We stop by one of the hotel rooms to get blankets and pillows, and head to the rooftop.
“You know we don’t have time for this,” I say as Wyn pulls two recliners side by side and faces them toward the west.
“There’s nothing else we can do right now, Nixy, so we might as well do something useful. Our brains need rest. And besides, look over there,” he says, lowering himself into a recliner and pulling me down beside him.
The setting sun has made a picture in the sky, striping the horizon like a silk scarf of delicious colors: lemon meringue, orange sherbet, tangerine, blood orange, and pomegranate. Wyn pulls a blanket over us and we lie there for a while in silence. I try to focus on the beauty of the sunset and let myself relax. Wyn is right, of course. Our plan to turn the tables on our captors failed miserably and now we have to think of a new one. Only I’m too tired. Too worried.
I think of my mom then with a small pang. I remember when I was younger, I was a total worrywart over every little thing. Jill would always tell me the best way to solve a problem was to sleep on it. “We work a lot of things out in our sleep,” she would say, tucking me under the covers. “Sleep is the brain’s night shift, and we’d best let it do its job.” I used to imagine that my own brain’s night crew was a bunch of sudsy bubbles, scouring my brain of all the bad, troublesome thoughts so I’d have a nice, clean, worry-free brain the next morning. Maybe I can summon the bubbles tonight.
I take a quick peek at Wyn. He is staring into the sunset, his face solemn and still, his mouth slightly turned down at the corners.
He turns to look at me. “Think you can sleep for a bit?” he asks, taking my hand in his.
“Sure,” I say, squeezing his hand in return.
But before I close my eyes, I lean toward him. At the exact same moment, he moves closer to me. And I’m not certain how this is happening or why, but all of a sudden I am kissing Wyn Salvador.
And while I know that none of this is real, the smell of the tropics and the sound of the ocean and the feel of the breeze and his lips—so soft, how are they so soft?—convince my brain that it is very, very real.
And this is wrong, and we are in serious danger, and we should be trying right now to find another way to escape but for a moment I can’t think, I don’t want to think, and although I wanted to pulverize Wyn Salvador almost forty-eight hours ago, kissing him right now is very, very surprisingly good.
And as long as I am doing it, I don’t have to think at all.
When I wake up hours later, we’re still holding hands, though Wyn’s grip has loosened somewhat, his face soft and shadowy in the moonlight. I study him, poring over the contours and details now that he’s sleeping: the strong dark shape of his eyebrows, the soft curls of hair along his forehead, the long lashes that would be the envy of any cover girl, the slight dimples in his cheeks, the square of his jaw. The only flaw on his face, the only thing keeping it from perfection, is the way his mouth turns down at the corners again. Even in sleep Wyn is troubled, searching for answers.
Like I am.
I leave my hand in his and stare up at the night sky. I know the answer is inside me somewhere, I just need to find it. If I dreamed while I was asleep, I don’t recall, but I do feel more clear-headed now, more focused. The bubbles did their work.
I go over the chain of events again, one by one:
1.Diego Salvador says that Wyn has barricaded himself inside the MEEP and left behind a suicide note.
2.The barricade is a type of maze, which several people before me fail to get through.
3.Once I conquer the maze, I enter Wyn’s Havana via a portal in the Floridita.
4.I find Wyn (or he finds me), and he claims that he is trapped in the MEEP.
5.He denies both creating the maze and leaving behind the suicide note.
6.The portal in the Floridita disappears. Wyn’s original portal is also gone.
7.Wyn claims there are human players in the MEEP with us. We capture one of them, who turns out to be Kora Lee, Diego Salvador’s personal assistant.
8.Kora claims to be working for the Legionnaires, an anonymous group determined to shut down the MEEP.
9.Kora also claims they will kill her if she is captured.
10.Kora disappears, possibly dead.
11.Wyn Salvador and I truly and very thoroughly make out before falling asleep.
The last two puzzle pieces make me feel a little ill.
