. “Yeah, but I’ll tell you later. We’re about to have a lot of unwelcome visitors. It looks like a zombie parade out there, and we’re the food.”
“It’s over here,” Bryson said, gesturing for them to follow him. They had trudged down the middle of the pit about fift
een feet when he pointed to a section of the wall where the black tarp had been shredded. In most places, white ice shone through, but there was a spot where a slight purple glow emanated.
The shouts and cries of the approaching players were getting louder.
“No time like the present,” Sarah said. She turned to Michael. “You stand guard while Bryson and I try to figure this out.”
As Michael took position, Bryson tore away a big swath of the black tarp. Behind it, a six-foot-tall tunnel had been carved into the wall of ice. Michael couldn’t focus on exactly where it happened, but at some point inside the tunnel the dark space transformed into a throbbing purple light. What lay beyond was impossible to make out—the harder Michael strained to see, the more his vision blurred.
“It’s those underage kids!” someone screamed from above. Even as Bryson and Sarah moved into the tunnel, Michael glanced up to see a man holding a long blade.
Michael didn’t hesitate—he spun around and followed his friends into the purple light.
2
The sounds of the War of Greenland quickly disappeared—the tunnel was silent, as if a door had closed behind them. And when he looked back, Michael saw that that was exactly what had happened. The trench they’d just escaped was no longer there. Instead there was the same odd purple glow.
He turned back around and was relieved to see that he hadn’t lost Bryson and Sarah. They were still on their hands and knees like him, only they were concentrating, eyes twitching back and forth behind closed eyelids, frantically working the code.