The Rift (7 page)

Her fingers flew across the keypad. The
autocomplete on her awful phone hadn’t kept up. Well, at least
there was
something
good about this whole mess. Super
texting powers.

“
Speak for yourself.”

Mom called for her, again. Vero walked to where
another building’s wall provided some concealment. She leaned on
the railing, hopped, and balanced on her hands, legs stuck in the
air, nearly to the ceiling. Even with her armor weak without the
axe, she barely felt her own weight.

Something shifted in her pocket. Out of the
corner of her eye, her phone tumbled over the balcony. She darted
like a frog’s tongue to catch it, but the motion threw off her
balance. She fell face-first onto the cement walkway.

It didn’t hurt at all. She stood up, perfectly
fine.

Jed might be lurking out there, nursing his
wounds, but Vero and the others weren’t powerless. They weren’t
helpless.

Wearing a little more jewelry could be good for
her.

A white-haired lady watering her flowers glared
as Pieter parked the White Lady under a lit street lamp. Pieter
waved; she didn’t. It wasn’t the first time she’d given his ride
that look.

Pieter locked his car and walked to Neil’s
place. This neighborhood, built sometime recently, had a fresh, new
feel to it. Five short, parallel roads of idyllic, identical homes
rose at the foot of grassy hills on the south side of town, not far
from school. Neil’s dad practiced optometry, and his mom did
software development, so they could afford one of these pricey,
three-bedroom houses.

Pieter knocked on his friend’s door. It cracked
open, and Neil’s eye peeked through. “Come in… quickly. You weren’t
followed, right?”

“
I don’t know,” Pieter said. “That
grandma down the street gave me a pretty suspicious
look.”

Neil opened up the door. “Nothing new
there.”

Part of the reason Pieter did the double date
was to get some time together with his old friend. With Neil going
the gamer route, the two didn’t see each other much anymore. More
and more, their friendship began to seem like a “for old time’s
sake” sort of thing.

Pieter waved to Yuko, Neil’s mom. She kept her
eyes on her laptop screen at the dining room table, phone to her
ear. She’d moved to America as a kid. Pieter only heard her use
Japanese when Neil did something really stupid.

“
It’s Title Media Service again?”
she shouted.

“
They just had a big release
today,” Neil said. “Huge mess.”

“
Hello,” called Hiroshi, Neil’s
dad, from the couch. He sat watching TV.

“
Hey,” Pieter replied.

“
Friends over? You finish your
homework?” Hiroshi asked his son.

“
Yeah,” Neil said.

“
Haha, good. What the
motto?”

“
One more year to USC,” Neil said
rather dryly.

They started up the stairs. “Still heading for
the home of the Trojans, eh?” Pieter asked.

“
Yeah,” Neil replied. Every year,
he seemed to grow less exctied about the prospect of
college.

“
And still computer
programming?”

“
Yeah. You know what Dad says. USC
is the best. I’ll get a job like Mom’s, if I’m lucky.”

“
Kill it! The database is
thrashing,” Yuko shouted from the kitchen.

“
Some kind of luck,” Pieter
muttered.

Neil closed and locked the bedroom door.
Posters of
Star Wars
, some anime with a cat girl, and the
Avengers
movie covered the walls of his room. Novels and
DVDs covered a tall, black bookshelf. The
Wheel of Time
series had its own shelf. An enormous monitor rested on his desk,
and his tower roared like a fighter jet. A laptop sat on the other
computer’s tower. A sword—a replica from the
Lord of the
Rings
movies—hung on the wall. Well, at least his parents
wouldn’t ask questions about adding a mace to the
collection.

Neil lowered his voice and sat in an office
chair in front of his desk. “Finally.”

Pieter plopped down in a beanbag chair on the
floor. “Hey, Vero needed me today.”

“
And she doesn’t need you right
now, after what happened?”

“
Her family hijacked her,” Pieter
said. “Trust me, she’d much rather be with me at the
moment.”

“
You didn’t get hurt,
right?”

“
No, he didn’t notice
us.”

“
So, far as you know, it had
nothing to do with you? He was just in it for money?”

Pieter nodded. “From the news, it sounds like
he held up a few different stores. Guy’s gotta eat,
right?”

Neil swiveled back and forth in his seat.
“Perhaps. We don’t know anything about their biology.”

Pieter laughed. “You think they
photosynthesize?”

Neil spun a full circle. “It’s possible. Have
you looked through James’s bag yet?”

“
Yeah. Found a sheath for my sword
and a strap to cover Vero’s blade. Plus some clothes. A little bit
of dried meat and some crackers. Some other odds and ends and, get
this… a flashlight.”

Neil stopped spinning. “A flashlight? It
works?”

“
Yeah. It’s metal, has a clear
switch on it and everything. I even managed to get the battery
out—at least, what I assumed was the battery. It’s not exactly
double-A.”

“
Flashlight, flashlight,” Neil
muttered. “Why a flashlight?”

“
Uhh… to see in the
dark?”

“
No, I mean, they use swords and
axes and stuff for weapons. If they had that kind of technology,
shouldn’t they have guns or something?”

Pieter shrugged. “Well, if you hadn’t noticed,
it’s not exactly your normal sword. I think with Croga, I could
take somebody with a gun.”

“
But it’s a full-blown fantasy
world! I totally had them pegged at a medieval technology
level.”

“
Umm… Neil? What’s the big
deal?”

Neil snatched his laptop off his other
computer’s tower. “Yeah, but the more advanced they are, the more
threat they pose. Anyways, I’ve been drawing up plans since
Saturday night.”

“
Plans?”

