Mindwar

by Andrew Klavan

  “Tower, Air East 2612 is under pilot control again.”

  And then another: “TRACON Approach, Jet Tomorrow 151 is in control.”

  More voices joined the others. All seven jets were coming back under pilot control. As Lasenby looked around him, he saw on the faces of his fellow controllers what he knew was on his own face. The pallor of fear was giving way to a rush of color and relief. As another pilot called in and another, Lasenby lifted his hand in the air. The other controllers did the same.

  Then they all began cheering.

  The first blast from the short-circuited control panel knocked Rick off his feet. He dropped down onto the flagstones hard. Mariel’s blade was jarred out of his hand and clattered to the floor.

  Rick lay dazed, staring blankly into the darkness, shaking his head. He saw zigzagging lines of purple energy running up the body of the great wheel above him. Flames spouted from its energy receptors, and the flames began to spread around its circumference. A section of the wall above the generator panel—blackened and weakened by the explosion—began to crumble. A large flagstone came loose and tumbled down through the air. It crashed to the floor at Rick’s feet, breaking into pebbles and dust. The room grew steadily brighter with a wavering orange light as the flames spread around the great wheel. There was a grinding, tearing sound as the wheel began to wobble on its moorings.

  Rick blinked, stunned. He looked around. Smaller stones dropped like dust from the ceiling.

  The Generator Room was falling apart. The walls were crumbling. He was going to be buried alive in here.

  He swept Mariel’s blade off the ground. As his fingers wrapped around her image on the hilt, he felt fresh energy flow through him. He heard her voice in his head:

  Hurry, Rick. Go.

  He climbed to his feet. He caught one more glimpse of Reza where he lay, of Reza’s agonized and tragic yellow stare, his desiccated husk of a body. With a shudder, he tore his own gaze away. Looked to find the spiral staircase. There it was, through the smoke and flame, a curling shape against the wall. It was quivering and rattling as more stones began to drop out of the wall to which it was anchored.

  Rick ran for it. The wheel was now bright with dancing fire. A burning piece of the mechanism dropped off and fell through the air to crash at Rick’s side. Rick kept running, went past it. A hunk of stone crashed in front of him, missing him by inches. He dodged around the fragments. He reached the spiral staircase. He grabbed the iron banister. He flung himself up the first two steps and began a running climb.

  Another flaming hunk of the wheel dropped past him, sizzling as it fell through the air. There were more tearing noises. More dropping stones. The iron of the spiral staircase trembled beneath his feet as he climbed. He reached the first walkway. He had to run around the arc of it along the wall to reach the next flight of stairs—the stairs that rose to the door. As he took his first step, the room—the air—the flames—reality itself—seemed to zoom away from him, out of focus. The Realm seemed to dissolve into the energy at its source: snaking, hissing lines of power.

  Rick reeled, dizzy, on the walkway, grabbing blindly at the rail. He knew what this meant: his time was up. His mind was beginning to disintegrate.

  He forced his consciousness to steady. The world came back into focus. He found he had stopped for a moment on the walkway. Ironically, that pause saved his life.

  Because just then, another flagstone came loose and plummeted off the wall directly above. It crashed into the walkway just a few yards ahead of Rick—just where he would’ve been standing if he hadn’t stopped. The stone crashed right through the metal, tearing a hole in the path, leaving a dead drop into nothingness between Rick and the stairs. The walkway wobbled from the blow, and Rick clung to the railing to keep himself on his feet.

  He was scared now, good and scared. Everything was coming down around him—his mind was going—he was out of time. And he did not want to die in this place—to die Reza’s death, that death that wasn’t death, but nothingness and slow decay. He sheathed his sword. He gritted his teeth as he looked across the broken walkway to the stairs on the far side. Then, without another thought, he raced forward, charging at the gap.

  In the moment before he jumped he thought: It’s too far! I can’t make it!

