Chapter Text

Episode One
A Fresh Start

Chapter 1
Welcome to Kadic Academy

“Welcome to Kadic Academy!”

The warm female voice spoke just as the crimson and white coat of arms on the screen began to fade, an image quickly replaced by footage of campus. Stately three- and four-story buildings of pale yellow stone or red brick. Sprawling green lawns with shady arbors and beds of flowers in bloom. An enthusiastic acoustic guitar swelled in the background. Your typical orientation video.

With a sigh, Jeremy Belpois nestled his head in the crook of his elbow on the desk in front of him. It’s way too early for this, he thought, thinking longingly of the bed he had been so hastily rousted from. He was the only student seated in the forest of sturdy plastic tables and wooden chairs. To his left, tall windows ran the length of the wall, shades drawn and shuttered to keep out the harsh morning sunlight. Along the right wall was a well-ordered black counter bearing math textbooks in several neat stacks, with gray cabinets above and below. One open cabinet door revealed more textbooks. A projector above Jeremy’s head casted the orientation video onto a small white screen drawn down over the whiteboard at the had of the classroom. Two green chalkboards flanked the whiteboard, one dressed with axes for graphing equations. A door set into the right wall led from the room.

Opposite the door, in the corner beneath the last of the tall windows, was a long wooden teacher’s desk, its glossy surface mostly hidden under piles of paper, a disorganized jumble that only its owner could decipher properly. Presently the desk was occupied not by that owner, but by Ms. Stranix, the school’s disciplinarian. She was a prim, severe-looking woman with short gray-brown hair and a teal pantsuit; she sat unnervingly still, her face rendered eerily statuesque by the light coming from the computer monitor on the desk. In his limited interaction with the woman, Jeremy had gotten the impression she was not one to be trifled with.

Stifling a yawn, Jeremy dragged his gaze back to the video. “…and our award-winning academic curriculum, with state-of-the-art accommodations to ensure that you feel right at home…”

Alone, Jeremy thought bitterly. Growing up, Jeremy had always been a loner. It hadn’t always been by choice; at least, not at first. He was a nerd. There was no doubt about it, not even to Jeremy. He certainly looked the part, with his short, scrawny figure and his thickly-rimmed glasses beneath a mop of sandy blonde hair. But it wasn’t his appearance that set him apart from his peers, even from an early age.

Two characteristics all but guaranteed he would be the class pariah no matter how hard he tried. For starters, he was very good at being a student. Prodigiously good, in fact. Top of the class without even breaking a sweat. He had a genius mind and a quick wit that served to alienate as much as distinguish him from his classmates. Teachers loved him—he was their best student, after all—but his success earned him nothing but scorn from most of his peers. Bullies were a constant issue, though over time he learned to just ignore them, mostly. And secondly, he was… headstrong, to put it mildly. Opinionated to a fault, Jeremy simply did not have time for what he saw as rank stupidity. And growing up in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, he saw the stupidity of those around him as nothing short of excessive. So much primping and preening, posturing for attention, chasing popularity for the sake of popularity. It was all so meaningless to Jeremy. Frivolous. Therefore it was only natural for him to stop trying to accommodate the banalities of others, to go the route of a loner. He pursued computer programing instead of popularity, robotics instead of rabid materialism. His was a world of science and logic; the rest might as well have been in another galaxy altogether.

Except… until now, he had at least had his family. His mother was loving without being overbearing, stern but fair. A positive, motivating presence, she was singlehandedly responsible for his academic drive. “Never be afraid to be different,” she always said. “Too many people let their fears stuff them into a box full of normal.” Then there was his sister, Nicole. A breath of fresh air if there ever was one, almost certainly because Jeremy practically raised her. Though outgoing where he was introverted, she was every bit as strong-willed and independent, and if she lacked Jeremy’s pure genius, she more than made up for it with her kindness and her sense of humor. Even if Jeremy was lacking in the friend department, he always felt comfortable with just his family, small and eclectic as it was.

“…and as this year’s recipient of Kadic Academy’s prestigious Governor’s Scholarship, your tuition and your room and board have been fully covered by our generous benefactors…”

Oh right, thought Jeremy. The reason I’m here.

It was unfortunate, as Jeremy saw it, that his mother had never been as comfortable with his nonexistent social life as he. Several times, she had tried to strongarm him into finding a new locale, somewhere his nerdy, standoffish reputation was unknown. A fresh start, she called it. And despite his flat refusals, an application to an upscale California private school appeared on his desk one evening. “Just fill it out,” she said over his mild protestations. “With your brains, they’ll be happy to have you.” She must have known she could never come close to affording the yearly seventy-thousand-dollar price tag attached to that application, not as a single mother of two on a teacher’s salary. Perhaps she thought that if the school awarded Jeremy a scholarship, she could somehow cobble together the rest. So he appeased her, knowing that even if he was accepted, there was virtually no chance of him being able to attend.

Jeremy remembered it vividly, that day he stepped off the school bus to a nervous wreck of a mother. A letter from Kadic Academy had arrived, and though she had managed to wait for Jeremy to open it, it had required an anxious deep-cleaning of the entire apartment for her to accomplish such a feat.

With his mother hovering over his shoulder, Jeremy slid a finger under the seal with nothing but confidence. He had had an oh-Mom-you-know-we-can’t-afford-this speech prepared for weeks and weeks. He shook open a piece of heavy manila paper and skimmed the letter. Congratulations, Jeremy Belpois! You have been accepted into the Kadic Academy Class of 2012… yada-yada-yada… some notes about the start of term… how to contact the administration to confirm enrollment… He was just about to roll into his prepared monologue when he noticed a folded page still inside the envelope.

“What does it say, sweetie?” his mother asked, unable to keep the note of desperation from creeping into her tone.

Jeremy pressed the acceptance letter into her hands and fished the second piece of paper out of the envelope. He unfolded the page and read, and… Kadic offered to pay for the whole damn thing.

Swallowing another sigh, Jeremy slouched a little further onto the desk. There’s no going back now, he thought glumly, resigned to his fate.

Back on the screen, the woman’s voice was still blithering on, now waxing grandiose about the school’s many amenities, each given ample time in the limelight. A four-story library, a thirty-acre sports complex, a gymnasium complete with three weight rooms and an Olympic-sized swimming pool, two auditoriums, a planetarium, a private park… Man, this place is ritzy, he thought sourly. I bet all the kids here are rich assholes. He knew the type. Vain, materialistic, self-centered. Always the center of attention. His old school had more than its fair share; for his life he could never figure out why the most popular kids were almost always the ones who were the most rotten on the inside.

And now he was in a school full of them. There was a small part of Jeremy—larger than he cared to admit, even to himself, yet small nonetheless—that longed for someone he could call a friend. But he had long since surrendered to the reality that he was better off on his own, especially in a place like this. It’s just more teachers to fawn over me, more classmates to despise me… More of the same, really. Only now he was so far from home and everything he had ever known.

Jeremy yawned, then shut his mouth so quickly his teeth clicked at the baleful glare he earned from Ms. Stranix. At least the dirge of a video seemed to finally be at an end. “…and we hope you enjoy your time here at Kadic Academy! Go Dragons!” Several photogenic upperclassmen and the school mascot—a dragon, complete with scaly red wings—waved cheerily at the camera as the acoustic guitar chugged toward its final cadence. The image faded, becoming the school’s coat of arms once more. Three Latin words—Veritas, Pietas, and Caritas—were written in a curly script above a shield emblazoned with an open book, an eagle in flight, a hammer, and a lit candle in four quadrants; they were meant to symbolize knowledge, bravery, strength, and perseverance respectively. At least, that’s what it said in the brochure.

The screen cut to a harsh blue as Ms. Stranix rose to her feet. She was quite short—only a few inches taller than Jeremy—but her stern bearing was such that Jeremy felt like he was a bug under her heel. With a start, his chin came off his arm and he sat up straight, burying yet another yawn.

“Come now,” Ms. Stranix said, crossing to the door. “You only have a few minutes to join your classmates for first period.” She didn’t look back to see if Jeremy followed; this was a woman who expected to be obeyed.

Shouldering his messenger bag, Jeremy stood and scampered after her, catching up in the hall outside. There, he found his opinion of Ms. Stranix was rather common. As soon as the children in the corridor caught wind of the disciplinarian among them, a hush enveloped the hall. It appeared the woman was one of those rare figures on a school campus whose mere presence inspired a total silence in even the most riotous of students. Not to be trifled with, indeed, Jeremy thought wryly.

Ms. Stranix set a brisk pace; Jeremy found himself almost jogging to keep up with the booming clack-clack of her high heels across the glossy tiled floor. Despite his diminutive stature, Jeremy was surprised to realize that he was the tallest kid in the corridor; the faces he passed shone with the gleeful youth of children even younger than he was. This must be one of the middle school buildings, Jeremy supposed, trying to avoid their curious stares as Ms. Stranix shepherded him through.

Almost at the end of the hall, the disciplinarian abruptly turned left and pushed through a set of double doors. Jeremy stayed on her heels, squinting into the light of the newly risen sun. Before them was a wide courtyard, paved with pale yellow stone and surrounded on three sides by academic buildings. Awnings sheltered the space next to those buildings, but Ms. Stranix’s route cut straight across, between two arbors poking out of small pallets. As they stepped out into the ripening late-summer morning, she cleared her throat.

“It is highly… unusual for a student to arrive a week into the semester and escape without punishment.” Jeremy noticed how she stressed the word “unusual” as if she resented anything even slightly out of the ordinary. “Regardless, on behalf of all faculty here at Kadic, I’d like to extend our warmest welcome.”

Pretty cold and distant, if you ask me, Jeremy thought. It wasn’t his fault he had been late. His mother had been the one with the bright idea to load up the decrepit family van with all of Jeremy’s school things. “Don’t worry,” she had said. “Old Matilda’s got one more cross-country trip in her. You just wait and see.”

So they left Jeremy’s little sister, Nicole, in the care of their upstairs neighbor and departed from their quiet Philly suburb, bound for the mountains of California. The trip should have taken less than a week. That would have given Jeremy plenty of time to settle into his dorm and a full weekend to get to know the lay of the land before classes began.

That was the plan, anyway. What they hadn’t counted on—yet what seemed inevitable to Jeremy in hindsight—was their transport breaking down eight times on their voyage. Eight! When Old Matilda limped into a parking spot late yesterday evening, it was the sixteenth day of their journey through hell, and Jeremy had missed the first week of classes. All in all, not the way he had envisioned arriving at his new school. His things were then carted off to his room by two burly twelfth-graders from the welcoming committee, who were clearly annoyed that their services were solicited on a Sunday night after the start of term. To add insult to injury, the van refused to start again, and his mother had to have it towed. After wishing Jeremy goodbye and good luck from the backseat of a yellow cab, she sold the thing for scrap and bought a one-way ticket back to Pennsylvania. So, yes. Technically, Old Matilda did have one more cross-country trip in her.

All of this was irrelevant, however, to the steely disciplinarian, who only saw a tardy student who she had to “hastily orientate.” Jeremy might have said something in his defense, but, remembering the other children’s avoidance of the woman, decided to keep his silence.

Their path led to a building identical to the one he had just left, like most of the academic buildings he had seen. Pale yellow stone facades with marble accoutrements and tall windows, arched on the first floor and peaked on the upper floors—more suitable for a wealthy manor than a school, in his opinion. Ms. Stranix led him through another pair of double doors, striding into a hallway lined by lockers of the same dark red as the school’s colors. Just like before, a noticeable hush fell over the students upon their entrance, or rather, the disciplinarian’s. Now Jeremy was one of the shortest kids in sight, confirming his hypothesis that he had been in a building for the younger grades.

The warning bell rang, a high-pitched chime through the speakers of the public address system, and to Jeremy’s surprise, the other students actually took heed, hurrying off to their classes with hardly a glance in his direction. It was a far cry from his old school, where the bell was more or less a suggestion. Although on second thought, he reasoned it could be another effect of the disciplinarian’s stifling aura.

Jeremy tailed Ms. Stranix to the midpoint of the hall, up a flight of stairs, and down another hallway. She slowed her gait as she steered toward a door, the last one on the right. Knocking twice, she poked her head inside.

“Mrs. Hertz, I have a new student for you.”

Taking Jeremy’s wrist, Mrs. Stranix shunted him brusquely into the room. Stumbling forward a step, he caught his balance just as he caught the strap of the messenger bag sliding into the crook of his elbow. He was beginning to think the disciplinarian’s fearsome reputation was more than deserved. He straightened quickly. That woman! If she had broken my laptop, I swear to God I—

But whatever he would have done was promptly driven from his mind, as he took in his surroundings for the first time. He was at the head of a large classroom filled with stolid square lab tables, perhaps six feet on a side and with plenty of room to maneuver between them during experiments. Their matte black metallic surfaces were each fixed with two Bunsen burners and a deep sink in the center, and there was a smattering of beakers and other materials besides. Every side of the square tables was abutted by a round metal stool, most bearing a student. And every eye was fixed on Jeremy. Despite his self-confidence, his face reddened. I hate being the new kid.

“It’s about time you showed up.”

Jeremy’s head whipped toward the voice; he found a middle-aged woman rifling papers against a long gray table that spanned the front of the classroom, its surface covered with clutter. She looked every inch the stereotypical mad scientist. Crazy, flyaway brown hair tinged here and there with gray; thickly lensed glasses with large, circular frames; a wrinkled, long white lab coat. Mrs. Hertz eyed Jeremy with a smirk.

“We—” Jeremy’s voice cracked; a few students laughed. He swallowed thickly, his cheeks flushing deeper. “We had car troubles.”

“It’s quite alright,” she said quickly, perhaps noticing his discomfort. Her smile became warmer, kinder. “I was told you’d be coming to class today.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” announced Ms. Stranix. Everything the woman said seemed to be a declamation of some sort. She disappeared into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind her. And good riddance, Jeremy thought. The late bell sounded. Mrs. Hertz waited for the peal to fade before she spoke again.

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Jeremy Belpois.”

Mrs. Hertz placed the papers in a neat pile on the messy table. “Alright, Jeremy, let me see”—she turned, taking inventory of the rest of the classroom—“why don’t we put you in the back with Odd and Ulrich?”

Jeremy looked to where she was pointing and saw a table in the back row with two boys seated there. Taking a steadying breath, he hiked his bag up to his shoulder, hating how awkward he felt, wishing his home weren’t three time zones away. Then he made the slow, painful procession to the rear of the classroom, focusing intently on his shoelaces, his flush deepening even further at the imagined stares of his new peers. After what seemed like several minutes, Jeremy slumped onto a stool, letting his bag slide to the floor.

Looking across the black tabletop, Jeremy laid eyes on his tablemates, peering at them across the smattering of scientific tools and materials. One was short, even shorter than Jeremy. He wore a long-sleeved purple shirt that ended above the midriff, revealing a pink shirt underneath. Shoulder-length blonde hair with bangs dyed the same shade of purple framed his mousey face. In contrast to the eccentricity of the first, the second boy had his brown hair styled short above his handsome features, and he wore a dark green button-down shirt open to show a lighter green shirt beneath. The blonde gave a boisterous wave; the brunette eye-rolled good-naturedly before giving a meek smile. It could be worse, Jeremy decided.

Blondie looked like he was about to say something, but a “Settle down!” from Mrs. Hertz at the front of the classroom headed him off. She moved behind the long table, stared down at a sheet of paper, and cleared her throat. “Adrian Amora?”

A curly-haired boy halfway up the room responded, “Here.”

“Sarah Bannon?”

A girl with brown hair and freckles answered this time. “Here.”

“Jeremy Belpois; obviously here.” Mrs. Hertz rattled off a few more names. Then, “Odd Della Robbia?”

Blondie gave a hearty “Present!”

So the other one must be Ulrich, Jeremy thought, looking from Odd to the brunette. Such unusual names.

“Elizabeth Delmas?” No one answered; Mrs. Hertz looked up from her list. “Sissy?”

“That’s already the third day she’s missed this year,” Ulrich muttered, picking at his green shirt. “How does she get away with it?”

“By being Kadic royalty, that’s how.” Odd’s voice was thick with scorn. He must have caught the confusion on Jeremy’s face, because he added, “Though I’d never say that to her face. I don’t know if she’s more likely to slap me or start wearing a tiara.”

That meant absolutely nothing to Jeremy, but before he could say anything, Mrs. Hertz was back into her roll call. I guess I’ll find out on my own, eventually.

In short order, Mrs. Hertz had gone through the whole list of names. Sure enough, the brunette responded to “Ulrich Stern.”

Walking back around the long table, Mrs. Hertz clasped her hands together. “Okay, today is a lab day, everyone. Please turn to page fifteen of your textbooks and complete the experiment outlined there. Everything you need is already in front of you. As always, coats and goggles. Oh, and Jeremy, I have a textbook for you up here… somewhere…”

As Jeremy slid off his stool, the rest of the class sprang into motion, getting to their feet as well, a general commotion braking out. He stiffly made his way through the fold, avoiding eye contact until he stood back where he had started next to Mrs. Hertz. The chemistry teacher was crouched behind that long gray table, rummaging through untidy shelves built underneath its surface. It was her desk, he realized, massive as it was, and it needed every inch to hold everything Mrs. Hertz had discarded there—books, ungraded papers, several piles of beige folders bulging with even more paper, sections with what looked like experiments in progress or recently completed, and bobbleheads, toy cars, and dozens of other personal affects to mark the desk as her own.

“Oh!” Mrs. Hertz suddenly straightened, knuckling the small of her back. “I know where I left your copy. Wait here.” She turned on a heel and strode from the room.

Exhaling, Jeremy turned back toward his milling classmates, for the first time really taking in the room he was in. Much of what he saw was like the other classroom, with tall windows along the outside wall, a long whiteboard along the front wall, and a cream-colored projector clinging to the ceiling like a barnacle. The similarities ended there, though. Glass-fronted cabinets along one wall held beakers and other implements of science instead of books. One corner housed an emergency eye-wash and a shower; another had a fumigation hood for any experiments with toxic elements. There were decorations, too—a plastic skeleton dangling from a tall frame and several posters pinned to the wall with the periodic table and diagrams of the atom and the like. In the rear of the room, the other students crowded around a wooden wardrobe, donning opaque plastic lab coats and plastic safety goggles.

By the time Mrs. Hertz returned, the others were all properly attired and settling into their work. And when he finally got back to his table, textbook in hand and garbed as the rest, Odd was already busy at work, pouring two liquids into a beaker. To Jeremy’s practiced eye, his method seemed anything but scientific. “Umm… what are you doing?”

“Mixing tomato juice and sodium… something. What is it again, Ulrich?”

“A weak sodium hydroxide solution,” Ulrich answered, reading from the textbook rather robotically.

“Yeah that’s it. Sodium hydroxide,” Odd finished matter-of-factly.

Jeremy blinked. “I mean, what are we supposed to be doing?”

Ulrich read some more. “Combine the following acids and corresponding bases to create neutral solutions.”

Jeremy shook his head. It was an effort not to roll his eyes. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

“How would you do it, then?” Odd asked.

Seeing it as an invitation, he grabbed the beaker from Odd and dumped its contents into the sink in the center of the table. Odd stared at the reddish mixture swirling down the drain, looking mildly taken aback, but he said nothing as Jeremy rinsed the beaker and opened his own textbook to page fifteen, reading for himself. Let’s see here… There’s even explicit instructions about measurements. Can they really be that thick? He glanced up at Odd to find him watching intently. Just like I thought. A bunch of dumbass rich kids.

“it’s all about ratios,” Jeremy said with a sigh. If they didn’t realize he was a nerd yet, they would very soon. He pulled the materials he needed in front of him and affected the air of a tutor. “The stronger the acid is, the more base you need to neutralize it, and vice versa.” Jeremy measured out two hundred milliliters of tomato juice and fifty milliliters of the sodium hydroxide solution into two separate graduated cylinders. Then he poured both into the beaker, stirred the liquid, and dipped a paper pH test strip into the red mixture. “See?” Jeremy said, holding up the strip to show how it had gone from white to a neutral green. “You gotta know the right ratio.”

Odd stared at the strip for a moment, then beamed. “Well, whataya know. Thanks, Einstein!”

Jeremy bristled. Einstein. He had heard that one often enough, a common jeer hurled at him by his ex-classmates back on the east coast. He was not one to let bullies get to him, but that particular insult had hounded him, following him through the years, chasing him from elementary school up through the middle grades no matter what he did. He hadn’t expected it to catch on so soon. The first day, no less. The first goddamn hour.

And yet… this time, it seemed… different. Coming from Odd, at least. His face was bright, cheery; it was almost as if the boy had meant it as a compliment. So, swallowing his knee-jerk anger and begging his quickening heartbeat to settle, Jeremy did his best to shrug it off. “Can you read me the next one, Ulrich?”

The rest of the experiment was just as easy, the three working together nervously as Ulrich read Jeremy the liquids and their amounts and Odd recorded the results in his notebook. Or at least it was nervous on Jeremy’s end. He kept looking from blonde to brunette, wondering when the first ribbing would begin. In his experience, one did not display a measure of academic ability and escape unscathed. Part of him wondered why the boys had not started in on him already. Perhaps it was because Jeremy was so new to them, but regardless, he was certain the mockery would come. It always had.

As Jeremy finished the final mixture—milk and soapy water—Mrs. Hertz spoke up again to get the class’s attention. “Fifteen minutes left, everyone!” she announced. “I see most tables are wrapping things up. Good! Each group will be responsible for a lab report due on Wednesday”—a collective groan issued from the students; Mrs. Hertz continued as if she didn’t notice—“so that gives you two nights to coordinate with your group members and complete it. Keep up the good work!”

The murmur of conversation was renewed as Jeremy busied himself with rinsing and washing the lab equipment. Odd added his voice to the din.

“So how about it, Einstein? We could do the lab report tonight. Get it out of the way.”

“I don’t mind doing it alone. It’ll save you guys the trouble.” Jeremy decided that if he was going to be given the moniker of “Einstein” already, he might as well play the part. Plus, it might keep them off his back a little while longer.

When Jeremy looked up from his washing, he saw amusement on Ulrich’s face. He braced himself, ready for the ridicule.

Instead, the brunette’s smile was warm. “I think I get it,” he said slowly. “You were the smartest kid in your class back home, maybe even your whole school. A four-point-oh GPA, top test scores, all that jazz. Teachers went nuts over you, but the other kids hated you for it, probably couldn’t wrap their tiny heads around the idea that someone could actually enjoy school. You had very few friends, possibly none at all, so your buried yourself in your books. Now you’re here at Kadic. A place where you have no history. A fresh start.”

Jeremy swallowed passed a lump in his throat, mouth suddenly dry. A sudsy beaker lay in the sink, forgotten. “Is it that obvious?”

Odd let out a trill of laughter, slapping the brunette on the back. “Ulrich just has a way of reading people. All I got is you’re smart and a little bossy.”

Ulrich shot a frown at Odd, shrugging the blonde’s hand from his upper back. “Don’t worry,” he said, turning to Jeremy with a smile. “Your secret’s safe with us.” He took Jeremy’s forgotten beaker in hand. “But anyway, there’s no way we’d let you do all that work on your own. Hertz wants a lot of detail. And, I mean, you did all of the actual experimenting. The least we could do is chip in.”

Jeremy faltered, looking from one face to another. Open and honest faces. Kind faces. Not at all the sort he was used to. And his own grew warm as another flush threatened to rise in his cheeks. But it wasn’t nerves or embarrassment that put it there. It was shame. Shame at having written off Odd and Ulrich before they ever opened their mouths, at having judged them so poorly. Rich assholes, dumbass rich kids… I couldn’t have been further off the mark.

Gathering himself, Jeremy forced his lips to a smile. “Okay. What time works for you?”

“Ulrich and I have soccer practice after seventh period lets out. Then Taekwondo master over there has karate practice—”

“It’s Pencak Silat,” Ulrich interjected, rolling his eyes.

“—and then there’s dinner at six. So whataya say, wanna swing by our room around seven?” Odd finished.

So they’re roommates. Jeremy tucked that piece of information away. “Sure, what’s your room number?” Oddly, it came out in a sort of nervous rush.

“We’ve got something to take care of after lunch, if you want to tag along and find out.” The blonde smiled. “Of course, you’ll have to show us your room in return. It’s only fair.”

That threw Jeremy for a loop. He opened his mouth, then shut it again, words dying in his throat. Why are they being so nice to me?

“I think,” Ulrich broke in, “that Odd just thought you could use a few friends to show you around the place.”

Friends? Still guarded, he studied their faces. And all of a sudden, he realized where his nerves were coming from. He liked these boys. He wanted to be their friend. And he was nervous that he would mess it up, somehow, that there was still a chance that he could become the class pariah that he had always been.

Finally, he found his voice, doing his best to return their easy smiles. “It’s a deal,” he said. “Your room for mine.”

“Great!” Odd exclaimed.

Well, whataya know. I made friends.

Odd and Ulrich showed Jeremy where to stow the clean lab equipment. Then the three doffed their coats and goggles and returned them to the wardrobe. “What’s your schedule like?” Odd asked as they sat back down.

Jeremy dug a rumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it over to Odd. The blonde smoothed it out on the black tabletop and analyzed it. “Lucky you,” the blonde said. “You get to spend the whole day with us. All but two periods.”

“Let me guess,” Ulrich said. “Algebra 2?”

“Algebra 2,” Odd confirmed with a wry smile.

“What about it?” asked Jeremy, retrieving his schedule and stuffing it back in his pants.

Ulrich’s smile was a twin of Odd’s. “Nothing, really. It’s just the most advanced math offered to our year.”

“Ulrich and I have just the right combination of stupidity and laziness to put us back in Algebra 1 with the rest of the normies,” Odd added.

Jeremy looked from Odd to Ulrich, his grin a product of more than just the boys’ quip. Friends, he thought again, still incredulous about the idea.

At that moment, the bell sounded. “Well,” said Odd, rising to his feet, “it’s time for Señora Jackass. C’mon, Jeremy, we’ll show you the way.”

The two roommates grabbed their things and made their way toward the exit, Jeremy with a hesitant smile tagging along behind. This place might not be so bad, after all.

Chapter Text

The way Odd and Ulrich led from the building was different from the doors Ms. Stranix used. Instead, Jeremy stepped outside into the second of Kadic’s two academic quads, almost identical to the first—paved with the same pale yellow stone and surrounded on three sides by buildings—with students emptying into the quad from all sides. Except this one had a small shack in the exact middle. Low and with a green roof, it contained a sheltered nook with a few vending machines and was surrounded by a handful of picnic tables. It was toward this shack that the roommates were aimed, Odd keeping up a rambling commentary of Kadic as they went, mainly teachers and students that were bad news. At the top of his list was their Spanish teacher, Mrs. Marciano—a.k.a. Señora Jackass.

“It’s like she gets off on our suffering or something,” Odd said with a shrug.

Ulrich scoffed. “I never understand how people who hate children so much can end up teaching. The only one she really likes is Sissy.”

“Sissy?” Jeremy asked. That was the girl Odd had mentioned before, the girl who skipped chemistry.

Odd’s face turned sour. “Ugh, don’t even get me started…”

“Oh, Ulrich!” called a girl’s voice.

Ulrich stopped in his tracks, palm going to his forehead. “Oh no. Speak of the devil…”

From the cove of vending machines strutted a girl that Jeremy could tell in an instant was the antithesis of everything he stood for. If glamor took human form, it may very well look like the figure fast approaching. Sissy was tall for a girl, almost as tall as Ulrich, wearing a pink t-shirt with a yellow heart over the chest that exposed bare torso, the hem nearly skintight above her bellybutton. Her mauve miniskirt would have been borderline indecent had it not flared out over tight maroon pants that in turn flared into bell bottoms over her pink platform shoes. Her face was slathered with heaps of makeup, and long black hair held in check by a yellow headband fell to the small of her back. A foam cup was in her hand, giving off a wisp of steam. She made sure to sway her hips as she sauntered, planting her feet directly in the path of the three boys. Jeremy was not sure she even noticed him; it seemed she had eyes only for Ulrich.

“Ulrich, sweetie, how are you?” Sissy said, her voice a high drawl, so sweet Jeremy was shocked she didn’t gag on it.

Odd smirked, answering for his roommate. “Well whataya know. It’s Miss Conceited in person.”

“No one asked you, creep!” Sissy snapped at the blonde. But in an instant, she had refocused on Ulrich, and her fury had melted into what Jeremy figured was meant to be a flirtatious half-smile. “So, Ulrich, when are you gonna stop being so shy and finally tell me how you feel about me, huh?”

Ulrich gave a tired sigh. “Again, Sissy? I thought you'd have learned your lesson by now.”

“All I learned,” Sissy said, “is that you need to be honest with yourself. Nothing good can happen if you keep your desires buried that deep.”

“Apparently so deep I can’t even find them.”

Sissy missed the sarcasm. “Exactly!” she said. “See? Doesn’t honesty feel good?”

“You might want to try it out for a change,” Odd cut in. “Anyway, we’d love to stay and try to unravel some of those delusions you got there, but we’ve gotta take Jeremy to Spanish.”

Sissy glanced at Jeremy, then did a quick double-take. Apparently she really hadn’t seen him, with all she was fussing over Ulrich. “Delusions—?” she began hotly, but Ulrich interrupted her.

“You’d have to start with her ego first,” he said to Odd, “or maybe her vanity. Either way, it’s way more work than anyone can hope to accomplish in one morning.”

“One lifetime wouldn’t be enough,” Odd added.

Sissy’s face flushed with indignation. Her mouth worked silently for a moment, as if a gear in her brain had jammed. Then she gave a vexed growl and spun away, muttering under her breath as she stomped across the quad.

“And good riddance,” Ulrich murmured, smiling apologetically at Jeremy.

“I take it that happens often?” Jeremy asked.

“All the time,” Odd answered, rolling his eyes. “You’ll learn how to handle her. You can’t be nice, or she’ll take you for one of her fan club. And you can’t reason with her because, well, there’s nothing in that empty skull to reason with. The trick is to make her mad so she gives up. At least for a few hours.” He started forward again. “Come on, I’ll give you the rundown on the move so we’re not late…”

Sissy, as Odd would go on to explain, was Elizabeth Delmas, darling daughter of Kadic President Jean-Pierre Delmas. As daddy’s perfect little princess, she had free reign to do just about anything; Sissy could do no wrong. So she roamed campus like she owned the place. “She will get under your skin—trust me; it’s what she does best—but you cannot let her know that she gets to you,” Odd cautioned as the three sank into their seats in the Spanish classroom. “And never try to get back at her. With daddy wrapped around her finger, she’ll have you in detention like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Jeremy sighed; Sissy sounded more like what he had expected Kadic students to be before he met Odd and Ulrich. But before he could say so, a door slammed. Conversation died as utterly as if someone had flipped a switch. Just inside the door to the hall stood a stout, motherly-looking Latina woman with short black hair. She wore a modest black dress with tiny cream-colored polka dots and a pink rosette pinned to the bosom.

“Buenos dias, class,” she said kindly, walking to the front of the classroom and pulling down the screen for the projector. “Let’s get started.” She doesn’t seem so bad, thought Jeremy.

Maybe Odd was exaggerating.

Fifty minutes later, after three nasty tirades and Emily Morgan bursting into tears, Jeremy left the room feeling slightly staggered. He understood exactly where Odd and Ulrich were coming from; Señora Jackass was an apt title.

After Spanish, the boys split up, Odd and Ulrich headed upstairs for Algebra 1 and Jeremy venturing across the quad on his own for U.S. History. It took Jeremy a while to find the right place—he kept getting turned around—but he managed to stumble into the right classroom seconds before the late bell rang. Mr. Arthur was a short, thin man with an elderly stoop and a heavily balding head. With stark white hair above the ears and a drooping mustache, Jeremy decided he was a top hat and a cane away from being the Monopoly man. He talked with the dry wit of a man half his age, however, and Jeremy actually enjoyed listening to Mr. Arthur lecture on the assassination of President McKinley.

Then came lunch. When Jeremy grabbed a tray at the beginning of the line, he caught sight of Odd and Ulrich a dozen or so kids ahead, Odd waving Jeremy forward with a smile. “About time you showed up,” the blonde said as Jeremy squeezed in next to him. “I was starting to think you left me alone with this moron.” He bobbed his head at Ulrich. The brunette shook his head with a small smirk, stepping forward to receive a ladle of food from one of the lunch ladies.

As the boys picked at their trays of mashed potatoes and meatloaf, Odd began to regale them with a tale from his summer vacation. Jeremy felt his mind and gaze start to wander. He had to admit, being at a school this ritzy had its perks. The cafeteria was beautiful. Tables and benches of white oak were spread evenly across a floor of some sort of deep green stone polished to a mirror-like sheen. Century-old white marble pillars supported a steepled roof that would have been at home in an old church, with attic-like windows throwing rays of light across the motes of dust that drifted through the rafters. The wall behind Jeremy was all glass, offering a generous view of one of the quads and the castle-like library beyond. A niche cut into the opposite wall allowed him to watch three women in white aprons go about cleansing the kitchen.

