With a roar and a howl, something dropped out of the darkness to hover six feet in front of him.
Warne fell back onto the catwalk, crying out in surprise. He barely had time to register what it was he was seeing—a pod, full of laughing, smiling faces—before it lurched downward again, out of sight.
He picked himself up off the catwalk and crouched cautiously in the opening. Ahead of him, framed by the surrounding wall of glass, lay a field of stars. On the far side of the archway was a narrow platform, maybe two feet on a side. It was painted black and almost invisible against the swiftly moving starfield. It was surrounded by a railing, also black.
Warne waited a moment. Then, taking a deep breath, he ducked through the opening and stepped out onto the platform.
It was like walking out into the vastness of space. He was surrounded by stars, infinite and infinitely far away, all racing hell-bent for the vortex beneath his feet. For a moment, the illusion was so overpowering that he closed his eyes and swayed slightly, grasping for the railing. Dimly, he was aware that water was soaking through his clothes. He waited, breathing slowly, fighting vertigo, focusing on the reassuring solidity of the railing. He waited another moment, then opened his eyes again, squinting against the rain.
Gradually, he began to understand what he was looking at. He was standing atop a platform on the inside edge of a huge, hollow cylinder. Its curved surface was some sort of one-way mirror, onto which the countless hurtling stars were reflected and re-reflected, giving an alarmingly realistic sense of depth.
There was a rumble above him, which turned quickly into a roar. Glancing upward, he saw another pod descending toward him at a sharp angle, wheeling through the rain. It seemed to be heading straight for him, and he shrank back toward the low archway. But then the pod curved and slowed, stopping beside the platform. The roar subsided to a whine as, against all reason, the direction of the rain seemed to alter subtly. The motion of the stars on the surrounding walls slowly ceased, until they hung motionless in the void. Inside the pod, he could see a family of five, all wearing the same dazed, happy expressions he’d seen in the previous car. They were clutching their lap and shoulder belts as if to keep themselves from floating out of their seats. “Attention, please,” came a voice over the pod’s comm unit. “We’ve been given clearance to approach the mothership. Initiating docking sequence now.”
One of the children, looking around, caught sight of Warne. For a moment, she simply stared, as if disbelieving her eyes. Then she jabbed her mother and pointed toward him.
The woman looked over, not seeing him at first. Then her eyes seemed to focus and her expression changed from wonder to consternation. At that moment, the roar returned and the pod dropped away from the platform, en route to its final destination.
Warne watched it drop out of sight as once again the stars went into motion around him. Like everything else about the ride, the platform had clearly been designed to enhance illusion and disguise reality. No doubt any spotter in position here would be dressed in black, invisible from the perspective of the riders inside their pods.
He was beginning to fully comprehend the clever artifice that lay behind Escape from Waterdark. The ride was built inside this cylinder—cone, actually, wider at the top than at the bottom. Although the pods actuallydescended in a tightening spiral toward the mothership at the base, riders inside the pods would have the sensation ofrising into space. Even at this extreme moment, he was struck by the almost brazen brilliance of the conception. In the ride, the pods were supposedly flying up from the castle to the orbiting ship. And yet the castle dungeon was the highest physical point of the ride: the mothership was at the bottom of the cone. Everything—the utter darkness of space, the computer-controlled motions of the pod, the wheeling of the stars, the direction of the wind-controlled pulses of rainwater—was precisely calibrated, synchronized, to allow Utopia’s designers to superimpose their own reality over the laws of physics. As the pods revolved on their hidden spokes, the rate of descent increased, creating a false sense of low gravity. The angle of the pod was constantly adjusted so the riders remained unaware they were traveling in descending circles. And he himself was standing on a spotter’s platform, used for covert observation of the passengers, or perhaps in case of . . .
There was a whine overhead, the roar of another escape pod descending into its holding position. As it came into view, Warne’s train of thought dissolved instantly. Inside sat Georgia, mouth open, wide delighted eyes reflecting the stars.