  Then he jumped. He flew through the air between one jagged edge of the walkway and the other. His arms pinwheeled. His feet sought purchase on the emptiness. But he was right. The gap was too wide, the leap too far. He couldn’t make it. He dropped. He screamed. He reached out desperately. His wrists smacked painfully down onto the edge of the walkway—and slipped off as he kept falling . . .

  But somehow, with one hand, he managed to snag a loose bar of metal. He held on with the top joints of his fingers.

  His body dropped and swung. His own weight nearly pulled him right off the walkway, but still he held on. He dangled there above a fatal fall, the big wheel flaming right beside him, the fire licking at his back. He shouted with effort and pulled himself upward. He grabbed hold of the torn metal with his other hand. Another armload of stones dropped off the walls above him and fell all around him, peppering his face and hair with flecks of rock.

  He dragged himself up onto the walkway. Pushed off his knees and stood. There was the stairway, right ahead of him. He rushed for it.

  All around him, the Generator Room was now in flames and crumbling. The fire shot up to the ceiling and the stones rained down from the flames as he climbed the spiral staircase’s final flight, two steps at a time. He reached the iron door. Threw back the bolt. He heard a loud rending noise above him. He knew the wall was about to come down on top of him.

  He hauled the door open and leapt through just as the rocks crashed into the stairs and tore the entire staircase from the wall with an almost human screech. The structure plunged into the flames below as Rick stumbled out of the Generator Room and into the Great Hall beyond the door.

  An alligator guard was waiting to meet him there. He nearly ran right into it.

  Rick cried out at the sight of the creature. It stared at him, its reptile eyes only inches away, its fierce teeth visible outside its snout. Rick spun to the side to avoid crashing into it. His sword gave a long, metallic whisper as he drew it from its sheath, ready to strike.

  But the alligator didn’t move. It stood where it was, staring, its enormous hands at its sides. Another moment and Rick realized it wasn’t budging at all, wasn’t alive at all. In fact, he noticed that, here and there, other guards were also standing lifeless around the Great Hall. The animating force seemed to have gone out of them—out of all of them.

  Kurodar is gone, he thought. Kurodar had left the fortress, had maybe even left the Realm—for now, at least—and he had taken his life force with him.

  Rick turned to the double doors that led into the domed room where he had seen Kurodar and his father. He wanted to go back there now, to make sure he had set his father free.

  But once again, as he gripped his sword’s hilt, the energy seemed to travel up his arm from where his hand held the image there—the energy and a voice. Mariel. Whispering in his brain:

  Your father’s safe now. You’ve won, Rick. Go.

  Rick nodded. Prepared to obey her, he took a step—but as he did, his vision fizzed and blurred again. The world began to fragment. Rick stumbled.

  In confusion, he thought: My mind . . . going . . . have to get out . . .

  He managed to steady himself again by force of will. He recovered his feet. Just as he did, there was another huge blast from behind him in the Generator Room. Stones flew from the wall above him. Flames spat out of the iron door. Across the hall, he saw water flooding out of the corridor, spreading across the rugs. And now the glass in one of the immense rosette windows shattered and came raining down in sparkling shards, making a chandelier swing and flicker.

  The whole fortress was coming down.

  Dizzy and sick, Rick pushed himself forward. He could see—way, way down at the ot
her end of this enormous hall—a towering front door. He ran toward it on wobbly legs, shaking his head as he went, trying to keep his mind in one piece, feeling it collapsing inside him, even as he saw the Great Hall begin to collapse around him.

  Another rosette window shattered. Another storm of glass rained down. More of the stone walls began to crumble, too. A rock fell from somewhere, smashing into an enormous statue. The statue wobbled on its base and then pitched forward, crashing face-first to the floor, the marble head breaking off the neck and rolling over the rug.

  Rick reached the door, panting, dazed. Two alligators flanked the exit, but both stood frozen, lifeless, staring. Rick was still afraid—he still wanted to live—but weariness and confusion were beginning to eat into his willpower as his consciousness began to decay. Still he managed to throw up the bolt on the front door. He yanked it open.