A change in the tenor of Odd’s tale drew Jeremy’s attention back to the blonde. “What? The old hag really did threaten to call the cops, so Sam and I booked it. We had to run six blocks!” He frowned at a smirking Ulrich. “You don’t believe me?”

“Not a word of it,” Ulrich answered. He turned to Jeremy. “You’ll hear all about this girl, Sam. Supposedly they run around Queens all summer long, getting into all sorts of crazy adventures. I’m not convinced this Sam even exists.”

Odd crossed his arms over his chest. “Well then, I’ll just have to have you over one of these days so you can see for yourself.”

Ulrich raised an eyebrow. “I think I’ll take you up on that.”

Jeremy chuckled suddenly, drawing the two out of their “fight.” “What’s up with you?” Odd asked.

“Nothing,” he answered with a smile. How could he explain it? This was the first time he found himself truly comfortable around the two boys. It wasn’t as if he had ever really distrusted the pair, not after getting to know them a little. But with his history… suffice it to say Jeremy was still learning how to act around friends. These guys are alright.

Odd swiveled around to check the clock high on the wall, then turned back to Jeremy. “You done? We only have twenty minutes until class, and like I said, Ulrich and I gotta check on something.” He cracked a smile at his roommate before schooling his face straight.

“I’m ready whenever you are,” replied Jeremy, who had really just been dancing his spoon through a mound of peas. Rising, they left the cafeteria, leaving their trays on a trash can on the way out.

To get from the cafeteria to the dorms, one had to take a covered walkway that formed something of a tunnel between two close academic buildings. The view on the other side was enough to make Jeremy smile even though he was becoming more and more familiar with campus.

The high school dorm was, in his opinion, the most picturesque building on campus. A façade of pale yellow brick rose high into the air, with four stories of windows glinting in the afternoon sun, a fifth row set into the slanting roof of forest green shingles. Fluted columns supported a stately marble portico, casting shade on the blue French doors into the windowed lobby. Trimmed bushes and holly trees abutted the building in mulched pallets bursting with poppies, lilies, and roses in all sorts of hues. It was a scene that looked stolen right from a European countryside.

Inside it was a little more modern, meant for utility more than beauty. Against the outer wall were a few hundred small gray mailboxes, each with a silver keyhole. In the back of the lobby, a wooden staircase wound around a corner and out of sight, each walnut stair sagging slightly in the middle and rubbed a lighter shade of brown by decades of feet. Residential corridors led off to the left and right, the white tile of the lobby giving way to patterned carpet. A small potted topiary rested in a corner, its leaves trimmed into a sphere.

Odd waltzed over to the left-side hall—where Jeremy knew most of the ninth-grade boys lived—and he was visibly surprised when Jeremy instead crossed to the staircase. He led the way up and around to the next landing, then up and around some more. In short order, the three were all the way up on the fifth floor, Jeremy the only one panting.

Odd smirked, slapping Jeremy on the back hard enough to make him start. “Cost of living in the penthouse, eh?” Ulrich rolled his eyes.

Gathering himself, Jeremy walked down the empty corridor to room 536. Unlocking the door with a bronze key, he let Odd and Ulrich inside.

The room didn’t have that “lived-in” feel quite yet, which made sense, as Jeremy hadn’t even been on campus for a full twenty-four hours. It was split almost evenly into two parts. The first, closest to the door, was still neatly ordered the way his mother had helped him organize. A twin bed in the front left corner was tightly made, red bedspread rolled back underneath the pillow; a poster of the real Albert Einstein was tacked to the wall above the bed—that famous image of the physicist sticking his tongue out at the camera. Opposite the bed was a beige wardrobe and few mostly bare shelves. A scooter leaned against the wall next to the door.

It was the back of the room that Jeremy had begun to make his own. Because his room was tucked up under the roof, the last quarter of the ceiling was sloped steeply down so that when it met the outer wall it was no more than four feet high, except for where a large dormer window jutted out in the exact middle. Flush against this window, and wrapping around the corners to the walls on either side, was a large desk. And on that desk was everything Jeremy really cared about outside of academics.

Straight ahead under the window was his pride and joy, his custom-built PC. With two monitors trailing cables to three tall computer towers, it featured the most advanced tech that his carefully accrued allowance could buy, though Jeremy was constantly tinkering with it to further increase its capabilities. To the left of his PC was his miniature robot, a roughly cube-shaped brown metal box on wheels, with a lens attached to the front and an antenna poking from the top. It sat amidst a smattering of circuitry, wires, and screwdrivers, next to its wireless controller.

Jeremy stood tentatively aside as Odd and Ulrich took in the room, more nervous than he felt he had any right to be. No, nervous wasn’t quite the right word. Self-conscious. Then Odd noticed the poster above the bed. Pointing it out to Ulrich, the blonde turned to Jeremy and said, “Nice self-portrait, Einstein.” Jeremy couldn’t help but smile. See? Nothing to worry about.

Wandering over to the desk, Ulrich’s eyes ranged from the PC to the robot. “Wow, that looks intense.”

“Just working on a few upgrades,” Jeremy said nonchalantly, pride burgeoning in his chest. If there was one thing Jeremy took pride in above all else, it was his technological prowess. “I have almost everything I need to get the robot up and running again. I get most of my materials from scrap, or else buy what I can’t find.”

“I think there’s a store in town somewhere—” was as much as Ulrich got out before Odd talked right over him.

“How did you luck out and get a single, anyway? I didn’t even know they had these. Except for Sissy’s, of course.”

Ulrich rolled his eyes at an angle only Jeremy could see, then turned to the blonde before Jeremy could answer. “This is one of the scholarship suites, right Jeremy?”

Jeremy nodded. “It is.”

“You know everything,” Odd said wonderingly. “How is it that you know everything?”

Ulrich’s face was a stoic enigma. “I have my sources.” Then he barked a laugh at the incredulous look on his roommate’s face. “But seriously, Jeremy, I think there’s an electronics store in town. I don’t know what it’s called or where it is—”

“At least there are some things he doesn’t know,” Odd cut in.

“—but one of the guards in the security booth should be able to tell you,” Ulrich finished.

Jeremy gave a grateful smile. “I’ll have to check it out. Maybe after class lets out. It’ll give me something to do, at least, and I wanted to see a bit of town, anyway.”

“Ophelia is a good little town,” Ulrich said. “Quiet, but there’s more than enough to do. Odd and I didn’t leave campus much in middle school—you were only allowed out on weekends—but in high school, all they ask is that you be back on campus before the eleven o’clock curfew…” He trailed off as Odd cleared his throat. “Oh, we gotta go, Jeremy. Odd and I have something we have to do.”

Jeremy quirked his head at the excited look exchanged between Odd and Ulrich, but he said nothing, following his new friends out into the hall and locking his door behind him.

Unlike his own room, number 113 was obviously well-inhabited. It was only the second week of the semester, but already it seemed most of Odd’s wardrobe was amassed in a sweat-stained pile on the floor next to his bed. The bed itself was unmade and strewn with even more clothes, discarded textbooks, crumpled bits of paper, and other trash. A skateboard lay overturned at the foot of the bed. And on his pillow… Is that a dog treat? Jeremy didn’t ask.

The furniture in Ulrich’s half of the room was a mirror image of Odd’s—bed, then wardrobe, then desk—but that was where the similarities ended. The brunette’s dirty clothes were neatly bundled into the hamper next to the dresser; trash filled the waste basket under the desk. His navy comforter was free of creases. Books were stacked in an orderly pile on the desk. A set of golf clubs rested in the corner, and a second skateboard—Ulrich’s, Jeremy assumed—was propped against it.

“Sorry about the mess,” Ulrich said as Jeremy edged around Odd’s dirty clothes. “Organization isn’t exactly Odd’s strong suit.”

Odd shrugged. “What can I say? I’m more of a free spirit.”

Ulrich chortled. “Free spirit or no, if they start to smell, the clothes are going out the window. Then you’ll just have to go around naked.”

Odd gave a laugh, but it sounded forced to Jeremy. He looked up and was surprised to find the blonde blushing deeply, facing away from him and Ulrich as if hoping to avoid notice. What is that about? I didn’t take him for a prude.

At that moment, Jeremy was distracted by a loud thud. “What was that?” he said, looking around. Odd and Ulrich just stood there, grinning. Then it happened again. Jeremy’s head whipped toward Odd’s wardrobe. It definitely came from there. One of the bottom drawers had nudged open a hair. Was that open before? Another thump. Is… is there something alive in there?

Odd slid the drawer open, and… out hopped a little brown dog. “Jeremy, meet Kiwi.”

Jeremy couldn’t help it; at Kiwi’s sudden appearance, he burst into a fit of laughter. A dog hopping out of a wardrobe was just too much—just about the last thing he expected.

The dog was unlike any breed Jeremy had ever seen—a mutt, probably. It was very small, not much bigger than a chihuahua, with dusty brown fur the color of its namesake. Kiwi’s spindly, curled tail was closer to a pig’s than a dog’s, and its conical snout was almost as long as the rest of its head.

Getting his giggling under control, Jeremy bent down as Kiwi took an exploratory sniff of his hand and then slobbered all over his fingers. “He likes you,” Odd said brightly, taking the dog treat from his pillow and flipping it to Kiwi.

“I didn’t know we were allowed pets,” Jeremy said, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose—with his un-slobbered hand, of course.

Ulrich smirked. “We aren’t. But when Odd found him as a stray, alone in the park, he just couldn’t resist.”

“He’s got all his shots and everything,” Odd added. “We sneak him out to the vet downtown”—he gestured at the dresser—“and we trained him to stay in there while we’re out.”

Ulrich cleared his throat. “We trained him?”

Odd rolled his eyes. “Fine. Ulrich trained him. And it’s a good thing, too. With as much as he yelped in the beginning, it’s a wonder we never got caught.”

Looking closer at the dresser, Jeremy found that the bottom of the drawer above Kiwi’s had been removed, giving the mutt plenty of space to stand and roam around. A nightlight and a small electric fan had been rigged up next to small bowls of water and dry kibble. And with the clothes that had been laid down as bedding, it was more like a cozy crate than anything. An ingenious setup, really.

“C’mon, Kiwi!” Odd said cheerily, crouching down and spreading his arms wide. With an excited yip, Kiwi leapt into the blonde’s arms. “I gotta take him out,” he added in explanation, stowing Kiwi in his backpack. “I learned the hard way that he can’t make it through the whole school day in there.” Zipping the bag almost all the way, he left.

After Kiwi had done his business and was safely back in his drawer, the three boys left the dorm and joined the rest of the ninth- and tenth-grade boys on the way to the gymnasium. The campus of Kadic Academy was split into two sections, one on either side of a steep, twenty-foot-tall ridge. All of the academic buildings were located on top, in the aptly named Upper Campus. To get to Lower Campus and the sprawling sports complex, the boys strode through the quad, past the cafeteria, and down a long flight of steps cut right into the rocky wall of the cliff. Once down, they rounded the football stadium and entered the massive gymnasium. A quick change in the locker rooms, then they stood on the basketball court, each garbed in a gray shirt with “Kadic” over the breast and red gym shorts with a white dragon near the hem.

The gym class was taught by a man named Jim, oddly enough. First a chemistry teacher called Mrs. Hertz, and now a gym teacher called Jim? Jeremy wondered. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is. Jim was a strange character. Potbellied, with spiked brown hair long out of style, Jim was a thirty-something ex-student who seemed to be desperately clinging to the last vestiges of his youth. He made a lot of bad puns about food, and three times he made vague references to his tenure as a forest ranger. But when pressed further, he only said, “Uhh… I’d rather not talk about it.”

After a rather unenthusiastic go at dodgeball, Jeremy changed and once again went his separate way from Odd and Ulrich, this time headed for Algebra 2. Mrs. Vessey was a plump, older woman with graying hair and massive gold hoop earrings framing her lightly wrinkled face. She seemed nice enough, but the sheer mountain of equations she assigned for homework was, in Jeremy’s opinion, nothing short of cruel and unusual.

Then he rejoined his new friends for the last class of the day, English. Jeremy was among the few students that seemed immune to the siren song of the sunlit grounds outside the tall windows, and he was able to focus on Ms. Belefonte’s spirited discussion of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ulrich’s eyes had long since glazed over. Odd couldn’t even manage to pretend interest; his head lay in a pool of spittle on his desk.

When at last the final bell rang, Jeremy watched the rest of the class emerge from their collective coma. Ulrich shook his roommate with a “Wake up, princess.” Odd started, a punch half-thrown before he realized where he was. Ulrich and Jeremy chuckled.

They stepped out into the warmth of the afternoon sun; the weather could not have been better—close to eighty degrees, with the only clouds being wispy, high-altitude cirrus. Jeremy agreed to meet Odd and Ulrich for dinner at six. But instead of going his own way, he followed the two boys as they trekked back down the stairs to Lower Campus.

“What are you gonna do with your free time?” Ulrich asked him once they were back on level ground.

“I’m gonna go see this park I keep hearing about,” he answered. “Then maybe head into town to see if I can find that electronics store.”

“See that path?” Ulrich pointed to where a concrete sidewalk curled around the football stadium and became a well-worn track of bare earth between two fields. Jeremy nodded. “That’ll take you there. There’s not much to it, though. It’s basically just a forest.”

Jeremy shrugged. “I got time. I might as well.” Then they split up, Odd and Ulrich back to the boys’ locker room and Jeremy along his predetermined path.

A few students in athletic gear already populated the sports complex as Jeremy strolled along, with ever more trickling out of the rear of the gymnasium. The dirt path he took had several girls warming up to play field hockey on one side and a vacant softball field on the other. Beyond, he could see what must be the park, a tall black fence separating the athletic fields from moderately dense foliage.

At the end of the path was a stout wrought iron gate, with Rosetree Park scribed across the top in handsome iron lettering. Both doors of the gate stood wide open. From the look of the rusted hinges, Jeremy doubted they were ever closed. He passed between them, leaving the rest of campus behind.

The park wasn’t the showy fountains or perfectly groomed hedgerows that one might have expected given the school’s lofty price tag. It was exactly as Ulrich had described—just a forest. Trees and bushes as far as the eyes could see. A swath of wilderness cordoned off and protected from the hyperdevelopment of modern society.

Jeremy struck out straight ahead, very conscious of the sun on his left so he wouldn’t end up lost. There was no sound, save for the crunch of detritus underfoot and the birds hidden up in the branches. It was utterly peaceful, yet after a minute or two he began to feel uneasy. Growing up, his sister had always joked, “Jeremy is an indoor cat,” whenever his mother asked why he wouldn’t go outside and play. He knew there was nothing to worry about, but there the worry was.

So he turned and started making his way back toward Kadic proper. After a moment or so, the gate popped back into view. He had just begun to feel relieved at being back on campus—and more than a little perturbed at just how great that relief was—when he heard a loud ka-chunk.

Jeremy yelped—actually yelped, like a goddamn dog!—and he leaped at least a foot in the air—which, for Jeremy, was quite a lot—his heart fluttering in his chest. He looked around frantically. There was no one in the vicinity except for two girls just coming through the gate, certainly nothing to account for the disturbance. The girls had seen his odd behavior and were giggling to one another, clearly laughing at his expense.

He flushed profusely, mortified, and averted his eyes… and that’s when he saw it. Under his feet was a corroded manhole cover. Ophelia, CA Waste Management, it read, with the number 0228. Jeremy muttered a curse to himself. Stop being such a coward. He searched for the girls again, but they had already moved on, their attention drawn elsewhere. Still muttering, he put the fence and the park behind him.

With his mood souring, he almost decided against going into town, after all. But after conceding that his workload was only likely to grow as the week went on, he unchained his secondhand blue bike from the rack beside the high school dorms. Besides, he thought, checking his digital watch, I’ve still got plenty of time to burn. He got directions to the store from the uniformed guard in the security booth—Ed’s Electronics, she said it was called—then left campus, peddling north on Magnolia Street.

Ophelia, California was a suburb of Sacramento, one of those places that was too small to be called a city yet too big for a town. Its downtown was only a few square blocks, with some restaurants, a few dozen shops and businesses, apartments, a library, and a courthouse, with some buildings as tall as three or four stories. None were visible to Jeremy, though. All of that was several blocks away, hidden by houses and hills. The part of Ophelia where Kadic resided was quiet and had the feel of age. Two story houses and colonials sat close to the two-lane road, most made of brick and stucco. Yards were small, as was expected of a gridded city of any size, but with more greenery than Jeremy was used to seeing. The sidewalks were cobbled with red brick instead of paved with concrete.

Jeremy normally liked to bike on the sidewalk instead of the road, but after a minute of being jounced around by those cobbles, he took to the street. There wasn’t much traffic to worry about, anyway. It was still an hour or so till rush hour; there were far more parked cars to navigate around than moving ones.

The eight blocks Jeremy had to ride were all up and down; for every foot he traveled, he swore he gained or lost at least a foot in elevation. The result was that for most of the ride, he was either churning his legs up a tough incline or riding the brakes hard down a descent. As he started to count the blocks, he noticed that all the intersections were only three-way stops; to his left the perpendicular streets led downtown, but to his right was a string of houses unbroken by roads. He could see the wrought iron fence of Rosetree Park behind them. It must have been quite large to extend that far.

After the necessary eight blocks, he came to a halt at the intersection of Magnolia Street and Remosa Avenue. It was the first four-way intersection, which was a problem because Jeremy couldn’t remember if the security guard had said to turn left or right. He hesitated for a moment before pulling his handlebars to the right and pushing off.

It didn’t take long for Jeremy to realize he had chosen the wrong way, but the view was way too spectacular for him to turn back. A few hundred feet down Remosa Avenue, the houses abruptly ended. The road took a sharp nosedive, the steepest Jeremy had encountered yet, then leveled out around a slight bend. To his right were several decrepit buildings, each one boarded up and abandoned, the fence of Rosetree Park high on a hill behind them. And to his left, Lake Remosa lay before him like an unfurled map, its still, shimmering surface like a mirror reflecting the low mountains in the distance. But it wasn’t the lake that held Jeremy’s attention, nor the distant peaks. Sitting just offshore, on a long, low island, was an old, crumbling, multitiered behemoth of a factory.

Woah.

The factory was long and narrow, like a worm, slightly curved to match the contours of the island’s gentle arc along the lakefront. Its main body was drab and rectangular, a gray that was probably once white, with the end nearest to Jeremy ending in a sweeping arc across the narrow side of the building. Jeremy estimated it to be about as tall as his dorm back on campus, though the two rows of massive windows along the side of the building hinted at only two very tall floors. Dozens of smokestacks rose like teeth from the building’s flat roof. A long concrete bridge with yellow trusses linked the island factory with the shore. At its mouth was a vacant security booth with a yellow bar extended to block off traffic.

Altogether, it was the sort of thing Jeremy would have been ridiculed for showing interest in back home. He doubted Odd and Ulrich would have batted an eye.

The place appeared deserted, so Jeremy swung his leg off the bike, propped it against the booth, and ducked under the bar. His heart raced with the thrill of discovery. Not only that, a place like this just had to have plenty of old junk he could use for his robot; he might not even need to go to the store. He glanced at his watch again. Four o’clock. Plenty of time.

Though the bridge seemed in good repair, it was covered with sagging wooden crates, rusted metal drums, and waterlogged wooden pallets. Clearly the factory had been out of commission for a long time. A cool breeze rose off the lake as Jeremy crossed the concrete structure.

The bridge led to the second floor of the factory, to an opening large enough to drive a bus through. There was a metal grate that could be lowered to prevent entry, but it seemed nobody had bothered. Stepping across the threshold, Jeremy gasped.

Inside was a massive complex, one cavernous chamber which seemed, by Jeremy’s estimation, to account for more than half the length of the factory all by itself—so long that he could barely see the far end through the shafts of light from the large windows and the haze of floating dust. If there were a religion dedicated to America’s bygone industrial age, Jeremy figured this would be its cathedral. He stood on raised walkway that encircled the room, supported by heavy steel beams that ran from the floor far below to the rafters in the peaked ceiling. There was no railing to separate Jeremy from the gap, which was maybe eighty feet across and a fall of more than two stories. The first level was strewn with more wooden crates and pallets, many broken into splinters. From his vantage, Jeremy didn’t see any parts for his robot, but that didn’t deter him in the slightest. He liked a challenge.

Instead, he searched for a way down to the ground level, which was not as easy as he expected. A broken set of stairs spilled off the walk directly across the gap from Jeremy, but it ended in a jagged fracture after only a handful of steps, nowhere near the ground. The only way Jeremy could see to get down was two ropes that dangled from the rafters, possibly left over from some pully system when the factory was operational. They reminded Jeremy of the rope climb he had been forced to do during gym at his old school. He was not very good at it, but then the hard part was getting up, not down.

Reaching over the gap, he plucked a rope and gave it a yank. It seemed to hold fast, so he gripped it tightly and swung over the side. Pinning the rope between hands and feet, he slid down its length, only mildly spoiling the feat by stumbling at the bottom and nearly falling flat on his face. Pinwheeling his arms, he managed to stay upright.

A few doors led from the short sides of the long room, but Jeremy only gave them a cursory glance. Instead, his attention latched onto a framework of beams in front of him that supported high tension cables and, at ground level, the open car of a freight elevator.

Stepping into the elevator, he looked over the selection of controls on a small panel. There were two red buttons that obviously meant up and down. He hesitated only briefly; the rusted plaque on the wall helped him to make up his mind. If it could lug 4000 pounds in its prime, it can hold me now. He pressed the down button.

A ribbed metal door slid down from the mouth of the elevator, sealing Jeremy inside with a thud. Then it began its descent, shuddering into the bowels of the factory, a mechanical whine filling the car as the dormant cables were called upon once more.

Moments later, the elevator slowed to a halt, and the metal door opened… to reveal another door. A complex-looking thing made of a greenish metal, with a round golden lock in the exact center that Jeremy thought might be an electromagnet. And it could only be opened by entering the right passcode into a keypad.

Jeremy frowned at the door, working it like a math problem. If that’s an electromagnet, I could never get through the door without cutting the power. And I’d need access to some pretty hefty power tools to get through all that metal… No, I can’t go that route.

Then he analyzed the keypad itself and saw that four of the nine digits were faded. Bingo! That must be the digits of the passcode. And assuming it is a four-digit code, there are only twenty-four possible permutations. Unless entering too many incorrect codes activates some sort of fail-safe, I should be able to get inside by methodically trying each arrangement.

It didn’t take Jeremy very long. On the eighth try, he entered five-seven-nine-three. There was a loud thump. The hiss of static filled the car as electricity surged through the electromagnetic lock. Then the heavy metal doors began to separate with what sounded like large metal gears turning, the round lock rotating like a wheel as the doors slid sideways into the wall, finally giving Jeremy a glimpse of what lay beyond, a glimpse that drove all thoughts of robotics from his mind.

Whatever he might have expected to find in that factory basement, this was not it. There was no old assembly line with primitive robotics lying dormant. No warehouse full of storage, nor cubicles where office workers might handle clerical work.

The chamber Jeremy stepped into was not very wide or deep—perhaps three of Kadic’s dorms put together—but it was tall. Walls of the same green metal as the prohibitive door rose perhaps two stories, a ladder welded to one of them leading to dense metal rafters that Jeremy couldn’t quite make out in the dim lighting. He only noticed that peripherally, though, for his attention was snared by a massive metal arm that clung to those rafters, reaching down from a circular frame and ending in an equally large array of computer screens—four of them, the largest in the center and the others tacked above and to the left and right. A keyboard was suspended beneath the screens, and a plush high-backed chair completed the setup. It was a large computer.

Behind the computer was the first thing that truly befuddled Jeremy thus far. It was an enormous metal… something. Sort of like the top half of a sphere sticking out of the floor—maybe three feet tall and ten feet across, with six curved ribs serving to support the thing at regular intervals—only someone had sliced off the top and hollowed it out. Set within this hollowed-out dome was a large concave surface of semitransparent glass, lowered to almost the level of the floor. It reminded Jeremy of a giant camera lens.

His interest thoroughly piqued, Jeremy crossed to the high-backed chair and sat down, swiveling to face the quartet of monitors. He had his theories about what it might be. The factory’s center of operations was chief among them, though he was thrown off by how new the computer looked in relation to the rest of the factory. Yet when he pressed the spacebar on the keyboard, a red message flashed on the main screen.

LOW POWER MODE

Jeremy smiled. Another puzzle. Then he went about solving it.

His first thought was the ladder and the metal rafters above, but quickly shook that off. It wasn’t crawling up into an enclosed, dark space that made him turn his nose up at the ladder. The makers of this computer wouldn’t have made it so hard to turn on, he reasoned. I am not afraid of the dark. Not really…

Instead, he turned back to the elevator. Perhaps there were more subbasements he could access. He pressed down on the control panel and was rewarded when the metal doors slid closed and the elevator dove further into the bowels of the factory.

When the elevator opened for the second time, Jeremy was once again baffled. The second basement was not sealed by any electromagnetic door, but he thought it ought to be. Because what he laid eyes on looked ripped straight from some science-fiction movie. Three tall, cylindrical, golden pods stood in a triangle, roughly twenty feet tall and just wide enough—Jeremy noticed with a shiver—for a human to stand in. Enormous cables ran from the backs of the pods along the floor until they reached the walls and disappeared, most thicker than Jeremy’s leg. More cables stretched from the pods up to the high ceiling. Whatever the pods were for, Jeremy figured normal factory operations wasn’t it. He couldn’t even begin to imagine their intended use. Regardless, there was nothing that led him to believe the pods could be used to boot up the computer, so he stepped back into the elevator, pressed the down button again, and left the pods as a mystery for another time.

One more floor down was another chamber—exactly the same size as the other two, yet it seemed larger due to the comparative lack of objects inside. There was only one, yet it was exactly what Jeremy was looking for. It was a server, perhaps fifteen feet tall, the bottom third of which extending outward into a broad disk of considerable width, and the rest of the server rising from this disk in a thin tower. The floor was cut out around the server in a larger circle, and in its place was a dense nest of wires that one had to step on to approach the server itself. The server was absolutely silent; the room had the feel of a cave for some slumbering beast.

It was like nothing Jeremy had ever seen, and he had seen plenty of tech in his young life. The structure was navy-blue, with much of the server covered in intricately-shaped golden panels, no two looking exactly the same. Open sections of the server showed more dense bundles of wires and cables that must run throughout. With such a complex layout, Jeremy was certain the computer it housed had nothing to do with whatever the factory used to make. No, Jeremy amended, not computer. Supercomputer. For he was sure that’s what it was, this device that was so futuristic that it looked almost alien. But what does it do? And how are those golden pods involved?

Jeremy took a step toward the server and he noticed something else. Facing the elevator was a sliding panel, and on that navy panel was a golden symbol. It consisted of two concentric circles, one inside the other, with a dot in the very center. Three short lines hatched from the bottom of the outer circle, each angled away from the middle, and one more from the very top. It kind of looked like an eye.

As he approached the tower, the panel opened, the eye-like symbol splitting in half to reveal a black lever. With a click, the lever slid outward, angling away from the server, awaiting a hand to pull it down. Jeremy missed a step; it was strangely foreboding, as if the supercomputer itself wanted to be turned on.

Shaking off the feeling, Jeremy stepped gingerly across the bed of wires and placed a hand around the lever. “I hope I’m not gonna regret this in a minute,” he said aloud.

He pulled the lever.

Immediately, there was a change. The unique golden panels flooded with a pulsating light, almost too bright for Jeremy to look at, and a low whooshing sound like moving air filled the room as the supercomputer awakened from its long slumber. The noise grew with the light, rising, strengthening, until the small factory room was practically trembling with the cacophony of electronic birdsong. Jeremy covered his eyes with an arm…

And then it stopped. Exhaling heavily, he let his arm fall away. The gold panels still shone bright, but other than a low hum, the server room was silent. The hum was oddly menacing. He felt like he was being watched.

Shivering, Jeremy retreated to the elevator, scolding himself for imagining things. Anyway, he had done what he came for. All that was left for him to do was go back to the first room with the monitors.

He pressed up on the control panel of the elevator, then up again as soon as it began to slow to bypass the room with the mysterious golden pods. When it stopped, he was once again faced with the metal door. A quick five-seven-nine-three, and the doors whirred open.

Then he heard something. A voice. One that would alter the course of his life forever. “Hello?” it called. “Is anybody there?”

Chapter Text

Reflexively, Jeremy ducked into the corner of the elevator before the doors had fully opened, his first thought being that someone had called the cops. But that didn’t make any sense. The elevator would have had to move, and even with the commotion when he turned on the supercomputer, he wouldn’t have missed that. Besides, the elevator had still been there for him to use. The only way to access the basement would be to climb down from the rafters somehow. It was unlikely, but not impossible.

“Hello?” the voice called again, nothing like the commanding air of a police officer. It was a girl’s voice, small and perhaps a little confused. And there was something odd about the voice, too, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Could it be that a girl had followed him inside and gotten lost? It stretched plausibility, but was it any stranger than wandering into an abandoned factory and finding state-of-the-art tech?

Gathering himself, Jeremy stepped into view of whomever might be in the factory chamber. It was empty, but that was not what stopped Jeremy in his tracks. He had been half-right; the large piece of glass set into the metal dome was a lens, but not for a camera. The thing was a projector. Because hovering over the projector, and bathing the green room in pale white light, was a hologram.

Exactly what it depicted, Jeremy had no clue. It was a diagram of some sort, with four distinct segments extending like the arms of a compass from a bright ball of light in the exact middle. Or perhaps fan blades was a more accurate description. The arms were irregularly shaped, though flat and roughly rounded at the ends, and each seemed to be made of hundreds of tiny component parts, sort of like how individual splinters made up grains of wood. Each was a different color—a green, a dark orange, a violet, and a pale blue. The object was entirely surrounded by a transparent sphere, with circular lines that perhaps hinted at some sort of scale or measurements. The whole thing rotated incrementally so that at regular intervals each of the arms faced straight up.

It was a struggle to pull his eyes away. He could have spent hours deciphering the strange hologram. It was a freaking hologram! But the voice. He had to worry about the voice first.

Yet there was not a soul to be seen, not unless there was a girl deliberately crouching behind the metal of the hologram projector and calling out. But it makes no sense. Someone had to be here to speak. I’m not hearing things… am I? Suddenly it dawned on him what had been so strange about the voice when it spoke before. It sounded modulated somehow. Almost as if… as if I heard it through a speaker…

“Is anybody there?” the voice said.

Jeremy understood completely, now. He hurried to the monitors, turned, and gasped. There was a girl on the monitor of the supercomputer.

She was obviously some sort of artificial intelligence. The first thing he noticed was her ears—long and narrow, they tapered to delicate points like a Tolkien elf, holding back short, violently pink hair. Nobody had ears like that; she couldn’t possibly be human… Still, Jeremy was instantly smitten. It just couldn’t be helped. She occupied a window in the central monitor, her background an ocean of blackness with green flecks of light drifting slowly up and down in vertical lines. Other windows on the monitors depicted strange objects or maps of some sort or lines of source code so convoluted that even Jeremy couldn’t divine their purpose. The left screen was dedicated to a whole host of fluctuating readouts that also left him baffled.

But none of that mattered. For the moment, all Jeremy could see was her. He sidled closer to the high-backed chair. “I—I’m here,” he said meekly.

The girl’s face perked up as if startled by the sudden noise. Her eyes latched onto his—green eyes, Jeremy noticed, with a pink streak leading down each cheek like some sort of tribal markings. “Who…who are you? W-where am I?” She was confused, but not panicked. Everything about her was calm and collected.

“I’m Jeremy,” he said, maneuvering into the chair without taking his eyes off the girl—or perhaps unable to—his heart pounding. If he had to guess, he would have said she was about his age, maybe a tad older. The window cut off everything below her upper arms, but he could see the beginnings of a shirt or maybe a vest of some sort—the same vibrant magenta as her hair—with a high-collared white shirt underneath. “Do you have a name?”

The girl didn’t answer. Instead, she seemed distracted by her surroundings, looking beyond what Jeremy could see. After a moment, he tried again. “Artificial intelligence, do you read me?”

A slight frown creased her brow. “Yes, but would you mind calling me something else, please?”

Jeremy thought for a moment. Other than the hair, she looked a little like a girl he once knew from his old school. She had been kind to him—one of the very few that were—but she moved away when Jeremy was still in elementary school. “How do you like the name… Maya?”

“Maya?” She paused, as if testing the way the name felt on her lips. “I like that. But what I’d really like is for you to tell me what I am doing in this virtual universe.”

Virtual universe? Is it really that extensive? He tabled that thought and its implications for later. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Do you not know the purpose for which you were programmed?”

“I can’t remember,” Maya said. “I have no memory at all.”

“Maybe you lost your memory when the supercomputer was shut down,” Jeremy suggested. “I just stumbled into this old, abandoned factory, and I found you when I was snooping around.”

Maya gave a puzzled look. “A factory?”

“In California, to be specific.”

She cocked her head slightly. “What is that?”

“A state. Part of the United States of America.” She still looked lost. “Uhh… on Earth?”

“Earth? What does that mean?”