Warne did not stop to think. As the pod hovered, he dashed forward, reaching over the railing and fumbling with the access handle. Georgia looked over as he climbed over the rail and half jumped, half fell into the pod.
The look of wonder on her face changed quickly to alarm and confusion. “Dad? What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
“It’s okay,” he said, closing the access door and kneeling on the floor of the pod, taking her hand. “It’s okay.”
“Gross,” Georgia said. “You’re allwet .”
He sat a moment, embarrassment beginning to mingle with the overwhelming relief. He felt water rolling off his nose and ears, dripping onto the molded interior of the pod. Once they reached the mothership, he’d explain everything.Well, not quite everything, he thought as he waited for the pod to begin its final descent.
“What’s going on, Dad? Why—?”
And then Georgia looked away from him suddenly, her fine features backlit by the starfield, dark brows knitting together.
Then Warne, too, heard the voices—distant at first, but coming closer.
“There he is. Platform 18.”
“Waterdark tower, I need an E-stop. Repeat, emergency stop.”
There was a clattering of feet, and then vague forms appeared on the platform beside him. From inside the pod, it was difficult to make them out against the illusion of space, but Warne guessed they were security officers.
“Excuse me, sir,” one of the men said, “but you’ll need to come with me.”
“No,” Warne said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.”
“Sir, please exit the pod and step onto the catwalk,” the man said again, his voice a little harder this time.
Warne felt Georgia tighten her grip on his hand.
It was all so ridiculous. He was with Georgia, she was safe now. Everything would be all right if they’d just get the ride under way.
He turned to explain this to the men on the platform, but found he could not hear himself speak. In fact, he could not hear anything, except for a sudden harsh eruption of sound that seemed to come from everywhere.
There was a flicker of light overhead. He looked up just in time to see two huge spurts of orange-colored flame lick down toward him. For a moment, in the blinding illumination, he glimpsed the secret architecture of the ride—the expanding cone of glass, the central hub with its umbrella-like supporting spokes—before the glare, magnified off the infinite mirror, overloaded his vision. He jerked his head away, closing his eyes. There were shouts of alarm and surprise from the platform. The pod gave a sudden lurch to one side. The terrible noise faded, replaced by the crash and shriek of rending metal.
“Daddy!” Georgia cried.
Warne turned toward her.
Then—with a sudden, convulsive instinct—he leaned forward, shielding the girl with his body as the pod gave another sickening wrench and enfolding darkness abruptly claimed them.
2:40P.M.
UTOPIA’S CENTRAL MEDICALFacility was located on A Level, directly beneath the Nexus. It had been designed so that, in case of calamity or natural disaster, it could be reached from any area of the Park, public or private, in a minimum amount of time. And it had been diligently stocked with enough emergency equipment to make a world-class trauma center envious: respirators, ventilators, defibrillators, intubators, monitoring systems, crash carts. Most of this high-ticket equipment stood silent and unused within darkened bays and storage areas, lifesav
ing objets d’art that, in a nonsterile environment, would have been collecting dust. In the hectic seas of Utopia, Medical had always remained an archipelago of calm: soft-voiced nurses tending the occasional scraped knee or sprained ankle, orderlies stocking supplies, technicians running obligatory diagnostics on machines that rarely saw use.
But now, Medical had been transformed into a frantic triage operation. Cries of pain mixed discordantly with calls for plasma. Paramedics darted from room to room. Orderlies who would normally be doing drug inventories were shuttling equipment between operating theaters. Guests clustered in waiting rooms, huddled around sobbing figures or sprawled in chairs, looking vacantly at the ceiling.
Warne pulled the light blue curtains around the recovery bay, shutting out the noise as best he could. His left shoulder throbbed as he dragged the rings along the overhead rail. As he turned back toward the bed, he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the small basin: face drawn, eyes deep-set. A gauze bandage on his temple, dark with drying blood, made him look like a brigand.
