Brath leaned forward but caught himself quickly and tried to downplay his interest. “Oh yeah?” he asked.
“That means your future is…well, I guess the best way to say it is that you have infinite possibilities with where you go from here. After the past and present stuff that I said before, you get to choose what your future is after you’re done asking questions.”
Brath chuckled as he leaned back. “You could have said that about anything.”
Alex took the three cards and put them back into the deck. “True,” Alex admitted. “I could have said them to anyone. But I said them to you and only you. Right now. So, take that as you will. But I see that today will not be your last.”
After shuffling again, Alex had Jollies draw cards. Hers were dove wings, dragon fire, and a skull. “Oh, that’s bad,” Jollies said. “The skull means I’m dead.”
Alex shook her head and gave the pixie a sly smile. “No, you misunderstand. It means that you are the bringer of death.” She looked at the two recruits and saw them both emboldened, their panic subsiding. Good. She had gotten through to them.
No panic meant they were thinking again, and that gave them all a chance.
Gill, the only one who had been calm the whole time, raised his finger to his lips, turned off the lights, and motioned for them all to get closer.
Gill threw up a holograph from his HUD that showed their hall. There were more orcs walking down the hall, but this time, they were kicking open every door. The orcs were only a few doors away.
Gill shifted the view to another hallway. Dead bodies covered the floor.
Alex grabbed her mouth to keep from yelping. She had never seen anything dead before. She wanted to look away more than anything else in the world.
Gill changed back to their hallway. “There’s worse going on right now,” he said. “Fights throughout the Nest and they’re coming our way. Real soon. Any ideas?”
Brath jumped to his feet and pulled out a knife hanging from his waist. “We fight them,” he whispered. “Better than sitting here and waiting for them to find us. At least we choose how we die.”
Jollies was shaking her head as she tried to fight back tears. Alex could see that the pixie was terrified, and there was a part of Alex that was scared too, but she felt the same way Brath did. If there was going to be a fight, it should be on their terms.
The images of the dead cadets in the hallway flashed through Alex’s mind. Her desire to fight instantly dissipated. She could be one of the corpses in the hall. Her parents would never know.
Gill stood up and turned off the holograph. He walked over to Brath and coaxed him into putting away the knife. “I know you’re looking forward to using your father’s blade for revenge,” Gill said softly. “But there’ll be a better time. We need to figure out what we’re going to do to stay alive.”
Alex pointed up to the unlit light bulb in the middle of the room. “Can you get into the systems and turn off the lights for the whole place?” Alex asked.
Gill looked at the lightbulb and then at the darkness of the room. “I can try.”
Chapter Two
Gill attempted to hack into the entire Nest system. His brows were furrowed as he tried to figure out how to get past the firewalls. Alex wondered how such a young kid had managed to acquire that much hacking expertise.
Manny sat quietly in the corner. He hadn’t spoken a word since they had been ushered out of the mess hall. Alex wondered if Manny was panic-stricken, but that seemed unlikely. It wouldn’t have made sense for Myrddin to assign Manny to Alex if he spooked so easily.
The desire to walk over to the dorm room’s door and peek through the peephole was overwhelming. Alex pushed it down along with her fear, which was doing its best to take over her reasoning. She kept imagining the orcs breaking into the room and tearing them all to shreds.
The lights in the hallway flickered. Alex could see light through the crack where the door didn’t quite touch the floor, but they still remained on.
Outside, there was another explosion. This one was big enough to rock their room. Orcs started yelling in the hallway. Alex couldn’t make out what they were saying, but she assumed that it was something violent in Orcish.
Brath sighed as he started to pace and finger the knife hanging from his waist again. Once in a while, he would stop and look at Gill, who would glance at his visor and shake his head.
Alex had never missed the HUD in Middang3ard so much before, not even when she was on Earth, trying to stay awake during her homeschooling lessons. The HUD she had received when she got her armor was noticeably different.
The HUDs in Middang3ard had an amazing feature that allowed their users to gauge what their likelihood of success or failure was going to be. All you had to do was look at a situation that you were thinking about, and the HUD gave you your success ratio.
Over the last few months in VR, Alex had become extremely dependent on that little percentage. It made all the difference in whether or not she would engage in a battle. She wished that she knew what her likelihood of survival was right now.
Gill groaned, frustration dripping from his voice when he spoke. “Damn it, there are so many back ends, I don’t even know where to start. Maybe I should just try to isolate the hallways. No, that doesn’t make sense…”
Alex walked over to Gill and took a seat beside him. “What if you just knocked out the whole network? Just kill the whole Nest.”
Gill rubbed his cheek as he thought it over. “I guess I could do that,” he admitted. “But I don’t know
