“I don’t know,” Aja said. “I have to do some calculations. Let’s move to a room with better light.”
“But…I thought you said you’d get us out,” Omni said.
“I will,” she said. But she wasn’t feeling all that confident.
A door began to open.
“Let’s go,” she said. She put her arm under Omni’s shoulder, supporting him. They walked slowly into the next chamber. And stopped.
After a while the grinding ceased.
“What’s in here?” Omni said. “Why don’t we keep moving?”
She shook her head. “I have to do more calculations.”
“Calculations?” Omni looked at her as if she were crazy. “How’s that gonna get us out of here?”
But Aja just began scribbling. As she furiously calculated, she realized her mistake. There were two sets of variables. The symbols and the times between reconfigurations. The time was anywhere between one and five minutes.
“Let’s just go!” Omni grabbed her hand and started yanking. “How are we gonna get out if we don’t explore?”
“Omni, please—”
“Let’s go! I wanna go! I wanna go into another room. Why do we have to stop here?”
Her eyebrows went up. That was it! That was why Nak said he wasn’t cheating. The times between the moves were a red herring! They were just random.
No, Lifelight reprogrammed the sequences depending on where you stopped. If you followed the symbols to the very end of the sequence, Lifelight would just start the next sequence. But if you didn’t, if you stopped in a room that wasn’t the final one in the sequence, then Lifelight would generate a new sequence—a sequence that was based on the symbol on the door of the room where you stopped. Which meant…
She began scribbling again.
“Let’s go!” Omni pleaded.
“Wait!” she shouted. “Shut up!”
Omni fell on the floor and started to cry.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just that—”
She started running sequences as fast as she could. There had to be a way to get out. Nak said he wasn’t a cheater. She had said that she was better in math. And he’d said, “Exactly!” Like that was somehow to his advantage. Like math wasn’t the solution to the problem.
Surely it wasn’t something stupid. Like she had to smash the wall down with a crowbar or something. No. Even if she had a crowbar, that wouldn’t work. These walls were all too thick. It had to be something else. It had to be.
And then she knew what it was. Press had said that sometimes the solution was that there wasn’t a solution. The solution wasn’t math! Not exactly, anyway. It was…well…anti-math!
She smiled furtively. Then she started to scribble.
It took three more moves and a lot of calculation. But finally she did it. Once she found the sequence, she memorized it.
“Let’s go, Omni,” she said.
“Did you figure a way out?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
The boy looked at her hopelessly. “Then why go anywhere? My ankle hurts. I just wanna lie down.”
“Can you trust me?” Aja’s eyes bored into the boy’s.
He nodded.
“All right then.”
They began walking. They walked and walked and walked, following the sequence of symbols she’d memorized. Through reconfiguration after reconfiguration.
“When are we gonna get there?” Omni said after they’d gone through at least six or eight reconfigurations.
“We’re almost there,” Aja whispered.
The walls began grinding.
“This way,” Aja said.
“But we’ve been in this same stupid room five times before. There’s no way out from here.”
“That’s right,” Aja said. “There’s no way out from here.”
They walked into the room. It was high ceilinged, with all kinds of scary carvings of the Beast chiseled into the walls.
“Now,” Aja said. “Stop.”
They stopped. For a moment, nothing happened.
And then, the carvings began to fracture, like reflections in a breaking mirror. A high-pitched whistle, like a terrible wind, filled Aja’s head. The fractured images grew dim as the whistle grew louder.
And then—suddenly—there was nothing at all.
ELEVEN
Aja woke to find herself lying in the jump tube. Her head was aching. Her teeth were chattering. Her mind was a blur. What was happening?
She sat up slowly. All the lights were off and a strange low pulsing tone was echoing throughout the building. As she stumbled out into the hallway, she saw a red light on the wall flashing on and off.
Dazed-looking people were walking around in the hall.
“What happened?” a man said.
“I don’t know,” a young woman replied. “I was in the middle of a jump, and I heard this weird noise….”
The lights blinked back on, the flashing red lights went off, and then a soothing voice broadcast: “Lifelight has experienced a brief break in service. All systems are now functioning properly again. However, all jumps will be temporarily suspended while diagnostic routines are implemented. Lifelight apologizes for the inconvenience.”
She noticed Headmistress Nilssin standing near her booth, talking urgently on her communicator. She turned and looked curiously at Aja. “Something happened to Lifelight,” she said.
And then it all came back to her.
“I just spoke to Dal from the core control room,” Headmistress Nilssin said. “We had a stroke of amazing luck. There was a brief power failure and a total system shutdown. That’s the first time it’s happened in years. But when the system came back, the program was inactive. Dal’s been able to quarantine it and erase it from the system.”
“Good,” Aja said.
Headmistress Nilssin looked at her closely. “Aja? Aja, are you okay?”
“Now that you mention it,” Aja said, “I feel a little funny.” Then her feet went out from under her and she slumped against the wall.
