the phaders and vedders, but now that we were alone, she lost it. I felt bad for her, but I was feeling worse for all those people who were stuck in the vacuum of Lifelight. Their only hope of getting out safely rested with Aja, and she wasn’t looking all that capable of saving anybody. Finally she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“I didn’t want you here on Veelox, Pendragon,” she said. “Do you know why?”
“Uh… no” was my dumb but truthful answer.
“Because you’re you,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Give me a break,” she said with tears forming again. “You’re the lead Traveler. You swoop into a territory and take on Saint Dane like some kind of fearless savior. Denduron, Cloral,
First Earth… every one a victory for the good guys. It’s all so simple for you.”
I wanted to laugh. I really did. Fearless? Savior? Me? Yeah, right. I didn’t know what stories she had heard, but her information was definitely twisted.
“I’m not like you,” she went on. “I’m not some big adventurer. What I am is smart. Smarter than you. That’s not a boast; it’s fact. My whole life I was trained to maximize my intellect. I lived with teachers and scientists. Evangeline was my only friend. It was a cold way to grow up. I hated it. Then one day your uncle showed up to tell me I was a Traveler. Suddenly it all made sense. I knew what I was meant to do. All the training and studying and loneliness I had to endure meant that I had the tools to protect Veelox. It was like I had suddenly come alive, because my life had purpose. I was all set to take on Saint Dane with the weapon I knew how to use best… my brain.”
Aja stopped talking. I think she was trying to hold back tears. She swallowed and said, “The reason I didn’t want you here, Pendragon, was I didn’t want you to take that chance away from me.”
I was slowly starting to get the picture. Finally. Aja had been cold toward me because she feared I would take away the one thing that gave her life meaning.
“But as it turns out,” Aja continued, barely keeping her emotions down, “I not only failed to save Veelox, I made things worse. I didn’t stop Saint Dane, I helped him!”
“We don’t know that yet-“
“No?” she shouted, spinning the chair toward me. “I created the Reality Bug. It’s my fault that millions of people are in danger. And that Alex is… I thought I was being so smart, and all along I was doing the worst possible thing.”
“Aja, you have to understand,” I said carefully. “Saint Dane may have had a bigger part in this than you know.”
“No! I programmed it. I installed it. It was all me.”
“I know that, but like I told you. Saint Dane is more devious than you can imagine. I’m not saying he was by your side helping you program the thing, but he probably put ideas in your head. It could have started years ago. He might have been a teacher who first planted the idea about how Lifelight would be better if it weren’t so perfect. He could have been a phader who suggested it might be possible to alter the program, or a vedder who said it was impossible to be hurt while jumping. That’s what he does, Aja. He plants ideas. He gets you thinking in directions that seem right, but are totally wrong.”
Aja didn’t turn her gaze from me. It was the first time she actually listened to what I had to say.
“And it probably wasn’t just you,” I added. “I’ll bet he was doing the same thing with other phaders, and getting them to monkey with Lifelight so that when you installed the bug, it would blow up the way it did.”
Aja let this information work its way through her brain. I wished she had done that when I first met her, but hey, no sense in looking back.
“There’s something else,” I said. “I don’t know where you’ve been hearing these stories about me, but things didn’t exactly happen the way you think they did. Yeah, we’ve been able to slam Saint Dane a couple of times, but it wasn’t because I was a brave guy who charged in to kick butt and take names. Most of the time I was so scared I couldn’t think straight.”
“So how were you able to beat him?” she asked with a touch of confusion.
“Luck, as much as anything,” I said. “To be honest, I blew it on First Earth. If I had been alone, there would have been a disaster worse than what we’re looking at here. I’m still trying to figure how to live with that.”
“But it all worked out/’ Aja said.
“That’s because I wasn’t alone. Gunny bailed me out. I don’t think any one of us can stand up to Saint Dane alone, Aja. Working together is our only chance.”
I hoped I was getting through to her. The future of Veelox depended on it, not to mention the rest of Halla.
I then added, “But what we’ve got here is a little bit different.”
“How?” she asked, confused.
I walked over to the vast console and looked at the sea of buttons and switches.
“The Reality Bug was a brilliant idea. If Saint Dane hadn’t stuck his nose in, it might have worked. But he did. We can’t change that. We can only look forward. Our job is to save Veelox. But first we have to stop the Reality Bug. I have no idea how to do that. But you do. I can be here to bounce ideas off of, but only you can stop the bug. So when it comes right down to it, you are going to get the chance to save Veelox.”
Up until that moment Aja looked like she was ready to crawl into a corner and shrivel up. But now the sparkle returned to her eyes. She sat up straight and put her yellow glasses back on. She stood up and faced me with the same confidence that I saw when she spoke with the technicians outside.
“Not a problem,” she said. “All I have to do is tap into the grid and purge the bug from the processing code.” Whatever that meant.
“That won’t solve the larger problem though,” she added. “Once I’m done, Lifelight will go back to normal and Veelox will still be in trouble.”
“One step at a time,” I said.
Aja walked over to me and turned me around. I wasn’t sure why until I realized she was examining the cut on the back of my arm.
“Go see a vedder and get that taken care of,” she said. She even sounded like she cared. A little.
“You sure you don’t need me?” I asked.
Then… a miracle. She smiled. Was it possible? I’d like to take credit for getting her to lighten up, but the truth was that nearly causing the deaths of millions of people was probably earth-shattering enough to get anybody to see things differently… even an ego case like Aja. All I could do was smile back.
“It’ll take me less time to purge the Reality Bug than it will for you to get your arm fixed,” she said, then spun away from me and sat back down in the control chair. She pulled the control arm in front of her, ready to work. A few keystrokes later, the large monitor flashed to life. She had slipped into computer world, so I left her alone and went looking for some Bactine and
Band-Aids.
The glass corridor of the core was empty and quiet. The technicians were gone and all the monitors at the control stations were showing the same blank green color. It was creepy seeing the place so dead, so I hurried to the end of the corridor to get out as fast as possible.
I stepped into the room with the long counter where I had been fitted with my silver bracelet for the jumps. It was empty too. I walked up to the counter and gazed at the portrait of young
Dr. Zetlin, the inventor of Lifelight. He didn’t look like a genius. He just looked like a regular kid.
“Hiya, Doc,” I said. “This what you had in mind when you invented Lifelight?”
A voice then came from behind the counter. “Who are you talking to?”
For a second I thought it was the portrait, and it made me jump. But it turned out to be the
Goth-looking vedder who had pricked my finger the day before.
“Uh, nobody,” I answered, embarrassed. “Hey, you think you could take a look at my arm?”
The vedder rolled his eyes. “If I have to,” he said, as if it were the last thing he wanted to do. I wasn’t sure why he minded so much. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do. I unzipped my jumpsuit to my waist and pulled my arm out.
“Where did everybody go?” I asked as he examined my cut.
“They’re all up in the pyramid,” he answered. “They’re going to jump as soon as Aja gets Lifelight back online.”