We—I—may have accidentally caused someone’s death, so I used the opportunity to hook up with a guy I hardly know?
Seriously? What is wrong with me?
I try to remember what Wyn has said to me over and over: that it’s not my fault, that I was just trying to save him, save myself, and Kora could have been bluffing. She was our last chance of finding a way out of here. We couldn’t afford to let her go. And even if someone did hurt her—kill her even—it wasn’t me.
But who was it? Who was she truly working for? The Legionnaires? Chang and Moose talk about LEGION all the time. As far as I know, it’s just a bunch of kids like Chang who spend way too much time playing online games, sharing data, and grumbling about Diego Salvador’s monopoly on MEEP technology. Sure, they might consider Salvador an enemy, but they wouldn’t have the means to actually kidnap Wyn and blackmail his father. It makes much more sense to assume that Kora was working for some big tech firm or even a foreign government trying to get their hands on MEEP secrets—the kind of people who have the power and money to buy Kora’s cooperation.
My next thought sends a chill down my spine. If those same people killed off Kora for blowing the operation, what’s to keep them from doing the same to me if I get in their way? They don’t need me; they need Wyn, and they need him to stay inside the MEEP.
Had Kora been on the Salvador estate when she was killed? I grimace at the thought.
I picture my body back in Wyn’s room. I’ve been gone almost forty-eight hours and I must look the same as the Wyn I saw two days ago—my body attached to monitors and IV fluids, completely vulnerable to anyone who might wish me harm.
I shiver. Then I remember Dad sitting by my side, keeping vigil with Mama Beti. Those two will keep us safe. Heck, my dad would take on dragons before he’d let anyone harm me, and I’m pretty sure that on behalf of her beloved grandson, Mama Beti could do some damage with that metal walker of hers.
The thought almost makes me smile.
Beside me Wyn stirs and murmurs something in his sleep. After a moment he begins to rustle, as if agitated, though his eyes remain closed. He continues to speak, but the words are slurred and I can’t make out what he’s saying. He’s having a nightmare, I can tell, and I can’t decide whether I should leave him be or wake him up. When he cries out, as if in fright, I can stand it no longer.
“Wyn, wake up,” I say, gently shaking him by the shoulder. “Wake up, you’re having a bad dream.”
His eyes open slowly, and I can still see fear there. As he stares at me, the fear begins to dissipate and relief washes over him. “Nixy,” he whispers.
I reach over and lay a hand on his cheek, just like my mom used to do when I had bad dreams. “It’s over now,” I say.
“I dreamed we were being buried alive,” he says, sitting up in the recliner. “We were trapped in a deep pit and there were people above us—shadows, really—shoveling dirt on top of us. It was awful.”
“That does sound awful,” I agree, and my body shudders a bit. I don’t say aloud what I’m thinking: Wyn’s subconscious has painted a pretty accurate picture of our predicament. Gruesome, but accurate.
“All I could hear was Kora’s voice saying black every time a new shovelful of dirt fell,” says Wyn.
“That was a pretty dramatic last word,” I say, remembering Kora’s frightened face before she disappeared.
Wyn looks out at the city l
ights, his brow knitted in concentration. He gasps suddenly. “Nixy, what was the last thing you said to Kora, before she said black?” he asks, grabbing my arm, his voice now urgent.
I close my eyes and try to remember. “The portal,” I say. “I asked her where they’d hid the portal.”
It hits us both at the same time. Maybe Kora wasn’t describing death with her last word. Maybe she was giving us a clue.
Wyn hops off the recliner, pulling me up with him.
“Come on,” he says. “Over the river and through the woods. We’re going to Grandma’s house.”
SIXTEEN
WYN TAKES THE STAIRS TO MAMA BETI’S BEDROOM BY TWOS AND I am right on his heels. We hardly spoke to each other on the motorcycle ride over here, but as we move to enter the room I pull on his arm to slow him down.
