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"Hey!" one of them yelled.

For the briefest moment Robin froze, looking like a headlight-startled rabbit. Then he took off down the hall.

The guards jumped up from their game, upsetting one of the benches. I heard the scraping sound of swords leaving scabbards, and then the pounding of feet down the hall, toward the fleeing Robin. And, thanks to my own plan, toward me, too.

The shadows preceded the guards as they left the well-lighted area. I held my breath and shrank as far into the alcove as I could while they came closer, closer. The one in the lead passed, never seeing me. I let him go. The second passed., Almost. My foot caught him totally unawares, and he went sprawling, his sword skittering down the hall without him. I stepped out into the hall, and the third guard ran straight into my outstretched dagger. Conditioning kicked in totally. I didn't even flinch as the guy doubled over—I braced my free hand against his helmet and shoved him away from me as though I'd been killing people all my life.

The first guard had skidded to a stop and rounded back on me. Beyond him, Robin had realized the trap had been sprung, and headed back, but there was no way he'd get here in time to be any help at all. I kicked the guy I'd tripped just to keep him off balance a bit longer, then thought,
Who am I trying to kid?
There I was with a five-inch knife, facing a guy with a three-foot-long broadsword, and I was closing in for hand-to-hand combat? I threw the knife. It hit the first guard in the throat and he keeled over backward with an awful gurgling sound.

The second guard started to get up and I kicked him yet again. Now what? Suddenly all the instinct was gone, and here I was without a weapon and burdened with this man who refused to lie still and surrender. I put my foot down on the small of his back, but I could tell that wasn't going to keep him long. "Surrender or die," I told him.

His hand whipped behind his back and grabbed my ankle. I hit the floor hard and rolled, half expecting to find him on me.

I found him dead.

"What a team!" Robin said. He was holding the sword with which he had just killed the guard, the man's own blade.

"What a team," I answered.

Robin retrieved his knife from the guard's throat and returned it to me. "You all right?"

"Yeah."

This was, I reminded myself, just a game. And Harek was a trained warrior who had killed many times before.

It didn't help.

Robin looked up from riffling through the pockets of the dead guards. "Half of this is yours."

"Ahhh...," I said, unenthusiastic but worried about getting the reputation for being a killjoy. I just wanted to get out of there.

Robin stuffed some copper coins and a small throwing knife into various hidden compartments about his person, then buckled on the dead guard's sword belt. After all, his inclination was to be a thief, and he certainly wasn't going to twist my arm to force this booty on me. "Let's explore," he said.

"Ahhh...," I hedged.

"Harek, look around you. This is a dungeon. We're supposed to explore dungeons."

"Ahhh..."

"There might be treasure here. There might be magic items that we'll need for later on in the quest."

He was right, of course. Not that it seemed likely. Still. There was no use getting all weird on him just because I was grossed out by our having killed the guards.

"But we'd better make it quick," I said. "We don't know how long till the next shift of guards comes on."

Robin saluted to show he understood and jangled the ring of keys he'd filched from one of the guards.

I went and got the torch from our cell. It stank—something like burned hair—and sputtered and threw distracting shadows on the walls so that I kept jumping, sure that someone was coming out at us. But Robin had already opened the door of the next cell and was waiting for me.

The room looked pretty much like the one in which we had been locked: chains dangling from the wall, cesspit in the corner. "Nothing here," I said, pulling back.

Robin gave me a you're-not-getting-off-that-easy look and stepped forward. "Something written on that far wall?" he asked.

It looked like a four-lines-and-slash accounting, where someone had been keeping track of days—a lot of days. But I held the torch higher and Robin took another step forward.

And disappeared.

There was no shimmering, no fading out, no flash of smoke or crackle of electricity in the air. But no Robin either.

"Robin?" Gingerly, I held out my hand. Being an elf, I should have been sensitive to the presence of magic. But I felt nothing. "Robin?" My voice was shaking, though Noah Avila had certainly never been a special friend. 1 took a step away.