Thus began one of the most rambling, cyclical, and frustratingly difficult conversations Jeremy had ever had. But years later, Jeremy would always contend that his first encounter with Maya was one of the best moments of his life. Maya had no knowledge of anything, not of her own existence within the virtual world, nor of the world in which Jeremy lived. So Jeremy did most of the talking. Not knowing where to start, he spoke of his likes and dislikes, his dream of one day becoming a computer programmer, his private fears of new places and new people. He spoke of moving across the country and of his first day at Kadic. It was very slow at first—Jeremy had to stop and explain something new to Maya every few words—but she had a keen intellect and an absorbing mind, and fairly soon, she was able to understand most of what Jeremy said, more or less. She liked the sound of Odd and Ulrich; she asked Jeremy to describe them several times.

“What is a friend?” Maya asked after his latest retelling. It was the first in which he had actually used the word to describe the boys.

Jeremy paused, trying to piece together the right words. It was one of Maya’s more philosophical questions. Plus, it was an area where Jeremy had very little firsthand experience. ‘A friend is someone who you like to be around,” he began slowly. “Someone who makes you happy. At the end of the day, when it’s just yourself and your thoughts, your friends are who you think about.”

Maya smiled; those green eyes held Jeremy like a vice. “You are my friend,” she said earnestly.

Jeremy blushed. “You’re my friend, too,” he said, trying to make it sound less awkward than he felt. Keep it together, he thought, wrenching his eyes away to check his watch. It read 6:20. “Crap,” he said, leaping to his feet. “I’m late! I have to go back to Kadic.”

Maya’s face fell. “You will come back, won’t you?”

He smiled comfortingly. “Of course, I will…” He trailed off, suddenly struck by a wonderful idea. His smile deepened, a grin stretching ear to ear. “I might be able to take you with me.”

“What do you mean?”

Jeremy made a few swift keystrokes. The interface was peculiar, but not so foreign as to be unworkable. “If I find what I need, I should be able to… There! I’ve made it so that the supercomputer will recognize my PC as friendly hardware. Now I should be able to operate the supercomputer remotely.”

Maya just blinked. “Jeremy, I don’t know what any of this means.”

“Maya, I’m bring you with me back to Kadic.”

Her grateful smile warmed his heart even more than his face.

After Jeremy promised to see her again shortly, Maya asked, “What should I do until then?”

“You said it’s a virtual universe, right? Why don’t you explore?” He glanced at his watch again. “I really gotta go. I’ll see you as soon as I can.” With a quick wave, he left the room, the stout elevator doors cutting off one last glimpse of his pink-haired mystery girl.

When he stepped out of the elevator into the main factory complex, Jeremy was on cloud nine. Nothing could put a dent in his happiness, not a single thing. Not even the small voice in his head that told him he was being ridiculous, that Maya wasn’t even real. On his very first day at Kadic, he had made not one, but three friends. It was more than he had ever let himself believe possible. The factory, the mysterious supercomputer… those just turned a spectacular day into one he would never, ever forget.

Those ropes that he had been a little worried about climbing? He practically danced up one of them, shimmying to the top like someone twice his size. He felt free as a bird… but he only got halfway across the concrete bridge before it all came crashing down. Standing at the mouth of the bridge, leaning against the hood of his cruiser and looking down at Jeremy’s bike, was a police officer.

With no time to think, Jeremy vaulted behind a wooden crate that was bowed outward in the middle by time and exposure to the elements. He landed awkwardly on all fours, very nearly tumbling beyond what little cover the crate provided. He didn’t see me. He was looking at the bike. It was more of a plea than an observation.

Straining his ears, Jeremy could just make out the cop conversing with someone on the other end of the radio. “Yeah,” the man said, “it’s just sitting here.” There was some indistinct garble from the radio. Then, “No, it’s a hell of a maze in there. I’ll wait here for a bit to see who comes out.”

Jeremy breathed a sigh of relief. He really hadn’t been seen. Though it was a small comfort. No matter how he looked at it, he was stuck. I could go back inside. There’s got to be a backdoor somewhere. I could swim for it… No, he’s probably looking down the bridge right now. I can’t risk it. I’ll just have to wait him out.

He shifted his weight and almost fell over when he was rewarded with a soft ka-chunk. He looked down.

Salvation!

It was another manhole cover that read Ophelia, CA Waste Management. His mind started racing. What are the odds? I bet this one takes me right to the manhole in the park!

As quietly as he could, Jeremy pried the manhole cover loose from the surface of the bridge, revealing a metal ladder descending into a dark hole. The bottom was hidden in darkness, but the wave of noxious fumes that hit Jeremy like a hammer between the eyes didn’t leave much to the imagination. Mildew and feces were the most predominant.

Considering the alternative, Jeremy swallowed hard and swung his legs over the edge. A moment later he was pulling the cover over his head, sealing himself in semidarkness and further cementing this day as the strangest of his young life.

Ulrich Stern stood alert, rocking on the balls of his feet, the last line of defense before Odd, who stood in goal. Ahead, a striker came at him, dribbling furiously up the field, his feet kicking up dust from the sunbaked grass. It had been a dry summer. If it didn’t rain soon, there would be bare patches before the season even started.

He shook himself, refocusing. This was no time to be thinking about the weather. He started to backpedal, allowing the striker to close the gap between them, watching and waiting for the right moment. A few more seconds, he thought. The ball drew ever closer…

Suddenly, the striker made as if to dart around Ulrich’s right side. It was the most obvious play; Luke was left-footed after all, so his most comfortable move was to Ulrich’s right. But Ulrich was not looking at Luke’s feet. Instead, his eyes were on the striker’s face, and he saw the striker’s eyes narrowed in the opposite direction. He almost smiled. Feet could lie, but eyes almost never did.

Ulrich cut to the left a fraction of a second before the striker moved the same direction. Luke’s eyes widened slightly, but there was nothing he could do now. Ulrich sighted his target… or he tried to. A swish of black hair behind the striker pulled Ulrich’s eyes toward the track for just an instant, but it was enough. He went into a slide… and crashed directly into the striker’s shins, sending them both tumbling across the turf.

A whistle sounded from across the field. “No, no, no!” Jim cried. The wide man was clearly visible in the red windbreaker he wore when he coached instead of teaching gym. “You tackle ball first! Ball first! Sweep the legs like that and you’ll foul every time!”

Ulrich offered Luke an apology and pulled the striker to his feet. “Walk it off, Rogers,” Jim said to the boy. “That’s why we wear shin guards. Next!”

Jogging over to the sideline, Ulrich joined the queue of defenders waiting to do the drill. Then he couldn’t help himself; his gaze wandered off the field to the track that encircled it. More specifically, to a girl that sprinted headlong around the far turn. She was tall and toned, with sleek black hair that fell to the shoulders of her dark gray crop top. As Ulrich watched, she put on an extra burst of speed as she came out of the turn. Having crossed some predetermined finish line, she slowed to a walk, ambled over to a bench, and grabbed a water bottle. To Ulrich, she was the most beautiful girl on campus. He had no idea who she was, but it wasn’t the first time she had snagged his attention from practice. If only he could work up the courage to say hello…

“Stern!” Ulrich shouted, yanking him from his daze. “Daydream on your own time! What’s the matter with you today?”

Ulrich gave a start and looked around, surprised to see it was his turn again. “Sorry, coach!” With one look at a smirking Odd, he spurred his feet back onto the field.

After a few more drills, there was a brief scrimmage in which Ulrich redeemed himself by stealing a pass and turning it into a breakaway chance, even managing to score on Odd—which was no small feat; despite his roommate’s diminutive stature, Odd had by far the highest vertical on the team. When it was over, the rest of the team headed to the showers. Not Ulrich. He followed Odd to the locker room, but instead changed into his karate uniform. Because Pencak Silat was not technically a school sanctioned club, there was no budget for an actual uniform. Instead, his makeshift gi consisted of a black tank top tucked into black pants, with a black cloth belt cinched around his middle. Then he made for the gymnasium.

As usual, Jim was alone in the middle of the lacquered wood floor. That was a big part of why the school didn’t fund this club—as much as Jim tried to promote it, Ulrich was the only student who ever showed any interest.

When Ulrich was seated cross-legged in front of the gym teacher, Jim rolled into his spiel. “How are you all? I’m so happy to see so many of you here tonight!” He paused, like a character in a sitcom waiting for the applause to die down. Ulrich didn’t offer any. Clearing his throat, he continued. “Kalari Payat. Kuk Sool Won. Jutsu. No, these are not dishes served at the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant.” He slid a hand behind his head as if embarrassed, looking at a point beyond Ulrich. “Uhh, no offense, Ms. Ishiyama.”

“None taken, sir. I’m Japanese,” said a girl’s voice. Ulrich turned with a start, and… it was her. The girl from the track. She strode across the gymnasium floor, sinking to her knees next to Ulrich.

Ulrich had no time to process this new development; Jim was already motoring on. “Yeah, whatever. Anyway, these are combat techniques that can save your life! As they did for me when I was a forest ranger in Wyoming.”

“Really?” said Ulrich. He exchanged a doubtful look with the girl. “What happened?”

“Well,” Jim began, “I was quietly enjoying a waffle with maple syrup by my campfire. You see, the trick is to mix maple sugar into the waffle batter. That’s very important, because it really compliments the flavor of the syrup… Uhh, never mind. Anyway, while I was eating, I was suddenly attacked! By a vicious beaver! Its razor-sharp teeth were going for my jugular, but I was able to save myself with the perfect hand of Li Fo Chan!”

With another look, both Ulrich and the girl burst into laughter. “Huh?” said the teacher, looking from one to another. “What’s so funny about that?”

Between heaves, the girl managed to get out, “Excuse us, sir.”

“Honestly, I think you would have been better off not talking about it,” Ulrich added, forcing the smirk off his face.

Jim seemed taken aback. “Right… okay then, that’s enough laughing. Let’s get into groups of two.” He paused again, as if waiting for them to acknowledge the joke. Neither of them did. Then his phone started buzzing in his pocket, and the gym teacher sighed. “See what you make of one another. I’ll, uh, I’ll be right back.” He walked out of the double doors into the gym lobby.

Standing, Ulrich positioned himself about five feet apart from the girl, bowing. “Ishiyama, is it? I’ve been doing this for a while, but don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you.”

She gave a wry smile and a bow of her own. But instead of words, she lashed out with a high kick that Ulrich only just managed to duck underneath. While he was still flatfooted, she followed it up with another swift kick, this one low.

But this time, Ulrich was ready for her. He absorbed the blow with a shin, letting her momentum push him naturally into a sweep of the legs that would surely send Ishiyama to the gymnasium floor.

There was a hint of surprise on her face, but it was quickly veiled behind an absolute surety of her movements. She slid backwards a step, indeed off-balance and ready to fall… except she turned the maneuver into something else. One second, she was toppling, headed for the ground; the next, her feet were airborne, body pirouetting into a seamless backflip, and she landed perfectly on her feet.

She blew a lock of black hair out of her eyes, her expression a blend of determination and admiration. The feeling was mutual; Ulrich knew he had a worthy opponent in this Ms. Ishiyama. You should say something, he thought suddenly. So she thinks you’re cool. What that might be, though, he had no clue. His mind started to race as the girl dipped back into a fighting stance. He knew his window for some clever comment was closing, but his brain felt stuck. So, he panicked.

“Pretty good, for a beginner,” he said. It was more of a taunt than anything, and he wanted to snatch it out of the air as soon as it left his lips. Are you crazy? You want her to like you! He was so flustered that he almost didn’t see the roundhouse kick coming, and the next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, Ishiyama above him, her hands pushing his shoulders to the floor. Ulrich struggled mightily, fists balled and teeth gnashing, but he couldn’t lift himself an inch. With a vexed sigh, he surrendered, letting Ishiyama shove him fully to the ground.

And in that instant, he found himself gazing up at his conqueror, finding eyes like two clear pieces of jet just above a pert nose, an ocean of black hair framing a lovely round face, two lips like pieces of pink velvet quirked into a triumphant smile…

And he blushed. Very deeply.

“Uhh, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna have to wrap this session up early,” came Jim’s voice. Ulrich used the opportunity to make his escape, rolling out from under the girl and facing the gym teacher, who was standing just inside the double doors, pointing at his cell phone. “Urgent business. Anyway, you two could both use a lot more work. That’ll do it for tonight, though. Bow to each other, now, and go get some grub.”

Taking a deep breath to steady his nerve, Ulrich turned to see Ishiyama already in the process of bowing, her eyes downcast, and he felt himself blush even more furiously. Without a word, he spun on a heel and strode from the gymnasium, through the main doors, anything to get away from the girl. He was being rude, he knew that. It was unfortunate, but it was better than coming across like a lovestruck fool. And he had already made an utter ass of himself with that beginner comment. There was no saving that. What he needed was fresh air and a walk to clear his head. Besides, he thought, trying to look at the bright side of things. I wasn’t the only one who was blushing.

An hour later, Ulrich was in the cafeteria with Odd. Jeremy hadn’t shown. It struck Ulrich as a little strange, but he didn’t have much brainpower to spend on Jeremy anyway. He was too busy replaying his bout over and over in his head… I am such an idiot…

“Yumi Ishiyama.”

At Odd’s sudden declaration, Ulrich flinched, turning to the blonde. His roommate had a grin that put the Cheshire Cat to shame. “What?”

Odd bit off a hefty mouthful of pizza, but that didn’t stop him from mumbling through it. “That’s the girl you can’t stop staring at.”

“I was not staring!” Ulrich said indignantly, though his inability to hold Odd’s gaze didn’t help his case.

Odd smiled knowingly. “Well, you better come up with a good excuse for when she catches you. Or else, you know, grow a pair and talk to her first.”

Ulrich gave a sharp exhale. “I already did…” He went on to explain his rollercoaster of a time at Pencak Silat. When he finished, Odd wore a look that suggested Ulrich had whacked his head a few times as a child.

“Wait, let me get this straight,” said the blonde. “You insulted her. Then you lost to her. And then you just left?” Ulrich nodded, his head in his hands. “Oh no, no, no, no. Didn’t I teach you anything? Come on”—he stood suddenly—“let’s go.”

“Uh, where?”

“To go find Yumi, of course!” Odd looked as if Ulrich failed to understand something as basic as water is wet. “There’s still time for you to salvage this!”

Ulrich shook his head ardently. “Oh, no way! I’m not talking to her tonight. I’ll just make an ass out of myself again.” Odd looked insistent, but Ulrich wouldn’t let up either. “Odd, we have no idea if she’s even on campus. Besides, we told Jeremy to meet us for dinner. The least we could do is wait to see if he shows up.”

Sighing, Odd sat down. Then he eyed his meal like a starving man and dove back into his tray. “You’re right. What do I keep saying? Never let a good meal go to waste.” Mouth once again full, he looked around the cafeteria. “Where is Einstein, anyway? Should’a been here twenty minutes ago.”

“Like I said before,” Ulrich said, “he probably got sidetracked. I’m sure he’ll turn up soon.”

But as the dinner hour wore on, Jeremy remained elusive. Before long, Ulrich and Odd were among the last few stragglers in the cafeteria. “I’m calling it,” Odd finally said. “Let’s head back to the dorm. He might still show up to work on the lab report.”

Just as Ulrich turned toward the wall of glass and the quad beyond, Jeremy went jogging by. The boy looked thoroughly bedraggled, running from the direction of Lower Campus toward the dorms, oblivious to Ulrich and Odd inside the cafeteria.

“You see?” said Ulrich. “He probably just got lost in the park or something. Let’s go.”

Jeremy crashed down into the chair at his desk, panting heavily, the stench of the sewers seemingly ingrained in his nostrils. Still, he was smiling again. I did it. I got away.

Wasting no time, he typed out a bit of programming that would allow him to control the supercomputer from his dorm room. It was shockingly easy—barely three lines of code—and when he was finished, the supercomputer’s interface was up on his screen. Some of it. The small portion that could fit on the central monitor in the factory. The strange black room with green lights was there, but Maya was curiously absent. “Maya?” he called, pulling his headset over his ears. “Are you there?” There was a long pause. Then…

“Jeremy!” She sounded frantic, out of breath. Something was very wrong.

He felt his pulse quicken. “Maya! What happened? Why can’t I see you?”

“Jeremy, they are everywhere!” she spluttered. “I left the tower, and they started following me. I didn’t know they were there, at first, but I—I think I’ve lost them. Jeremy… help me…”

“What tower?” Jeremy demanded. “What did you lose?”

“They are animals of some sort. I—” Maya cut off with a gasp and a piercing, blood-curdling scream.

“Maya! Maya, are you there? Maya, answer me!”

“Who’s Maya, your girlfriend?” said a voice.

Jeremy flinched to his feet, spinning around, knocking the chair over to bang into the mostly empty shelves. Odd stood in his open doorway, lounging against the frame with a smirk on his face, Ulrich right behind him. Jeremy tried to speak, but nothing came out. It was like he was stuck between gears. What do I even tell them?

Odd’s smug façade melted into genuine concern, and Ulrich asked, “What’s wrong?” pushing past Odd into the room.

“I…” His mind was going a hundred miles a minute. He knew he must look absolutely shellshocked. He just didn’t know what to do. A girl in a computer? He knew it sounded nuts. I can’t just tell them. I have to show them… and maybe they can help.

He made up his mind. “Do you guys trust me?”

The hardest part was getting them into the sewers. Odd looked doubtful and Ulrich flat out refused, the two only relenting when Jeremy started down on his own, saying he was going whether they went with him or not.

To say the sewers were dank and dingy fell far short of truth. Four-foot-wide concrete walks ran along both sides of a wide trough of murky gray water. The walls were concrete as well, near-vertical with a slight outward tilt, entire sections covered in fuzzy black mold. Much of the recessed lighting had either burnt out or was so caked with grime as to be almost useless, meaning large stretches of the tunnel were in near total darkness.

Jeremy goaded Odd and Ulrich into a run, promising a thorough explanation after they reached the other end. They complied, but it was grudging, halfhearted. Jeremy wanted to pull his hair out, but he didn’t press them for any more speed. They hardly know me. I’m lucky they are following at all.

At regular intervals, they jogged past the black metal rungs of ladders, with faded yellow numbers painted high on the wall to show what manhole they led to. They didn’t interest Jeremy much, and neither did the rickety, corroded grate that crossed over an intersecting channel roughly halfway to the factory. Jeremy had spent nearly ten minutes talking himself into crossing it the first time. Now, there was no hesitation as he sped across.

The end of the tunnel was marked by the number 0237 and one last ladder. Well, not quite the end. Just visible in the gloom beyond the ladder, the sewer ended in a wall with a rounded metal door that Jeremy figured must lead into the factory somewhere. If the ladder was halfway across the bridge, there was nowhere else for the door to go.

Jeremy was the first to reemerge. He took a quick peek around the wooden crate, then sighed. The cop was gone, but so was his bike. Oh well, he thought, grunting as he bent to pull Ulrich and then Odd to their feet behind him. This was easily more exercise than he’d done all summer.

As they entered the factory, Odd’s interest was piqued. “Wow,” he said, impressed, his voice echoing across the large complex. “I’ve gone by this place a hundred times, but I’ve never been inside. Why are we here, Einstein?”

Jeremy managed not to mess up the landing this time when he took one of the three ropes in hand and slid down to the first level. “I have to show you,” he called back up. “We’re almost there.”

When the doors of the elevator let them out into the factory basement, the splendor of the supercomputer produced the effect Jeremy had been expecting—Odd and Ulrich gazed openmouthed, marveling at the hologram hovering in the center of the chamber. “Okay,” Odd remarked, “now that’s cool.”

Jeremy sank into the operator’s chair. “Maya?” he called out anxiously. “I’m at the factory. Are you ok?”

The response was barely a whisper. “Yes.”

Jeremy heaved a sigh of relief. “Where are you?”

“Hiding.”

Ulrich moved closer to the screen to get a better look. “What is all this?”

“I have no idea,” Jeremy answered, “but there’s this girl… Well, no. Technically she is an artificial intelligence…” Then he told them everything—stumbling upon the supercomputer, meeting Maya, and escaping back to Kadic only to find out that she was in some sort of peril. “I know she isn’t real,” he said in closing, “but I want to help. And I want to figure out what all this is for.”

When Jeremy finished, Ulrich shook his head in disbelief. “This is completely insane,” he said. “A virtual universe? Total science fiction.” Then he smiled. “But what the hell. We’re already here, so we might as well stay, right?” He turned to Odd, smirking. “Unless you’d rather be working on Hertz’s lab report.”

“Hell no,” the blonde answered, grinning back. “What can we do to help, Einstein?”

Jeremy had no clue, so the two stood by as he made exploratory clicks on the keyboard. Almost immediately, he knew helping Maya would be a tall ask. He didn’t know what type of system he was dealing with, nor did he know what exactly he wanted the supercomputer to do. When he asked Maya, all she would say was that she left the tower and “ran away from the big red creatures.” She was as in the dark as they were. However, this suggested to Jeremy that the virtual universe operated with at least some of the same constraints as the real world and that there was a virtual space that maya was physically moving through, though he couldn’t figure out how to see it. What he did find was an extensive maze of submenus, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of most of it, and every tentative action he took appeared to have no effect whatsoever. He was flying blind.

After several minutes without any progress, Odd was growing restive. “I’m gonna take a look around,” he said, nodding toward the elevator.

Jeremy only nodded, his attention on the monitor. “Call me if you need anything,” said Ulrich.

Just as the elevator doors closed behind Odd, Jeremy discovered something new. Buried in a series of menus, he found an option entitled MAP SIZING. He changed it from universal to local.

At once, the hologram in the middle of the room began to expand, zooming in on a section of the four-pronged image. To Jeremy, it was like looking through the eye of a bird descending through the heavens. The tiny splinters that formed the larger image resolved into landmasses, some tiny, others vast, all of them uniquely shaped and apparently suspended in midair. The image settled on one such landmass. It was more or less circular in shape, with a tall spire of rock located slightly off-center. At the top of the spire was a yellow triangle; several red triangles slowly circled the base of the spire.

“Woah,” said Ulrich. “I’m calling Odd. He needs to see this.”

Odd’s phone started buzzing. He slid it out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Hello?” It was Ulrich. He sounded excited about something. “Yeah, I’ll be right up. I wanna take a look at something, first.” Odd hung up. Then he turned his attention back to… well, whatever they were.

There were three of them, evenly spaced across the floor in a triangle, facing the center of the room—tall, cylindrical, golden pods, each of them with their metallic, handleless doors sealed shut. Huge cables snaked out of the back of each pod, meandering to the closest wall and tunneling through the floor. More cables rose from the tops of the pods and through the ceiling, probably to the room he had just left.

Strange…

Jeremy eyed the yellow triangle and a thought came to him. “Maya, are you at the top of a spire? Up high?”

There was a moment of silence. “Yes,” came her whispered response.

That confirmed it. Maya was the yellow triangle. That meant the red triangles must be what she was afraid of. He had a map of Maya’s virtual world. Still no more, but it was way better than nothing at all. At least he could see.

“Jeremy, I’ve been thinking,” Ulrich began. “This setup, it reminds me of a video game.”

Jeremy nodded. “I had that feeling, too.”

“Well, if it is a video game, then where are your visuals? How do you control it? A map isn’t much to go on.”

Shrugging, Jeremy clicked into a menu called HARDWARE. “Beats me. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking.” He saw that an option called SCANNERS was disabled. Throwing caution to the wind, he enabled it. Nothing happened.

With a click and a hiss, the doors of the golden pods slid open. Steam belched from within, creating a fog that roiled around Odd’s ankles before dissipating. Tentatively, he approached the nearest pod and peeked inside. The inside was a plain cylinder of metal which almost seemed aglow from the intensity of the yellow light set into the circular floor. A shallow step led inside. Clearly it was meant to be entered.

Odd briefly reflected on how this was exactly how stupid people died in horror movies. He stepped inside anyway.

A message appeared on the monitor. SUBJECT DETECTED. BEGIN SCAN?

Not knowing what else to do, Jeremy selected yes.

The golden doors snapped shut. Odd was trapped. Okay, bad idea, bad idea! The pod began to emit a low hum, the whole thing vibrating, air blowing up through vents near the floor like a great gust of wind.

“Help!” he shouted, panicking, even though he knew it was useless. Ulrich and Jeremy would never hear him—they were a floor up, through several feet of combination steel. He was on his own.

The noise in the pod swelled from a hum to a whine, the wind roaring in his ears, strong enough to make his long hair stand on end. “Help!” he tried again and again, shouts becoming screams, banging his fists futilely against the doors of the pod, then trying to force them open again with his fingers. Nothing worked.

He started to feel strangely weak, as if some outside force was rapidly draining him of vitality. His arms fell limply to his sides. “Help…” he mumbled, wavering on his feet, his lips barely able to form the word.

Then Odd’s heart stopped, and everything went black.

Chapter Text

The first thing Odd noticed was that it was very bright. All around him was the endless orange expanse of a sky at sunset. He could not blink or look around.

Then he noticed his body was completely numb. No, that wasn’t right at all. He didn’t have a body. He was just a head floating in space. What a strange feeling, he thought, amused. He tried to smile, but found he could not move his lips. Am I in heaven?

Out of nowhere, Odd was forced to endure the alien sensation of his neck and torso coming into existence, seemingly created from the empty air beneath his head. It itched something awful, bone and muscle and sinew all being stitched together underneath fresh skin. And it didn’t stop there. Arms sprouted from immobile shoulders. Hips and glutes formed in layers below his midriff. Thighs, elbows, knees, forearms, calves, hands, feet. Just as his fingers and toes phased in, it was like a switch was flipped on in Odd’s brain. With a massive convulsion, his heart started pumping, pushing life into his limbs. A flood of feeling like an inferno roared through his body as neurons began firing. He took one shuddering gasp… and fell right out of the sky.

Down he plummeted, tumbling head over heels, the sienna-colored earth rushing up to meet him. He hit hard, flat on his back, all air forced out of his newly grown lungs. Stunned, he lay in a cloud of orange dust stirred by his crash landing. Heaven hurts, he thought sardonically.

It took Odd a few failed heaves to get his lungs working again, and once he managed it, he rose shakily to his feet. The sight that greeted him was exotic to say the least. Beneath a cloudless orange sky, Odd stood on… well, he wasn’t exactly sure. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it. It was a wide, flat island of bone-dry earth. Only this island wasn’t surrounded by water. It was suspended in midair, like Odd himself had been, held in stasis by some inscrutable force. Hundreds of other islands filled the horizon in all directions and at varying altitudes; a few of them abutted Odd’s island, separated by a gap he might be able to jump across with a running start. Most of the islands Odd could see were connected by strings of what looked to be massive cables, weaving through the surface of the islands and visibly pulsating with red energy. The island he was on was sparse, only containing a small pile of boulders and a shallow pond, both some three hundred feet from Odd. No other people occupied the island, nor any of the other islands he could see. No footprints either, human or otherwise. If this was heaven, it seemed he was the only one who had been allowed in. Strangely, the sky held no sun, though it was far brighter than any sunset Odd had ever seen.

Confounded, Odd took a step toward the water, intent on examining his new surroundings. But either he was stronger in this place or gravity was weaker, for with that small motion, he nearly sent himself sprawling back to the dirt. Two clumsy steps and a pivot, and he was back upright. Guess I don’t know my own strength, he thought, bemused. He started again, taking a few careful steps; it took all of his focus just to keep his movement restrained and his body upright. He felt like a caged lion, so he started jogging instead. It was effortless; he moved faster than he ever had before without even trying. With a grin he broke into a sprint.

He flew across the packed earth, covering the distance to the pond in mere seconds, kicking up puffs of dust and sand in his wake. In no time, he skidded to a stop at the water’s edge. And what he saw in its reflection made his jaw drop.

It was as if an artist had taken all of his flaws, all of his impurities, and removed them from his visage, rendering Odd—well, there was no other word for it—perfect. His jawline was sleek and angular, his nose smaller, his brow more defined, his cheeks devoid of their usual acne scarring. Instead of their normal brown, his irises were a burnished orange, shading to gold as the light took them, and a streak of purple ran down each cheek from each eye to jawline. His ears tapered to slight points, and rather than falling to his shoulders, his blonde hair rose up into a single spike as if it were gelled back, his purple bangs forming a diamond-shaped patch in the front.

As for clothing, Odd could only describe his getup as something ripped right out of a science fiction movie, a weird material that shone dully like some sort of metal, yet stretched like something fibrous. The whole thing seemed to be of one piece, an almost skintight suit wrapped around his entire body—even his hands and feet—a deep purple with swaths of midnight blue down the inner legs. Segmented lines of violet accented his chest, with yellow lines encircling his kneecaps and shoulders. Two jagged yellow lines like bolts of lightning wrapped around each arm, with more yellow accenting the black gloves that adorned his hands. The gloves were strange, black and shiny like leather but made of the same material as the rest of the suit, with iridescent blue circles of light placed on the biggest knuckle of his middle three fingers. They were also fingerless, allowing for his fingers to poke through the ends, the digits encased in the same purple as the rest of the suit.

Odd stared at his hands for a moment, wondering at the purpose of those blue lights, before returning his gaze to his reflection. If Ulrich could see me now… At the thought of his roommate, a felt like he had been punched in the gut. There he was in an alien world, and there was no evidence that anyone else had or would ever set foot where he stood. Whether he was dead or that golden pod had done something beyond his comprehension, he was isolated. Totally and irrevocably alone…

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

Odd flinched—a move which, with his unnatural strength, accidentally launched him several feet in the air—and he whirled around…

But no one was there. He looked around, puzzled; he definitely felt something. And the only cover anywhere was a pile of boulders clear across the island. Even Odd, with his newly acquired speed, could not have gotten there undetected.

Then he felt it again. Without turning his body, Odd reached behind his back with a deft hand and snatched… something. Long, sinuous, and wriggling in his clenched fingers. He pulled the whatever-it-was roughly to his front, earning him a sharp pain at the base of his spine. What the hell? He craned his neck, and… the thing was attached to him. I have a tail? He looked at the thing in disbelief. There it was, long, purple, protruding from a hole in his pants, and, surprisingly, downy soft to the touch. Then Odd gaped at the hand holding his new tail. Because jutting from the tip of each finger was an inch of razor-sharp, bone-hard claw. At a loss for words, he watched as his hand slowly relaxed and his exposed claws retracted back into the purple fingertips of his suit.

Suddenly, a voice spoke, emanating from everywhere at once, booming down from the heavens and echoing out across the sere landscape. “Maya?” it said, “I think something happened. Can you see anything new?”

And Odd’s heart skipped a beat. The golden pods, the massive cables connecting the islands, that voice… He knew exactly where he was.

VIRTUALIZATION COMPLETE

Jeremy didn’t understand the message any more than he understood what he was even trying to do. But the words didn’t hold his gaze. Next to the message was an image of a person clad in purple, standing rigid with their arms splayed out to the side, complete with a long purple tail and claws. Perhaps the virtual world has more denizens than just Maya, he thought. It looks kind of like…

Then, without Jeremy doing anything, the holographic map changed. The landmass that held Maya and the red triangles shrank to allow other adjoining landmasses to crowd into view. On a large, roughly circular landmass a fair distance from Maya’s, a second yellow triangle appeared. Jeremy looked a question at Ulrich, who shrugged.

Curious, he tried Maya again. “Maya, I think something happened. Can you see anything new?”

But the voice that answered him was not Maya. “Jeremy?”

“Odd! Is that you?” Jeremy’s booming voice was punctuated by a series of muffled thumps and a choked “Ow!” which Odd took to mean he had knocked the poor boy out of his chair. He couldn’t stop grinning.

“Yeah, Einstein, it’s me,” he called back, fighting the urge to giggle.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the computer.”

A pause, then, “What do you mean, you’re ‘in the computer’?”

If possible, Odd’s grin stretched even further. “Exactly what I said, Einstein. I’m in the computer.”

This conversation was going nowhere, and Odd couldn’t contain his excitement any longer. He bent at the knees, then launched himself into a full front flip—a move that would have been impossible for him on Earth. He managed it with ease, over rotating even, forcing himself to land in a perfect handstand, instinctively using his tail for balance. Letting out a bark of laughter, Odd sprang back to his feet, adding another flip for good measure.

“Odd,” a voice echoed, Ulrich’s this time, “you gotta tell us what happened…”

Jeremy sat in awe as he and Ulrich listened to Odd describe the room he had completely forgotten about, the one with the golden pods—scanners, he realized. And if possible, he was even more stunned at hearing him speak of the virtual world. When Odd finished his story, everything fit into place in Jeremy’s mind. The messages on the screen, the new yellow marker on the map… It all made sense. Odd had been—how did the supercomputer put it?—virtualized.

Behind him, Jeremy heard the low, mechanical rumbling of the elevator as it moved through the walls once again. What now…? He turned his head. To his surprise, Ulrich stood at the closed elevator doors, waiting expectantly.

“Where are you going?” Jeremy demanded, flabbergasted that he could even think of leaving at a time like this.

“To the scanner room,” Ulrich said, as if it were obvious. “I want you to virtualize me.”

“No way! We don’t even know if it’s safe.”

Ulrich shrugged unconcernedly. “It worked for Odd.” He stepped into the elevator as the doors groaned open. “You were looking for a controller for this thing, right? Well, now you have one. Us. Besides”—the grin Ulrich gave Jeremy was way too knowing—“you want to help Maya, don’t you?” With a wink, he pressed a button; the doors closed, and he was gone.

