stone structure and tons of water from the lake came crashing through. The dam crumbled like wet sand. I saw the small stone hut on top fall into the chaos of crashing stone and water.
“Gunny,” I said to myself.
The screen went blank. The jump was over.
“What went wrong?” Loor asked. She was standing behind me, watching the disaster. “Where is Aja?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
I led Loor out of the Alpha Core in search of Aja. Where was she? Why had she left the controls in the middle of the jump? Of course, my mind rushed to all the worst possible answers. I feared she had somehow gone into the jump and gotten hurt. Stranger still, how had Gunny ended up in Zetlin’s jump? Worse, if he was in the jump, did he go down with the crumbling dam? There were a ton of questions that needed answering. But first we had to find Aja.
We ran quickly through the core to see all was exactly as we had left it. The monitors were still showing green and there were no phaders or vedders around. There was no Aja, either. We left the glass corridor and hurried back to the counter where we had been fitted with our control bracelets. The Goth vedder was still there, looking as bored as ever.
“Have you seen Aja?” I demanded.
“She left a while ago,” he answered. “She was in a big hurry, too. She said to tell you she had to get home.”
“Home?” I shouted. “But the grid is still suspended!”
“Hey, don’t ask me,” the guy said. “I’m just a vedder.”
This made no sense. What was so important at home that she would leave us alone in the jump? I looked to Loor, hoping she might have an answer, and saw she was staring at the oil portrait of the young Dr. Zetlin.
“We must find him,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. But we can’t do it without Aja. C’mon.”
We started to leave when the vedder called to us. “Hey!”
We looked back at him and he pointed to his wrist. Right. We still had our jump bracelets on. Loor and I quickly unclasped the bracelets and put them on the counter.
“Thank you,” the vedder said. “This is the way it was meant to be.”
I shot the guy a surprised look. “Why did you say that?” The Goth guy shrugged. “Just something to say,” he answered, and smiled. That was weird.
“Let’s go,” I said to Loor, and headed out.
I was confused and angry and frightened all at once. How could Aja abandon us? Loor and I jumped onto one of the three-wheel pedal vehicles and quickly made our way back toward the mansion that Aja made home.
“I am having trouble understanding what is happening, Pendragon,” Loor said.
“Yeah, me too,” I answered truthfully. “Nothing is making sense, but I guarantee that if Aja went home, it was for a good reason. Let’s not sweat about it until we find her.”
We pedaled the rest of the way in silence. The empty streets of Rubic City seemed even more chillingly quiet than before. This was a ghost town in the middle of a ghost territory, and we weren’t doing much to change it.
We arrived at the mansion and ran up the marble stairs. I wanted to burst through the door, screaming for Aja, but that would have been rude. This was still Evangeline’s house too. So I grabbed the door knocker and pounded it a few times. A few agonizing seconds later, the door opened and Evangeline was there. When she saw me, her face lit up with a bright smile.
“Pendragon! What a surprise!” she exclaimed. “And who is this?”
“This is my friend Loor,” I answered. “She’s a Traveler. Where is Aja?”
“Another Traveler?” Evangeline said. “How wonderful! You two are just in time for dinner.”
She stepped back to let Loor and me inside.
“We need to find Aja, Evangeline,” I said urgently.
“But surely you have time for some gloid,” she said sweetly. “We’re having your favorite. Blue. You like blue the best, don’t you?”
Yeah, right.
“Where is Aja?” Loor demanded. She didn’t care if she sounded rude.
“She’s not here,” Evangeline answered. “Please, come into the kitchen and eat.”
She turned and walked down the hallway, headed for the kitchen.
“If she is not here,” Loor said, “where else could she be?” “I don’t know,” I answered.
We followed Evangeline through the house, toward the kitchen. No way I was going to get near any of that blue gloid, but we had to find Aja. I stepped up to the kitchen door, swung it open, and saw something that froze both Loor and me in our places. It was impossible, yet as real as can be.
Evangeline was scooping big ladles of blue gloid into white bowls. But that wasn’t what shocked us.
“Sit down, you two,” she said with warm hospitality. “Plenty of room.”
Loor and I didn’t move. That was because there were already two dinner guests seated at the table. As impossible as it was, sitting there, chowing down on huge spoonfuls of blue gloid, were the two cowpokes from the mountain ravine in Zetlin’s fantasy.
“Howdy there, you two!” one of them said. “You come by to return our horses?”
“That’s right nice of you to go out of your way!” the other one said. He then looked at Evangeline and said, “Ma’am, this chow sure is tasty.”
“That’s kind of you to say,” Evangeline said, blushing.
What was going on?
Loor asked me, “Do you smell that?”
At first I thought she meant the gloid, but I took a whiff and realized it was something else. Something was burning.
“Evangeline, are you cooking something?” I asked.
Before she could answer, a door opened from the far side of the kitchen and another guest arrived.
“Gunny!” I shouted.
Yup. In walked Gunny Van Dyke, dressed in his bell captain uniform from the Manhattan Tower Hotel.
“Hey there, shorty!” he said. “I see you made it off that dam. You going to introduce me to your friend?”
I was numb. My brain wasn’t computing any of this.
“This is… this is… Loor,” I said numbly.
“Osa’s daughter?” Gunny exclaimed. “I am very pleased to meet you.”
Gunny reached across the table, holding out his hand to shake Loor’s. Loor reached out, looking as dazed as I was. And there was a gunshot.
The smile froze on Gunny’s face. He pitched forward and fell face first onto the table. Gunny had been shot. Both cow-pokes dove away from the table and hit the floor. Evangeline screamed and huddled behind a counter. I looked across the room to where the shot had come from.
Standing in the doorway was Saint Dane. He was still dressed in his black cowboy outfit and had a smoking six-shooter in his hand.
“You cheated, Pendragon,” Saint Dane exclaimed. “There’s no fun in a challenge if you cheat. Now you two will just have to pay the price.”
From behind him, the desperados entered with guns drawn.
I was absolutely, totally frozen in shock. Things were happening so fast and seemed so impossible, I couldn’t even begin to figure out what to do.
Luckily, Loor could.
She quickly grabbed the end of the kitchen table and flipped it up on end. Cutlery and gloid flew everywhere as the desperados opened fire. Bullets slammed into the table, shredding it. But Loor’s quick thinking had protected us. At least for the time being.
“Outta here!” I shouted, and we ran for the door to the hallway.
More gunshots were fired as bullets ripped through the kitchen, barely missing us and instead slamming into the kitchen walls. The instant we ran out the door, we discovered where the bad smell had come from.
The mansion was on fire.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the entire downstairs hallway was full of horses. I’m serious. It was like being in