“Wait a minute, Wyn, we need to talk about this first. Tell me what you’re planning to do.”
“The Black, Nixy. You heard Kora. Maybe we can somehow get home through the Black.”
“It’s the somehow part that concerns me,” I say, warily eyeing the door to the once-room, the now-nothing.
Wyn shrugs nonchalantly, though I wonder how much confidence he’s pretending. “We’ll just have to experiment. Tell me what you know about the Black.”
“Very little,” I admit. “Mostly that you probably shouldn’t, you know, experiment with it.” I feel a twinge of guilt as soon as I say this. I’d made a habit of tuning Chang out over the past year whenever he started telling horror stories about the Black. It’s just a game, Chang, I’d say. Those LEGION gearheads are just trying to scare you. Now I wish I’d paid better attention to him, for more reasons than one. “For all I know, the Black is the Loch Ness Monster, with Frankenstein’s head, on a giant spider body. It’s all rumor and hearsay. Dangerous rumor and hearsay. But your father invented the MEEP. Surely you must know more about it than I do.”
Wyn rubs his cheek. “All I’ve ever heard the programmers say about the Black is to leave it alone. Something to do with MEEP coding, and that the Black is actually part of your unconscious mind so the codes don’t work there.”
I peer again at the door into Mama Beti’s room. A wave of shame washes over me as I think of all the beautiful work Wyn did on the other side—work that I ruined, leaving Godzilla-like destruction in my wake.
I turn back to him. “That’s what my friend Chang says—that frequency codes can’t reach you in the Black, and that some gamers have actually fried their short-term memories just by touching it.”
Wyn looks skeptical. “That’s impossible. Regular gamers wouldn’t even have access to the Black. The MEEP protocols, even for custom-built worlds, provide for 360-degree safety walls. The only people who would ever encounter the Black are my dad’s programmers.”
“And us,” I say, pointing to the door.
Wyn shrugs. “I’m not sure what happened here. I’ve never seen the Black in any of my custom worlds before. Maybe it’s because I’ve used so many beta modules here? In any case, the story you heard can’t be true. Regular players wouldn’t have access to the Black.”
“What about unauthorized players?”
Wyn frowns at me. “You mean hackers? Like LEGION? I don’t know, Nixy, and I don’t care. They take their own risks when they break into someone else’s property.”
“You sound like your father,” I say, but without much bite behind it. I can’t summon the nastiness. Not when we’re both still reeling from our encounter with Kora and, well, whatever you call last night.
“Yeah, well, my dad has taken plenty of his own risks and it’s about time for me to take one too,” Wyn says. “Maybe the Black will reset us back to the Landing . . . or even better, wake us up back at home.”
He pulls away from me and throws the door open. The Black is just on the other side.
It is a gaping, jagged oval taking up the entire door frame. The insides are kinetic, shimmery and spongy . . . like a brain, I guess. Alive, somehow. As before, a shudder of revulsion comes over me when I look into it, a shadow of fear. I can tell Wyn feels it too by the grimace on his face.
“Are you sure we should be messing with this?” I ask.
“Absolutely not, but what choice do we have? Someone may have killed Kora in the real world. What’s to keep them from killing us next?”
“You,” I say. “You’re what’s keeping them from killing us next. As long as you’re alive, they have power over your father, Wyn. If you die, they have nothing.” I pause and shrug. “Me? I suppose I’m pretty expendable at this point. Probably even a liability in their eyes.”
That last point does not sit well with Wyn. “All the more reason to get out of here this very minute. Come on. What have we got to lose?”
“Our minds?” I offer, glancing at the Black.
Wyn ignores this. “We’ll go together on the count of three,” he says, taking my hand.
“No way,” I argue, pulling him away from the hole. “I’ll go by myself. If it does work and I get out of here, I’ll come right back for you, I promise. If it nukes my noggin instead, well, at least one of us will still have a working brain to figure out Plan B.” Wyn doesn’t think this is funny. “I should be the one to take the risk,” I insist.