Georgia lay in the bed, her breathing slow and regular, eyes motionless beneath parchment lids. Her music player was grasped in one hand. His arm still ached where that hand had held him. She had not released her grip, not ever; not when the rescue team brought them down from the crippled ride on a backboard, not when the electric cart had sped them through the backstage corridors toward Medical.
Now her eyes fluttered open, looked up at him.
“How do you feel?” he asked gently.
“Sleepy.”
“That’s the Demerol. The shot the doctor gave you. You’ll rest for a while now.”
“Mmm.” The eyes slid shut again. He looked at her, at the ugly bruise coming up on one cheekbone. He reached forward, stroked her hair.
“Thanks for coming to get me. Back there, I mean.”
“Sleep well, Georgia,” he replied.
She shifted slightly beneath the covers. “You didn’t call me princess,” she murmured.
“I thought you didn’t like being called princess.”
“I don’t. But say it, anyway. Just this once.”
He leaned forward, kissed her bruised cheek. “I love you, princess,” he whispered.
But she was already asleep.
He stood for a moment, watching the rise and fall of her chest under the thin hospital blanket. Then he smoothed the corners of the blanket beneath her chin, eased the music player from her hand, plucked her small backpack from a nearby chair, unzipped it. As he stuffed the player inside, something fell to the floor. Placing the backpack on the chair once again, he knelt down, picked the object up. Then he stopped dead as recognition burned its way through him.
It was a bracelet, made of a simple chain of silver. Dangling from its loops were half a dozen sailboats: yawls, ketches, trim sloops. He turned it between his fingers, feeling tears well up in his eyes. His wife had given this charm bracelet to Georgia for her seventh birthday. Whenever she had finished a new boat design, she’d given Georgia a replica to add to the bracelet. He’d forgotten about it, had no idea his daughter had been carrying it around with her all this time.
His fingers found the graceful lines ofBright Future, the last boat his wife had designed. The boat she’d drowned in, that day off the Delaware coast.
“Charlotte,” he said under his breath.
There was a subdued rustling noise, then a man’s face appeared at the edge of the curtain: middle-aged, balding, small mustache over an even smaller mouth. Catching sight of Warne, he stepped into the bay, another man following behind. They did not wear the usual white blazers of Utopia crew: instead, they wore dark, understated suits.
“Dr. Warne?” asked the first man, consulting a metal clipboard.
Warne rose, turning away a moment to wipe his eyes. He nodded at them.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” the man with the mustache said. “My name’s Feldman, and this is Whitmore. I wonder if we could ask you a few questions.”
“And perhaps answer a few of yours, too,” the man named Whitmore said. He was tall, with a high, reedy voice, and his eyes blinked rapidly as he spoke.
Before Warne could answer, the curtain parted again and Sarah Boatwright entered briskly, Wingnut whirring along in her wake.
Sarah’s eyes landed first on Warne, then on the men in suits. “Don’t bother him,” she said.
The two men nodded at Boatwright and quickly left the recovery bay.
“Who were they?” Warne asked without much curiosity.
“Feldman, Legal. Whitmore, Guest Relations.”
Warne watched as an invisible hand pulled the curtain shut from outside. “Damage control,” he said.
“Keeping the incident contained.”
Warne nodded. “How much do they know?”
“They know what they’ve been told. That it was a minor mechanical glitch.” She came closer. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I had a close encounter with a Peterbilt. What happened in there?”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“I don’t know.” Warne took a deep breath, remembering. “There was this explosion, a flash of light. The whole ride was bucking and shuddering. I thought it was going to come crashing down on us.” He stopped. “I shut my eyes, held Georgia close. That’s all I remember until your emergency teams arrived.” He looked back at her inquiringly.