Neil set his laptop on his knees and tapped the
keyboard. “I just finished installing hard drive encryption
software on both my boxes.”

“
For…”

“
Security, of course. And don’t use
public email services for communication. They’re too easily
accessed by law enforcement. As the dimensional barrier becomes
breached more and more often, we all know that the three-letter
agencies will end up involved. Did you know they took the field off
the market?”

“
What?”

“
I drove by today. Not for sale.
And they’re building a chain-link fence.”

Pieter shrugged. “So they sold it.”

“
This exact weekend? And now
they’re building a fence? Don’t call that a
coincidence.”

“
I wasn’t going to,” Pieter said.
“But don’t call it the FBI.”

“
CIA, more likely. Or some agency
we’ve never heard of. But that tipped me off that somebody else
knows about this. So I set up a secure email server in Panama. I’ve
already deleted my Facebook account and suggest you do the same in
about a week—not too close to mine.”

“
Umm… You wake up yesterday with a
hangover, too?”

“
I’ve never had a hangover, but
yes. It’s obvious that using the soul armors drained us, as it will
probably continue to do.”

Neil tapped on his laptop.

“
I’ve outlined three scenarios. In
number one, we’ll grow used to the devices and eventually function
normally when using them. In numer two, we’ll continue to
experience exhaustion. In number three, the strain on our bodies
will eventually kill us.”

This is what Neil had been up to? Pieter was
really, really glad to have a girlfriend. “So, what’d you think of
Gloria?”

“
Don’t we have bigger things to
worry about right now?”

Not a particularly surprising response. Nothing
during the date had convinced Pieter they’d work as a
couple.

Neil slid his finger over the track pad.
“Anyways, let’s at least get your email set up.” He handed the
laptop to Pieter. “Enter your password. You’re
[email protected].”

Despite thinking that a secure email was the
least of their worries, Pieter typed
mashup
, the password he
used for most things. Bright-red text appeared on the screen,
explaining how the password wasn’t long enough.

“
You’ll have to do better than
that,” Neil said. “Make it longer. Throw in some numbers and
special characters.”

Pieter stared at the password screen. “You’re
sure jumping into this quick.”

“
Of course. You think that waiting
is going to make our problems vanish?”

“
No, this is all just… weird, you
know?”

“
Weird’s an understatement. What
difference does ‘weird’ make?”

Pieter typed
Mashupmashup@
for his
password. The server accepted it. He bitterly swore not to use this
email.

“
So, think it’s real?” Pieter
asked.

Neil planted his elbows on his desk, cupped his
face, and began idly bouncing his nose back and forth between his
index fingers. “Parts. I’m not sure how many lies James mixed in.
But I know he’s from another world and there’s some kind of war
going on, a war where we have to choose a side.”

Pieter grabbed a little piece of paper and
wrote the password. “Exactly. How is that not weird? And how can
you just accept it?”

Neil snatched the laptop back. “Of course it’s
weird. But look at the facts. You saw what these armors can do.
Either it’s some kind of super-secret military technology, or James
really comes from a world of magic. We saw two guys kill him last
night. The quicker you accept the facts, the quicker we act on
them.”

A glint of passion shone in Neil’s eyes. Easy
for him to say. He was just… different. His mind worked a million
miles a minute. It took ideas and information, processed them, and
then just believed “the facts.” Something like a robot. It helped
him in school, but it probably, somewhere deep down, also explained
his perpetual singleness.

“
Then, what don’t you
believe?”

Neil folded up his laptop and tossed it onto
his bed. “I’m not sure which side to join. I mean, James seems to
work for someone named Rolland, but who’s to say Rolland is the
good guy? Consider this story. James, servant of the tyrannical
King Rolland, was tasked with a mission to begin a brutal campaign
of guerilla warfare against the heroic revolutionary, Terian.
Injured during the journey and with his companions slain, he gave
their weapons to the first people he found on Earth to prevent them
from falling into enemy hands.

“
Furthermore, he came up with a
story about the ‘evil prince’ to get us to begin his guerilla
campaign for him. Thus, when Terian comes to Earth to seek help in
overthrowing his despot father, we will take up arms against him.
Different story depending on who tells it, eh? Given what we know,
do you see any reason that’s impossible?”

“
Jed still tried to kill
us.”

“
No,
we
tried to kill
him
. Maybe he was just defending himself.”

“
You just had to make things hard,
didn’t you?”

“
Of course. You don’t question
enough. America doesn’t need an autocrat like this so-called King
Rolland. Or maybe he’s the good guy. At this point, who
knows?”

And that was the problem with Neil’s brain.
Just as easily as he could believe the facts, he could argue
himself into a circle.

“
Okay, so how about we just back
off and watch what happens? Getting killed would, you know, spoil
my senior year,” Pieter said.

In his mind, Jed taunted that he’d kill them
all.

“
No good. We’ve got a bad guy who
knows our faces and maybe overheard our names. In a town this
small, he might find us. If you want out of this, we have to do
something about Jed.”

“
You sound like you already have a
plan.”

“
Scenarios,” Neil said. “Scenario
one: path of the chicken. If we ignore Jed and Dek, they either
kill us, or when Terian finally comes through—evil prince or not—he
knows who we are, and we get sucked into this thing. Running away
doesn’t keep us out of the battle.”

Pieter stared at him.

“
Come on, Pieter. You’re not an
idiot. You have to see the logic behind this.”

Idly, Pieter flipped around in his hands the
piece of paper with his password on it. “I do, but…”

But it was a lot to think about. And after
making a password for an email server in Panama, he couldn’t tell
what parts of this conversation came from Neil being paranoid and
what parts came from Neil being smart.