Suddenly Robin was there again, stepping backward from ... wherever. He swore, using the kind of language that lands kids in principals' offices. Finally he asked, "Where was I?"

"I don't know," I fairly screamed at him. "You tell me."

"I don't know." He rubbed his arms, looking at the air before him warily. "Nowhere," he said. "I was nowhere."

"Don't give me that. You were gone. You weren't here."

"But I was nowhere," he insisted. He shivered. "There was nothing there, Harek. Nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing? Do you mean it was dark? You couldn't see anything because it was dark?"

"I don't know."

"What's that supposed to mean? Either it was dark or it wasn't."

"No."

"Robin." I was ready to shake him: it seemed such a basic question, but I switched tactics. "Could you hear me call you?"

He shook his head.

I lowered my voice. I'd been close to yelling, and I suddenly remembered where we were. "Some kind of magic?" I asked. A powerful enough wizard could have put warding spells around an area, to hide it from detection. "Some place we have to pass through?" Now, there was a thought.

Robin was shaking his head. "I don't think so. You try it."

"What if I get stuck?"

He shouted at me: "There's nothing there."

"I know there's nothing there," I shouted back. "You keep telling me there's nothing there. All right, I get it: there's nothing there."

We stood nose-to-nose, glaring at each other, both breathing hard. We were being stupid—loud enough to attract unwanted attention. All of a sudden I could feel every ache from being whacked on the head and tied up and thrown into a cold, damp dungeon.

I looked beyond him to the perfectly harmless-seeming air into which he had disappeared. "How did you get back?" I asked.

"Just stepped back," he told me.

I took a steadying breath. I flexed my hand on the handle of the torch. I was taking it with me, to light up Robin's nothingness. I started to take a step forward.

In the half moment as my center of balance shifted, Robin said, "It's just a matter of finding your body so that you
can
step back."

I finished the step.

And I was nowhere.

No walls around me. No floor under my feet.

No feet, come to think of it.

I was slightly dizzy, though I wasn't aware of having a body, as though my head—if I still had one—was stuffed with cotton.

Was it dark?

I don't know.

Not, I don't remember. Just,
I don't know.
I didn't have eyes to see with, or a brain to think with. Dark or light? The question was meaningless, like asking, Is the sky afraid?

I wondered if this was death. Or rather the computer equivalent of death. But Robin had come back from it. And only a cleric can bring people back from the dead. Game rules.

I wanted to step back, but I couldn't.

I didn't know how.

Just like I don't know how to wiggle my ears, can't find the right muscles to spread out my toes, couldn't begin to flex my appendix.

I couldn't see.

Couldn't hear.

Couldn't feel.

Couldn't scream.

Couldn't move.

I was beginning to dissolve, to spread out, to lose track of who I was. In my head (I think) I formed a picture of myself. I made that image step backward.

Nothing.

I remembered that I wasn't Harek Longbow of the Silver Mountains Clan, tall and fair and muscular and self-possessed. I was Arvin Rizalli. And while I couldn't remember exactly what that meant, I knew it was the opposite of Harek. I got a vague image in my head (I think) then gave
it
a mental shove backward.

I stepped back into the cell.

Robin had the decency not to ask me whether it had been dark.

I grabbed hold of his arm to steady myself. "Something's wrong, Robin," I gasped.

"Yeah, tell me about it. Let's get out of here."

We stumbled out of the cell, down the hall past the dead guards, through the guard area with the tipped-over bench. Robin snatched up the abandoned playing cards. I didn't wait, but he was only two steps behind me when I reached the stairs.

The stairs were carved out of the ground and slanted first one way then the other. They were worn lower in the middle than at the edges, so that I continually felt off balance as though I were about to fall.

At the top was a foyer. In one direction a door led outside, guarded by one of the bandits, who had his back to us. It was night already. I could see the not-quite-full moon low in the sky, and bright pinpricks of stars.

