Game Over (22 page)

Just at the place where the light spilled into the hall, Rick could detect the first drifting tendrils of mist.

“I guess that's the mist we're supposed to follow,” he said to Favian.

“I guess,” Favian said weakly. “Kind of spooky-looking.”

Rick didn't answer. He began moving up the passageway. After a moment, Favian flickered at his side.

As the light of the doorway grew closer, Rick felt himself getting tighter inside, more nervous. What was this monster Mariel had seen guarding the interface? Could he fight it? Could he win?

Baba Yaga's words haunted him:
You must go into the belly of the beast. You must face the horror he cannot face.

He still didn't know exactly what those words meant. Something about those horrific images he had seen in the witch's table. But what? He felt he was going to find out, and soon.

He and Favian reached the end of the corridor. They hesitated at the threshold of the doorway. The mist blew
in and curled and rose around their feet. Rick looked at the anxious Favian and Favian anxiously looked at Rick.

“Well, buddy, I guess this is it,” Rick said. “This will decide it one way or the other.”

Favian nodded very slightly, very slowly. “I guess.” He peered at Rick anxiously. “And your dad will really build me a portal out of here?” he said.

Rick nodded. “That's what he told me.”

“And you trust him, right? I mean, he's not the kind of guy who would lie or anything, is he?”

“No, he's not,” said Rick with certainty—certainty he hadn't felt for quite some time. “He's a good man, a man you can trust.” He felt a surge of warmth as he said it. He was lucky, he thought, to have a father he could say that about.

Favian nodded. “Okay. Okay. Okay,” he repeated nervously.

Rick forced himself to smile. “Come on, you blue dipstick,” he said. “Let's go fight the bad guys.”

And they stepped through the door.

32. CITY OF FOG

MOLLY STOOD OVER
Rick's sleeping body, holding his hand. Miss Ferris had returned to the makeshift portal room and was standing beside her, her expression blank, her eyes gazing at nothing. On the monitors on the wall, the Battle Station turned in space. Its power meter, Molly saw, was now more than halfway full. Ninety minutes left, she thought. If that.

“Traveler?” said the techie Chuck.

Lawrence Dial and Professor Jameson sat side by side, working their keyboards relentlessly. At Chuck's call, Dial blinked through the code reflected on the lenses of his glasses. As if he had been wakened from a dream, he turned hazily to the tech. Molly could see his mind was still distracted.

“What is it?” he said.

“I don't know,” said Chuck. “Look at this.”

The Traveler looked at Chuck's screen, and Molly looked too. The view of the Realm had changed. There were simple, pixilated images of streets and buildings, but it was all unfocused, unclear. A shifting patch of blackness
was moving over the image, obscuring different sections at different times.

And where were the figures of Rick and Favian? Where had they gone?

“What's happening?” she heard herself say . . . but neither Chuck nor the Traveler answered her. They were bending their heads together as they stared at the screen. “What is that on the screen, that black patch?”

The Traveler shook his head. “I don't know what it is.”

“Me either,” said Chuck. “And look here.”

Using the computer mouse, he moved the image. There was an even darker black patch moving off to one side.

“It doesn't look like a program exactly,” he said.

“No,” said the Traveler. “It's almost like an organic structure. It seems to be generating the mist that's blocking the image elsewhere.”

“Yes,” said Chuck. “The mist seems to emanate from there.”

“He's protecting the interface,” the Traveler murmured. “And anything he might have hiding in there.”

Molly couldn't stand the way they were talking, as if it were all some kind of interesting experiment, as if Rick's life were not in danger.

“Where's Rick?” she said. “Why can't I see his figure anymore? Where is he?”

The Traveler looked at her over his shoulder as if he'd forgotten she was there. “Don't worry,” he told her.

“Why not?”

The Traveler blinked. “Well, because it won't help, for one thing.” He turned back to look at the screen. “Rick is heading into this mist. Whatever's there, he's going to have to face it.” He glanced at her again. “That's what he went in for, Molly. That's what we sent him to do.”

Molly stared at him, amazed. “You sound so calm about it! He's your son.”

The Traveler gave her a small smile. “Actually, I already know who he is.”

“Yes, but . . .,” Molly started to say. But what
could
she say? The Traveler was right. This was what they had sent Rick into the Realm to do. She hated that they sounded so calm about it all. But what good would it do to sound excited or panicked?

“We're just going to have to wait and see what—” the Traveler began to tell her.

But before he could finish, Molly's father, Professor Jameson, let out a gasp. He leaned away from his own monitor and his big body went back against his swivel chair. It was as if something on the screen had struck him. He continued staring at the numbers on the screen in front of him.

“Dad? What's the matter? What's happening?” Molly asked him.

The Traveler rolled his chair up behind Jameson so he could look past his shoulder at his computer.

“Look at that!” Professor Jameson said to him. “I . . . I can't believe it!”

The Traveler could only look on in shocked silence.

The streets of the Golden City were empty. Even the dead were gone. Rick and Favian moved slowly along the pavement through the ever-thickening mist. Rick gleamed in his silver armor. Favian flashed a shimmering blue.

Rick's eyes kept moving as he looked all around him.
Weird place
,
this Golden City
, he kept thinking. It didn't seem real and yet it didn't seem totally a dream either. It wasn't like some fairy kingdom in a video game exactly. It was more like something you half remembered. A place you'd been to that you couldn't quite recall. It was meant to be beautiful, Rick could see that. And parts of it were beautiful. There were buildings that looked like some sort of great cake, with towers and onion-shaped domes and golden facades lit by sourceless rays of light. There were great open squares with towers and statues that seemed to stretch almost to the edge of the horizon. There were wonderful bridges flanked with lacy stone balustrades and presided over by statues of winged lions. And yet as beautiful as these places were, they—and everything here—looked solemn and sad, spiritless and hollow. Empty shells under a yellow sky that had darkened to a color like amber as the day wore on.

