“How much time?” Michael asked anxiously.

“When did I become our official stopwatch?” Sarah responded, but even so, she checked her NetScreen. “She should be pulling us out in twenty minutes. Keep your diapers dry.”

Michael held back a smile that would have given her too much satisfaction. When had she become so uppity?

“That’s going to be twenty long minutes,” Bryson muttered under his breath.

As if some cosmic holder of the code heard his remark, a wind picked up. The purple fragments began to swirl into wispy clouds of a darkening blue. The gusts, stronger and stronger, tugged at Michael’s clothes, his hair. The lights continued their dance, flaring, then dying. More than two-thirds of them were gone now, the darkness almost complete.

And then, in a thunderclap of an instant, everything picked up.

The wind blew with the force of a hurricane, ripping at Michael and his friends. Clouds and streaks of black mist swirled around them, and a discordant symphony of sound filled the air, threatening to deafen Michael once and for all.

And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it. He jerked his head around to get a better look. A hole of darkness, deep and pure, the blackest thing he’d ever seen, yawning wider and wider until it was dozens of feet in diameter.

And somewhere within it, Michael thought he saw yellow eyes.

A boom sounded behind him, a concussion of noise that shook the substance he floated in, pushed him several feet forward in the purple code. He turned around to see another hole opening, maybe a hundred feet away, but this one wasn’t black. This one glowed with an ethereal orange light that cut through the darkness. Figures appeared within it—silhouettes of people of all shapes and sizes. They were moving, heading straight for Michael and his friends.

He spun again to see the black hole—the eyes. Shadow upon shadow. There were figures there, too; he could sense them more than see them. Coming. Coming fast. Dark shapes suddenly leaped out of the gaping hole.

Stunned, Michael didn’t have time to feel fear. He reached out and grabbed his friends, pulled them closer.

“What in the world!” he shouted.

“What do we do?” Sarah shouted. “We still have ten minutes before Weber Lifts us out!”

Bryson wrenched free of Michael’s grip and held up his fists. “We have to fight. That’s not long to hold them off!” Michael didn’t know what to do but get in a defensive position himself. He held his arms up, feeling totally useless. Figures emerged from both sides: people from the orange light, creatures of darkness from the black hole. What would happen, he wondered, if they did get killed? This place seemed like a wild card. And what if Kaine was behind it all? What if the life could be sucked out of them?

He wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go. The wind roared, noise filled the air, and from two opposing directions, enemies charged in.

His life was ridiculous.

There was but an instant of time to decipher those who charged at Michael and his friends. From the blackness came dark-skinned creatures, loping and slithering and pouncing, all shapes and sizes, no beast the same as another, and none Michael had seen before. They looked like KillSims morphed into twisted, unnatural shapes with yellow eyes.

From the blinding orange light came more recognizable—if strange—characters. All of them appeared to be from famous VirtNet games: warriors with axes; fully suited astronauts with laser guns; giants with wooden clubs; a woman on a deathcat, brandishing a staff lit with fire; a mechaknight on his robotic horse; a sunpyre and his brood of white lions; the fighting priest of Grendelin; and countless others. They charged in formation, rallying behind someone who was obviously their leader.

It was a woman. Tall and powerful, decked out in all kinds of futuristic, gleaming armor, she had four arms, and four weapons. In one hand, she gripped a thick cylinder with spinning blades on the end. In another, a shaft of pure blue light, pulsing as if ready to fire. In yet another, a menacing black box with a gaping hole at one end. And the fourth arm cradled a long barrel that looked exactly like a cannon from ancient wars.

As she ran, bricks appeared beneath her, one after the other, forming a path under her feet. The rest of her army charged atop their own surfaces—flat beams of light and rocky gravel and patches of stone or grass. Their battle cries filled the air and their eyes shone with anger.

Michael took it all in, in what could only have been a few moments. Time seemed to slow to reveal one of the strangest sights he’d ever seen. He thought that it really did slow, as if the programming itself, this cesspool of countless destroyed virtual lands, wanted to witness the spectacle. Michael’s friends were still beside him, seeing what he saw, their movements sluggish, as if they were flies trapped in molasses.

And then, with a burst of wind and a screeching noise, everything ripped back to full speed.

The warriors rushed in. From one side: yellow eyes like raging fires, set in snarling and snapping, slithering and pouncing, blacker-than-black forms. From the other: heroes from decades of gaming, charging along on their magic paths. The fierce woman leading them was only a few dozen feet away from Michael and his friends, and she yelled at the top of her lungs, a sound like crushing rocks and booming thunder.

“Out of the way, pips! It’s not your day to die!”

Who were these people? Where had they come from?

Instinct took over Michael before his mind could catch up. He grabbed both of his friends, pulled them close. And then he reached out and scrambled the code, manipulating it with his mind, understanding on some deep level what he’d once done in the Hallowed Ravine. Everything around him was a fabrication, a visual manifestation of sequenced letters and numbers and symbols, including Bryson, Sarah, and himself. He attacked it all with nothing but thought.

He and his friends suddenly catapulted to the sky, three human missiles rocketing upward, just as the armies of light and darkness crashed into each other below like two out-of-control freight trains.

Michael stopped their flight several hundred feet above the clashing battle, suspended in the ethereal world of goop. His mind was a cyclone, spinning with a million thoughts, backed by a fierce rush of adrenaline through his body.

Sarah looked at him almost as if she were afraid. Of him.

“I just did what she told me to,” he said.

“Look!” Bryson shouted, pointing downward.

A couple of stragglers had separated from the battle—one a long streak of blackness with yellow eyes, the other a bulky mass with at least a dozen arms and legs. Both were coming at Michael and his friends, flying fast.