TWELVE
Aja Killian sat in Headmistress Nilssin’s office. After her last jump she had spent three days in the hospital. But she was better. And now Headmistress Nilssin was welcoming her back to the academy.
“Did you find Omni?” Aja said.
The headmistress smiled. “Omni’s fine. He was in a jump tube in a different level of the research wing.” Her smile faded. “But we can’t find Nak Adyms anywhere.”
“I don’t expect you will,” Aja said. “Not anytime soon. With the skills he’s got, he’ll be able to disguise his identity anywhere he goes.”
“I’m told that Nak hacked the origin code,” the headmistress said. “If Lifelight hadn’t had that temporary shutdown, you might well have died in his game. You’re very lucky.”
“No,” Aja said. “Luck didn’t have anything to do with it.”
The headmistress frowned. “Meaning what?”
“The shutdown wasn’t accidental.”
The headmistress looked at her curiously.
“Say what you will about him, Nak didn’t cheat. There was only one way out of the game. See, the maze was designed to reprogram itself based on where you went in it. But it followed a strict algorithm. The reprogramming of the maze was a solution to a mathematical sequence. Each time it reprogrammed, that would determine where you had to go if you wanted to get to the exit gate. The thing is, the exit gate was actually a tease, a diversion. It closed automatically before you could ever actually get out.”
The headmistress cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I see what this has to do with—”
“Listen,” Aja said. “Once I figured out that the route to the gate was a solution to a mathematical problem, and that the problem was based on which chambers you went into, I simply constructed a problem that the computer couldn’t solve.”
The headmistress’s eyes widened. “Like a nonterminating
, nonrepeating decimal!”
“Exactly. The same idea. It’s possible to create a mathematical series that never ends. It just goes on and on and on forever. You see, in order to keep anybody from knowing what he was up to, Nak had to run his code in Lifelight’s Alpha Core. His game had Priority One access to Lifelight’s processing power, along with the ability to modify Lifelight’s origin code. So once the program started trying to solve an unsolvable problem, Lifelight rechanneled one hundred percent of its processing power into solving the problem. Since the problem was unsolvable, it maxed out the system. Boom. Automatic shutdown.”
Headmistress Nilssin looked at Aja for a long time. “Amazing.”
“There was one strange thing though,” Aja said. “Inside the game I ran into a man. A man named Press. He told me that he was tandeming into the game, but that Nak didn’t know he was there.”
“Press?” the headmistress said, eyes widening. “Press was inside the game?”
“You know him?”
Headmistress Nilssin smiled fondly. “Yes, I do.”
“He told me all this weird stuff about how I was something called a ‘Traveler.’ It didn’t seem like he was part of the game at all. He told me that he couldn’t talk to me in person because there was some evil guy here. Some guy who was spying on me or something.”
The headmistress’s face went pale. “What evil guy?”
“Saint Something. Saint Pain, Saint Rain…”
“Saint Dane?”
Aja looked at her, puzzled. “Yeah. That’s it. He said he was masquerading as that Lifelight director, Allik Worthintin.”
The headmistress didn’t say anything for a very long time. Then, finally, she reached into a desk drawer and pulled something out. “I’ve been holding something here that I probably should have talked to you about a long time ago,” she said. “But…you push yourself so hard. I guess I just didn’t want you to have this burden too. Not at such a young age.”
“What burden?” Aja said. She had an odd feeling rising inside her—the nervous, frightened feeling she got when things weren’t working out the way she’d predicted.
Headmistress Nilssin leaned forward, rested one fingertip on the desk, and then pushed something across the wood toward Aja.
There, on the desk, lay a small silver ring with a stone in the center. Aja picked it up and examined it. Around its rim were strange little symbols.
“Unfortunately,” the headmistress said, “it’s not a game. Press is real. Everything he said to you in the game was true.”
Aja swallowed.
“Before you take this ring,” the headmistress said, “I have to ask you something. What have you learned from this experience?”
Aja squinted, thinking hard. “I’ve always thought that the solution to every problem could be found through logic. But I guess sometimes it can’t. Sometimes you have to rely on other things. Feelings, emotions, whatever.” She paused. “Remember when Allik Worthintin was trying to get me to go up to his office with him? There was a moment there where Dal Whitbred could have decided not to let me jump again. And yet ultimately he decided to trust me.”
The headmistress nodded.
“I mean, honestly?” Aja said. “He didn’t make the logical choice. Everything pointed to me being the person who was destroying the core. But I think he did it because he saw something in my eyes. Something he trusted. He made his choice based on a feeling.”
Aja picked up the ring and studied the symbols. They were the same ones that had been carved into the rock inside the maze.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” the headmistress said. “The thing that has always worried me about you is that you put too much faith in logic. But now? Now I think you’re ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“There are a great many things I need to tell you, Aja.” The headmistress put her hand on Aja’s. “You see, I am the Traveler on Veelox. And you are my successor.”
After her strange conversation with the headmistress, Aja walked out into the quad, her head in a whirl. So it was really true, the stuff that Press had said in the game? It just didn’t seem to make sense. She felt like Lifelight must have felt, trying to process a problem that didn’t have a logical solution. She wasn’t used to feeling that way.