Smiling, Jeremy turned back to the supercomputer. “Maya, help is on the way.”

When Odd heard Ulrich’s plan, he let out a whoop of excitement, leaping into the air. Then he (quite literally) hightailed it back to the spot where he had fallen in, eyes scanning the sky.

It started as a ripple, a slight distortion in the air about fifty feet up. The ripple solidified into a distinct outline in the shape of a man, held rigid in the sky just like Odd had been. Then a head appeared, filling in its corresponding place in the outline. A neck soon followed, then a torso, midsection, hips… No sooner had his extremities formed, than Ulrich began to fall.

Scrambling, Odd scurried beneath the tumbling form of his friend, caught him in his outstretched arms, and set him gingerly on the barren earth. Dazed, Ulrich stood slowly, staring openmouthed at the exotic beauty of the virtual world.

Odd stared at Ulrich. His roommate had always been handsome, but now he looked like a prince out of a fairy tale. No, not a prince. A warrior. He also wore a skintight suit—his a pale yellow—with gray across the shoulders and down the back. Two swords were slung crisscross over his back, with brown bracers strapped to his forearms for protection if he were to use the weapons. Several yellow polygons accented his suit, decorating his shoulders and hips as well as the bracers. A yellow headband held his hair in check.

Like Odd, Ulrich’s features had been stripped of their earthly flaws and elevated to a state of otherworldly perfection. But where Odd was gifted with the lean build of a swimmer, Ulrich’s frame was rippling with corded muscle, his stature radiating latent potency. His high cheekbones and broad jawline were chiseled from marble, his eyes a lighter orange than Odd’s. Odd tried very hard not to blush.

“How come you get swords?” Odd groused in mock outrage, dispelling the tension only he felt. “All I got is a tail.”

Ulrich’s eyes fell on Odd for the first time, darting from the pointed tips of his ears to his tail absentmindedly flicking from side to side. “Odd! You’re… a cat?” And Ulrich laughed. Deep, full-chested, and pure. The kind of laugh where Odd couldn’t help but crack a smile, even though it was at his expense.

“Yeah?” he said wryly. “Well, this kitty’s got claws!” With his left hand, Odd gripped his right wrist tightly and flexed his right hand, bearing his claws. But something else happened as well. A section of the black glove shifted slightly, depressing a fraction of an inch beneath the pressure of his thumb with a click, as if a button had been pressed. There was a blue flash as something was fired from the blue circle on the knuckle of his middle finger. It rocketed past Ulrich, missing the brunette’s head by inches.

“What the hell was that?” Ulrich sputtered, stunned out of his laughter.

Odd shrugged, smirking. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Do it again.”

Careful to point his fist at the ground, Odd pressed his wrist again. Another flash of blue as something discharged from his hand, this time kicking up dust as it embedded in the dirt.

Stooping down, Odd plucked it from the earth and held it up for Ulrich to see. It was a dart, about an inch long, aerodynamically designed, with three prongs in the rear and a wicked needle at the business end.

“It’s like some sort of laser arrow,” Odd said.

Ulrich let out a low whistle. “That could do some damage.”

“But where did it come from?” Odd asked, looking at the back of his gloves quizzically. “There can’t be much room in there.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Ulrich. “At least we know what your weapon is.”

The voice of God spoke again. “Uh, guys? You ready to go find Maya?”

Odd grinned. “Lead the way, Einstein.”

Guided by Jeremy, the two boys made their way to the edge of the landmass, or plateau as Jeremy called it. Ulrich stumbled briefly, but quickly adapted to his newfound strength. At the edge of the plateau, a gap of about ten feet separated them from more solid ground. Odd never would have tried to jump it on Earth, but here in the virtual world, he knew it wouldn’t pose a problem. Looking down, he was surprised to find, hundreds of feet below his perch, a roiling digital sea, with swells dozens of feet high roaming ominously across its surface. Odd described this to Jeremy. “Don’t fall in,” was his sage advice.

After vaulting over the divide, Odd and Ulrich dashed across a much smaller landmass that served as an intermediary between the first plateau and their next destination. Another leap, and they stood on a plateau twice the size of the one they had dropped onto. It was a rough triangle; the boys occupied one of its vertices. The far side was dominated by an imposing cliff nearly as tall as the plateau was wide. Several adjacent plateaus led from theirs.

“Where to, Jeremy?” called Ulrich. “Looks like left or right.”

“Up,” Jeremy commanded.

With a nod to Ulrich, Odd led the way to the cliff. Upon closer inspection, narrow ledges pockmarked the cliff every fifteen feet or so all the way to the top. “Looks tricky,” said Odd. “And there’s no other way around?”

“Not without backtracking a few miles.”

Ulrich smirked. “Nervous?” Then he sprang into the air, latched onto the lowest ledge, and pulled himself up, all in one fluid motion. He looked down at Odd. “See? Piece of cake.”

Not one to be outdone, Odd set his sights on the sheer wall of the cliff itself. Protracting his claws, he leapt into the air, slamming into the cliff face several feet to the left of Ulrich’s ledge. He slid downward a few inches, claws gouging deep rivets into the rock, but ultimately, Odd held, clinging to the rock face like some overgrown lizard. Delighted, he let out a single “Ha!” before climbing hand over hand, scampering up the rock. In no time, he stood at the top, looking down at Ulrich as his roommate vaulted up the last few ledges. “See?” he called down. “Piece of cake.”

“Showoff,” Ulrich muttered, clambering onto the summit. Neither boy had even broken a sweat.

Their climb had taken them to another barren plateau. Other than the ever-present cables winding through the surface, its only feature was the burnt-out husk of a dead acacia tree, blackened by exposure to the sunless sky. No obvious exit points presented themselves, so Jeremy conducted the boys across the platform, beneath the scant shade of the acacia’s frail branches and to the plateau’s far edge. It was Odd who first called the place a desert. And it was, sort of. It was as if someone had described a desert to an artist who had never seen one themselves. The result was a bizarre amalgam of features—the dusty earth, the dead flora, the craggy cliff—all of which added up to an approximation of an earthly desert.

It was when they skidded to a stop at the edge of the plateau that they first caught a glimpse of their quarry. Five diminutive pieces of land led like a stairway downward, each about a dozen feet below the level of the previous platform. The last was connected to a large plateau by way of a rocky arch. And in the very center of that plateau, atop a tall, three-pronged spire of rock, the boys could just make out a small figure with violently pink hair. The problem wasn’t getting to Maya.

It was the things that stalked around the spire.

There were two of them, large and quadrupedal, with scarlet carapaces and spindly, rust red legs curved slightly like scythe blades, long enough for either of the boys to walk comfortably beneath the things’ raised bodies. They had three milky white, lifeless eyes. Every so often, one of them would look up toward the top of the spire, eyes glowing an angry red before launching a red bolt into the rock formation. A warning shot. And on their bulky, misshapen backs was a symbol. Two concentric circles with a dot in the center and four lines extending from the outermost circle—the same symbol that adorned the button Jeremy had pressed to breathe life into the supercomputer.

“Crabs,” Odd murmured. Again, he was right. They were a bastardization of a common saltwater crab, but without the prototypical pincers. They appeared to know exactly where Maya was, but they were either unable or unwilling to climb the spire.

“Is that what they are?” asked Jeremy, “There should be four of them. The two you see, plus two more concealed behind the spire.”

“You think they know we’re here?” asked Ulrich.

“Only one way to find out,” replied Odd. With that, he leapt down the first step of the natural staircase, landing in a crouch before jumping down to the next step, Ulrich following at his heels. When they reached the bottom, the Crabs showed no sign of having noticed them, preoccupied as they were by Maya.

“Looks like we can take them by surprise,” said Ulrich. “How do you want to do this?”

Odd looked out across the plateau at the crabs, a devious smile forming. “You sweep the legs, I take the ball?”

The brunette grinned maliciously. “Jim would be furious.”

Ulrich clambered up the side of the stone arch to its zenith, exactly halfway to Maya’s plateau. Perched there, he drew one of his swords slowly, dampening the sound as much as he could. Motionless, he took a few breaths to ready himself.

He sprang forward, landing on the plateau in a somersault, spinning effortlessly back to his feet with his sword still in hand. Then he sprinted, a blur of motion across the desert floor, moving even faster than Odd could even in his new virtualized form. He was forty feet from the nearest Crab. It still hadn’t noticed him. His brow knitted in concentration as he drew close. He poured on an extra burst of speed. Twenty feet to go. Ten. He raised his sword.

Ulrich blindsided the Crab, his sword gleaming with blue energy as it sheared clear through its two front legs. Crippled, the Crab teetered on its back legs, tipped forwards precariously, and landed face-first with a thud and a cloud of dust. Unable to right itself, the Crab’s eyes flooded with red light before they released a steady stream of laser fire, only to have its red missiles plow harmlessly into the earth.

He had no time to admire his handiwork. As he expected, the commotion had alerted the second Crab, which turned and immediately began to fire its own lasers. Without breaking stride, Ulrich ran toward the base of the spire, his new enemy in hot pursuit.

Without warning, a bolt from the Crab’s eyes struck him in the left shoulder, sending him crashing forward into the dirt. Hot agony flared as electricity lanced through the left side of his body. Gritting his teeth, Ulrich stumbled to his feet and resumed his mad dash, leading the Crab around the far side of the spire. I hope it’s worth it, Odd, Ulrich thought with a wince. The stage is set.

Jeremy sat at the monitors of the supercomputer, feeling relatively useless. Sure, he had virtualized Odd and Ulrich, guiding them across a virtual network of plateaus to save an artificial intelligence. Just the thought of what they were doing still had his head spinning. But now he was rendered a spectator. He watched the red and yellow triangles flitting around the holographic map. It had once again zoomed in on Maya’s plateau now that all of the virtual world’s occupants were there. And it’s not even a good view.

Suddenly, the yellow marker he knew to be Ulrich flashed briefly white, its position halting momentarily before continuing its feigned retreat across the plateau. Back on the monitor, the whole screen changed. What looked like trading cards appeared, three of them—one each for Odd, Ulrich, and Maya. Each card bore the virtual visage of its character, and each contained a series of confusing statistics. Most of them he didn’t understand, but one stood out to him as important—a figure called “Life Points.”

Jeremy had little time to marvel at his friends’ new appearances. Almost as soon as the cards came onto the screen, the left shoulder of the image of Ulrich began flashing red, and his Life Points dropped from 100 to 70. Ulrich must have gotten hurt somehow. Jeremy was about to ask how when a feature at the bottom of each card caught his eye. It was a button that said “Visual Sync.” Intrigued, Jeremy pressed the one on Odd’s card.

The screen changed again. The cards grew smaller and were shunted off to the side. What filled the void was the virtual world—as seen through Odd’s eyes—and Jeremy finally got his first peek.

Woah…

Odd slid down the stone arch onto Maya’s plateau, the coast now clear. Wasting no time, he darted past the debilitated Crab, right up to the base of the spire. Digging his claws into the rock formation, he began his ascent, using myriad hand- and footholds to aid him.

The spire had three distinct prongs, and Maya was hidden at the top of the highest peak. Odd negotiated his way to the neck where the three prongs diverted from one another. Then he set his sights on Maya’s peak. Soon, he was nearly at the pinnacle. Just as he reached out for the crest of the spire, a terrible pain erupted in his outstretched hand, and he fell.

Throwing an arm out, Odd managed to hook it around an outcropping of rock back at the neck of the spire, jerking himself to a sudden stop, nearly yanking his arm out of its socket in the process.

Wincing, Odd pulled himself up to stand on the neck, and he turned to see what he was up against. To his surprise, it was the crippled Crab. It crawled forward on two short—but rapidly lengthening—front legs.

“Watch out, Odd! The Crabs can regenerate!”

“Oh can they!” Odd scoffed, ducking for cover behind the smallest peak to avoid a volley of red laser fire. “A little slow on the draw, eh Einstein?” He fired twice from his wrist, the arrows leaving the knuckles of his gloves in a burst of blue light.

Jeremy ignored the dig. “Also, you guys each have 100 Life Points. A hit from a laser appears to deal 30 points of damage.”

“So four hits puts us at zero?” Odd asked, firing another shot. Even with his abysmal math skills, he could work that one out.

“Looks like it.”

“What happens then?”

“I’d rather not find out.”

Frustrated, Odd peeked at the Crab around his cover. His unskilled shots were veering wildly off-target. So, throwing caution to the wind, he forsook his cover, opting for quantity over quality, firing five bolts in quick succession. Luckily, one found its mark, tearing a gash in the center of the symbol on its carapace; the wound wept a pale white light.

The Crab staggered slightly, laser going quiet. Looks like I stunned it, thought Odd.

Then it popped like a zit. Red chunks of carapace rained down on the desert soil; its four legs toppled, lifeless. Then, all of the matter that used to be the Crab faded out of existence, leaving only a cloud of disturbed dust.

Odd blinked. That was unexpected. With a shrug, he turned and continued to climb.

“Well done, Odd! That’s one down.”

At the summit, Odd pulled himself over the edge and found Maya peering over the opposite side, no doubt interested in the fight Ulrich must be putting up against the other three Crabs.

Odd cleared his throat, causing Maya to flinch and spin around. “Hello, princess,” Odd said with a deep bow. “I heard someone needed rescuing.”

Maya smiled.

Ulrich was a bit of a mess. The Crabs had him surrounded—the one that followed him and the two that had already been behind the spire—attacking in tandem, never allowing him to get close enough to take a swipe with his sword. So he was constantly on the defense, ducking and dodging, bobbing and weaving… and yes, as it turned out, you could indeed break a sweat in the virtual world. He had discovered, quite by accident, that he could deflect the Crabs’ lasers with his sword, but he couldn’t do this regularly enough to make a habit of it, nor could he do it accurately enough to direct the bolts back at his attackers. He had also been struck twice more, once in the leg and once in the chest. By Jeremy’s estimations, he couldn’t afford to take another hit.

Now he was being steadily pinned down, pushed backward toward the edge of the plateau, with nothing at his back but the dizzying drop to the digital sea. Any time you’re ready, Odd! I won’t last much longer!

As if on cue, a single bolt tore down from above and slammed into the back of one of the Crabs. The Crab lurched violently, then exploded into red chunks.

Ulrich looked up. Odd and Maya stood side-by-side atop the spire; Odd gave a lazy wave. "On their backs, the thing that looks like an eye—it’s their weak spot,” the blonde called down.

Nodding, Ulrich leapt into action. The remaining Crabs had looked up to see who had slain their fallen comrade. By the time they leveled their great ugly heads back to Ulrich, he had already jumped onto the closest Crab and buried his sword in its carapace, plunging it down to the hilt. Then he leapt onto the last Crab and likewise dealt it a lethal blow. Before either Crab knew what hit it, Ulrich was back on solid ground, both Crabs exploding in his wake.

The sound of applause punctured the silence that followed, booming across the desert. “That was incredible!”

Jeremy was beside himself with excitement. He did it. How, he had no idea. This went way beyond the bounds of any established science Jeremy knew. But he did it anyway. He virtualized Odd and Ulrich. He guided them across a wild new frontier. He saved Maya.

He watched through Odd’s eyes as Odd and Maya climbed down to the base of the spire. Then Odd and Ulrich made their introductions, Ulrich smirking at his roommate’s bombastic “Pleased to meet ya!”

Then Maya took the boys a few plateaus over to a tall, narrow, freestanding structure that rose from the flat ground of the desert and loomed several stories above them all. Oh, right. Maya did say something about a tower. Its base was brown and bulbous, giving way to an unbroken white cylinder about a third of the way up. The whole tower emanated a strange sheen, giving off a soft blue aura.

Without hesitation, Maya waltzed right up to the front of the tower, spread her arms wide, and phased through the tower wall as easily as if she had opened a door and stepped inside. After a moment’s pause, Jeremy said, “I think she wants you to follow.”

He watched as Ulrich stepped tentatively up to the tower and reached out with a hand. The brunette recoiled like it had burned him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Odd.

Ulrich scrunched up his face in disgust. “It’s like a cold slime.”

“Step aside,” Odd said, waving his roommate off. Odd approached the tower, its brown base growing closer and closer in Jeremy’s monitor until he saw nothing but black. Then Odd was inside. Everything was a deep sapphire, from the circular wall to the platform in the middle of the tower. The platform was circular as well, separated from the wall on all sides by a two-foot gap, save for a narrow strip leading outside on which Odd stood. The wall itself contained small blue rectangles holding pieces of information—what looked like digital files or bits of code—some brighter and clearer than others, giving the walls a strange sense of depth. On the platform was the same symbol from the backs of the Crabs. Jeremy figured it must have something to do with the virtual world if they kept seeing it all over the place like this. Below the platform was a seemingly endless abyss, the blue color of the wall fading into a murky blackness that Jeremy could not make out. Ulrich appeared through the wall next to Odd.

Maya stood off to the side, operating what looked like some sort of square blue hologram. A moment later, Jeremy’s view of the tower through Odd’s eyes vanished, replaced by a view of Maya. “Jeremy!” she exclaimed. That hologram must serve as her window into the factory.

Odd and Ulrich crowded into the frame. “Hey there, Einstein,” Odd said with a smirk.

For the next several minutes, Odd and Ulrich energetically relived Maya’s rescue, each trying to convince the other that they played a more important role. Jeremy had to tone down Odd’s exaggerations on more than one occasion. Maya stayed quiet for the most part, a rapt audience, only interjecting when she needed the boys to clarify some earthly concept.

After Odd’s third retelling of how he “nearly lost his arm” on the spire, he turned to Jeremy, adopting a more stoic expression. “So, this is great and all—the best time of my life, actually—but, uh, how do we get home?”

Jeremy hesitated for a moment. He had already been working on it while they talked and hadn’t found anything useful. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Most of what I find doesn’t seem to have any obvious purpose. Or it does, and then it doesn’t actually do what I think it should. But I’ll keep looking. I put you guys in there; I’ll get you out.”

Then a phrase caught his eye. It was in a list of executable functions the supercomputer could perform. The last item on the list was TEMPORAL ADJUSTMENT.

He blinked. That can’t possibly mean what I think it means… can it? He looked back at Odd, Ulrich, and Maya, smiles on their faces. Their virtual faces. So much of what he had thought reality to be was already thrown out the window. What was one more anomaly? Finger hovering over the keyboard for just a moment, he pressed the enter key.

A blinding white light swept through the factory chamber. Then everything ceased to exist.

Chapter Text

Episode Two
The Dog Days of Summer

Chapter 5
Answers

“How are you all? I’m so happy to see so many of you here tonight!”

Ulrich blinked, dazed, squinting into the harsh, flat light overhead. What…? Where am I?

He looked around slowly; the broad wooden floor and rows of metal bleachers put his setting into perspective. The gymnasium.

How he got there, though, was another question entirely. For he could clearly remember another location, a virtual world of dusty desert plateaus with a pink-haired artificial intelligence… I must have dozed off, he thought, shaking his head to clear it, though he had no memory of actually falling asleep, or even trying to. On top of that, his dream had been incredibly vivid, unlike any he had ever experienced before. His heart pounded; he could still feel himself plunging a sword hilt-deep into the back of a monstrous red Crab. It was all so real…

That’s when he noticed Jim, the stout gym teacher poised over him with his arms folded, clearly in the middle of some kitschy speech by the amused look on his face. Ulrich himself was sitting cross-legged, wearing his makeshift gi. It was his Pencak Silat class. Right, thought Ulrich, his mind frantically working to piece events together, I came in and sat down, and… had a dream? Is that even possible? He felt a little sick to his stomach. Swallowing thickly to settle his nerve, he decided that he must have blacked out somehow. Which was scary as hell, sure, but what else could possibly have happened? And all that other stuff—the factory, the virtual world—it must have been some sort of… karate-induced fever dream. Yeah, that must be it. I was getting ready for karate, so it only makes sense that I had fighting on the brain. That was the theory, anyway.

At least, it was until Jim spoke again.

“Kalari Payat. Kuk Sool Won. Jutsu. No, these are not dishes served at the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant.” He slid a hand behind his head as if embarrassed, looking at a point beyond Ulrich. “Uhh, no offense, Ms. Ishiyama.”

Ulrich felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. It was the exact same words, the exact same cadence, even. He had heard this all before. And he knew exactly what he would find before he turned his head to look…

“None taken, sir. I’m Japanese,” Yumi announced as she crossed the gymnasium floor. It was the same as the dream.

In a state of mild panic, Ulrich figured there were two possibilities. The first was that somehow, he had had a premonition. That in a split-second, he had had a dream of the near future, perfect to every minute detail. Which was ridiculous… right? Even if it were possible to glimpse the future, what he had seen was so farfetched, so nonsensical, that it could only be false. There is no factory chamber, he decided, no supercomputer, no such thing as virtualization. Or premonitions, for that matter. Which left him with door number two… Déjà vu? Coincidence? A glitch in the matrix?

“Um, are you alright?”

Ulrich looked up to see Yumi staring down at him, a wry look on her face. He realized he had been staring in her general direction, though through her rather than at her, his mouth gaping like a trout.

Promptly, he turned away from her. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, his words only mildly spoiled by a voice crack. Unlike his dream—or premonition, or whatever the hell it was—he didn’t find himself blushing at a mere interaction with Yumi. There were more important things to ponder than a stupid crush. And with a start, he realized something else. That was different than before. I can change things…

As if to spite this discovery, Jim dove right back in to what Ulrich already knew. “Yeah, whatever. Anyway, these are combat techniques that can save your life! As they did for me when I was a forest ranger in Wyoming.”

“Really?” Ulrich felt compelled to say. “What happened?” After all, he had said it before.

“Well,” Jim began, “I was quietly enjoying a waffle with maple syrup by my campfire. You see, the trick is to mix maple sugar into the waffle batter. That’s very important, because it really compliments the flavor of the syrup… Uhh, never mind. Anyway, while I was eating, I was suddenly attacked! By a vicious beaver! Its razor-sharp teeth were going for my jugular, but I was able to save myself with the perfect hand of Li Fo Chan!”

Despite himself, Ulrich found himself snickering along with Yumi once again—it was even funnier a second time. “Huh?” said the teacher, looking from one to another. “What’s so funny about that?”

Between heaves, Yumi managed to get out, “Excuse us, sir.”

“Honestly, I think you would have been better off not talking about it,” Ulrich added, completing the predestined dialogue. This is surreal…

Jim seemed taken aback. “Right… okay then, that’s enough laughing. Let’s get into groups of two.” He paused, as if waiting for them to acknowledge the joke. Neither of them did; Ulrich waited for Jim’s phone to ring. When it did indeed start buzzing, the gym teacher sighed. “See what you make of one another. I’ll, uh, I’ll be right back.” He walked out of the double doors into the gym lobby.

It was an out-of-body experience for Ulrich as he slowly rose to his feet, as if he were controlling a version of himself rather than actually moving. Because, in a way, he was. He had already been through a series of events identical to what he was currently experiencing, had already performed several actions that had produced an outcome. In many ways, turning to face Yumi for a second time felt like playing a video game, like he had respawned after failing to complete the objective. Which he had, of course—the first time through this “level” had been admittedly embarrassing. Anomaly or not, Ulrich had been gifted with an opportunity; a second chancec. One he was determined not to waste.

So, Ulrich took his position just out of arm’s reach from Yumi, inclined his head forward in a slight bow, and flashed her a reserved smile. No lame attempt at breaking the ice; no unnecessarily pompous remark. Just a smile and a nod.

Yumi bowed in turn, tucking a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. “I’m Yumi, by the way.”

Catching himself just in time to stop from saying “I know”—Ulrich cringed; that would have been a nightmare for sure—he instead opted for “I’m Ulrich. Nice to meet you.” Again, he reflected on how the exchange was different from what had happened before. Turns out, when you don’t act like an ass, you don’t get sudden kicks aimed at your face. What a novel concept.

“You ready?” Yumi asked, sinking into a fighting stance.

Ulrich smiled again. “Do your worst.” He felt completely relaxed. Polite introduction? Check. Playful banter? Check. Everything was damn near perfect…

Which is why Ulrich was so dismayed when the double doors suddenly burst open.

He spun around, took one look at Odd standing between the open doors, and blurted out, “You’re not supposed to be here!” That was true on multiple levels. Not only was Odd wholly uninterested in karate—he often mocked Ulrich for his weekly sessions, albeit playfully—but Odd had been nowhere near the gym the first go around. He should be back in the dorm, looking after Kiwi. Why in the world would he be there now?

“I need to talk to you,” Odd said quietly, the large space letting his voice carry.

“Uhh, can’t you see I’m a little busy?” Ulrich replied, annoyed, turning ever so slightly so Yumi couldn’t see him flashing his eyes pointedly in her direction.

But Odd didn’t seem to get the message. “It can’t wait.”

Crossing his arms, Ulrich was prepared to rebut his roommate when he really looked at the blonde for the first time. Odd was sweating profusely, much more than a simple jog or even a sprint down from Upper Campus could account for. And he was strangely reticent. Odd might have the stature of a mouse, but most of the time he had such a strong presence due to his bombastic manner and his often-crude humor. Now, the mouse had a better chance.

Ulrich relented, doing his best to exude patience. Whatever had spooked his roommate enough to run all this way must be important. “What is it, Odd?”

“I think we should talk in private. It’s… it’s about Maya.”

And with that one statement, Ulrich felt like the world was crumbling around him. His breath halted in his lungs, and it was an effort to keep his knees from wobbling. And in that feverish state of numb disbelief, Ulrich’s beleaguered brain managed to grasp the only thought it could muster—just two words. He knows.

With that realization, Ulrich broke toward Odd without a second thought, seeing his grim recognition mirrored in the blonde’s eyes. It was only after he had almost reached Odd that he remembered they were not alone. Spinning suddenly, he almost fell, tripping over ungainly feet. “I gotta go,” he said to Yumi, making a vague gesture at Odd. “I just… um… yeah.”

Only dimly registering the blank look on Yumi’s face, he turned and fled from the gymnasium, following Odd into the lobby. There, they passed Jim walking the other way, tucking his cell phone back into a pocket.

“Della Robbia? And Stern, come back here! Where do you think you’re going?”

“Sorry, Jim,” Ulrich called over his shoulder without stopping. “You were just gonna end practice anyway.”

The two roommates left the building at a run. The last thing Ulrich heard before the door closed behind them was a very faint “But how did he know that?” Then they were speeding toward the steps that led back to Upper Campus.

Odd refused to speak until they were all the way back to their dorm room, claiming that the rest of campus wasn’t private enough for whatever he had to say. Ulrich might have agreed, had Odd not just dropped the verbal equivalent of an atomic bomb on Ulrich and then literally ran away. And when they were finally safely tucked away in their dorm, when Odd finally elaborated on what he was thinking, all Ulrich could do for several pregnant moments was stare.

“Time travel?” he finally managed to get out. “You’re saying we went back in time?”

The blonde nodded slowly, an uncertain look still fixed on his clammy face.

It was ludicrous. Ulrich should feel stupid for thinking it, let alone saying it aloud. But he didn’t.

And that terrified him. Because traveling through time implied many things. The first was that what Ulrich had experienced wasn’t some hallucination. It wasn’t a dream or a premonition. It had actually happened. There was a virtual world in the abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. Okay, that wasn’t so bad—technological advances happen all the time; it’s not a stretch to think a virtual world could be created, especially with a powerful enough supercomputer. But on that virtual world resided a being, an artificial intelligence that Jeremy had named Maya, who had a seemingly infinite capacity for instantaneous machine learning. Again, straining reality a bit, but not unfathomable; AIs were getting more complex by the day. Then Odd went and got himself sucked into that virtual world. And Ulrich joined him there, decked to the nines in warriors’ garb like some anime protagonist and gifted with incredible strength and speed, sprinting across a virtual desert, fighting off murderous Crabs to save said artificial intelligence from an uncertain, yet assumedly grisly fate.

And all of that was somehow forced to the backburner because their working theory was that they fucking traveled back in time.

Yet to Ulrich’s amazement, it made sense. This was a shared experience; they both had memories of the factory and the virtual world. How else could Ulrich account for that, and for his apparent déjà vu in the gym? He knew what would happen because it had actually happened before. He could change events because he was not beholden to the choices of his past self.

“I believe you,” Ulrich finally said with a sigh.

Odd responded with a weak smile. “I’m not so sure I do myself. But there is one way we can find out.”

Ulrich nodded. He knew what Odd was getting at. “Jeremy.”

The two spent almost an hour in the lobby of the dorms, waiting for Jeremy to return to campus. Odd had wanted to go straight to the factory, but Ulrich remembered Jeremy mentioning something about a cop waiting on the street outside. So they waited, arms folded, sitting on the main staircase. At least, Ulrich was sitting. Odd only seemed able to sit for brief pauses in between endless bouts of pacing, dragging his feet back and forth across the tile floor at least a hundred times.

Finally, Jeremy burst through the blue French doors with a heavy sigh, leaning forward with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He didn’t notice them at first—neither Odd, who had stopped in his tracks, nor Ulrich, who stood apprehensively. Then Jeremy looked up and gave a start at the sight of them both.

After a moment’s hesitation, he gave a weak attempt at a smile—more of a grimace, really. “Time travel?”

Ulrich swallowed, nodding. “Time travel.” Feeling flooded back into his numb hands. He must have been sitting on them. He hadn’t noticed.

For a long moment, the three stood in silence, the gravity of the situation sinking in, the only sound Jeremy’s heavy breathing. Finally, Odd asked, “What does this mean?”

Gathering himself, Jeremy beckoned Ulrich and Odd to the stairs. “It means we need answers.”

The discussion that followed lasted all the way until their eleven o’clock curfew, a few hours of wild speculation between the three boys and their virtual companion, Maya, whom Jeremy once again summoned to the PC on his desk. Maya was like Odd and Ulrich; she, too, recalled their flight to save her on the stony peak and their fight with the Crabs.

But Jeremy didn’t. That shocked the two roommates—and Jeremy, for that matter. Once he had turned on the supercomputer, the Maya that greeted him on the monitor wasn’t completely naïve to the world beyond her virtual universe. Instead, she had an incredible knowledge about Jeremy—an impossible knowledge—describing in near perfect detail his first day at Kadic Academy, his impressions of Odd and Ulrich, even the journey he had taken to the factory mere minutes before.

When Jeremy asked how Maya had come by this knowledge, she was confused at first. From her perspective, she had just been talking to Jeremy, with Odd and Ulrich standing next to her in the desert tower. Then it was like she closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she opened them, the two boys had gone, with Jeremy standing alone in the factory room. Only, it wasn’t the Jeremy she remembered. This Jeremy didn’t know her, and it took a lot of convincing before he would show any measure of trust.

Which is how Jeremy came to know of their jump to the past. All of his knowledge of previous events was secondhand; he had listened to Maya describe, in painstaking detail, a tale of virtualization, of Jeremy guiding Odd and Ulrich through a virtual world from that factory room. And despite his awe, despite the absurdity of it all, he began to believe her.

Still, he had had his doubts until Maya reached the end of her tale and began to talk about his search to find a way back home for Odd and Ulrich. That’s when his scientific brain was able to latch onto some nugget of quantifiable reality. He reasoned that if Maya was telling the truth, his lack of memory must stem from somewhere, and the supercomputer itself was the most likely prospect. Perhaps he had done something to cause it.

And as it turned out, he had. After a thorough search through the vast index of menus and submenus, he found a very curious function that read, TEMPORAL ADJUSTMENT.

Time travel.

“But why don’t you remember anything?” Odd asked Jeremy as the night wore on. “For Ulrich and me, it was like we saw the future or something. I didn’t know what to think. Why not you?”

“He wasn’t virtualized,” Maya said suddenly. “Only someone who has been virtualized will remember. Even if they happen to be on Earth when the return to the past is initiated.” Maya looked startled by her own statement, as if she had no idea what words would come out of her mouth once she started speaking.

The three boys just looked at her. “How do you know that?” Jeremy asked after a pause.

“I… don’t know. I just do.”

A thought came over Ulrich, one that had never occurred to him before. “Maya, do you have a past? What do you remember about life before Jeremy booted up the supercomputer? Is there anything you can tell us about why the virtual world exists?”

Thinking for a moment, Maya began hesitantly. “I have no memory of my past. It makes logical sense that I must have one. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened before Jeremy came to the factory, so I have nothing to tell you.”

“So how do we unravel this mystery?” Ulrich asked, crossing his arms. “We have absolutely nothing to go on.”

Jeremy smiled. “I think I have some ideas on where we can begin…”

It was almost a full day until they would be able to put their plan into motion. Odd insisted that they should start right away, that they should sneak across campus and back through the sewers. He argued that they could be back in the factory investigating within the hour. But with Ulrich’s help, Jeremy was able to convince the blonde that a cautious approach was best. Ultimately, Odd grudgingly agreed that time travel and virtual worlds were not things to be taken lightly.

Instead, Odd and Ulrich set off for bed, and after a hasty goodnight to Maya, Jeremy slipped into his own. He felt like a kid on Christmas, doubting very much that his excitement would allow him to sleep any time soon.