He holds my gaze. “I don’t want . . . you shouldn’t have to do this. Not for me.”
I know he’s trying to say more than the words coming out of his mouth.
I shake my head and try to pull off the same magic trick, to say the things I want to say, but don’t have time for.
“There are only a few people I would do it for—and since you’re the one I happened to be trapped here with—”
“But, I—”
“Think, Wyn,” I say, cutting him off. “What if I do get kicked back to the Landing? I know exactly how to get through the maze now, exactly how to defeat the enemies. I can be back in a flash. You? It will take you forever to fight your way through, and I don’t have that kind of time.”
Wyn finally rewards me with a small smile. “Hey now, pretty full of yourself, aren’t you, Nixy Bauer?”
“Only when I know I’m right.”
Wyn rubs his lips together, then nods. “Okay, I concede. But go slowly, and if anything feels wrong then come right back out.”
“Roger that,” I say, swallowing the last bit of fear that’s been camped in my throat. No reason to be a scaredy-pants at this stage of the game. Not after everything I’ve been through.
Wyn is still holding my left hand, so I mentally brace myself and stick my right hand into the Black. I expect it to feel gelatinous inside, but instead I feel nothing, like I’ve just put my hand through a cloud. I wave my arm around for a second, feeling, reaching for I-don’t-know-what. A button would be nice, a big fat GAME OVER button, but I know that’s wishful thinking.
“All right, I’m going in,” I say. “You wait for me right here in Mama Beti’s house, okay?”
Wyn nods. “Good luck,” he says, but he doesn’t let go of my hand even when I try to tug it away.
“You’re going to have to let go of me at some point,” I say, smiling.
“I know,” he says, returning the smile, “but not until the very last second.”
This time it’s my turn to give him a good-bye wink, which I hope comes off as jaunty, and I step inside the Black.
SEVENTEEN
THE WORLD GOES PITCH DARK. I CANNOT MOVE.
Terror seizes my heart.
The Black is all around me.
A single thought pulses through my brain.
Don’t breathe it in, can’t breathe it in, don’t let it get inside me.
I feel it, like a dense fog pressing up against my face.
I hold my breath, but it is no use.
I can feel it invading my body, creeping in through my nostrils, seeping through my pores.<
br />
I try to call out but my face is stone, unable to make a sound.
Dread.
The feeling floods my brain.
I can’t move.
I am stone.
Every muscle, petrified.
And now the pain begins.
It starts in my lower body, like someone is holding a match to each one of my toes. I want to thrash, move away from the fire, but I’m paralyzed.
The burning licks up my legs.
I scream and cry. I beg for help.
No sound comes out of my mouth.
The fire is in my torso now. The heat is melting my organs, incinerating my bones.
The pain consumes me.
NO! Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop!
I am burning alive.
Another moment and the heat will reach my brain.
And I will be dead.
EIGHTEEN
“NIXY!”
I am stone, I am dead.
“Nixy, wake up! Please, look at me!”
I feel a hand on my face, stroking my cheek.
“Please . . .”
I see color through my eyelids. The darkness is gone. I try to open my eyes, but the lids are so heavy, leaden, I can only lift them a sliver.
“That’s it! Come back, come back to me.”
The hand is running through my hair now. I remember someone doing this to me when I was younger, when I was alive. Someone who loved me.
Mom?
I come back to myself in a rush, a tidal wave. I remember who I am now. I am Nixy Bauer and something bad happened, but Jill is here now. Everything will be okay.
I slowly force my eyes open.
“Thank God,” says a voice above me. It is not my mother’s.
A salty sea breeze drifts across my face and I breathe it in. The person behind the voice slowly comes into focus. Brown curly hair, brown eyes, long lashes.
“Nixy, are you okay?” He is kneeling on the floor beside me, one hand still on my face, the other hand resting awkwardly in his lap.
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