“I won’t lie to you, Andrew. It was a near thing. Some kind of explosive was attached to the ride’s central shaft. That shaft is critical to the structural integrity of the entire ride. If it had snapped, the pods would have all broken free and plummeted to the ground. But they miscalculated when they set the device. A retaining spar held, kept the shaft from collapsing. It allowed us to evacuate the guests.”
Miscalculated. For the briefest of moments, Warne felt something almost like relief. Whoever they were, these bad guys weren’t invincible, after all. If they screwed up once, they might screw up again.
Sarah nodded toward the bed. “How’s Georgia?”
“A little banged up. The doctor says she’ll be fine. She’s a brave girl.”
Sarah stared down at the sleeping form for a moment. Then she stretched out a hand, touched Georgia’s forehead.
Warne followed her with his eyes, really looking at Sarah for the first time since she’d entered the bay. There was an expression on the proud face that he didn’t remember ever seeing: a look of pain, almost of vulnerability. He thought back to their last conversation, in her office. He realized, quite abruptly, that she had never asked for his help before.This Park means everything to her, he thought, watching her.Just like Georgia means everything to me .
A spasm of anger cut through him: anger at those who had done this, hurt the people he cared about.
“What can I do?” he asked.
Sarah looked up.
“In your office, you asked for help. I’d like to help you, if I can.”
She hesitated, her eyes returning to Georgia. “Are you sure?”
Warne nodded.
After a moment, she let her hand slip from the girl’s forehead. “We’ve been warned not to alert the police. We don’t know what’s been touched, and what hasn’t. We know there’s at least one rotten apple inside the Park, but we don’t know who. All we know is that the Metanet was used to hack the operating code for some of the bots.”
“You can’t evacuate?”
“They’ve rigged the monorail with explosive charges. We’ve been told they’re watching the emergency exits, as well.”
“Do you know why they set off that explosive charge in Waterdark?”
The pain grew stronger in Sarah’s face. “We—I—underestimated these people. We arranged to give them the Crucible technology. But we were planning to put a tail on John Doe, the leader, when he picked up the disc. He found out.” She fished her hand into a pocket, pulled out a plastic bag containing half a dozen silver shards. She put it on the edge of the b
ed with a bitter smile. “A security guard was killed in the struggle, and that’s all that remains of the Crucible disc. Waterdark was our punishment. Now I’m waiting for them to contact me again, arrange the delivery of a second disc.”
She met his gaze, held it.
“So what can I do?” Warne said after a moment.
“If you can use the Metanet to narrow down which bots have been affected, and how . . . Anything, any scrap, would be useful. If we know what they’ve done, maybe we can figure out their next move. Prepare ourselves.”
She looked down. “Let’s hope to God it doesn’t come to that.”
There was a brief silence.
“I’ll do what I can. As long as—” He gestured toward the bed.
“I’ll personally make sure that Georgia’s looked after. We’ve had security teams sweep a few select areas—Medical, the VIP suites—for any signs of tampering. She’s safer here than anywhere else in the Park.” She lowered her voice. “There’s something else you need to know.”
“What’s that?”
“Teresa Bonifacio is on the short-list of possible suspects.”
“Terri?” Warne said incredulously.
“I don’t believe it, either. But there are only a handful of people with the skills and the necessary access to pull this off. She’s one of them. Keep that in mind. And another thing. You remember how, in my office, we traced Georgia from her imagetag? Well, I noticed somebody was tracing you, too.”
“Me?” Warne felt surprise, followed by an uncomfortable trickle of fear. “Why?”
“No idea. But be careful. And maybe you’d better take off your tag. I’ll have somebody drop it in a trash can on the far side of the Park.”
Warne glanced down at his lapel, found it empty. “Gone. Lost it in the ride, I guess.”
“Just as well. If any cast member stops you, show them your passcard, tell them to talk to me.”
The curtain parted again, and a man in a white coat came in. “Ah, Sarah,” he said. “They told me I’d find you here.”