  There was a courtyard beyond. The walls, the ramparts, the big front gate with the winch and chain that lowered it. The night seemed to be bleeding out of the sky above, and the yellow color was seeping back into it. The red of the courtyard grass was becoming visible.

  Rick ran into the yard. To his left, a section of the fortress wall collapsed and spilled forward, spreading across the grass and dirt, burying the frozen alligators standing on the ground beneath it. Rick reached the winch, knocking yet another alligator out of his way as he went. The guard toppled over like a rotten tree. Rick sheathed his sword to free his hands. He grabbed the handle of the big wheel and turned it quickly. The gate began to lower slowly. He felt the pressure of its descent. He let the handle go, and the gate came crashing down.

  Something exploded in the fortress behind him. Rick looked over his shoulder and saw flames shooting out of the rosette windows. Another section of wall collapsed.

  He ran out the door, through the outer walls, into the courtyard before the moat. There were more alligators standing here and there, frozen, gazing into empty space.

  And there—there, finally—he saw the purple diamond of energy floating near the border of the silver water. The portal point. The way home.

  He started moving toward it. But just then, a powerful wave of nausea went through him. Everything around him became energy and light. Reality—or what passed for reality in the Realm—quickly sank into a vague dream. Rick barely knew where he was. He barely knew who he was . . .

  When he came around this time, he was on one knee. Sick, exhausted. He wasn’t sure what was going on—what he was supposed to do. And then, in a distant sort of way, he remembered. The portal point. The glowing purple diamond . . . He was supposed to do something . . . Oh yes. Reach it! Get out!

  He was beyond fear now. Beyond everything but exhaustion and nausea and dissolution. Only a will he did not know he possessed made him push himself to his feet. He staggered toward the diamond out of sheer ornery stubbornness—the native grit that made him almost impossible to stop on a football field, a sort of physical faith that still upheld him when even his mind was nearly gone. He went forward. But it was like pushing through mud now, the mud of his own dissolving personality. His steps grew heavy and slow. His thoughts grew vague. His knees began to buckle.

  He came to a stop.

  He stood there, staring stupidly, blinking stupidly, his arms hanging loose at his sides. As his fading consciousness flickered back in him a little, he realized he was going to die like this, lifeless on the spot like the alligators around him. Except they were merely bots. He was a living soul. They would feel nothing in their death. He would die and die for a long time before his spirit could get free.

  And yet, for all his fear, for all his will, for all his strength, he couldn’t bring himself to take another step. He didn’t have the power. He stood there helplessly as his mind went to pieces.

  He had only enough mind-energy left to think one word. He thought: sword.

  He lifted his hand. He laid it on the hilt of his weapon, on the image of Mariel.

  His whole body straightened as a burst of clarity went through him like an electric jolt. A voice spoke inside him:

  Live in your spirit, Rick! Go!

  Rick shook his head, uncertain.

  You . . . What will happen to you? he thought. To you and Favian . . . If I leave you . . . What . . . ?

  The voice didn’t answer him. It just repeated, Go!

  But Rick would not. There was something else he had to do. One last thing. What was it?

  His hand.

  He looked down, confused, at his left hand. He saw the red light flashing beneath the skin. He remembered: the program Miss Ferris had embedded in him. Energy for Mariel and Favian. To keep them alive a little while longer. Until he could come back. Until he could free them.

  Now, using all the strength he had left—not much—Rick drew his sword. Its energy pulsed up his arm, pulsed through him.

  Go, Rick! Spirit, Rick, Mariel commanded him.

  I will not leave you here, he told her.

  You have to. Go.

  I will not.

  He lifted the sword. He set its point against the flashing red light on his palm. He plunged the blade into his hand.

  He screamed with the pain. But at the same time, he felt the energy pod burst out of his palm. The red force ran out of him, ran into Mariel’s blade, charging it with fresh power.

  Go! said Mariel.

  The silver blade was now pulsing with red light. Rick could feel it. It was making him stronger.

  But now, he drew back his arm and with a mighty effort, he hurled the sword through the air toward the moat.