Despite this, before he knew what had happened, Jeremy was being awakened by the screech of his alarm clock. Sitting up slowly, he silenced the alarm, squinting, the low angle of the morning sun painting elaborate shadows on the wall. For a moment, he simply sat there, nestled in the lethargy of being not-quite-awake. Then he remembered. The factory…

“Hello, Jeremy.”

With a yelp, Jeremy promptly fell out of bed. Straightening quickly, he blushed to the roots of his sandy blonde hair and snatched his black glasses off the bedside table, jamming them onto his face. He turned to see Maya smiling at him through the computer screen. “Good morning,” he said a little too cheerily. “How did you sleep?”

“I didn’t.”

A pause; Maya looked at him expectantly. Jeremy ran a nervous hand through his sleep-tousled hair. Small talk was not his strong suit, especially with mysterious girls from virtual worlds. “I don’t know how you stayed awake. I was dead to the world as soon as I got in bed.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Maya said. “I watched you sleep instead. What’s that noise that you make? It sounded like you were growling.”

Blushing even deeper, Jeremy stammered for a bit, a few false starts eventually yielding to “Snoring.” Then he mumbled something about a shower before grabbing his towel and practically fleeing into the hall. I need to teach her about social norms, he decided once there was a door between him and Maya. Gathering himself, he made his way to the bathroom at the other end of the hall, passing several bleary-eyed upperclassmen still trying to wake up.

Once he was freshly watered and clothed, Jeremy said his goodbyes to Maya. While they were going through their day, she would be exploring the virtual world. Jeremy initially objected to this part of their plan, but he eventually conceded that Maya couldn’t remain confined to the tower forever. Plus, there was a chance she might discover something on her own. “I’ll be careful,” Maya insisted.

Jeremy grabbed his messenger bag and left for the cafeteria. Laden with a tray of boiled eggs and toast, he sat himself across from Odd and Ulrich, the brunette watching in wry disgust as the blonde shoveled egg after egg into his mouth.

“What?” Odd asked after taking a break to gulp down some apple juice, smirking up at Ulrich. “Can’t a guy eat in peace?”

“Eating isn’t quite the right word for it,” Ulrich replied with a slight frown. “What do you think, Jeremy?”

Jeremy grinned. “Uh, maybe gorging? Devouring? Inhaling?”

“What can I say? I’m starving!” Odd countered. “Virtualization will do that to you, you know,” he replied matter-of-factly. Ulrich snorted a laugh into his toast.

All that stood between the trio and the factory was a day of classes. A slow, dull, mind-numbingly normal day of classes. Even Jeremy—who had an aptitude for learning and was still getting used to his new school—found it tedious. For Odd and Ulrich, it may as well have been torture. At least Ulrich’s was an internal discomfort; Odd couldn’t make it through any period without escaping to the bathroom at least once to pass the time.

By the time the final bell of the day had rung, Jeremy was more than ready to get started. There was still work to do before they could head to the factory—much to Odd’s dismay—and half the day was already gone.

Odd and Ulrich set off for Lower Campus and their soccer practice; neither wanted to go, but Ulrich had an athletic scholarship to maintain and Odd figured that passing the time with lots of movement was better than lingering around the dorms.

That left Jeremy plenty of time to do his research. Lamenting the loss of his bike, he instead retrieved his old scooter from his dorm and set off into town. This time, his destination was not the factory, but the Ophelia Public Library on Main Street.

Right in the heart of town, the library was housed in what was once an old church, fit snugly between two four-story buildings. It certainly looked the part, with a whitewashed front rising up to a peaked gray roof; a lone steeple balanced above, its belfry no longer functional. Locking his scooter to the bike rack out front, Jeremy climbed the stone steps and pulled open one of the large red doors.

The inside was like a scene out of a painting. Light filtered in through the church’s original stained-glass windows, gossamer rays bathing the dusty shelves in motes of teal and saffron and rouge. The librarian at the circulation desk perked up at Jeremy’s request. “It’s not often I get questions about local history,” she remarked, leading Jeremy behind the desk and down a narrow hallway. “Is this for some kind of school project?”

“Uh, yeah. Something like that,” Jeremy answered.

Stopping at a brown door, the librarian unearthed a large ring of keys and slid one into the lock. The room on the other side was small and shabby, and felt as if it hadn’t been disturbed in years. There was a microfiche machine in one corner and an old IBM computer in another. The remaining space was crammed with filing cabinets and shelves loaded with black cardboard boxes.

“Been meaning to have this stuff digitized for ages,” the librarian sighed, looking around at the crowded room. Then she strode over to a filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer, revealing reel after reel of microfilm. “What you’re looking for will probably be in here,” she said. “Everything is catalogued in the computer, so you can use it to find what you need.” Then she grabbed a reel at random and showed Jeremy how to properly thread it into the microfiche machine. “Make sure you put everything back where you found it. Give me a holler if you need anything.” The librarian left Jeremy alone in the room.

The information he sought wasn’t hard to find—a quick search for all articles with the keywords “Remosa Avenue” and “Factory” yielded a few dozen results. All of them were in the drawer the librarian had indicated, a repository for the now-defunct Ophelia Gazette.

Built in 1938 by Renault, a French car manufacturer, the factory’s maiden purpose was to produce automobiles. The oldest article Jeremy could find showed a picture of a car driving out of the factory and across the concrete bridge, the first of a thousand cars destined to cross the Atlantic to help with the reconstruction of post-WWII Europe.

In 1972, the island factory was sold to a company called Grunnings, which made drills, beginning a long stretch in which no company owned the factory for more than a few years. A mercenary, the factory produced everything from lightbulbs to batteries to microwaves, changing hands four different times in 1983 alone. In ’88, there was an attempt to hook the factory up to Ophelia’s waste management system, but the idea was scrapped when funding dried up. In ’94, Renault repurchased the factory with the intent to rebuild its footing in the Americas. However, three days into their production, a fire broke out on the assembly line. There were two fatalities, and the factory’s doors were finally shuttered for good.

One article in particular caught Jeremy’s eye. In ’97, the federal government purchased the factory as part of the Clinton administration’s Industrial Properties Rehabilitation Initiative. A generic statement from a California state assemblyman positioned this as a move to help boost the local economy, but Jeremy wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t find any record of the factory being sold again afterward, nor could he find any mention of what the government might have done to the property since its acquisition.

“Well,” Odd began later that night as they spoke quietly over dinner, “if I wanted to run top-secret experiments, I certainly wouldn’t advertise it.”

Ulrich agreed. “It would make sense, knowing that the government owns the factory. I’m no expert, but I seriously doubt that tech was there when it closed in ’94.”

“Anything else worth sharing, Einstein?” asked Odd.

Jeremy shrugged. “Only that four teens got arrested for trespassing back in 2001. Kadic students, apparently.”

Odd smirked. “Amateurs. Should’a used the sewers.”

“So,” concluded Ulrich, “it looks like we have even more questions to puzzle out.”

Nodding, Jeremy said, “Hopefully we’ll find some answers tonight at the factory…”

They left shortly after sundown, when the grounds of Kadic were less populated. Jeremy was very fortunate to have discovered the manhole in the park. Though the park technically closed at dusk, its gates were always open, providing them with an unregulated route off of campus—a perfect way for them to circumvent their nightly curfew, so long as they were careful.

When the three resurfaced on the bridge, only the barest hint of sunlight remained above the horizon to the west. Wasting no time, they scuttled across, into the factory.

As planned, Odd and Ulrich scoured the complex, looking for any clues as to the purpose of the supercomputer and the virtual world it held. Starting with the top floor, they worked their way around the complex diligently, discovering administrative offices and executive suites. In addition to combing around vast factory floor itself, they found a large door that led to an assembly line, as well as several auxiliary storage rooms for parts. The storage rooms were empty, but the assembly line looked exactly the same as it must have looked on the day of the fire, with several car parts in various stages of construction along the conveyor belts. Robotic arms loomed above them, frozen in time.

Together, they covered every nook and cranny of the factory. Yet despite their efforts, they came away emptyhanded. If there were any inklings of the supercomputer’s purpose, the factory seemed unwilling to give them up without a fight.

Meanwhile, Jeremy took the elevator down to the factory chamber. The doors slid open when he entered the passcode, and he couldn’t help the bubbly, excited feeling that rose in his chest. The room was exactly as he had left it the night before. The massive hologram stood in the middle with its rotating depiction of the virtual world, abutted on one side by a large metal arm hanging down from the rafters and its four computer monitors. Even after acknowledging what they had stumbled upon, it was still like walking through a dream.

When he sank into the high-backed chair, Maya was not among the still-indecipherable data on the monitors. “Hello?” he called. “Maya, are you there?”

Her response was instantaneous. “Jeremy! It’s good to hear your voice.”

Jeremy was glad she couldn’t see the inevitable blush; he needed to get a grip on that. “Are you still exploring the desert?”

“Not exactly,” came her reply. “I am still exploring, but I’ve left the desert. This place is different… taller. From what you’ve told me of Kadic, I think you would call it a ‘forest.’ Here, I can give you a visual.”

A moment later, a window appeared on the center monitor, and Jeremy was looking through Maya’s eyes. Gone were the spacious plateaus of the desert. Instead, Maya jogged along a long green path the color of grass, or perhaps moss. It was no more than ten feet wide; stepping off to either side of the path would yield a long drop to the digital sea, hundreds of feet below. All around her were trees, some narrow, others quite thick. Instead of sprouting out of soil, they hovered in the empty space to either side of the path, stretching way down to dip their roots in the roiling sea and far overhead to where the beginnings of branches faded into a bright sky of greenish white. Jeremy saw other paths in the distance, somewhat obscured by trees. Two of them came together to form a larger area, though still much smaller than any of the desert plateaus. Perhaps it was meant to be a forest clearing. On that clearing was a tower, bulbous and brown at the base and rising into a pale white cylinder, radiating a blue aura.

“It really is a whole world in there,” Jeremy said in wonder. “How did you get to the forest?”

“Through the base of the Way Tower,” Maya answered.

Just as Jeremy was about to ask what the heck that meant, he noticed something odd behind the monitors. It was small and wedged into the joint that attached the metal arm to the array of screens. Small enough not to be noticed, except that unlike the rest of the metal mount, the object did not reflect the light of the hologram in the center of the room.

“Jeremy? Are you still there?”

He blinked, realizing he had been silent for a moment. “Yeah, I think I might have found something.”

Standing out of the chair, he gripped the mysterious object and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. The thing was firmly stuck in the metal joint. Repositioning himself, Jeremy wrapped both hands around it and tugged again. He could feel it give ever so slightly. Whatever it was had a soft surface, and the metal arm did not want to let it go. With one last pull, it lurched free, Jeremy’s momentum carrying him back into the chair with a thud.

In his hands was a small book, bound in soft black leather, with a deep indent ingrained into its surface from its time wedged behind the monitors. There was no title or any other distinguishing marks on the cover.

“What did you find?” Maya asked.

“I don’t know.” Jeremy flipped open the front cover.

The first page was a few lines of cramped, untidy script scrawled at the top of an otherwise empty piece of lined paper. “It’s a journal of some kind, I think,” Jeremy said, excited. Pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose, he began to read.

If you are reading this, I am most likely dead.
Enclosed is everything I have accomplished with the Lyoko Project. These pages are my life’s work.
Keep it safe. Keep it secret.
F.H.

Nearly a half-hour later, Odd and Ulrich rejoined Jeremy in the factory chamber, crowding around the chair to get a glimpse of Jeremy’s mysterious discovery. “Who’s F.H.?” Odd asked, reading the passage and pressing the journal back into Jeremy’s hands.

Gripping the book, Jeremy picked back up where he left off, almost pressing his nose to its pages. He hadn’t been reading for very long, but already he felt like he could read the journal for the rest of his life and never understand half of it. “No idea,” he answered, scanning through heavily edited charts and mathematical formulas. “But there’s some incredible stuff in here. Just the theory alone is revolutionary.”

Odd cracked a wry smile. “That’s great, Einstein, but why don’t you skip the theory for now and look for a more practical application.”

“The theory is very important, Odd,” Jeremy contended. “Theoretical knowledge is the foundation upon which practical application is built.” At the irked look on Odd’s face, he added, “But your point is taken. I have read enough to send you back into Lyoko.”

Odd and Ulrich shared a confused look. “Lyoko…?” Ulrich asked.

“That’s the name of the virtual world,” Jeremy explained. “This”—he raised his arms in a vague gesture that took in the factory room—“is the Lyoko Project. F.H.’s brainchild.” Jeremy hefted the black journal. “I’ve only read a small fraction of this. Skimmed it, really. And I’ll be the first to admit that I understand almost none of what I’ve read. I think this journal is… abridged somehow. It leaves out a lot of information, almost like F.H. thought it was too trivial to be included. Or maybe there is a second journal, or even a series of journals, perhaps located within the supercomputer itself. If I could only access it, then maybe I wouldn’t be so confused…” He trailed off, eyeing the monitors curiously. I’ll have to do a lot of digging. If I schedule it out to, say, a few hours each day, it might not be so daunting… Oh, who am I kidding. For once, I think I might be way out of my league…

“Einstein!” Jeremy looked around to see Odd and Ulrich staring at him expectantly. Odd smirked and continued, “You were saying?”

“Right,” Jeremy said quickly. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”

“We noticed,” Ulrich remarked.

“Maya did some exploring of her own,” Jeremy said. “Perhaps I should leave the next part to her.”

The three directed their attention to the central monitor. Without preamble, Maya began to speak. “Lyoko is composed of four Sectors. Jeremy tells me they are called the Desert Sector, the Forest Sector, the Ice Sector, and the Mountain Sector. Since you have already been to the Desert, that is where you will be sent first. I have already returned there to meet you. Jeremy has also discovered how to choose the coordinates where you arrive on Lyoko, as well as how to materialize you back into the real world. Once you are here on Lyoko, I can teach you how to travel to the other Sectors.” Maya’s eyes fell on Jeremy. For a wonder, he didn’t blush at all. “Does that cover everything?”

Jeremy gave a warm smile. “That was perfect, Maya. Couldn’t have done it better myself.” He turned just in time to catch a knowing glance between Odd and Ulrich. Pretending he hadn’t noticed, he went on. “There is one other thing you two should be aware of. The digital sea is to be avoided at all costs. Touch the water, and a nasty process is triggered. First, the link between your virtual form and the scanners is broken. Then the virtual form itself is destabilized, loosing shape in a fraction of a second as you dissolve into mush. Lastly, all of the data that is you is scattered around the globe, nothing but ones and zeros dispersed across the near-infinite plane of the internet. This process is nearly-instantaneous and definitely irreversible, so please, please, be careful.” Jeremy’s gaze lingered on Odd more than Ulrich.

Odd shrugged. “So we pop like a balloon. Still better than having to sit through one of Hertz’s pop quizzes.” At Jeremy’s raised eyebrow, he added, “Oh alright. I’ll be careful. You happy?”

Jeremy smiled. “Thank you, Odd. Alright, you two. Get to the scanners.”

Odd sprang to attention, his hand raised in a stiff salute. “Sir, yes sir!” Maya laughed; Ulrich groaned. Then Ulrich followed his roommate into the elevator, and they were off.

It was a rocky start. Rather than let the supercomputer choose where to place his friends on Lyoko, Jeremy wanted to pick the spot for them to drop in. So he located Maya in the Desert and selected the necessary coordinates twenty feet above the level of the plateau she was on. For Odd, it worked without a hitch; he fell right at Maya’s feet and even managed to stick the landing, his purple tail lashing about to counterbalance his weight. But a misplaced decimal point had Ulrich plunging in from two hundred feet, pinwheeling out of control before landing in a crumpled heap, losing all of his Life Points in one fell swoop.

Simultaneously, Ulrich’s real-world form materialized in a scanner. It opened, Ulrich collapsing to a knee as the scanner released a jet of steam, gasping and sputtering for air, drenched in sweat. At least they now knew what happened when someone died in Lyoko. Soon he was back in the control room with Jeremy, weak-kneed and trembling, though it did nothing to lessen his resolve—he was determined to return to Lyoko as soon as he could.

Unfortunately, that proved to be a bit of a wait. The supercomputer wouldn’t let Jeremy virtualize Ulrich again for twenty minutes. In their journal, F.H. said this was a cautionary measure, meant to prevent excess strain on the earthen bodies of those who entered the virtual world. They waited, Odd doing flips and tricks to amuse Maya. After the grace period, Jeremy sent Ulrich back in, making a mental note to always double- and triple-check the coordinates. When Ulrich finally stood next to Odd and Maya, they took off immediately, eager to explore.

But they had only been on the move for a minute or two when they hit another setback. Odd misjudged a leap and found himself flailing over empty space, not a handhold in reach. Luckily, Ulrich was quick on the draw. With nothing between Odd and the malevolent digital sea below, Ulrich flung a sword down at the rapidly-diminishing body of his friend, impaling Odd clear through the chest. Odd’s skewered form wavered and disappeared like sand thrown into a gale, still a few hundred feet above the waves.

And they were forced to wait once more.

“Should we stop?” Jeremy asked tentatively, looking over to where Odd was stepping out of the elevator.

Odd was fingering the nonexistent hole in his chest, for once straight-faced. The blonde shook his head. “Not a chance, Einstein. I’ll just be more careful, that’s all.” His uncharacteristic stoicism belied his anxiety.

Twenty more minutes, and they were finally proceeding as planned, though without the reckless abandon that drove their first sprint through the virtual world. They moved quickly across the landscape, hopping from plateau to plateau. Some were barely large enough for a picnic lunch. Others were more like continents, large enough to house deep ravines or long, precipitous rocky shelves. Here, there, and everywhere, there were towers. Each was identical: bulbous and brown at the bottom like a gnarled branch, then changing to a sleek façade that was perfectly cylindrical and a dull white. Dozens of them. Some were very prominently placed, visible for miles. Others were hidden, tucked into rocky nooks or inside small caves. And just as omnipresent were the gigantic wires—bunches of them, black and red, and each wider than any of them were tall—that wove through the landscape like massive stitches. They thrummed faintly.

After a few minutes of aimless exploration, the trio came to a stop on a small plateau with a few boulders. Odd sat down on one of them, running a gloved hand across the end of his purple tail with amusement. “I still don’t know why you get to be a warrior,” he said, looking across the plateau at Ulrich. “Don’t get me wrong, I like this”—he gestured down at his strange purple-and-yellow skintight suit—“but I could have done with a sword or two.”

Ulrich drew a sword with a flourish, the blade shimmering a faint blue as he took a few experimental hacks through the air. “Maybe it is something to do with what we are thinking. I had just come from Pencak Silat the first time. The supercomputer could take suggestions from our memories.”

Odd stood, throwing his tail back behind him. “Maybe.” He smirked. “I always figured myself for more of a dog person.”

Maya cleared her throat; they both turned to her. “I’ll lead you to the Way Tower, if you’re ready to move on.”

So Odd and Ulrich followed her across the Desert, bounding from one plateau to another. They passed three regular towers before stopping on a plateau so massive that its far end was completely obscured by a series of stony ridges, some half-mile distant. There, at the base of the first ridge, was the Way Tower. Identical to the other towers in almost every way, the only visible difference was the soft cocoon of light that radiated around it—the light was a darker teal instead of blue.

Like last time, Odd and Ulrich followed Maya through the outer skin of the tower. Like last time, it felt as if they had taken a dip into a vat of refrigerated hair gel. Then the sensation passed, and they were standing on the blue platform of the inner chamber, with the eye-like symbol that was so prevalent in Lyoko under their feet.

“Where to now, Maya?” Ulrich asked, peering around the tower. There wasn’t any obvious exit point, save for the narrow strip of platform leading back outside.

“Down,” she answered. And without another word, she strode to the edge of the platform, spread her arms wide like a bird about to take flight, and let herself fall gracefully over the edge.

The boys hurried to the edge just in time to see a smudge of pink hair fade into the blackness deep below. Then Maya was gone, and they were alone in the tower.

“What do you think?” Ulrich said, straightening.

“What’s there to think about?” Odd answered with a shrug. “She jumped, so we jump.”

Ulrich glanced back over the edge. “Down into the abyss, with no end in sight.” There was no answer from Odd. Ulrich glanced over at his friend just in time to see the crooked smile and the sudden shove that sent him sprawling forward.

For an instant, there was a horrible sensation of weightlessness, of his heart plunging into his stomach. Then Ulrich was falling, plummeting out of the bottom of the Way Tower, the blue around him quickly overwhelmed by an inky blackness. “Odd! I’m gonna kill you!” he sputtered, managing to collect himself somewhat. The only response was a hacking laugh from somewhere in the blackness above him.

Reorienting himself toward the direction he was falling, Ulrich braced himself for what might be another fatal splat. After all, he had already fallen far enough to take a hefty chunk out of his Life points. But instead of a bottom, something else came into view beneath him—a horizontal stream of data, with bits of code moving rapidly along the flow. It looks sort of like an underwater current, he observed, just before he was pulled into the stream. Then he was racing along, outpacing the data along the current. Looking back, he saw Odd a few dozen feet behind, a goofy grin plastered to his face, a look Ulrich realized was mirrored on his own cheeks.

When he looked forward again, he flinched—there was a roadblock ahead, a gray circle that looked to be nearly the width of the current, a roadblock they were rapidly approaching. There’s no way he could survive an impact like that. It was unavoidable. Ulrich steeled himself, resigned to another imminent materialization…

At the last moment, the current pulled him around the roadblock, like a river diverting around a boulder in its path. A bloom of blue light filled Ulrich’s vision as he emerged into a circular chamber. It was another tower; what he thought was a roadblock had actually been the underside of the platform. Then, with a lurch, Ulrich came to a stop as gravity reoriented him toward the platform. If he had been on Earth, he would have definitely lost his dinner. As it was, he was pitched forward suddenly, sprawled onto his stomach on the blue platform next to a pair of pink shoes. He looked up to see Maya peering down at him with some amusement, just as Odd crashed onto the platform next to him with a grunt.

“Welcome to the Forest Sector,” she said with a smile.

Jeremy watched from the factory as the trio explored the same landscape he had seen through Maya’s eyes. It looked to be every bit as expansive as the Desert, with hundreds of green trails leading through the somber trees. And just like the Desert, the Forest Sector seemed to emulate the real world, while at the same time wildly missing the mark. It seemed to be giving the impression of a living ecosystem—with vibrant shades of green underfoot, shimmering ponds, and shady hollows with boulders sticking out of loamy patches of ground—but nothing there actually seemed alive. There was no wind to stir the branches, no bugs scuttling along the forest floor. Nothing moved at all except for the digital sea far beneath.

They spent an hour in the Forest Sector, long enough to for Jeremy to guide them to the outer boundary of the Sector and back to the Way Tower. That’s how they discovered another feature of the Forest that was similar to the Desert: they could hardly find a spot in the Sector where a tower was not visible through the trees. Nor could they deviate long from the enormous wires that wound through the Sector—there were always more to be found just out of sight.

When Jeremy returned them to the Way Tower, no one hesitated to jump into the black abyss this time. But instead of being sent back to the Desert, the next tower let them out onto the rocky craigs of the Mountain Sector. There, they encountered massive purple rock formations like floating mountains, suspended high over the digital sea, adorned with steep paths that climbed up their slopes with sharp, hairpin turns, as well as labyrinthine cave systems within. Between individual peaks spanned harrowingly spindly land bridges, crisscrossing high over the sea, similar to the green paths of the Forest Sector. There was no greenery here, however, only elaborate, windswept mauve rock formations. The sky over the mountains was the periwinkle of the hour just after dawn, which befit the ubiquitous fog shrouding the distant peaks.

The Ice Sector, too, was very different. The trio emerged there to find vast, frozen plains and jagged ice cliffs, all a crisp arctic blue so bright that it almost seemed to glow. There, the cliffs jutted out mere tens of feet over the digital sea instead of the dizzying drop of the other Sectors. White islands and fragmented ice flows dotted the waves, offering precarious safety over the deadly water. Smooth ice caves carved through the cliffs, providing easy shortcuts through the rugged terrain above. And though the sky was the midnight blue of a starless night, there was an ambient light with no obvious origin that ensured the Ice Sector was every bit as bright as the sun-blasted Desert.

Odd, Ulrich, and Maya explored for hours, reveling in the freedom of it all, each new turn revealing to them new and awesome sights of the virtual world. And though they covered a mere fraction of Lyoko, all of them—Jeremy included—expected to encounter some more of the angry red Crabs. There were none.

All the while, Jeremy read F.H.’s journal, gaining plenty of insight into how to operate the supercomputer. He was able to pull up a readout of Odd and Ulrich’s weaponry, and found that each of Odd’s wrists contained twenty projectiles, or “laser arrows” as the blonde had termed them. Jeremy could reload them if Odd ran out, and he could even replace one or both of Ulrich’s swords if they were ever lost—though this required almost a full thirty seconds of inputs and could be difficult in a pinch.

Jeremy also discovered he could speak directly to any individual within Lyoko, rather than broadcast his voice everywhere (although whenever he did this to Odd, he earned a “Get out of my head, Einstein!”). Jeremy figured that could be useful if Odd, Ulrich, or Maya ever got separated.

And then there was the very back of the journal. The last page began with a heading entitled XANA. Written below were specs for some sort of artificial intelligence. To Jeremy’s practiced eye, it operated almost like a computer virus. That makes some sense, Jeremy mused. In order for an artificial intelligence to learn and grow, it must be granted some level of independence for its operations. As far as Jeremy could tell, part of its function was as some sort of firewall. The term “tower protection” was written more than once. That would explain the Crabs. Perhaps this “XANA” saw us as intruders. But why isn’t there any resistance now?

Much to his dismay, the rest of the journal had been completely torn out, the tattered edges of the missing pages providing a window to the inside of the back cover, where a lone message had been hastily scrawled:

Check the towers.
Always.

Well, that’s not ominous or anything. Then Jeremy remembered: in the supercomputer’s subsystems, there was a program named TOWER SCAN.

He was distracted by a beeping from his wrist, and he glanced at the lit dial of his digital watch. “Guys?” he called. “We gotta head back. It’s midnight.”

Jeremy watched as the trio skidded to a halt on a shelf of ice. “Yikes!” came Odd’s reply. “Yeah, okay. You better pull us out.”

Then Jeremy began the materialization process, reading from the journal. A few button presses later, Odd and Ulrich exited adjoining scanners, thoroughly exhausted but perhaps happier than they had ever felt.

The three boys said their goodbyes to Maya in the control room, promising to return as soon as they could. Then they left—up the elevator, up the dangling ropes, across the bridge, into the sewers, and out again into Rosetree Park. They made their way back to the dorms, careful to put a significant distance between themselves and the route they knew the security guard occasionally patrolled after dark. In no time, Jeremy was whispering his goodbye to Odd and Ulrich on the ground floor.

As soon as he had closed himself inside his room, Jeremy sank into his desk chair, smiling as he called out to Maya.

“Hello, Jeremy,” she said, appearing onscreen. She was in a tower once again.

“I can’t talk for long,” Jeremy replied, rubbing tired eyes. “I just wanted to let you know I’ll see you in the morning.”

Maya smiled. “Okay, Jeremy. Get some sleep.”

Jeremy stood just long enough to take off his glasses and collapse onto his bed. He didn’t even bother to change his clothes, pulling the blankets around him as he buried his head into the pillow. Just before he could drift off, Maya spoke up again from the monitor.

“Jeremy?”

He glanced at his PC. “Yeah?”

“Thank you for bringing me friends.” Maya’s image winked out of existence.

Sighing, Jeremy smiled warmly to himself. He fell quickly into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

The next day, the three boys met in the cafeteria, eager to return to the factory. Odd suggested skipping class. “We can pop on over to the factory and go back in time,” he said offhandedly—at least, as offhanded as one can be when discussing time travel. “And it will be like we never even left.”

Jeremy would have none of it. Besides the logistical problem of still not being able to remember anything once they jumped to the past, Jeremy was still worried about moving too quickly. “Besides,” he concluded, “You said you were the only ones who relive the days over again. Does that mean you age at twice the normal rate for every hour you repeat? Do you want to risk doubling every day if it means graduating at twenty-two?”

Odd sighed. “Point taken. We’ll go as soon as we can.”

Unfortunately, as soon as we can quickly became eventually, as they moved through their class schedule with teachers piling on the homework as if they had personal vendettas against the ninth grade. Not the least of which was Mrs. Hertz’s lab report, which, in their excitement over the factory, they had forgotten completely. “I’ll give you an extra day because you’re still new to the school, Jeremy,” the chemistry teacher said before turning to Odd and Ulrich, “but I expect better of the two of you. Be warned; I will be keeping a much tighter leash going forward. No excuses.”

So instead of returning to the factory, the three spent their Wednesday evening in a shady corner of the quad, slowly delving into their mountain of work. In their sparse breaks, Jeremy strove to learn as much as he could about Odd and Ulrich. Their foray into Lyoko had forged a connection between them that Jeremy likened to the bond of soldiers at war, but he still knew relatively little about his new friends.

Odd, it turned out, was New York City royalty, a fact that he was reluctant to admit, but which he did not hesitate to expound upon once it was out in the open. His father was the Frank Della Robbia, billionaire real estate mogul and investor, known worldwide as a financial risk taker and cutthroat businessman. Odd’s childhood was littered with personal chefs, pampering nannies, and lavish homes across the country, all adding up to an admittedly entitled view of the world. Despite his plush upbringing, Odd grew resentful of his family. The youngest of six, he had five older sisters all jockeying for favorable position with their father to carve out their slice of the Della Robbia empire. But not Odd. He often felt neglected, an afterthought. He turned to vandalism, falling in with the wrong crowd and developing an affinity for graffiti and small acts of property damage. After several incidents, he was on shaky ground with his elite New York private school, though his father did his best to smooth things over with the administration. But after getting caught breaking into school grounds after hours, not even the mighty Frank Della Robbia could talk them down from expulsion and a night spent in juvenile hall. Fed up, his father shipped Odd out west to Kadic on a very limited allowance “…to clear my head and sort out my priorities. And I have, I think,” the blonde concluded, with an uncharacteristically self-conscious shrug.

Ulrich, on the other hand, was a native German, though his parents moved to San Diego when he was just a toddler. His mother worked as a college professor, his father, a mechanic. They both worked hard, scraping together a small fortune through years of living well below their means and sheer stinginess. “Have you ever seen Extreme Couponing?” Ulrich asked Jeremy. “Yeah, that’s how my parents live.” An only child, Ulrich found his parents to be extremely domineering. As a C-student, Ulrich could never live up to his parents’ lofty standards, and when he saw an ad for Kadic, he jumped at the opportunity to get out from under their thumb. He spent months convincing them to let him apply “…so I could focus on my studies. At least, that’s what I told them. Really, it was managing to get a partial athletic scholarship that sealed the deal.”

Maya was always within arm’s reach as well—Jeremy rigged his laptop to show the supercomputer’s interface in addition to the PC back in his dorm, so he could bring Maya outside to join them. She listened intently, asking probing questions and learning more about what it meant to be human. Inside the tower, Maya discovered that she could use the holographic interface to access the internet, a development that exponentially expanded her scope of the world. Her questions evolved from “What is a bird?” to “How does a bird fly?” and over the course of two days, she actually began to show hints of a sense of humor and an intellect to rival Jeremy’s.

Finally, after two seemingly endless days of classes and coursework, Jeremy agreed that they had lightened their load enough to go to the factory on Thursday night. “We wait until dusk,” he said over dinner. “That way we won’t be spotted.”

That was the idea, anyway. In reality, they found themselves slipping into the manhole within the hour; the three boys were simply too eager to put it off any longer.

Once in the factory chamber, Jeremy wasted no time sending Odd and Ulrich to meet Maya in the Ice Sector. There, they spent hours careening across the frozen landscape, with its starless sky and its luminescent ice flows. Maya was determined to cross from one end of the Sector to the other, but it was one thing to see the route on Jeremy’s map and quite another to attempt it on Lyoko. Their paths led across meandering peninsulas and through twisting caverns, often doubling back on themselves, making travel much less direct than in other Sectors. After two hours’ progress saw them little more than halfway across the Sector, Odd and Ulrich broke off into an impromptu game of tag. Ulrich had the advantage in speed, but Odd was like a greased hog, nimble enough to put up a good fight, especially when he could hook his claws into a wall and climb out of reach.

Meanwhile, Jeremy worked on his laptop, seeing exactly what he could do to control the supercomputer remotely. To his disappointment, it wasn’t much. Despite its stellar specs, the laptop was simply too much of a limiting factor in manipulating the powerful supercomputer, like trying to put a leash on a shark. He couldn’t use the scanners at all, but he could operate some of the cursory functions and do programming within Lyoko’s impressive framework.

He also leafed through F.H.’s journal, going into the weeds with the theories and mathematics behind the virtual world. Even taking his time, he was hard-pressed to follow F.H.’s work. Like before, he kept finding holes. Not fallacies, to be sure, but substantial gaps in F.H.’s line of reasoning, as if the journal was missing the connecting tissue that was crucial to understanding the larger body of work.