The streets were empty everywhere. It looked to Rick as if there had been a catastrophe and everyone had been evacuated or killed. This also struck him as sad. In fact, the whole place just seemed to pulse with melancholy.

Rick stopped, feeling the heaviness of the atmosphere inside him. Favian stopped, too, hovering in the air.

“It's like a ghost town,” Rick said.

“I know,” said Favian. “I hate it here. I've been stuck here I don't know how long. But there's nowhere else to go. All the rest of the Realm is blackness. We thought it was bad before when we had the Blue Wood and the Scarlet Plain to wander through. But now . . . stuck here . . . dying slowly . . . I sure hope your dad can make that portal.”

“He will, don't worry,” Rick murmured, but he was barely paying attention to Favian's anxieties. He was trying to figure out which way to go.

They had come to a crossroads. Up ahead was a long street of ornate concrete buildings lit by enchanting green and golden lights. It went on a long way and seemed to narrow in the distance to a vanishing point. To his left was a canal, a passageway flooded with silver water. Small boats lined the quays under more buildings with pastel colors. To his right, a wide-open square with a huge building in the center of it: another one of those fancy buildings with onion domes of various shapes and colors.

The mist blew around Rick's and Favian's legs as they turned in one direction and the next, trying to make up their minds. It dissipated and thinned over the square, and stayed about the same on the street of buildings. To Rick, it seemed to grow thicker over the mercurial water of the canal.

“This way then,” he said.

He headed off, and Favian followed.

They moved along the canal on a rolling sidewalk bordered by a low stone balustrade. With every step they took, the mist seemed to grow thicker before them, the buildings and colored lights growing dim and distant. A chill crept over Rick. He could feel it even with the silver armor coating his skin.

Even Favian, creature of light that he was, felt it. “It's chilly, huh.”

“Yeah. The whole place feels kind of chilly and sad.”

“And spooky.”

“Yeah, and spooky.”

“You're almost there.”

Another voice. Both Rick and Favian looked around, startled.

“Don't stop now.”

It was Mariel. Her words echoed all around them through the empty air.

“The water!” said Favian.

That was it. Rick looked toward the canal. He moved closer to the balustrade and peered over into the silver flow. The darkening amber sky was reflected and refracted on the moving metallic surface. Half a dozen colors seemed to shift and blend and separate in the depths of the current.

But she was there. Mariel. Rick could see her: a sort of suggestion of a shape moving with the movement of the water.

“Look to where the mist thickens up ahead,”
her voice said to him, speaking it seemed from all around him.
“Be ready, Rick.”

He nodded. “I'm ready,” he said. Which was sort of a lie. He wasn't ready at all. How could he be ready? He didn't even know what he was going to face. But really, it didn't matter whether he was ready or not. He wasn't turning back for anything. So in that sense, anyway, he was ready enough.

Rick and Favian continued to walk along the canal. They could feel Mariel flowing along in the canal to their left.

“It's good to have you here,” Rick said to her. It was. He felt stronger, safer, with Mariel nearby.

“I can only go with you as far as the graveyard,” Mariel said, “not beyond. The fog cloud blocks the flow of water—and light. There's a stream that goes around the graveyard and gets closer to the interface, but I'm running out of strength . . .”

Rick didn't answer. He could hear the weakness in Mariel's voice. She was beginning to sound old.

As if to give her some encouragement, Favian piped up, “Rick's dad is going to make portals to get us out of here!”

Rick didn't say anything. And for a moment, Mariel didn't say anything either.

But then she did. She said, “Is that true, Rick?”

Before he could answer, Favian broke in like an excited
child. “Yeah, if anyone can do it, Rick's dad can. He's like a genius or something. Right, Rick?”

Rick walked alongside the canal in silence. The mist twisted and roiled and grew thicker around him. He could feel his friends waiting for his answer.

“Mariel,” he said, “what do you remember? What do you remember about before you came here? About RL?”

In the silence that followed, he shivered at the cold. The silver armor rippled on his flesh, almost as if it were imitating the rippling movement of Mariel in the water, as if she were as close to him as his own skin.

“I can't remember very much at all,” Mariel said then. “Hardly anything. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear people laughing—laughing and talking like friends. I must have had friends, I guess. And I know the grass is not supposed to be red, but green. And the sky should be blue not yellow. I don't know why I know those things, but I do. It must be something I remember. And I think . . .,” she began and then her voice seemed to sink back into the mist.

“What?” said Rick.

“I think someone must have loved me,” said Mariel. “A man. There are times, when it's very quiet, when I'm all alone . . . there are times when I can feel his lips against my lips . . .”

Rick listened to her intently. He was wondering: How could she know these things? How could she remember anything, if she was just a program, just a code? They must
have been some other person's memories, or fragments of many people's memories, held within the connectome generated by the black box.

There was a sound of distant thunder, a soft, ominous rumble very far away. Mariel's voice broke off.

“Here we are,” she said then.

Rick stopped and looked around him. The mist had grown very thick while he was listening to her. It was almost a fog now. It shifted and parted and came together on every side of him. Peering through it, Rick saw an opening off to his right. Down a narrow lane, there was an iron gate. Beyond the iron gate, there was a field. As the mist shifted, Rick saw statues and stones and small towers and a large building beyond them. It was a graveyard, almost hidden in the dense and shifting mist.