  “I will come back for you!” he shouted.

  The silver-red sword flashed over the silver water. The water rose up to meet it in a sudden wave. As Rick watched through unfocused eyes with fading vision, the rising water took the shape of a womanly hand. The hand caught the sword in midair. The red light flashed from the sword into the hand.

  Thank you, Rick! Now, go!

  And still gripping the sword, the hand sank down and vanished into the liquid metal.

  The water closed over the sword and was still, as if nothing had happened.

  Mariel was gone.

  The burst of energy from the sword had given Rick a little more strength, just a little. Slumped, weary, he forced himself to shuffle forward another heavy step. Another blast of flame flew up over the fortress ramparts as something within exploded. He took one more step toward the portal point and then one more. He was almost there.

  At last, nearly dead on his feet, he stood before the purple diamond. A thunderous blast made him turn just in time to see the fortress walls above him beginning to crumble and tumble down. He faced the purple glow of the portal point and marshaled his will. Lived in his spirit. The deepest part of himself.

  I’m still here, he thought up into the heavens. Always here.

  And from the heavens, the answer came back to him: So am I. Even in the Realm.

  That still, small voice seemed to inspire him with the last strength he needed. He took the final step toward the portal. He willed himself into it.

  There was a great liquid rush. The exploding Realm melted around him. He flowed into nothingness.

  CUT SCENE:

  AFTERMATH

  31. HOME FRONT

  THE LONG BLACK limousine traveled smoothly over the curling country lane. Forest stood close to the road on either side, the late autumn trees nearly empty, the stark branches lacing the air with the pale and sinking sun peeking through them.

  The massive bodyguard Juliet Seven drove the big car. Miss Ferris sat beside him. The Dial family—Rick and his mom and Raider—sat in the backseat.

  None of them spoke. Even Raider had finally fallen silent after jabbering like a squirrel for over two hours. His mother had her arm around him now, and he was leaning against her, half asleep. As for her, Mrs. Dial, she gazed out the window, staring into her own reflection on the tinted glass. Her face looked tired, but her eyes looked excited and bright.

  Rick
sat next to Raider, his crutches propped on the seat between them. He looked out his window, too—excited, too, in a quiet, satisfied way. He gazed out at the passing trees and at the sun gleaming and fading as it appeared and disappeared behind the branches. He was thinking . . . well, he was thinking a lot of things. So many memories and plans and hopes and worries were flitting through his brain that he could barely sort them out. They flashed on the screen of his mind like random scenes from a half-finished movie. Mariel. When would he see her again? The MindWar. His fight with Reza. His father. Jonathan Mars with a gun in his hand. Favian. His good-byes to Molly. Kurodar’s fortress exploding. His workouts with his training weights. Mariel . . . Would he get back to her in time . . . ?

  It had been over a month since he had fought his way out of the nightmare that was the Realm. The first three days after his return were lost to his memory. Apparently, for most of that time he had lain insensible in a hospital bed in the MindWar compound. When he spoke at all, it was gibberish. He did not remember who he was. He did not remember where he had been. He was so weak and wounded that, at one point, the doctors almost despaired of his recovery.

  But he did recover—not slowly either, but suddenly, all at once. Suddenly, he sat up in bed. His mother was sitting beside him.

  “Mom?” he said.

  She grabbed his hand with both of hers. Her eyes filled with tears. “You remember,” she said.

  She made him lie down again. He gazed at her face. He did remember. Her. The Realm. Everything but the last few days. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

  “They thought you might die, so they brought me in. They told me everything.”

  He nodded wearily. He was glad she knew. He hated keeping secrets from her. He was beginning to hate secrets altogether.

  It seemed to him that the next week or so was one long argument. Mostly, he argued with Miss Ferris. He wanted to know about Mariel and Favian. Who were they? How had they gotten stuck in the Realm? How long did they have before their strength ran out and they died? He wanted to go back into the Realm to try to help them. He shouted at Miss Ferris.