Still, he worked with what he had. He understood a little more about the Temporal Adjustments and how they functioned. Essentially, the supercomputer was able to create a closed loop, meaning it would establish a point in time to which a future Lyoko-ite could return to. Normally this loop was fixed at twelve hours—whenever a return to the past is initiated, the operator would return to a point exactly twelve hours in the past. However, because the supercomputer had been dormant, their previous jump could only take them back to when Jeremy had flipped the switch to turn Lyoko on. So that’s why Maya knew me when I had no knowledge of her, Jeremy mused. Then another thought came to him. It’s no wonder why Lyoko is so ahead of its time. If F.H. could routinely do days over again, he could accomplish years of work in a fraction of the time.

And again, Jeremy wondered at the missing pages behind the heading XANA and the cryptic message etched into the back cover: “Check the towers. Always.” Are the two connected? Are the torn pages an accident, or was F.H. trying to hide something? On a whim, he set his laptop up so that it would perform the tower scan function every hour on the hour. Just in case…

Just before they finished on Lyoko for the night, Jeremy made another important discovery. There was a way to begin a delayed virtualization, meaning he could virtualize himself by giving himself a minute or so to get down to the scanners.

The thought gave Jeremy pause. The virtual world elated Odd and Ulrich. Being on Lyoko gave them a sheer joy that was infectious. Jeremy felt it the whole time he watched them flit across the Ice Sector; he couldn’t help but smile. However, going in himself… He shook his head. The thought terrified him. Unlike his friends, he wasn’t athletically inclined. I’d be liable to trip over my own feet and fall into the digital sea. But he knew it was something he needed to do. After all, the only way to remember their jumps to the past was to be virtualized. He had to go.

So he began a virtualization, giving himself exactly a minute to get down to the scanner room, with the added precaution of an auto-materialization a minute later. It’s just for a minute, he told himself as he stood out of the chair. What’s the worst that can happen?

“Guys? I’m coming in…”

It was bad.

Like, really bad.

First he fell flat on his face, landing in a heap on the icy plain, much to a guffawing Odd’s delight. Even Ulrich couldn’t help but chuckle a little at Jeremy’s expense.

That wasn’t unexpected; Jeremy never thought his entrance would be all that graceful. But then he stood up, turned, and there she was. Maya.

“It’s nice to finally see you in person,” she said with a smile, extending a hand toward Jeremy.

Jeremy blanked. It was like his mind was a clock that a single stuck cog had ground to a halt. He stared from Maya to her outstretched hand, and all he could think was, When the hell did she learn how to shake hands?

Apparently, he had been standing stock still for longer than he thought, because Maya’s gaze became uncertain. “Am I doing something wrong?” she asked, looking at her hand.

“No,” Jeremy said quickly, rushing forward and almost tripping, so that when he gripped her hand in his, he almost took both of them to the ground. When he finally steadied himself, he blurted out, “Nice to see you, too.” Or, at least, that’s what he tried to say. It sounded more like “Nigh tsee yahtoo.”

“Uh, Einstein?” said Odd, bemused. “Did you just have a stroke?”

Spinning away from Maya, Jeremy blushed and turned to Ulrich. “Materialize me.”

“Are you sure?” the brunette answered, hefting a sword tentatively. “I mean, you just got here.”

“I’m sure. Someone has to be in the control room.” Not to mention I might die of embarrassment if I stay here for another second.

Nodding, Ulrich stepped up to Jeremy and ran him through with the sword. The next thing he knew, Jeremy was gasping for air, pulling himself from a scanner.

He hadn’t even lasted the full minute.

A half hour later, Jeremy called it quits, beginning the process of Odd and Ulrich’s materialization. Soon, they were crossing the bridge under a cloudy sky, headed back to campus. Even Odd had the grace not to mention Jeremy’s experience on Lyoko—for which Jeremy was eternally grateful—instead lamenting about not being able to jump a dozen feet in the air at will.

Before he knew it, Jeremy was back in his dorm room, still slightly reeling, but oddly hopeful. After all, he had met Maya in the flesh—well, as close to in the flesh as possible, considering—and he had plenty of time to get used to being around the virtual girl, even if he was determined to never return to the virtual world again. A smile was plastered to his face by the time he pulled his bedcovers up to his chin, and he felt perfectly content with his life for the first time in years.

“Goodnight, Maya,” he yawned.

“Goodnight, Jeremy.”

There used to be a radio station down in the basement of Hopper Memorial Library, the library at Kadic Academy. It was student run, a yearly project for the eleventh graders back in the ‘90s, meant to foster business acumen as well as an attempt for Kadic to establish more of a community presence.

Unfortunately for the school, the cost of owning and operating the station became too taxing, especially considering its listenership usually peaked at just a few dozen. The station was scrapped, the room converted into a computer lab and the broadcasting equipment shoved into a closet to gather dust. The operating computer, an ancient thing, was left as a conduit to the large antenna on the roof, just in case its services should be called upon again.

Early Friday morning, in the soft stillness of the hour before dawn, the library lay shrouded in darkness, its angular, stony edifice meant to resemble a castle. The doors were locked; the floors were silent. So too was that basement computer lab… that is, until the ancient computer wheezed to life.

The computer’s tower groaned, mechanisms shuddering, old neurons firing despite the choking mouthful of dust. The monitor winked through the startup sequence. Then it displayed a distinctive symbol, the symbol that Jeremy discovered on the button he pressed to turn on the supercomputer, and that Odd and Ulrich found on the backs of the menacing Crabs—the lidless, malevolent eye of Lyoko. The symbol of XANA.

In short order, new lines of code sent a series of commands to the antenna, broadcasting a pitch indiscernible to the human ear, broadcasting on all frequencies. For the first time in more than fifteen years, WKDC was on the air.

In the adjacent city, a dog began to howl…

“Jeremy!”

Maya’s shout yanked Jeremy from a sound sleep. Flinging himself out of bed, he stumbled to his desk. The sun was still down, the sky mostly dark but shaded a dull gray to the east. Maya was on all fours, an ear pressed to the tower floor. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Something is changed.” She paused, listening. “There. It is some sort of pulse. Can you hear it?”

Before Jeremy could respond, there was a loud pounding on his door. Ugh… what now? He opened the door to see Odd and Ulrich outlined by the doorframe, backlit by the soft light in the hall. There was a pinched expression on Odd’s face.

“It’s Kiwi,” he said quickly, pushing past Jeremy and sinking down onto the unmade bed. “He ran off.”

Ulrich followed Odd in, shutting the door quietly behind himself. He patted his roommate consolingly on the back. “Tell Jeremy what happened.”

Odd exhaled loudly. “Kiwi started growling in the middle of the night. That’s not like him at all. I should have known something was wrong. He was really agitated, pacing all around the room. Anyway, I figured he needed to go outside, so I scooped him into my bag and took him out back as usual. But when I let him out… well, he just bolted.”

Jeremy didn’t know what to say; he didn’t have much practice with comforting friends. “That’s awful, Odd. I’m sorry.” It came out stiffer than he would have liked, but it seemed to suffice. Odd forced a smile, anyway. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Jeremy saw Maya phase through the tower wall. “Maya, wait!” he exclaimed, looking into the now-empty tower room. “Where are you going?”

“I need to find out what is causing these pulsations,” came her disembodied voice. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

“But what if there are Crabs out there?” Jeremy objected. “Remember what happened the last time you encountered them. You have no weapons.”

Maya’s reply was biting. “I am not a weakling.” She softened slightly. “I can’t wait around for you to come and let me out. Even if there are Crabs out there, I need to learn to take care of myself.”

Rebuked, Jeremy acquiesced. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

Ulrich looked thoroughly confused. “What’s going on?”

“There’s something wrong—”

But Jeremy was interrupted for the second time that morning, as a shrill beeping issued from his PC. A translucent red exclamation point appeared, overlaying the supercomputer’s interface, and a window opened, containing the image of a tower, cloaked in an aura of deep red instead of the typical blue. Next to the tower was a series of readouts, indicating unusually high electrical activity. It appeared the tower scan had found something out of the ordinary.

And below it all, a message was written. CODE: XANA. Jeremy harkened back to the message in the back of the journal. Looks like it was a warning after all.

“There’s a problem on Lyoko. I don’t know what, exactly, but I found something in the back of the journal…” Jeremy told them about XANA and the missing pages, and the results of the tower scan, ending with Maya waking him up and the odd pulsations.

When he finished, Odd rose from the bed. “Well, at least we can do something about it. Come on, let’s head to the factory.”

Jeremy hesitated. “What about school?”

Odd rolled his eyes. “Jeremy, do you really expect me to believe that you would let Maya investigate this on her own? Besides,” he pointed toward the clock on Jeremy’s bedside table, “it’s just after six. We’ll be back with time to spare.”

“I guess there are more important things than algebra,” Jeremy relented with a shrug. “It’ll be a long day, though. Especially if we’re gonna go look for Kiwi after class.”

Odd grinned at Jeremy. “Thanks, Einstein.”

Jeremy returned the smile, turning back toward the desk. “You hear all that, Maya? We’re on our way.”

“See you soon.”

The campus was gloomy, sun still stuck behind the horizon and further concealed by an overcast sky. The air was thick and still, hinting at rain. The boys crossed the grounds quickly, for once not needing to slink under the radar—just three friends taking an early morning stroll, perhaps headed for the gym to work out. They descended the long stairway down to Lower Campus. Rounding the football field and bisecting the sports complex, they peeled off the concrete walk down the well-worn track to the wrought-iron gate of Rosetree Park. Under the elegantly curved arch they marched, through a dense copse of trees and into a familiar clearing just out of sight of the fence where they found…

“There’s my diggity-dog!”

It was Odd who saw Kiwi first, the paunchy mutt sitting squarely on top of the manhole cover, still as stone, showing no reaction to the sudden appearance of his masters.

Grinning ear to ear, Odd took a step toward Kiwi, but Ulrich grabbed his arm. “Odd, wait. Something isn’t right.”

Odd wrested his arm from Ulrich’s grip. “What are you talking about? It’s just Kiwi.”

But Jeremy saw it, too. Even from the edge of the clearing, he could see that Kiwi’s eyes—normally a rich brown—were now a milky white throughout. And why wasn’t he moving? Definitely strange behavior for a dog.

Oblivious, Odd went to his mutt. As the blonde reached halfway, Kiwi lowered his head threateningly and issued a growl. Being so small, it came out as more of a squeak. Hardly intimidating, but a growl nonetheless.

Odd hesitated for only a step, frowning. “Kiwi, what’s gotten into you?” Approaching the manhole, he bent down to soothe his dog.

“Odd,” Jeremy began, “I wouldn’t—”

Kiwi lashed out, sinking his teeth deep into Odd’s wrist and wrenching his head back and forth, as if trying to break the neck of a captive squirrel.

Odd recoiled with a shriek, ripping his wrist free and leaping back; Kiwi held his position on the manhole cover, snarling. Odd spluttered, lips trying and failing to form words, shock and pain on his face. He cradled his wrist in his opposite hand as crimson blood made rivulets down his arm.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. To Jeremy’s horror, dark shapes began to emerge from the underbrush ringing the clearing. More dogs. Lots of them. Eight, ten, maybe a dozen. A variety of breeds and sizes, ranging from a tiny toy poodle to a massive wolfhound. A few had the mangy look of strays, but most had collars. Some dragged leashes behind them, as if they had recently escaped their owners. And all of them, Jeremy noticed, had the same murky white, soulless eyes as Kiwi.

Odd didn’t see them, fixated as he was on Kiwi. “Odd…” Jeremy said evenly, not wanting to upset the canines but desperately needing to get his friend’s attention. No response. “Odd,” he tried again, his tone more insistent.

“What?” Odd snapped, head whipping toward Jeremy.

Jeremy winced, but the dogs held where they were. “Behind you,” he said, voice quavering.

Odd followed Jeremy’s gaze and froze, all color draining from his face. The dogs began a slow advance, step by step padding into the clearing. Heads lowered and hackles raised, they circled behind Kiwi, coalescing into a tight pack. They began to growl.

“Odd, get out of there!”

Everything happened at once. Odd whirled around and bolted just as the pack sprang into motion, his eyes wide, his pumping arm spraying flecks of blood onto the grass. Hot on his tail, the dogs bounded through the clearing, snarling through bared teeth.

That was all Jeremy cared to see. He turned and fled, steps behind Ulrich, running for his life through the trees, under the arch, and across the school lawn, not daring to look back, chest heaving and heart pounding.

They were all the way to the gymnasium when Ulrich slammed to a halt, Jeremy nearly bowling him over in the process. “Look,” the brunette said, turning back toward the pack.

Odd skidded to a stop as well, hands on his knees and panting. He and Jeremy turned to look. The dogs had only pursued them to the park gate. There they stood, defiant and unnaturally still, staring after the boys for several seconds before turning in unison and retreating into the trees. Like they’re guarding something, Jeremy thought suddenly.

“What the hell was that?” Odd demanded, absentmindedly smearing blood all over his trousers.

“Beats me,” Ulrich said, slightly winded. “Some sort of wild dog pack?”

Jeremy shook his head vigorously. “Those weren’t strays. Most of them had collars.” He let out a shuddering breath. “I think they have something to do with Lyoko—”

“WHAT ARE YOU THREE DOING OUTSIDE?”

All three boys jumped nearly out of their skins, turning to see Jim the gym teacher stomping irately toward them from the open gym doors, his bright red windbreaker crinkling noisily with each step. And in his hands, was that a shotgun?

Ulrich started to stammer an explanation as Jim planted his feet in front of the trio. “We—we were taking a walk through the forest, when—”

Jim cut Ulrich off sharply. “So you just had to see it for yourself, huh? Couldn’t just take Ms. Stranix’s word for it?” He gestured the butt of the shotgun at Odd’s still-leaking wrist. “Looks like you got yourself bit, too. Well, that ought to be punishment enough. No need to bother old Stranix. She’s got enough on her plate, what with all the calls home and all.”

All of this went miles over Jeremy’s head. “What are you talking about it?”

Jim hesitated. “You seriously don’t know?” Seeing the answer in their blank faces, his tone lost its edge. “Stranix made an announcement, oh maybe ten minutes ago, now. Dogs have gone wild all across the city. It’s all over the news. Some sorta infectious disease, they’re saying. Classes are cancelled till further notice. All students are supposed to stay inside.”

Jeremy eyed Odd and Ulrich significantly, a look he hoped conveyed we need to talk. Odd nodded very slightly.

Jim took the look to be one of concern. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said reassuringly. “They say humans can’t catch it, whatever it is.” He hefted his gun self-importantly. “Well, come on. Nurse Yolanda isn’t here yet, and I got a first-aid kit in my office. I’ll get you patched up, Odd, then it’s back to the dorms.”

Jeremy stifled a sigh. Maya was alone on Lyoko, boldly venturing into the unknown, and here they were, stuck on campus. There was nothing for it, though, but to follow Jim to his office and let him tend to Odd. The gym teacher swabbed Odd’s wrist with rubbing alcohol—earning a healthy string of curses which Jim was kind enough to overlook, given the circumstances—and wrapped a cloth bandage tightly around the wound. Odd was still bleeding significantly, and Jim said he would probably need stitches once the nurse arrived. To Jeremy, the process was dreadfully slow, but in relatively short order, they were climbing the stairs back to Upper Campus, Jim opining on how lucky it was that he “kept this pee shooter in the trunk.” With one final admonishment for them to stay put, he left them in the lobby of the dorms.

Inside was mayhem. Students were flocking up and down the corridors in their pajamas, chatting excitedly with friends about the day off and crowding into the rooms of those few with cable to watch the news unfold. When the kids saw the three boys enter the building, Odd with his arm caked with blood from wrist to elbow, it was a swarm. Jeremy found himself fighting through the throng, elbowing fellow ninth graders out of the way in a frantic bid for the stairs. “Later!” he shouted over the endless stream of questions from the overexcited crowd. “I said later, damn it!”

Reluctantly, the crowd let them through, and the three boys clambered up the stairs, Ulrich glaring daggers behind them to discourage pursuit.

The activity on the top floor was noticeably more restrained. After all, it was almost all twelfth-graders, and they typically had cooler heads on their shoulders than the rowdy bunch below. Odd garnered a few curious glances, but they kept their distance.

As soon as Jeremy pulled his door flush behind them, Ulrich turned to him and asked, “What makes you think this”—he made an all-encompassing gesture with his arms—“has anything to do with Lyoko?”

Jeremy crossed to his desk and sank into the chair. “It’s a little too convenient, don’t you think? First, Maya discovers a disturbance on Lyoko at roughly the same time that Kiwi goes berserk. Then, the tower scan picks up abnormal readings—I still don’t know what that means, exactly—but when we try to go to the factory to investigate, we find the way blocked.” Odd scoffed; Jeremy eyed him seriously. “Those dogs were guarding the sewers, Odd. They were gathered there somehow, acting in unison despite the fact they were a motley assortment of house pets.” He fished F.H.’s journal out of his messenger bag and flipped to the torn pages. “I think this is the culprit.” He pointed at the word XANA.

“Jeremy, we don’t even know what XANA is,” Odd said doubtfully. “And how could anything in Lyoko control animals? Isn’t that, you know, scientifically impossible or something?”

Jeremy’s gaze became patronizing. “Odd, in the past four days, you were sent inside a computer to fight virtual Crabs with laser arrows that you fire out of your wrists. Oh, and then you traveled back in time. I don’t think we’re in a position to say anything is impossible.”

Odd threw up his hands, the bandaged wrist beginning to show an oozing red splotch. “Fine, but either way, what can we do about it.”

Ignoring Odd for a moment, Jeremy turned to his PC, still displaying the vacant tower and the tower scan’s findings. “Maya, did you catch all that?”

“Yes,” came her quiet reply, “and I think I have an answer.”

“What did you find?”

“I’m in the Forest Sector. That is where the pulsations are the strongest. They led me to a dead-end path that is being watched.”

“More Crabs?” Ulrich asked.

“No. I don’t know what to call them. They fly like birds, but they don’t look like birds. They guard the path to the tower.”

So there is a tower involved, Jeremy thought to himself. “Maya, can you give us a visual.”

“Hold on.”

They were three of them, small and agile—maybe three feet from end to end—keeping themselves aloft with translucent gray wings that moved in a blur. Their small, bulbous heads were eyeless, though the eye-like symbol adorned their crests; their bodies curled beneath them, the putrid color of bile just like the heads. Instead of a stinger at the tail, each had a curved, needle-like protrusion emerging from where a mouth might be. They flew in a slow circle above a forest path, clearly on guard, though they didn’t seem to have noticed Maya hiding a short distance away.

“Hornets,” Odd said.

Jeremy figured that was about as accurate description as any. “Why are they guarding the tower?”

“Something has taken control of it,” Maya answered. “I think… I think that maybe it is XANA. Something about this whole situation feels so familiar, but I can’t quite remember…” She trailed off, sounding frustrated.

“Don’t worry about it, Maya,” Odd said consolingly. “Maybe your memory will return over time. For now, though, what else can you tell us?”

“The air feels increasingly… wrong… the closer I get to the tower. And the pulsations have grown stronger, too. I…” There was a sudden note of clarity in her voice. “I know what to do.”

“What is it?” Jeremy asked.

“In each tower, there is an upper chamber that contains the source code of the tower itself. Once there, I will be able to deactivate it. That will kick the intruder—kick XANA—out of the tower, so that he will no longer be able to influence the real world.”

There was a pause. “XANA is a he now?” Ulrich said to himself, barely audible.

“Maya,” Jeremy said, “are you sure this will work?”

She hesitated. “It’s strange… like I’m acting without thinking. My memory is still gone, but it’s as if certain instincts are bleeding through… But yes. I know this will work.” She paused again. “But Jeremy, you were right. Without weapons, I can’t get past these things on my own. I need Odd and Ulrich to help me get to the tower. Only then can I deactivate it.”

Jeremy looked at Odd and Ulrich. “What do you think?”

“Let me get this straight,” Odd began. “The theory we are going with—and it’s totally insane, by the way—is that this… this XANA, whatever it is, hijacked a tower and is somehow using it to turn domesticated dogs into skilled pack hunters. And the only way to stop this is to go to Lyoko, fight a path through some killer Hornets, and get Maya to flip the switch in the tower?”

Jeremy shrugged. “More or less.”

Odd sighed. “Alright, then. How are we gonna get to the factory if every damn dog in the city’s gone rabid?”

Jeremy smiled, but it was Ulrich who answered. “I think I have an idea…”

Chapter Text

Yumi Ishiyama slept through her alarm.

Well, not exactly. Rather, the damn clock radio broke on her. No matter how much she shook the thing, every station she tuned it to gave her nothing but white noise. Piece of garbage, she thought, ripping the clock out of the wall and tipping it into the meshed metal trashcan at the foot of her bed. Luckily, she was only twenty minutes or so behind schedule. Still plenty of time to spare, as long as she didn’t dawdle.

So rather than lounge around for a bit like most days, she snatched her iPod from her bedside table and took it with her across the hall into the bathroom, plugging it into the small speaker on the counter and cranking it well past what her family would have ordinarily tolerated. That was the best part about having the house to herself for a change—she didn’t have to worry about stepping on anyone’s toes. Her mother was a political aide in Sacramento, gone long before Yumi awoke every morning. The added bonus was her brother, Hiroki, being away on a fieldtrip with her dad along as a chaperone. Which left her as queen, for a few mornings at least.

That allowed Yumi to step into the shower to punk rock blasting at full volume. As such, she was not able to hear the braying of Mrs. Nextdoor’s dog as it clawed furiously at the wooden fence keeping it constrained to the property, or the ringing phone that was the disciplinarian, Ms. Stranix, urging her to stay home. Nor was she unnerved by the unusually frequent sound of sirens keening from the direction of downtown Ophelia.

No, unlike the rest of the city, Yumi’s morning was free of such abnormalities. Better than normal, actually, as she sang along loudly to Paramore’s Misery Business, her brother’s shampoo bottle serving wonderfully as a makeshift microphone.

Once clean and refreshed, she wrapped a pale yellow towel around herself, stepping in front of the bathroom mirror and wiping away the condensation with a waterlogged hand. Frowning, she peered closely at her face, fingers brushing over the unseemly red bumps forming a cluster to the left of her nose.

With a sigh, Yumi grabbed a small jar from the counter and unscrewed the lid, dabbing the beige cream lightly over the breakout. She wasn’t one to wear makeup, but that didn’t mean she had to let acne find a home on her face. Then she quickly brushed and dried her shoulder-length black hair, conscious of the time she still had to make up if she wanted breakfast from the cafeteria.

Returning to her bedroom, she dressed according to her preferred color palette—black sweater on black pants, with dark gray combat boots. The garb had the effect of making her seem aloof and unapproachable. Which was fine by Yumi. Dealing with people—especially her fellow tenth graders—could be so draining. Plus, anyone who judged her solely on her appearance was not someone she wanted approaching her anyway.

For the brief moment without her music, Yumi did notice the near constant barking that drifted through her open window. But she simply threw on her headphones and pocketed the iPod, content to drown out the commotion.

Making a quick circuit around the room, Yumi swept her textbooks from her desk into her bag and pulled a change of clothes out of her armoire for her afternoon run. Unplugging her phone from the wall, she threw that into the bag as well. Then she closed her bedroom door, moving along the dark landing and down the stairs, hand brushing the polished wooden banister.

The downstairs was fashioned in the style of her parents’ native Japan. Technically her native Japan, too, though she had lived in California since she was three years old. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her heritage, or anything—far from it; Yumi was proud of the land of her birth—she just had no memory of ever living in Japan. As a result, her life had an interesting dichotomy. There was the world outside her front door—American suburbia and casual consumerism. And there was her Japanese homelife. The rooms Yumi passed through were open and austerely decorated, with paneled sliding doors and bright, airy color schemes. The dining room featured a squat brown table flanked by cushions instead of chairs. Décor tended to depict nature scenes, from decorative pillows embroidered with flowers to folding screens painted to resemble verdant forests.

Yumi gave the empty house a once-over, turning off lights and turning down the AC per her parents’ instructions. Satisfied, she left through the side door and locked it behind herself.

Outside, her street was empty. Not a single car could be seen in either direction. That struck Yumi as odd; while not a busy thoroughfare by any means, there was almost always at least a trickle of traffic pointed downtown. Thinking nothing of it, she turned left out of her driveway and began her walk to school.

Almost all of the Kadic student body lived on campus, but there were a few like Yumi who made the daily commute. The way was short—a little less than a mile—and fairly easy despite being rather hilly. Half a block east, then five short blocks south on Magnolia Street to the school gates.

Yumi walked briskly past cookie-cutter houses, each arrayed exactly like her own—on the outside, at least. They were heavily stuccoed, with dark brown shingled roofs, each positioned on narrow slices of lawn not much wider than the houses themselves. Those lawns were just as barren as the road. None of her neighbors were fetching the morning paper or sidling into their cars to leave for the day. Again, Yumi saw this as strange, but she didn’t truly feel as if anything was amiss until she reached the end of the block. Magnolia Street was deserted, too.

That stopped her in her tracks. Her street was one thing, but Magnolia Street was the quickest route from the suburbs north and east to nearby Sacramento. It was always jammed with cars. In the far distance, several blocks beyond the entrance to the school, a bright red flare burned in the middle of the road.

Seeing it, Yumi relaced. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation, after all. Just a car accident, she thought. Police must have blocked off the road.

Sure that all was right with the world—or that, at the very least, nothing was seriously wrong—Yumi crossed the road to the opposite sidewalk, starting the steady climb up the first hill on the way to Kadic.

It was pleasant, actually, to have a morning without angry drivers and acrid exhaust fumes. Yumi quickly lost herself in the music, her mind wandering to the French test that she had later that morning, or wondering what meal the cafeteria would have bacon today. She didn’t see the golden retriever lurking under a car, tracking her movement along the street, or the Pomeranian snarling at her from a strand of trees.

In fact, she was really enjoying herself by the time she reached the security booth at the mouth of Kadic’s driveway. Today is gonna be a great day, Yumi thought, stopping with a deep breath to dig her school ID out of her bag.

A sudden blur of motion streaked through her periphery before she was knocked to the pavement.

Pumping his leg furiously, Jeremy struggled to get his scooter up the hill away from the dorms, lagging behind Odd and Ulrich. They were several paces ahead of him, propelling themselves with relative ease, soaring over the pavement on their skateboards. Each of them—Jeremy included—wielded one of Ulrich’s golf clubs like a katana. Jeremy didn’t think either of them were willing to actually take a swing at a dog regardless of the circumstances—he knew he sure wasn’t—but better safe than sorry.

Up in the dorms, excited faces crowded into windows as word of their departure spread. Jeremy didn’t care about that; he was more concerned with teachers like Jim barring their way. Luckily there were none in sight. All good, so far.

So he panted up the slope leading away from the center of campus, Odd yelling back “Mush boy!” as the walk leveled out next to the middle school dorms. Jeremy rolled his eyes but simply had no breath to spare on a retort.

“Can it, Odd!” Ulrich said for him. It was the brunette’s idea to go through town; it was either that or find an alternate route to the sewers, which none of them wanted to attempt with the prospect of quasi-rabid dogs breathing down their necks. There were none that Jeremy could see, but that was likely to change once they entered the city proper. If this XANA was responsible for the dogs’ behavior as Jeremy suspected, he had no doubt XANA could manage to have eyes on them, perhaps even that very moment.

With a shake of the head, Jeremy banished the thought, putting all his focus into moving forward. They had accounted for the variables as best as they could—vehicles to speed them past any canine entanglement and tools for brute force if absolutely necessary.

The level ground allowed him to achieve a decent pace, wind grabbing at the fabric of his T-shirt. Past the middle school dorms, the sidewalk banked sharply down and around a small hill, arcing out of sight to the right. Odd and Ulrich took the turn without a problem, leaning into it and carving a path down the hill. But Jeremy, still unused to Kadic’s grounds, misjudged the descent, pulling on the handlebars and nearly crashing into Odd—who somehow managed to push Jeremy back upright and stay on his board.

“Alright,” Odd shouted as they straightened out, “who let Einstein behind the wheel?”

“Really, Odd?” Ulrich called. “Jokes at a time like this?”

In spite of everything, Jeremy smiled. Who could have imagined his first week at his new school would veer so wildly off the rails?

Another dip, and their path ahead merged with the asphalt of a road running perpendicular. Again, Jeremy leaned hard to the right, more successfully this time, using the full width of the road for his turn—though his careful concentration did earn him a smirk from a much more effortless Odd. Then they were on the blacktop of the school drive, Jeremy’s scooter aimed toward the security booth a hundred feet off. Even with the tinted windows, he could tell that it was vacant. That’s not a good sign. Jeremy switched legs, churning his calf faster, ignoring the bone-deep weariness settling into his scrawny legs. I really need to work out more… Or at all. Breathing laboriously, he sped past the booth, finally pulling even with Odd and Ulrich and surging through the open school gates.

Suddenly, she was there. A tall girl in dark clothes, planted on the sidewalk in front of Jeremy and rooting through a small bag for something. Jeremy yanked on the handlebars, narrowly missing the girl, but Ulrich was not so lucky and—

WHAM!

Ulrich smashed into the girl, his skateboard and 9-iron bounding loose across the road as he hit the pavement. Hard.

There he lay, dazed, staring up at the pearlescent sky, wondering in a distant sort of way why his lungs weren’t working properly. Then it was like a switch had been flipped; he drew a ragged breath, sweet air filling his lungs, pain throbbing to life in the back of his head as he sat up too quickly. Ulrich gingerly patted his scalp and was relieved when his hand didn’t come away bloody.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Ulrich looked up and… it was her again. Yumi. The girl he often spied from the soccer field—much to Odd’s amusement—the girl with the poignant grace and reserved smile that usually set Ulrich’s heart to racing, the girl who could kick his ass at karate and not even break a sweat doing it. There she was, out of the blue. Of all the developments of that hectic morning, it was this one that left Ulrich’s brain buffering.

Yumi was furious. She threw something small at Ulrich which struck him in the chest with a thud and landed in his lap. It was a broken iPod. “You’re gonna pay for that,” she growled, rubbing her badly skinned palms almost as an afterthought. “Well? Do you have anything to say for yourself, or are you just gonna gape like an idiot?”

Then Ulrich heard something that jolted him back to awareness. A distant howl.

Wincing, Ulrich scrambled to his feet and saw his fear echoed on the faces of Jeremy and Odd. “Sorry,” he said quickly—and rather distractedly, though he figured that was probably warranted—skittering quickly after his board and club. “We have to go.”

“What do you mean, ‘You have to go’?”

But Yumi was ignored as another howl sounded, this one much closer and echoed by a handful of others. Like a search party.

“Come on,” Odd said intently, “We have to keep moving.”

The three boys started to move, but Yumi simply stood there, angry as ever. Realization dawned in Ulrich. “Jeremy,” he said, getting the boy’s attention, “I don’t think she knows.”

All three boys looked at Yumi. “Know what?” she demanded. “Will somebody tell me what is going on?”

“Should we take her with us?” Odd posited.

“I don’t know,” Jeremy answered. “I think she can make it to the admin building if she hurries.”

“She can fight,” Ulrich put in. “I’ve seen it. She could help us.”

“I—am—right—here!” Yumi shouted, clearly galled at being ignored. Then she seemed to truly take the boys in for the first time—Odd and Ulrich hefting their golf clubs like weapons, Odd with his tightly wrapped wrist beginning to drip fat red drops onto the sidewalk—and she hesitated. “You’re all crazy,” she concluded, shaking her head. “Totally nuts. I don’t have time for this. I gotta—”

But whatever Yumi had to do died on her lips, as she turned toward the school and froze in her tracks. Skulking down the driveway in a tight formation was a gathering of dogs, Kiwi among them. To Ulrich’s eyes, it appeared their ranks had swelled by more than half. As one, they halted, motionless, about thirty feet away.

Yumi balked at the canines suddenly blocking her path, perhaps noticing the lifeless cast of their eyes or the odd way they held absolutely still. Regardless, her gaze swept across Kiwi’s red-tinged muzzle and Odd’s bandaged wrist, uncertainty yielding to realization on her face. At once, every dog began to growl.

“Hop on!” Jeremy yelled.

Yumi didn’t need to be told twice. She sprang toward Jeremy, crowding behind him on the scooter. Ulrich felt a twinge of jealousy as Yumi pressed close to Jeremy to grip the handlebars, but it was quickly forgotten as the dogs leaped forward, barking viciously, spittle flying from their muzzles.

Ulrich flung his skateboard to the road and tore after Jeremy, Odd at his side. He didn’t have to look back to know that the dogs were gaining on him; he could hear their snarls drawing closer, the rhythmic clacking of claws on asphalt.

Fortunately, the road rolled over a hill and dipped into a decline. Ulrich and the others quickly amassed speed. The canine advance stalled out as the humans began to outpace them, and when Ulrich chanced a look back, he was pleased to see the dogs losing ground.

Relieved, he turned around just in time to swerve around a line of parked cars. “Watch out!” Odd called a little too late, smirking. Is he ever serious? Ulrich thought incredulously. Even after two years of Odd’s ill-timed humor, his roommate still managed to surprise him.

