Book Two of the Travelers (6 page)

C
heater!” Aja shouted into the darkness. “You're a cheater! You're not smarter than I am! You're not better than I am! You're just a worthless little cheater!”

For a moment there was no sound. Just an empty, cold, featureless darkness. Omni Cader sniffled once.

Then, above them, a small square of light appeared. An eye looked down. “Oh, you're so predictable.” Nak's voice came out of the little hole.

“Predictable?”

Aja felt a horrible sick sensation in her stomach. What if she had been wrong about Nak? What if Nak was never going to let her out of here? There would be more Beasts. More sequences. More tricks. More gimmicks.

“I'm not a cheater,” Nak said. “I'm just smarter.”

“No offense, Nak,” she said, “but I've been better in math than you from day one.”

“Exactly!” Nak said. There was a note of triumph in his voice.

The tiny door through which Nak was looking slid shut. The room went dark again.

And then it hit her. She hadn't looked deeply enough into the problem. There was a sequence to the rooms, yes. But there was also a sequence to the timing, too. The gaps between reconfigurations ranged from one to five minutes. There was probably some kind of sequence there too. And if there was a relationship between the time and the symbols…well, it would get into some
seriously
complicated math.

After a while the grinding noise began again.
A new sequence,
she thought. A new sequence would be beginning.

But how did it start? Was it random?

“What do we do now?” Omni said.

“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.

A
ja 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.

A
ja 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.”