To the left of the stairs was a hallway leading farther into the bandits' hideout; but when I looked in that direction, my eyes watered and I lost track of where my feet were. It must have had a similar effect on Robin, for he never suggested exploring. He indicated my dagger—his dagger—tucked into my belt.

This wasn't like a bloodless miniatures-and-graph-paper game, nor like a video game with cartoonish graphics; so instead of challenging the guard, I sneaked up behind him and whacked him on the back of the head with the pommel of the knife.

He'd barely stopped twitching when Robin started searching his pockets.

"Would you cut that out?" I demanded between clenched teeth. "What if he comes to?" But I picked up the crossbow that had clattered to the ground beside the guard.

There was a courtyard ahead of us, a stretch of maybe ten yards, unoccupied land between the bandits' rather shabby fortress and the outer wall. The wall was stone, but it had a wooden door with a crossbeam lowered into a slot for a lock. I'd taken about two steps in that direction when another guard came strolling around the corner, unenthusiastically checking the perimeter. He was obviously as surprised to see me as I was to see him, but I had the crossbow.

I killed him before he had a chance to make an outcry.

For once Robin refrained from looting the body. Instead he ran ahead and pulled on the rope that eased the beam out of its slot.

We inched the door open and peeked outside. There was a clear area between us and the forest, and no obvious guards. But there were an awful lot of trees. An
awful
lot of shadows.

"We're sitting ducks here," Robin said. "Our best bet's to go fast."

He was right. If the trees could hide guards, they could hide us too. It was just a matter of hoping there weren't any guards, and of getting from the doorway to the forest. At a run, it should take us about five seconds. I nodded and told him, "On the count of three."

"Onetwothree," Robin said, taking all of about a quarter second to say it and to fling open the door and to start without me. I sprinted across the packed dirt toward the edge of the forest, counting off the five seconds I had estimated till safety.
One
...no sign of movement;...
two
...no shouts to stop, no clang of metal weapons, only my pounding heart;...
three
...I scanned the shadows ahead of us, aware at the same time that there might be guards behind us;...
four...
surely if there was someone there, he would have reacted by now;...
five...
the trees loomed, menacing or friendly, I couldn't be sure;
...six...
OK, so I'm a lousy estimator of distance;...
seven.
The branches whipped my arms as I pushed through them.

I took several steps more, but there was too much underbrush for mad dashing.

"Whew!" Robin leaned against my shoulder for a moment, his face sweaty but exultant.

Just off to his right, a hand pushed away a branch. Just as that registered in my race-numbed brain, a voice said, "Nice work, boys."

Human-shaped shadows separated themselves from forest-shaped shadows. Two of them grappled with Robin, to keep his sword sheathed. Somebody seized my wrist also, even though I hadn't moved.

"Easy, easy." Our wizard, Cornelius, stepped closer to Robin, making sure we could see his face. "Don't you know your friends when you see them?"

"
When
I see them," Robin said. He pulled free from Marian, who was one of the people holding him. The other was Thea Greenleaf, and she continued to grip his arm for a couple more seconds, as though to make sure he knew that she wasn't letting go till she was good and ready to let go.

The stocky shadow by me, Feordin, had released me already. The others, Mom and Nocona, weren't there.

"What's your problem?" Cornelius demanded of us. "We came here to rescue you."

Robin glared at him. "You. You're our problem. Harek and I don't need rescuing. We're perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves,
and
"—he cut off any possible rebuttal—"
and
you might be a second-rate wizard, but you're a complete failure as a hacker."

Cornelius sputtered in angry amazement that anyone could say such a thing.

"Stop it," Thea demanded in an urgent whisper—a reminder that we might not be alone in the woods. "Just stop it."

Cornelius and Robin stood glaring at each other, both breathing hard. I stepped into the breach. "We ran into a problem—a serious problem."

"Yeah?" Feordin asked, not willing to commit himself yet. For all he knew—for all any of them knew—we'd had a rough encounter and were taking out our frustrations on them.

"We got away from the guards no problem. But we found a hole in the program."