By the time they reached the bottom of the first hill, the dogs were a comfortable distance behind; Ulrich could count several stately homes between themselves and their pursuers. Jeremy and Yumi had established a comfortable—if awkward—rhythm on the scooter, powering themselves forward in tandem with Yumi using her left leg and Jeremy his right. Despite himself, Ulrich began to actually enjoy the ride, rocketing without reservation down a road normally cluttered with vehicles. Now, the only other people to be seen were those few in the windows of houses they passed, their attention drawn by the cacophonic canines.

The sense of satisfaction lasted only until they began to climb the next hill. For one thing, their speed slowed, allowing the dogs to close the gap behind them. That wasn’t the biggest issue, however—there was still a reasonable space between the two parties, one that the canines wouldn’t come close to closing completely before they reached the top of the hill.

No, the biggest issue was the second, smaller pack of canines that awaited them there. There were four dogs, formed up so that they spanned the road at equal intervals, a living barricade. Three were medium-sized, with the last being a Great Dane that Ulrich was pretty sure Odd could ride like a pony.

Ulrich held his 9-iron in unsure hands. If Jeremy’s guess was accurate, none of this was the animals’ fault. They didn’t know what they were doing. And when Ulrich and the rest did whatever they had to do on Lyoko, everything would go back to normal… right? Or would the dogs be stuck like this? Either way, Ulrich was extremely uncomfortable with taking a swing at fido.

Yumi, it seemed, had no such compunction. As they crested the hill and their speed had been reduced to its slowest, the dogs lashed out. Yumi delivered sharp kicks to first one, then another of the smaller breeds, turning them aside, the dogs yelping as they shrunk back between parked cars.

Of course the Great Dane had to go for Ulrich. Making a last-second decision, he held the club defensively, one hand on each end with a length of metal shaft in between. When the Grate Dane leaped, jaws poised to take a chunk of flesh from Ulrich’s face, he forced the metal shaft into the dog’s open maw and pushed, using all his strength and momentum to turn the beast aside. He lurched precariously and nearly fell, but he managed to keep to his board. Looking around, he saw Odd do similarly, the final dog sent sprawling to the ground.

Three times they met clusters of dogs on their wild ride, and three times they dispatched the animals with relative ease—though, as Ulrich noticed, none were nearly as big as the Great Dane. There were four dogs in each group, giving further credence to the idea the canines were being marshaled by some external force. The dogs recovered, rising to join the ever-growing horde further back, but by then, Ulrich and the others were long gone.

By the time Jeremy led the way onto Remosa Avenue and the final straightaway, they were at least a half-minute ahead of the pack. Lake Remosa came into view, a mirror of the uniform gray sky above. And with it came the factory, its blocky structure looking even more shambling in the flat light.

They turned onto the factory bridge, squeezing around the guard hut and easing their pace slightly to dodge the detritus strewn across the bridge. They ditched their wheels at the factory’s large entrance, just as a light rain began to fall.

“Why here?” Yumi questioned, looking around the large complex.

“In a minute,” said Odd, gesturing toward the continued barking in the distance. “Let’s put a few doors between us and them.” He then crossed the landing and slid down one of the dangling ropes, landing below.

Not to be outdone, Yumi followed without hesitation, copying the maneuver with a skill and grace that left Ulrich staring. She slid without flourish and landed without remark. When Ulrich followed, he clenched the rope rather tighter than normal, trying to convince himself it had nothing to do with Yumi’s watching eyes. He landed wringing his reddened hands, though he was glad that he had at least managed it better than Jeremy, who’s energy-depleted legs stuttered and nearly gave out beneath him.

The four crowded into the elevator, and Ulrich hit the button for the basement chamber. As the doors slid shut, it sounded as if the dogs had started onto the bridge. If they couldn’t reverse whatever XANA had done to them, they’d be trapped. Then the doors were closed and the noise was only a poignant memory.

Yumi let out a sigh, hands on her hips, before introducing herself to Jeremy and Odd. The two responded in kind—Jeremy completely winded.

“Where are we?” Yumi asked, eyeing the grumbling elevator car with curiosity.

As if in response, the elevator shuddered and stopped. Jeremy entered the code to release the electromagnetic lock; the doors withdrew, revealing the blue-green room beyond. “Only the greatest place in the world,” he said.

From the first words of Jeremy’s explanation, Yumi was skeptical. A virtual world? Really, that’s what you’re going with? But she listened, a patient and observant audience, at least willing to hear their lies before she objected. As the story went on, it grew increasingly farfetched. Artificial intelligence? Virtualization? Time travel? And that was just what Jeremy and the others supposedly knew for a fact—their theories beyond that included some rogue element called XANA that could turn the city’s canines into some sort of militia!

The strange thing was, Yumi found herself believing him. Sure, the story was fantastical, but it was also intricately detailed. Either Jeremy was an incredible liar or there was at least some truth behind his words. Then there were Odd and Ulrich, nodding along fervently, inserting the occasional tidbit of their own. Like when Odd described exactly what it allegedly felt like to be struck by red laser fire by a virtual Crab.

And there was the corroborating evidence. The room itself, for one thing, with its hologram and its impressive array of monitors. Then Jeremy had the AI, which he named Maya, speak with her. Yumi supposed the voice could be anybody, but Jeremy had not needed to place a call or even press a button for Maya to speak. When Jeremy fished F.H.’s journal out of a pocket of his cargo pants, Yumi was convinced.

“Okay,” she said, skimming the first page of the journal and handing it back to Jeremy. “I believe you.” Saying it out loud didn’t make it any less surprising. “But what I don’t understand,” she continued, “is if you want to stop all of this from happening, and you say you can time travel, then why don’t you go back to before it started and, you know, kill it at the source?”

Jeremy blinked in surprise. “Huh. I didn’t think of that…”

But Maya quashed the idea. “Lyoko needs every tower at its disposal to make the jump. It won’t work with one under XANA’s control.”

Yumi shrugged. “It was worth a shot. What do we do, then?”

“Odd and Ulrich are going to Lyoko,” Jeremy replied. “You can join them or stay here with me.”

Yumi hesitated. Very little in her life ever frightened her. Truthfully, this didn’t scare her, per se, but she had the distinct feeling that she was stepping into a situation that was far beyond her, that she was about to leap headlong off a cliff without knowing what awaited her at the bottom.

Well, she couldn’t leave—not with the canines lurking outside—and she had the impression that Jeremy needed no help operating the supercomputer. That left only one option where Yumi could be of any use. “I’ll go,” she said. “But I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”

Jeremy beamed. “Odd and Ulrich will show you the ropes.”

Odd placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Welcome to the team,” he said earnestly. Ulrich nodded, a strangely pinched look on his face.

The scanner room was exactly as Jeremy had described. Three tall, golden cylinders radiating a golden light. Yumi’s heart raced as she stood in front of one. It was one thing to have it described and quite another to see it for herself. To enter it. Maybe I am a little scared, she admitted privately.

“It’s easy,” Ulrich said as if reading her mind, stepping into his own. “Quick and painless.”

With a nod, Yumi climbed the shallow step into the scanner, her mouth a little on the dry side. Turning around, she saw Odd smiling at her encouragingly. “See you on the other side,” he said.

Then the doors closed, sealing Yumi to her fate.

Chapter Text

Ulrich stuck the landing on the spongy surface of the Forest Sector. He was getting pretty good at that. In quick succession, Odd landed with ease next to him, and Yumi crashed to the ground with a heavy thud on his other side.

“A sore ass is a rite of passage,” Odd said, lending Yumi a hand and pulling her up. “You’ll get used to the drop.”

Yumi’s wince as she straightened quickly fled behind a look of utter amazement as she gazed around at the strange forest, its thickly-trunked trees rising through the empty space around their clearing, branches above melding into the soft white-green sky.

Lucky for Ulrich, Yumi was too busy gawking at her surroundings to see the way that he gawked at her. She was beautiful. Of course, Ulrich had thought so of her back on Earth, but in the nature of Lyoko, her beauty had been distilled into something more, something inhuman. Her face was like polished stone, strong and lustrous, with a hint of coloring to her cheeks; her eyes shone like pieces of onyx beneath angles brows. Her jet-black hair hung loose about her shoulders, save for some locks that were gathered into a topknot, perhaps to keep them out of her eyes.

Her clothes suited a fighter; Yumi wore a modified kimono, with the sleeves and skirts cut short to allow for a wider range of movement. The robes were half gray and half red, with silver and gold sakura blossoms on each side respectively. A wide yellow obi wound around her middle, forming an elaborate knot behind her back, and a blood-red cord tied around the ensemble held everything in place. Two square brown handles poked out from behind that cord. Knives, possibly. Below the skirts, red leggings led to black combat boots that extended well up her calves.

Yumi’s examination of their surroundings took in the clearing itself. It was roughly circular in shape and very small—perhaps twenty feet wide at the most—featuring a ground meant to look mossy despite not actually being alive. Four narrow paths swerved off between the trees. Maya was right—there was a significant pulsing underfoot, a bass rumble occurring at regular intervals. It seemed to have a vector, moving toward the path behind Odd.

Then she turned her gaze to Odd and Ulrich. Odd, she favored with a crooked smile as he showed off his clawed fingers, but when her appraising look passed over Ulrich, her expression became strangely blank, unreadable. She seemed to be searching for something. It made Ulrich shift his weight between his feet.

He was rescued by Jeremy. “There is some sort of interference around the tower,” came his voice from everywhere at once. “This is as close as I could get you. I’ll lead you to Maya—”

“Not so fast, Einstein,” interrupted Odd. He turned to Yumi. “Jump.”

Yumi blinked. “What?”

“Jump right now, as high as you can.”

Though confused, Yumi obliged, coiling her legs and springing high into the air. An awestruck joy overcame her as she soared fifteen feet straight up, far surpassing what was possible in the real world. Unprepared for the height, her legs drifted out from under her as she arced back to the ground, and she landed flat on her back.

Slowly, and in some pain, she sat up and once again let Odd pull her to her feet. “You are stronger here,” the blonde said, his tail flicking subconsciously behind him. “You’ll get a feel for the place pretty quickly.”

Yumi nodded. “Anything else I need to know?”

It was Ulrich who answered this time. “Let me see your weapons,” he said, pointing to the handles tucked into her belt.

Yumi grabbed one, but wasn’t a knife as Ulrich had suspected. It was simply a short wooden stick, maybe seven inches long. Scratch that, it was actually two wooden sticks pressed together. They unfolded from one another and became…

“A fan?” said Odd, frowning. For that’s what it was, a folding fan of some synthetic material, a pink floral design on a field of yellow. “What kind of rip-off is that?”

Ulrich shrugged. “Maybe the supercomputer knows you’re Japanese. I think it reads your mind somehow when it scans you.”

“So it stuck me in a kimono and gave me some pretty fans?” Yumi countered, unamused. “That’s just racist.” She flung the fan over the edge of the clearing in disgust.

Only, it didn’t remain a fan. As it left her fingertips, it spun like a frisbee, becoming a glowing, yellow-white disc, emitting a high-pitched peal as it sped through the air. It carved a deep, straight gash in the trunk of a tree before curving in a graceful arc, angling back toward the clearing like a boomerang and picking up speed as it circled back to Yumi. With one hand, she reached up and plucked it out of the air. Intrigued, she turned it over in her fingers, but it was once again just a simple fan. “On second thought, I think I’ll keep them,” she said, a note of wonder in her voice. She returned the fan to her waist.

“Aim for the eye,” said Odd. “Well, it’s not really an eye, but…”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” finished Ulrich.

“Are you ready, yet?” came Jeremy’s voice once again. He sounded impatient.

“Just one more thing,” Ulrich replied. “Yumi, you have 100 Life Points. If you lose them all, you go back to the factory. Not the end of the world, but you do get stuck there for a while. Still, it’s better than the alternative.”

Ulrich walked to the edge of the clearing, motioning for Yumi to follow. When she saw the undulating digital sea far below, she gasped. “That is death,” said Ulrich, pointing down. “Jeremy says if we fall down there, we are smashed into a billion pieces. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”

Yumi stared off the edge a moment longer before turning to Ulrich and nodding. “I’ll be careful,” she pledged.

“Alright, Jeremy,” Odd called. “Lead us.”

“It’s about time. Maya is growing restless.”

“Sounds like she’s not the only one,” Ulrich grumbled. Yumi laughed. Why did that have to make his heart leap into his throat?

Jeremy ignored the quip. “Take the southwest passage.”

Odd smirked. “Can you be a bit more specific, Einstein? I forgot my compass.”

“He means that way.” Ulrich pointed down the path he had identified earlier. “The path where the pulsations lead.”

Odd paused, listening. He nodded. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go!” He took off down the path without a backward glance.

Ulrich met Yumi’s eyes with an apologetic smile on his roommate’s behalf. Then they followed after the blonde.

Yumi couldn’t keep the grin off her face as she ran down the narrow forest track after Odd and Ulrich. Flew was a more apt word. The odd scenery blurred around her, and still she felt as if she had another gear to go to if she needed. Definitely better than the school track, she thought.

The path curved slightly to the left, just enough for the way ahead to be obstructed by the tall trees which seemed to rise out of the sea. Those waters frightened her—certain death was a harrowing prospect, for sure. However, that fear ranked well below her excitement, her exhilaration. This was what it meant to be alive.

Soon they arrived in another small clearing, this one complete with a pond surrounded by boulders that were scabbed with fake lichen. From one corner of the pond, a waterfall dove off the edge of the clearing, the stream of water dissipating into mist long before it reached the waves below. And sitting cross-legged on one of the boulders, overlooking the pond and the waterfall, was a girl.

She was shorter than Yumi, her figure more spritely and slender where Yumi was muscular, with ears that came to slight points beneath her short pink hair. She wore a pink vest, which gave way to a cream-colored shirt with billowy white sleeves. Similarly, a short pink skirt flared out over loose-fitting cream pants, which in turn ended at the ankles of her pink shoes.

Maya stood with a warm smile, greeting Odd and Ulrich like old friends before turning to Yumi. “It’s nice to meet you, Yumi,” she said, holding out a hand which Yumi took.

“Likewise,” Yumi said, shaking.

Maya smiled, then gestured toward the far end of the clearing and the path that formed its only other exit. “This way,” she said, spurring them forward. “It’s not far.”

The four of them left the clearing at a jog, Yumi bringing up the rear.

Jeremy watched the exchange through Ulrich’s eyes. Now that it wasn’t happening to him personally, he found himself marveling at just how quickly Maya was learning, a very proud smile on his face. When Maya discovered the internet, she was quite eager to learn what the real world was like, and in a few short days, she had already become somewhat versed in the complexities of social interaction. It impressed him yet again just how advanced of a creation Maya truly was. It’s like she’s almost human…

A mechanical churning behind Jeremy interrupted his thoughts. Whirling around in his chair, he saw the elevator doors close and heard it withdraw. Who could that be? He thought, an ominous feeling in his gut. Maybe we were followed. All that barking was bound to attract someone’s attention. Unless…

With a gasp, he sprang for the keyboard just as the elevator stopped moving. And his worst fears were realized as the sound of furious barking filled the elevator shaft behind him. His heart plummeted. He should have known—if animals could be made to track them halfway across the city, of co¬urse they could operate an elevator. Which began to move again.

Frantic, Jeremy flew through a series of menus to a list of options he had previously discounted, functions that controlled not the supercomputer but the factory itself, the descending canines giving him a sort of feverish clarity. He found what he was looking for, a control panel for the factory’s electrical circuits. He pressed a button, cutting off the power to the elevator.

For an awful moment, nothing happened; Jeremy sat frozen as the barking grew louder and louder. Then the elevator issued a shuddering squeal and ground to a halt.

Jeremy released a pent-up breath, sinking into his chair. Behind him, the hateful barks morphed into—oddly—frustrated yelps, almost as if the dogs knew they had been stymied. Which, Jeremy found himself admitting more and more, they probably did.

His relief only lasted a moment. With a sharp inhale, he turned again to stare at the elevator, at the doors which kept the snarling hounds at bay. The doors which now kept Jeremy locked within the factory chamber. He was safe, but there was a cost—if disactivating the tower on Lyoko did not fix whatever XANA had done to the canines, they would be trapped.

Jeremy cleared his throat. “Guys, we have a problem…”

Knowing that the success of their mission now meant getting out of the factory alive put a little extra zip in Odd’s step. He sprinted alongside Maya, with Ulrich and Yumi following close behind. Back in Jeremy’s dorm, Maya had said the air felt wrong somehow. Odd felt it, too—an off-putting sensation that he couldn’t quite define, like the atmosphere was thick with… something. The pulsations grew stronger as well, now more like small tremors under his feet.

They darted into another clearing, this one bisected by a narrow ravine that bottomed out at the sea far below. A bridge of three logs linked the halves of the clearing together.

Maya pulled up just short of the log bridge, motioning for the others to be quiet. She said nothing, searching for something in the surrounding trees, as tense as Odd had ever seen her.

Seeing nothing, Maya relaxed slightly. “I saw them here,” she said. “They moved back and forth through the trees, like they were expecting—”

“Look out!” cried Jeremy.

Odd heard the sound of wings behind him before he was knocked to the ground, a searing pain in the small of his back.

Stunned, he rose slowly, the lingering sensation of electricity crackling across his flesh. It felt exactly like the lasers from the Crabs. Regaining his bearings, he saw Maya had been struck as well, also rising unsteadily to her feet. Ulrich and Yumi stood between them, sword and fan in hand respectively, squaring off against the culprits.

The Hornets looked even more menacing than they had in Jeremy’s dorm. There were three of them, puke yellow with the eye of Lyoko on their heads, hovering over the ravine and blocking the way onward. From the unconventional stingers hanging down from the underside of their heads came a steady stream of laser fire, red just like the Crabs.

Ulrich took point, drawing the Hornets’ fire away from the rest of them—Odd and Maya still staggered and Yumi still untested—using his sword along with his Lyoko-heightened reflexes to deflect the lasers, though he still couldn’t aim them with any regularity.

Yumi flung her fan at the Hornets, missing wildly but managing to scatter them, the three bugs turning and flying away in a tight, triangular formation.

Odd finally recovered enough to fire two arrows from his wrist; one struck the retreating back of a Hornet before they disappeared. The whole incident couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds.

“Where’d they go?” Odd asked, flexing his shoulder blades.

“I don’t know,” answered Jeremy. “If they leave your proximity, they disappear from my maps. Probably something XANA does to cloak them.”

“You couldn’t have given us a little more warning, Einstein?” Odd growled, though without much venom.

“Those things are fast,” Jeremy said defensively. “I barely saw them before they were on top of you. On the bright side, each on of their lasers only deals 20 points of damage.”

“Hornets have more mobility than Crabs, but less firepower,” Ulrich concluded.

“So what do we do now?” asked Yumi. “I may be new here, but I know a trap when I see one. The Hornets want us to follow.”

Ulrich turned to Maya. “You say the tower is this way?”

“I’m sure of it,” Maya answered with a nod.

Odd smirked. “Then it looks like it’s time to spring a trap.”

Ulrich was the first across the log bridge and down the path on the other side, his confidence very high. He was proud of how he had handled himself so far, especially considering Yumi was watching. The path veered first to the left, then hard to the right, eventually leading to the shadow of a fallen tree. It was massive, easily as big as a full-grown sequoia back on Earth. It laid at an oblique angle across the path, forming a low awning beneath which they would have to pass. A curtain of moss clung to the far side of the trunk, a wall that left them blind to whatever might be hiding beyond.

Eyeing the trunk, Ulrich slid to a stop ahead of the other three. It was thick enough that he wouldn’t be able to climb it, not even if he jumped as high as he could—which, on Lyoko, was saying something. “If there was ever a place for an ambush,” he said, “this is it.”

“Ulrich’s right,” said Jeremy. “Two of the—what did you call them, Odd? Hornets?—two of the Hornets are lurking not far past that tree. I can’t see the third.”

Odd left them no time for deliberation. He sprang upward, hooking his claws into the bark, feet and tail dangling over the others’ heads.

Ulrich frowned quizzically. “Odd, what are you doing?”

“Something unexpected. When Jeremy gives the signal, spring the trap, and I’ll hit ‘em hard from above.”

Ulrich sighed as Odd scampered up and out of sight. Impulsive as always… “Okay,” he said, addressing Yumi and Maya. “Maya, you stay hidden here until the coast is clear. We don’t know where exactly you would go if you lost all of your Life Points, so it’s probably best to let us clear a path first. Yumi, come with me.” Maya nodded, watching Yumi follow Ulrich to the curtain of moss.

As they readied themselves, Jeremy spoke again; this time, his voice resonated inside Ulrich’s head. “Odd says he’s in position.”

Next to him, Yumi shivered. “That feels so… invasive.”

Ulrich smiled. “I wish I could say you get used to it.” Together they drew their weapons, Ulrich hefting one of his swords and Yumi unfolding a fan. “On three. One… two…

“THREE!”

They burst through the curtain, the facefuls of moss quickly yielding what lie on the other side. Beyond, the path widened considerably into a long, kidney-shaped clearing, sloping away from them in a series of gentle, mogul-like hills. Maybe it was because he made the trip to the factory cradling a 9-iron, but the first thing through Ulrich’s mind was, Downhill par-5, with a slight dogleg to the right.

Then the Hornets attacked. One from the left, one right, closing fast and taking positions several feet from the edge of the clearing, stingers releasing a torrent of laser fire. Ulrich took the one on the right, though there was not much he could do at this distance other than dodge the bolts and try to deflect one or two. At least he had avoided the first volley.

Despite Odd’s plan, no help cam from above. Where was he? For that matter, where was the third Hornet?

Both questions were answered almost immediately. Ulrich heard an “Oomph!” from somewhere above. Then Odd plummeted down into the clearing, landing with a crash between Ulrich and Yumi. Another stream of red bolts rained down from where Odd had been.

“Careful, Odd,” warned Jeremy. “That fall put you below 30 Life Points.”

“Wonderful,” said Odd through gritted teeth, as he clambered to his feet. “Spread out,” he shouted to Ulrich and Yumi, unleashing a few bolts of his own back at the Hornets. “We’re easy targets bunched together like this.”

Ulrich obeyed, surging further into the clearing, drawing his Hornet with him as he moved down the slope. The laser fire stopped. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the Hornet leaning forward as it sped to keep up, its stinger angled harmlessly at the ground beneath it. They can’t fire if they have to move quickly, he realized.

“Great job, Yumi!”

Ulrich looked back in time to see Yumi’s Hornet explode into sickly yellow chunks that fell to the clearing, pieces that faded into nothing. Yumi wore a triumphant smile as she pulled the boomeranging fan out of the sky. She is amazing…

Two bolts struck Ulrich like a one-two punch, one to his head and one to his calf. Miraculously, he managed to keep his footing, though the pain was enough to make his stomach turn. He looked around, and was surprised to find the world still, his feet stationary. While he had been mooning at Yumi like an idiot, he had unwittingly come to a full stop. He was a sitting duck.

Cursing himself, he reversed course, lunging back toward the Hornet in a surprise assault. The suddenness of the move allowed him to close the distance before the bug could wing away. He jumped several feet into the air, and a swipe of the sword took the Hornet cleanly in the symbol on its head. Just like with the Crabs, his sword gleamed blue as it struck, and the resulting wound emitted a white light. Ulrich landed on the green surface of the clearing as the Hornet exploded into a shower of particles.

Odd was the last to take care of his Hornet, peppering it with laser arrows until it was downed. Enemies vanquished, Ulrich shouted to Maya, who peered through the moss, then ran into the clearing to join them.

“Great job, Yumi!” exclaimed Jeremy, as he watched her land a direct hit on the Hornet. It was very impressive; this was her first trip to Lyoko, after all. Maybe it was easier than it looked. One of these days he would work up the courage to go to the scanners again. But then, he rationalized, who would be here to make sure everything runs smoothly? He nodded reassuringly to himself. I’m better off staying here, where I can be the most help. It had nothing to do with having to interact with Maya in person if he were to go back. Not one bit.

At that moment, a faint rattling sounded from somewhere above Jeremy. He looked up, eyeing the space where the metal arm that held the monitors disappeared into high ceiling. There was a gap up there, large enough for a person if they stooped a bit. Certainly large enough for a dog. Perhaps Jeremy wasn’t as safe as he thought.

He listened silently, but there was nothing new to hear. He was still alone.

For now.

At the far end of the clearing was a short path that led to a piece of land that made a neat circle. And dominating that space was a tree unlike anything Yumi had ever seen. To say that it was big was an understatement. It was colossal; the tree Odd had climbed could fit inside this one ten times over. Its jagged roots curled over the edge of the land that housed it like gnarled, arthritic fingers. As Yumi approached the tree at a run—feeling strangely like an ant—she noticed that, like Odd’s tree, this one was also meant to appear long dead. The trunk was hollow, as if eroded by the elements, a wide opening like a crack revealing a cavity several hundred feet in height.

In the center of that cavity, a tower rose out of the earth, emitting a soft red glow to chase away the shadows. Three Hornets circled that tower, their flitting wings reflecting the ruddy light.

Stopping at the edge of the clearing, Yumi looked at the others as if to ask them what they should do this time. But they never got the chance to speak.

The Hornets attacked, swarming out of the crack in the tree, forming up just outside the opening so they could release a round of lasers. Yumi threw her fan as she danced between the offending bugs and Maya, drawing her second fan to use as a shield. Her throws were improving with each toss—this one darted through the air, a glowing yellow disc honing in on her target… until it was knocked out of the air by a red bolt. And as she bent for another throw, another bolt slammed into her chest, knocking her down.

Yumi groaned, rolling to her knees as quickly as she was able, stumbling to her feet. Odd was not exaggerating, she thought acidly. Those things hurt.

Speaking of Odd, the blonde fired multiple shots at all three Hornets, the bugs flitting around evasively between them and the tower. He clipped one Hornet’s wing, its flight pattern turning erratic as it struggled to remain aloft. Gray wing hanging limply, it crashed to the clearing, its momentum carrying it, skidding, all the way to Ulrich’s feet. “Thanks for the assist, Odd,” he said, delivering the finishing blow.

With Maya having successfully retreated back into the clearing, Yumi refocused on the two remaining Hornets, readying another throw.

“Good teamwork,” Jeremy said, watching through Odd’s eyes as Ulrich yanked his sword from the Hornet. “Only two more to go. Then Maya can get to the tower—”

A noise from above him once again pulled Jeremy’s focus from the monitors—a soft clicking. He looked up to find a dog staring down at him through the hole in the ceiling, the enormous Great Dane from their flight to the factory. Even with the poor lighting and the distance, Jeremy could still make out its milky white eyes, cold and empty. Vacant; a vessel for XANA. Lips pulling back to reveal sharp teeth, it began to snarl.

Part of Jeremy hesitated. It had to be at least a thirty-foot drop; no dog could make it unscathed. But XANA was cunning enough to make the impossible a reality. He highly doubted that something as simple as a drop would have been overlooked.

So he spun out of the chair, frantically seeking an exit. His eyes moved past the elevator—no hope there; it was still full of dogs—and came to rest on the trapdoor that led to the scanner room. That’s it!

Frightened feet propelled him across the floor just as a chorus of barking broke out overhead. He heard a metallic thud, followed by more soft clicking. With a jolt, he realized the latter was the sound of paws on metal. Chancing a look back, he saw that the Great Dane had vaulted into the metal latticework that held the rig of the supercomputer to the ceiling, a second ferocious dog already poised to follow. With another leap, the Dane landed on the metal arm. Very soon it would reach the floor.

Jeremy heaved the metal trapdoor open and flung himself over the rim, the horrid music of the bloodthirsty canines nearly causing him to miss the ladder on the other side. One last look back revealed the Great Dane landing in the seat of the high-backed chair on its way to the ground, several other animals following along the metal supports like gymnasts. The beast turned toward Jeremy, ready to charge.

“They’re here!” Jeremy screamed toward the monitors, before he ducked beneath the floor and slammed the trapdoor shut behind him, missing the muzzle of the crazed dog by inches.

Yumi faced the last Hornet with Odd and Ulrich at her side, while Maya stayed back, safely out of the line of fire. Three-on-one seemed excellent odds to her, especially given she had managed one of them on her own. This’ll be a piece of cake, she thought.

Then the virtual world exploded with noise, so much of it that Yumi could hardly hear herself think, much less anything else. It was barking, and lots of it. From everywhere at once, just like Jeremy’s voice had been. “They’re here!” came Jeremy’s cry, sounding strangely distant, followed by a loud bang that echoed across the virtual landscape. Oh God, Jeremy!

With a shared look of urgency, the three began their attack as one. It was as if they had planned it—while Ulrich deflected the enemy bolts with his sword, Odd fired a shot that caused the Hornet to swerve right into the path of Yumi’s fan and… pop, the way forward was clear.

Ulrich turned and waved Maya forward, but he needn’t have bothered, as she was already dashing past them and across the small land bridge, spurred on by the deafening canines. Yumi followed, into the hollow of the massive tree. The tower didn’t have any door that she could see, but that didn’t matter as Maya ran up to its base and phased right through it, disappearing inside.

Maya stepped onto the tower platform, trying not to let the endless howling make her think the worst. The sound was horrible, like death itself. How anyone could survive that… No, she affirmed, Jeremy is okay, I just know it. He has to be…

Like so much of what she knew about Lyoko, the next part was purely instinctual. She stepped into the center of the platform, the eye-like symbol of Lyoko glowing beneath her feet. It was a conscious thought, a desire to go up that triggered the movement, similar to how the desire to enter the tower allowed passage inside.

An unseen force gripped Maya, wrapped around her body like air made solid, and bore her steadily upward, with the code in the cylindrical wall quickly becoming a white blur as she moved past it. Soon, she rose beyond the ceiling that was not a ceiling, that was in fact a second platform high in the tower. There, she was set down as gently as a puff of wind, another symbol glowing white beneath her. Just like below, there was a blue holographic interface.

And suddenly, she was at a loss for what to do next. Instinct had told her to come to the infected tower, to deactivate it and thereby purge XANA from within… but not how to do it. Not for the first time, she lamented her lost memories, frustrated that she felt so alien in her virtual home.

Canine cries adding to the urgency of her plight, Maya made her decision. Don’t think, she told herself. Just do. She reached forward and placed a hand on the interface.

When she drew her hand away, a white handprint lingered on the interface for a moment before fading away. Then words appeared.

“Name: Aelita.”

And despite Jeremy’s peril, despite the dogs and the Hornets and XANA, despite everything, she smiled. For she had discovered her true name. I am Aelita.

Almost instantly, the words were wiped away, replaced instead by another phrase.

“Code: Lyoko.”

The first thing Aelita noticed was the wall around her; the pieces of binary code began to fall, as if whatever had been holding it in place suddenly decided to let go. The process was slow at first—only a few bits of data at a time—but rapidly picked up speed until the world around her became a torrent of white rushing downward. As the last of the code disappeared, the sapphire color of the wall itself followed, plunging Aelita into total darkness. Tower deactivated, she thought.

That’s when she sensed… something. A stirring of some sort, just at the edge of her awareness. XANA’s departure, perhaps. Whatever it was, the oppressive wrongness that Aelita had felt since the tower’s activation abruptly disappeared.

At the same instant, the explosive barking ceased, and she was blessed with silence. She let out a shaky breath. “Jeremy?” she called. “Are you there?” There was no response. Oh Jeremy, please by alright…

After a few seconds in that darkness, the light began to return. It was a trickle at first, the barest suggestion of blue radiating from beneath the platform. Then the data returned en masse, a flood of blue and white, and the tower was restored.

It was silent.

One moment, Jeremy was clutching the metal ladder, cold sweat beading on his brow as dozens of psychotic animals yelped and howled on the other side of the trapdoor, sharp claws scraping across metal in their futile attempt to reach him.

Then there was nothing. Nothing at all.

Swallowing thickly, Jeremy took a few moments to steady his nerve. A small voice in his head insisted that this was just another of XANA’s tricks, that the dogs were lying in wait, baiting Jeremy to come back into the room. But a much larger voice didn’t believe that. The silence was too abrupt for that. Too eerie. The only other explanation was that his friends had done it. That Maya had deactivated the tower, cutting XANA off from the real world.

Either way, the only thing he could think to do was return to the room above. Below him rested the three golden scanners, but there was nothing for him down there. The elevator was just as inaccessible to him there as it was above. So, heart racing, he adjusted his footing on the ladder, placed his hands on the trapdoor, and pushed.

It was very hard to lift—to Jeremy, it felt much heavier than it should have been. Once he poked his head back into the room, it became apparent why. No, the dogs hadn’t returned to normal as he had hoped. Nor had they remained as they were, vicious attack animals. Instead, they were frozen. Petrified. Every dog stock still in whatever position it had been in when Maya deactivated the tower. Those that had been without stable footing had toppled over, but most were poised like statues, packed together around the trapdoor, their muzzles locked in permanent snarls. Two medium-sized dogs were on their sides; they had fallen from atop the trapdoor when Jeremy heaved it open.

Slowly, cautiously, Jeremy stepped back onto solid ground, careful just in case the animals could be startled back into attacking. He made his way towards the chair, nudging dogs out of the way so his feet could find the floor. One tipped over sideways. “Sorry,” he found himself saying, lost in the surrealism of it all.