As she turned the corner, she bumped into a tall man.
“Sorry,” she said.
The man stepped back. He had jet black hair and the palest blue eyes she’d ever seen. It was Allik Worthintin. A cold feeling ran down her spine. If everything Headmistress Nilssin had just said was true, then she was locked in a terrible struggle with this man.
You’d never have guessed it from the look on his face.
“No apology necessary, Aja,” the man said pleasantly. Then he leaned toward her in a confidential manner. “But in complete fairness, I should warn you….” He spread his hands lightly.
“Warn me of what?” she said sharply.
Before turning and walking briskly away, the tall man smiled and gave her a broad wink. “The game,” he said, “is only just beginning.”
ELLI WINTER
ONE
Run!”
Elli Winter was at the bottom of the six-foot-deep hole. Her shovel had just hit the box. She looked up to see what the commotion was about. Elli was a short woman, and the hole was so deep she couldn’t really see anything. Just the blue, cloudless sky.
“Chopper!” somebody else shouted. “The dados are coming! Run!”
She could hear it then, the swoosh of the chopper blades over the horizon. She bent over and redoubled her efforts. Maybe she could get to the box before the security dados got there. She had a very strong feeling about this box. It was important. This was the last excav the team would ever do. She had to take a chance. She had to keep digging.
“Run!” Elli recognized the voice of the excav team leader, Olana Carlings. “Run for the trees!”
The hole was in the middle of a large meadow surrounded on both sides by small forested mountains. She supposed Olana was right. If she ran now, there was a good chance of escaping into the wooded hills, where the dados would have trouble finding her.
Instead, though, she jammed the blade of the shovel into the soft earth, tipped it back. She could see the whole box move. It was a long thin box. Maybe. Just maybe she’d get to the contents in time.
Olana Carlings pulled out her binoculars as soon as she reached the tree line. Everyone in the team had made it to the tree line. Everyone, that is, except Elli.
Elli had just stayed there in the hole, digging away. Even now, from her high vantage point on the mountainside, Olana could see that Elli was ignoring the oncoming black chopper. Painted on its side was the unmistakable logo of Blok—the powerful corporation that controlled the entire territory of Quillan.
“What is she doing?” muttered Olana.
Another team member shook his head sadly as the chopper swooped down over the hole.
Olana squinted, trying to make out details in the wobbly viewfinder of the binoculars. Elli was calmly working at the clasp that held the box shut. “She’s got the box. She’s opening it.”
As she spoke, four black ropes tumbled from the belly of the chopper above Elli Winter. Then four green-clad security dados appeared, grabbed the ropes, and began dropping from the sky.
“What a shame,” the other team member said. “I guess that’s the end of the road for the cleaning lady.”
TWO
Five Years Earlier
There is a road,” a voice said.
“Huh?” Elli Winter said, looking up to see who was addressing her. The voice had broken her from the terrible thoughts that had been running around her brain.
A smiling man stood behind a counter at the back of the video arcade. “There is a road,” the man said. “Even at the end of the road, a new road stretches out.”
She cocked her head. “I’m sorry, are you talking to me?”
The man motioned to her with his
finger. He was a tall, good-looking man, dressed in a strange bright costume. Most people on Quillan dressed in shades of gray, so it was a little shocking to see someone dressed in bright colors.
“You’re in pain,” the man said. “I can see that. You’ve suffered a terrible loss. A loved one perhaps?”
She stared blankly at the man. How could he know such a thing? She had just received the letter this morning. The final nail in the coffin that was her life. Her husband of twenty years, Marvek Winter, had died working in the tarz. Gentle husband, devoted father—the sweetest man she’d ever known. Now he was dead.
“My husband,” she said simply.
“Yes.” The man nodded and his smile saddened. “I know. You think you’ve come to the end of the road. You think that you can’t take care of your daughter anymore. You think that you’re of no use to anyone.”
A part of Elli Winter’s mind wondered how he knew this, how he knew it so exactly. A part of her was angry that he was invading her little bubble of pain. But Elli was a polite and mild woman. It was not in her nature to snap at people. So she simply said, “Yes. But…how did you know?”
The man pointed at the sign on his counter.
SD FORTUNES
SUPER-DUPER!!!!!!
LEARN YOUR FORTUNE—ONLY 6 CREDITS
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t have any money. I can’t pay you.”
She turned and stumbled away.
“No problem!” The man’s cheery voice pursued her as she hurried toward the door of the video arcade. “This one’s free! On the house, compliments of SD Fortunes, a subsidiary of the Blok Corporation.”
She pushed the lever opening the door and stumbled into the street.
She could still hear the man’s cheery voice pursuing her as the door closed. “Even at the end of the road, there is a road!”
Elli Winter had never put into words the things that the man had said. But it was true. She had been like a sleepwalker for the past year, doing her best not to think about anything at all.
Book Two of the Travelers Page 6