That’s when he noticed just how quiet it was. Too quiet. Because none of the dogs were breathing.

Alarmed, he bent down to the dog he had upended and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Every single one of them was now as lifeless as their eyes.

Uneasy, Jeremy stepped lightly through the pack, knocking over a few more canines before maneuvering back into his chair. On the monitor was the view inside a tower, with Odd, Ulrich, Yumi, and Maya staring into the factory chamber, apprehension on their faces. At the sight of Jeremy, relief washed over all of them.

“Jeremy!” Maya said breathlessly, a smile stretching her lips. “You’re alright! I was so worried…”

“We all were,” Yumi added, just as Odd quipped, “Took you long enough! What the hell happened to you?”

“I had a bit of a scare with our four-legged friends…” Jeremy went on to tell them about the events that had occurred while they were busy fighting on Lyoko. By the time he finished his story, no one was smiling, not even Odd.

“So all of them are dead?” Ulrich asked, scratching at his chin. “Are you sure they aren’t just stunned somehow?”

“They have no pulse,” Jeremy said, shaking his head gravely. “And I don’t think they could be revived, even if I knew how. It’s like—I don’t know—like the spark of life is just… gone. Maybe XANA has to empty them out in order to make them do what he wants. I don’t know.”

Everyone was silent, solemn. “I felt him,” Maya said suddenly. “In the upper chamber. He was in the tower.”

Jeremy shivered. “XANA?”

“Yes,” Maya answered. Her gaze gained a strange intensity, and she went on in a rush. “XANA stands for Extrapolational Analysis and Network Assessment. An artificial intelligence designed to safeguard Lyoko from outside elements. He views you as a threat. The dogs were his attempt to eliminate that threat.”

“Maya, why didn’t you tell us earlier?” asked Jeremy.

“Aelita,” Odd cut in.

Jeremy stared at the blonde. “Come again?”

“Aelita,” he repeated, smiling at the pink-haired girl. “Our mystery girl finally has a proper name?”

“That’s fantastic!” Jeremy exclaimed, glad for a reason to smile. “Aelita, huh? I like it. I think it suits you.”

“I’m glad you like it.” The weak smile Aelita spared for Jeremy was short-lived; it was quickly consumed by a frown. “I told you before, things come to me out of nowhere. I couldn’t tell you, because I didn’t know myself. Not until now.”

Ulrich shifted his feet. “So XANA attacked us because it saw us as a threat to Lyoko. What does that mean for us?”

“Beats me,” Jeremy answered, shrugging. After a long pause, he said, “Do we tell someone about this? About Lyoko?”

The four looked at each other, as if they were each waiting for someone else to speak first. “I have no idea,” Yumi said after a few seconds of silence. “I’ve only been in the picture for a minute. You guys are the experts.”

“If we spill the beans,” began Odd, “that’s it for us. We will never be able to come here again. The government or whoever will rope the factory off. This place might as well be Area 51 after that.”

“And if we don’t tell, won’t that happen anyway?” Jeremy countered. “If the dogs are petrified here, it’s a safe bet to assume they’re the same all over town. There will be an investigation. Inquiries. Hundreds of people must have seen them heading toward this part of town.”

There was another pause. Then Ulrich suggested, “We could shut it down.”

Jeremy balked immediately. “What? No way! If we shut the supercomputer down, we lose Ma—uh, I mean, Aelita. I won’t let that happen.”

Ulrich shrugged defensively. “It was just a thought.” He turned to Aelita, who looked dejected. “Don’t worry, Aelita. I won’t shut you down.”

Aelita gave a weak smile. “Thanks, Ulrich. But what if it is for the best? Lyoko is a threat to your world as long as XANA is in it, and if you leave the supercomputer running, he will strike again.”

Eyeing the four on the monitor, Jeremy was struck by a sudden thought. “There’s another option. We could go back in time.”

“What difference would that make?” asked Ulrich. “What if we wake up and everything happens all over again?”

Aelita shook her head. “XANA is smart. He learns from his mistakes. He will not try the same tactic twice. Like I said, he will strike again, but he will wait until he has a new plan. It might be a few days, or a few weeks, but he will come.”

“Aelita,” said Odd, “how can you be so sure?”

“This has happened before. Or something very similar.” She hesitated. “I don’t remember it, exactly, but I can feel it. It’s like… it’s like there is something in my head that’s missing, but I can almost make out what it was by the shape of the hole it left behind.”

Jeremy watched a pained expression mar Aelita’s face, wishing there was something, anything, he could do to help. Then it came to him. “I got it. We take XANA out.”

Aelita blinked. “What do you mean?”

“If XANA was coded into Lyoko by F.H., then XANA can be removed. Anything that has been written can be unwritten… theoretically speaking. I should be able to do it, given enough time.”

Odd appeared doubtful. “I don’t know, Einstein…”

“It’s the only way,” Jeremy said, his excitement building. “First, we go back in time. If Aelita is right, everything will be normal for a little while. I can study the supercomputer and find a way to isolate and remove XANA. Aelita will be safe, Lyoko will be ours, and nothing bad will happen ever again.”

“And what if XANA strikes before you can take him out?” Odd pressed.

Jeremy smiled, determined. “Then we will be ready for him.”

A silence fell over them. Odd looked at Ulrich. “What do you think?”

Ulrich was contemplative for a moment. Then he shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. Yumi?”

“It’s not up to me—” Yumi began, but Odd interrupted her.

“Don’t be ridiculous! Look around you. You are in a virtual world! You’re one of us now,”—Odd smirked—“and that means you gain voting privileges forthwith, and the ability to debate on the floor, not to mention filibuster—”

“Alright, alright,” Ulrich cut in before his roommate got too carried away. He turned back to Yumi. “Well?”

Yumi looked incredulously from Odd to Ulrich, and she grinned. “Let’s do it.”

Aelita beamed, looking gratefully at all of her friends. “Thank you. It means a lot to me that you would rather face XANA than shut me down.”

Jeremy smiled. “It’s the least we could do.” Then he tabbed through the menus and found the Temporal Adjustment function. “Seeing as we have a unanimous decision, I believe it’s time for a little trip into the past—”

“Hang on, Jeremy,” said Ulrich. He turned to the others. “First, I say we make a pact. To do whatever it takes to stop XANA if he ever rears his ugly head again. No matter what.” He looked expectantly around the tower room.

“Agreed,” said Odd, clasping the brunette on the shoulder.

“Me too,” said Yumi.

They looked toward Aelita. “Definitely,” she said, smiling earnestly.

Jeremy reflected that smile tenfold. Not even one last look at the stiff canines could diminish it. “A pact it is,” he said, primed to initiate the return to the past. “See you all very soon.”

Pure white light filled the factory chamber.

Chapter Text

Episode Three
Seeing is Believing

Chapter 9
Battle Plans

When Jeremy was awakened by his alarm clock, it took him a groggy moment to remember how it was that he had arrived in his bed. He silenced the alarm and rose with a shiver, the hairs on the back of his neck standing vertical. Knowing that he had traveled back in time didn’t make it any less disconcerting the second time.

“Hello, Jeremy.”

He turned to see Aelita staring at him from the monitor of his PC. He was growing used to her constant presence, and the mere sound of her morning greeting no longer made him blush. Well, not much anyway. “Morning, Aelita. Is everything back to normal on Lyoko?”

“I think so. There are no pulses that I can feel. What about Earth?”

Jeremy listened for a moment. There was no barking, which was certainly a good sign. Outside his window, he spotted a few early risers in the courtyard below, making their way toward the quad. “All good here,” he answered, relieved. A small part of him had believed XANA would mount another attack right away, regardless of what Aelita had said.

Ducking into his closet for privacy, Jeremy shimmied out of his pajamas and into a pair of tan shorts and a green and white checkered shirt. “Aelita,” he called as he reemerged, “is it possible for there to be a disturbance in Lyoko without you knowing?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied thoughtfully. “I was in the Forest Sector when the tower there was activated. I suppose it might be harder to sense something happening in another Sector.”

Jeremy moved to the computer. After confirming that the Tower Scan was still set to run hourly, he said, “I have to go to class.” As usual, Aelita’s face fell, but she nodded. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, I promise. In the meantime, can I ask you to do something for me? Something important.”

Aelita brightened. “Of course, Jeremy. What do you need?”

Jeremy hesitated. He hated to put Aelita at risk, but until they knew exactly what they were up against, he could think of no alternative. “Could you keep an eye out for anything strange? Maybe take a stroll through each Sector every so often.”

“Anything for you, Jeremy,” she said with a smile.

Blushing only marginally, Jeremy returned the warmth with a smile of his own. “Thanks, Aelita.” He slid into his sneakers and grabbed his messenger bag. With one last wave for Aelita, he left for breakfast.

Outside, he joined the tired march of students loping toward the cafeteria in ones, twos, and threes. The sky was a low ceiling of slate gray, same as it had been during their flight to Lyoko. Which made sense, as it was the exact same sky. In fact, as Jeremy made his way across campus, a light drizzle began to fall, reminding him that this time yesterday, they were introducing Yumi to the Factory. Well, yesterday was not the right word. Jeremy didn’t know what to call it. There wasn’t exactly a colloquialism for a day that no longer existed.

When he arrived at the cafeteria, he found Odd and Ulrich at their usual table, as well as their newest confidant, Yumi, wearing the same all-black outfit she had worn the morning that never was. Quickly grabbing his food, Jeremy made to join the others.

As he crossed the cafeteria, he noticed Sissy Delmas sitting with her usual associates, Herb and Nicholas. She kept sneaking covert glances at Ulrich from across the room, looking peeved about something. So far, Sissy hadn’t lived up to her pampered reputation, at least not in front of Jeremy. Though, in taking Odd and Ulrich’s advice, after that first meeting in the quad he had given the girl a wide berth.

Putting Sissy out of his mind, he took the empty seat next to Yumi, across from Odd and Ulrich. The mood of the trio ran the gamut from Ulrich who sat pensively, to thunderstruck Yumi who kept smiling to herself, to Odd who scarfed down his morning meal, utterly unperturbed. “Morning, Einstein!” the blonde said cheerily.

Jeremy could only stare, smiling bemusedly at the boy. The blonde had decided to restyle his hair—instead of hanging loose around his shoulders, it was now gelled back into a single spike. “What?” Odd said innocently after a moment. “I thought I’d kick it Lyoko-style.”

Ulrich rolled his eyes. “Don’t mind him. He just wants to know how it feels to be a normal height for once in his life.”

Sensing a long back-and-forth on the horizon, Jeremy cut in loudly, turning to their new recruit. “So what do you think, Yumi?”

Yumi’s smile broadened. “When I woke up, I thought it was a dream, at least until I remembered I’m not creative enough to make this up.”

Ulrich laughed. Or at least, he forced a laugh. To Jeremy, it sounded like a few rapid-fire hiccups. Ulrich must have heard it too, because the laugh died in his throat and his cheeks went slightly pink.

Odd flashed his roommate a strangely knowing smile. “So what’s the battle plan?” he asked quickly, perhaps to take the heat off Ulrich.

“What do you mean?” asked Jeremy.

“Well, we said we were gonna be ready if XANA ever tries anything again,” said Odd. “So let’s get ready.”

“I have Aelita making rounds on Lyoko while we’re in class,” said Jeremy, “and the Tower Scan runs automatically. What else can we do?”

Odd shrugged. “For starters, we need to be able to move the moment XANA acts. What good is a Tower Scan if you aren’t in your dorm room when it finds a problem?”

“Okay, I’ll just set up my laptop to give off an alert, even when it’s closed and in my bag.”

“And what if we’re apart?” Odd pressed. “We’re lucky Kiwi went all Hulk on us, or else we never would have been up to talk you into going to the factory.”

“Kiwi?” Yumi asked.

“Our dog,” Ulrich clarified. Pulling his phone out of his pocket, the brunette turned to Jeremy. “Give us your number. Then you can shoot us a text anytime, anywhere, and we’ll know something’s up. Plus,” he added with a grin, “I can give you a call whenever Odd’s humor pushes me to my breaking point.”

“Like that would ever happen,” Odd said with affected skepticism, winking at Jeremy.

“I would,” said Jeremy, “if I had a cell phone.”

“What?” said Odd incredulously. “How can you not have a cell phone? You must be the only one in our year without one. Maybe even the whole school.”

Jeremy faltered. “I… just never saw the appeal, I guess…” he said, his cheeks growing warm. How was the son of Frank Della Robbia supposed to relate to his family’s tight budget?

Oblivious to his discomfort, Odd plowed on. “I hope you can see it now. That’ll be priority number one, you getting a phone. We’d be flying blind otherwise. There’s a store in town; we can go after dinner.”

Sighing, Jeremy nodded. Odd was right, it was important. He’d just have to find a way. “I’ll have to call my Mom, but I’ll make it work.”

“Here,” said Yumi, digging her own cell phone out of her bag and offering it to Ulrich. “Put your number in.”

Ulrich stared at the phone for a moment, oddly reticent, but he took it, passing his to Yumi in turn. As Yumi did the same with Odd, Ulrich said, “Jeremy, I’ve been thinking. We don’t just need to be ready for XANA here at school. We need to be ready on Lyoko, too. You know, practice with our weapons. I, for one, could definitely use it.”

“I could draw up a training schedule,” proposed Jeremy. “We could head to the factory after sundown three or four nights a week. That would give me time to work on removing XANA from Lyoko, too.”

Odd grinned. “I like it. A little white Mr. Miyagi to whip us into shape.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “You know a thing or two about little.”

“Hold up,” Yumi cut in, her smile waning slightly. “A training schedule? Four nights a week? That sounds like a lot of commitment. What about schoolwork? Or free time?”

“It is a big commitment,” Jeremy said insistently. “You’ve seen firsthand what XANA can do. Until I find a way to shut him down for good, we need to be one hundred percent committed to keeping him contained.”

When Yumi still looked unsure, Odd chimed in. “Just think of it as a part-time job. Like Clark Kent. By day, you’re a mild-mannered high school sophomore. But by night, you protect the city and all of its inhabitants by becoming… um… the Ultimate Fangirl?”

With a wry smile for Odd, Yumi relented. “Alright, then. I’m in. One hundred percent.” She turned to Jeremy. “What was that you said about after sundown? I thought students couldn’t leave campus after eight.”

“We have a way…” Jeremy went on to explain the route through the sewers. “We could be gone from dusk till dawn and nobody would ever know.”

“That might work for you,” began Yumi, “but I’m a commuter. I have to sign a log at the security booth every time I enter and leave campus. If I don’t leave—or at least sign out—I think the school might go looking for me. Besides, I have a nine o’clock curfew. My parents would lose it if I was out all night.”

“A minor setback,” said Odd, nonplussed. “We’ll just have to go earlier in the day. Ulrich and I have soccer practice until five. Dinner starts at six, but if we skip it, that gives us until eight-thirty to spend at the factory. Maybe eight-fifteen, so you’re not cutting it too close with your folks.”

“You know,” said Ulrich, “the library stays open until ten. Plus, I think the gaming club meets until then. Do you think your parents would extend your curfew if you said it was for that?”

“For gaming? No,” Yumi answered resolutely. “But if I told them it was French club or something, they might bite.”

Odd shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. Even if they say no, we’d still have three-ish hours to train on Lyoko. Not to mention weekends.”

Yumi nodded. “I’ll talk to my Mom tonight.” She sighed, her huge smile returning. “Part of me still can’t believe what I stumbled into. It’s a lot to process.”

“Tell me about it,” said Jeremy. “When I got to Kadic, I told myself to stay under the radar. Believe me, I’m not usually one to take big risks. But now look at me. Sneaking off campus every other night, trespassing in the factory—”

Odd cleared his throat loudly, cutting him off. Looking over Jeremy’s shoulder, he gave a forced smile and a boisterous, “Good morning, President Delmas.”

Turning his head, Jeremy discovered Kadic Academy’s commander-in-chief several paces behind him and closing. President Jean-Pierre Delmas was of average height, with neat brown hair that was going gray in patches and a pair of silver bifocals perched on a protuberance that was more beak than nose. As sharp as Odd’s laser arrows, Jeremy thought idly. The man wore pleated khakis, and a green sweater with tan elbow pads was stretched around his paunchy gut. All in all, he looked much older than the handsome headshot that was displayed in Jeremy’s orientation pamphlet.

“Good morning, Odd,” said President Delmas, eyeing the blond with a disapproving frown. “Erm, trying out a new hairstyle, are we?”

Odd ran a finger along the gelled spike, careful not to dislodge any hairs. “Do you like it?”

“It is certainly… unique. Once again, I find myself regretting the Board’s decision to relax the school dress code. But that’s neither here nor there.” He fixed a small smile on Jeremy. “I’ve come to ask our newest student how he is finding Kadic so far.”

“It’s—uh—it’s wonderful,” Jeremy stammered, doing his best to return the president’s smile. “It’s… well it’s better than anything I could have imagined.” Which was the plain truth, if not for the reasons President Delmas might have suspected.

“Good, good,” the man said with the bearing of one who didn’t really care overmuch. “I have a daughter in your grade. Elizabeth. Have you met her?”

Odd snorted, but managed to pass it off as a cough. “We’ve spoken once,” Jeremy replied carefully. “It wasn’t a very long conversation.”

Eyes roving around the cafeteria, President Delmas found his daughter. “Elizabeth,” he called. “Come here for a moment.” Luckily, he missed the way Ulrich winced or Odd shook his head.

Sissy didn’t look too pleased, either. With a huff of exasperation heard clear across the room—which her father either didn’t notice or chose not to—she rose from her table and sauntered across the cafeteria. She wore her trademark pink headband to keep her lustrous black hair tucked behind her ears and a matching pink tank top that she seemed to favor.

Reaching her father’s side, Sissy put on a smile so sweet it was sickening. “Yes, Daddy?”

“This is Jeremy Belpois,” President Delmas said. “He’s new at the school.”

Sissy eyed Jeremy for a moment. Her gaze drifted to Ulrich before landing back on her father. “I’ve seen him around.”

“Would you be a doll and make sure Jeremy is comfortable at Kadic? Show him around, answer any questions he might have, that sort of thing.”

“Of course, Daddy. Anything he needs,” Sissy said sweetly, with a sideways glance at Jeremy that said, Not a chance.

At that moment, the first bell rang, signaling ten minutes until first period. President Delmas smiled magnanimously. “Good. Well, you all had best get to class. Make Daddy proud, Elizabeth.”

With a smile for her father—and an eye roll for Jeremy—Sissy turned on a heel and strolled back to her table. President Delmas likewise headed off, veering toward the exit.

When they were both out of earshot, all four friends broke into laughter. “Are they for real?” Jeremy said in disbelief.

“You’ve seen her when ‘Daddy’ isn’t around,” scoffed Ulrich. “Personally I find it preferable to whatever that was.”

Odd nudged his roommate in the ribs. “Honestly, I’m shocked she hasn’t tried to woo Jeremy into her fan club.” He nodded toward the two pimply boys sitting with Sissy. “Someone so close to her darling Ulrich would have been a major score.”

Ulrich stood with a sigh and a rueful glare for Odd, not dignifying the comment with a response. “We’d better go,” he said, checking the clock.

“Sure thing, darling,” said Odd, affecting Sissy’s revolting sweetness.

Smiling, Jeremy rose with the rest and deposited his breakfast tray on their way to the doors.

Odd paused before the exit, facing Yumi. “So, Ultimate Fangirl, will you be joining us for lunch?”

Yumi smirked. “Sure, as long as it’s fine by you, Pussyboy Wonder.”

Pawing at the air like a cat, Odd gave a sultry “Me-yow.”

Cackling, the quartet stepped out into the rain-slicked quad.

Sissy Delmas watched Ulrich leave from across the cafeteria, scowling. She had everything. Beauty, grace, all the clothes and accessories Daddy’s money could buy, and she was the most popular girl in school. People adored her. As well they should. All of Kadic was at her disposal; she walked the grounds like the queen she knew she was.

And yet… there was Ulrich. Handsome Ulrich. Frustrating Ulrich. He checked all of the right boxes. Tall, sweet, easy to look at, smart. And totally immune to Sissy’s charms. It didn’t matter what tactics she tried or how much she cossetted and cajoled. Nothing seemed to work. Which, of course, only served to make her want him even more.

Unfortunately for Sissy, Ulrich’s indifference toward her was an all-too-common occurrence. But it wasn’t the source of her ire. No, that was reserved for the tall girl walking next to him with the jet-black hair. Even Sissy had to admit the girl was pretty. In a mysterious, quasi-goth sort of way, but pretty nonetheless. And she must have some nerve moving in on Ulrich when he was so clearly hers. Well, not hers per se, but Sissy had more than staked her claim. The whole school knew it.

Perhaps the most infuriating part about it was the way Ulrich had been eyeing the girl like a lost puppy all morning. He was moonstruck. Sissy could see it clear as day from halfway across the room. Even now, Ulrich snuck glances at the bimbo as he trailed her through the cafeteria doors. The sight made Sissy gnash her teeth. If only she could get Ulrich to look at her that way just once. Who the hell does she think she is?

“Geez, Sissy. If looks could kill…”

Incensed, Sissy rounded on her tablemate. “Oh, can it, Herb. What do you know about looks, anyway?”

Herb winced as if he had been slapped, and Sissy regretted the remark almost instantly. He had done nothing to deserve her wrath. But she didn’t apologize. Apologies were a sign of weakness, and Sissy never allowed herself to look weak. And it was the truth. Herb was—there was no better word for it—ugly. Short and scrawny, with more pimples on his face than most of the rest of the grade had put together, Herb’s looks were further hindered by a weak chin and a pair of circular Harry Potter glasses that were flat-out ridiculous. And even that wasn’t taking into account his hair—a tangled mess like a bird’s nest sitting on the crown of his head, with the sides shaved short to reveal ears that jutted out like doorknobs. If Herb didn’t like hearing it, well, sometimes the truth hurts.

“Wow, Sissy. You didn’t have to say that,” prattled the boy to Sissy’s left.

Sissy sighed. Of course Nicholas was too stupid to just let it go. He wasn’t as aesthetically challenged as Herb; on the contrary, his shoulder-length blonde hair and light gray eyes were a very flattering combination. That, plus his height and muscular build, gave Nicholas a roguish handsomeness. But he was greasy. Like a go-take-a-shower-or-two kind of greasiness. And he was just plain dumb.

However, in this one instance, Nicholas was actually right. Sissy wouldn’t apologize, but the least she could do was let the blonde’s comment go uncontested. So instead, she turned back toward the windows, watching Ulrich and his gang traipse across the misty quad until they were out of sight. “Who is she?” she growled.

“Who?” said Nicholas, slow on the uptake as usual.

“Yumi Ishiyama,” Herb answered before Sissy was forced to ask again. “She’s in tenth, I think.”

“Yumi Ishiyama,” Sissy muttered to herself, crossing her arms. She liked to keep tabs on all the girls that she deemed rivals to her dominant social status. This Yumi was beneath her notice. A loner, introverted, friendless by choice. Apparently not even worth the effort of Sissy knowing her name. And definitely not a threat… until now. “Yes, but who is she?”

Herb shrugged. “I don’t know much about her. I can do some digging, if you want. Ask around the other sophomores.”

Sissy smiled. Herb and Nicholas had their flaws, to be sure. But what the latter lacked in brains and the former lacked in appearances, they both more than made up for in one aspect—they were both deeply, hopelessly infatuated with Sissy. And that infatuation could be used. “Yes, Herb. I think that is a wonderful idea,” she said in a way she knew would make the boy forget all about her earlier misstep. “Find out what makes Yumi tick.”

“…As you can see,” Mrs. Hertz continued, “this reaction has caused condensation to form on the glass, meaning the contents of the beaker have lost a significant amount of heat. Does anyone remember from last year what kind of reaction this is? Anyone?”

In the sea of students that crowded around Mrs. Hertz’s demonstration, only a handful of hands were raised. Ulrich smirked—of course one of them belonged to Jeremy. “An endothermic reaction,” his friend said once called upon. He didn’t realize just how right Odd had been when he gave Jeremy the nickname “Einstein.”

Mrs. Hertz smiled encouragingly. “Very good, Jeremy. Now, you will notice that a precipitate has formed as a result of the reaction, which—as you should all recall from you reading—is a solid that forms as a product within a liquid solution.” She turned to the whiteboard. “I want you to talk me through balancing this chemical equation. We begin with sugar—C₆H₁₂O₆—that has been dissolved in water—H₂O…”

As Mrs. Hertz started notating, Ulrich felt a tug on his sleeve and turned to see Odd gesturing for him to move back. Under the always-intrusive eye of Sissy standing a few bodies away, Ulrich extricated himself from the press of onlooking students, joining Odd in the very back. “What is it,” he asked under his breath, leaning close to the blonde.

“So what do you think of Yumi?”

Ulrich sighed indignantly. That’s what Odd pulled him out for? He made to rejoin the class, but Odd grabbed his arm. “Alright, alright. Stupid question,” Odd said quickly. He sighed. “I know you like her. You didn’t want to talk to her before, right? You said it yourself, you weren’t on her radar. But she’s one of us, now. You’ve made first contact. And I think you should go for it.”

Ulrich rolled his eyes and tried to pull away, but Odd held firm. “Listen, I’m gonna do you a favor. Later, I’m gonna do what I can to make sure you get some time alone with Yumi. So don’t miss your shot.”

Ulrich could only stare. That was such a bad idea for so many reasons. One: Yumi seemed to fit into their group dynamic fairly well so far, so why put it at risk? Two: admiring Yumi from afar was one thing, but he hardly knew the girl. What if they didn’t mesh? And three: they’d just embarked on something grand, something wonderful. Possibly even life-or-death important. It could all fall apart if he asked Yumi out and she said no. For that matter, even if she were to say yes, what would happen to their pact if he and Yumi broke up down the road? Ulrich would never want so much riding on the success of his relationship.

“Odd,” he began, “look—”

“Odd! Ulrich! Do you have something to share with the rest of the class?”

The boys turned suddenly to find Mrs. Hertz eyeing them fiercely from the head of the classroom, hands akimbo. “No, Mrs. Hertz,” they both said sheepishly.

“Then I suggest you pay attention.” She rapped the whiteboard sharply with her knuckles. “Unless you’d rather hear what Ms. Stranix has to say on the subject.”

“Yes, Mrs. Hertz. Sorry, Mrs. Hertz.” With one last we’ll-talk-about-this-later look for his roommate, Ulrich tuned back into the chemistry lesson.

Unfortunately for Ulrich, the opportunity never came. Odd must have known Ulrich would try to talk him out of it, so he did everything he could to keep Jeremy between the two of them for the rest of the morning. Ulrich let it slide, thinking he would have Odd pinned down when they went off to Algebra 1 by themselves. But the moment Jeremy left, Odd practically ran to grab a seat in the very front row, where Ulrich couldn’t risk being overheard. And when the bell rang for lunch, the little bastard was out the door before Mr. Finley had stepped away from the chalkboard.

It was no surprise, then, that Ulrich arrived at the cafeteria to find Odd already hard at work on Yumi and Jeremy. Eyes glinting triumphantly, Odd oh-so-casually suggested to Yumi that she go with Ulrich to meet Kiwi, while Odd helped Jeremy take care of his cell phone situation. Ulrich had to give the blonde credit; he had executed his plan to perfection. And what was Ulrich to do, say no? They were supposed to be fledgling soldiers-at-arms getting to know each other.

So, after fifteen minutes of rushed eating, the four stood, ready to go their separate ways. With a stifled sigh and a harassed look only Odd could see, Ulrich departed with Yumi in tow, resolved to have a perfectly normal time with a new friend and nothing more. After all, just because Odd was trying to shoehorn them into a relationship didn’t mean Ulrich had to act on it.

Still, it was one thing to decide against taking the leap and quite another to put the idea out of his head entirely. Just the thought made Ulrich’s stomach do somersaults as he and Yumi crossed the dreary quad in awkward silence. Stop it, Ulrich, he chastised himself. It’s only awkward if you make it awkward. Just say something.

“So,” he began, drawing Yumi’s eyes onto himself and subsequently trying to keep his knees from going weak, “I’ve seen you running before. After school, right?”

Yumi raised an eyebrow. “Really? I never figured you for a stalker.”

Ulrich’s lungs seemed to stop working, and he made a sort of strangled noise in the back of his throat. He supposed he now knew what it felt like for a car when it backfired. Fortunately, he was saved from having to say something coherent when Yumi smiled and said, “I’ve actually seen you, too, on the soccer field. And Odd. He’s a goalie, right?”

“Yeah,” said Ulrich, finally finding his voice. “You would think he’d be too short to play in goal, but he’s got the reflexes of a cat.” Realizing his unintended joke, he chuckled to himself and was delighted when Yumi joined in, too. See? You can do this. Just relax. “How about you? Do you do cross country or something?”

“I run track,” Yumi answered. “I do all the sprints and the hurtles. Plus I’m the third leg of the relay, and I do the high jump. And coach wants me to try the pole vault this spring now that Rachel McGee has graduated, but I don’t know. That thing is so intimidating.”

“You should go for it,” Ulrich said brightly. “Broaden your skill set; I heard colleges love that. Besides, after facing down a swarm of Hornets, that pole vault should be a piece of cake.”

Yumi gave a wry smile. “Maybe you’re right.”

By then, they had arrived at the dorms, and Ulrich led the way through the front doors. Once inside, Yumi looked around the tiled lobby, peering up the walnut stairs. “I always wondered what it was like in here,” she said. “On the outside, it looks more like a hotel than a dorm.”

This surprised Ulrich. “You’ve never been inside? Not even to visit friends?”

Yumi shrugged. “I’ve never been big on friends. I guess I always preferred the pleasure of my own company.”

Now that the ice had officially been broken, Ulrich quickly discovered that it was actually pretty easy to talk to the girl he had had a crush on from across the soccer field. Yumi absolutely adored Kiwi, and she thought it was hysterical that Ulrich and Odd could so easily flout Kadic’s unduly strict code of conduct. She sat on Ulrich’s bed, scratching Kiwi behind the ears as they both shared a laugh at the deplorable mess that was Odd’s half of the room. “It honestly doesn’t bother me much,” said Ulrich, carefully nudging a stray pair of Odd’s boxers toward his roommate’s laundry pile as if it were radioactive. “But if it starts to smell, I may need your help staging an intervention.”

Grinning, he took Kiwi from Yumi and tucked him into his backpack so he could take him out. The spot they usually used was perfect—just outside the backdoor of the dorm and around the side of the dumpsters—so long as he remembered to prop the door open so he could get back in. Above, the clouds still shed curtains of drizzle that were too fine to bother with an umbrella.

Once outside, Ulrich allowed himself a deep breath, still smiling. Maybe Odd was right. Yumi was amazing, there was no way around it. Down to earth, easygoing, funny. And there might even be a real connection there…

Ulrich shook his head. No. Don’t complicate things. Focus on being friends, first. But he couldn’t keep a small voice in his head from adding, And if it eventually leads to something more… then maybe it’s meant to be.

“Hey Odd, can you come here a minute?”

Tucking his cell phone away, Odd turned to Jeremy, who clutched the receiver of one of the wall-mounted student phones. They were currently in a small alcove off of the echoing, tiled chamber that was the lobby of the Admin Building. The row of black phones rarely saw use anymore now that cell phones were so prevalent. Odd had never used one, himself, but they couldn’t possibly be as complicated as Jeremy was making them out to be.

Odd smirked. “The great and powerful Einstein, protector of Aelita and defender of Lyoko, finally meets his archnemesis: the evil Doctor Landline.”

Jeremy was unamused. “Would you just shut up and help me?”

Ouch. Someone’s testy. Though mildly taken aback, Odd obliged. He dispensed with the humor, going to Jeremy’s side. “What’s the problem?”

“It keeps asking for me for an ID,” answered Jeremy. “Do I have to get it from the secretary, or something?”

Odd cocked his head. “You’re kidding, right? You mean your school ID? Like the one on that little piece of plastic they gave you?”

“Oh… right.” Cradling the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, Jeremy rifled a hand through his messenger back and resurfaced with his Kadic ID. He punched the six-digit number into the phone. “Now it’s asking for a PIN,” he said irritably.

“That was in your paperwork when you got here,” said Odd. “Don’t tell me you don’t know that either…” At the indignant look on Jeremy’s face, Odd shrugged and added, “You know what, never mind. Here, I’ll let you use mine.”

Without waiting for an answer, he took the phone from Jeremy and began to input his own information. Then he passed the phone back to Jeremy and stepped away, grinning to himself. For a genius, Jeremy was shockingly lacking in the common sense department. It was actually kind of adorable. Too bad Jeremy wasn’t really Odd’s type, even if the boy weren’t so obviously smitten by Aelita.

As Jeremy dialed, he looked strangely apprehensive. After a moment, he cleared his throat and said, “Hi Nicole, can you put Mom on?” A pause. “Yeah… no, I know. I just really gotta talk to Mom right now. I’ll call you back later, ‘kay?”

Jeremy glanced back at Odd, gave a rather stiff smile, and took a stabilizing breath. “Hey, Mom. How was your flight?… I know, I’m sorry. I should have called earlier. I’ve been really busy with, uh, a ton of homework from the week I missed. Listen, Mom…”

With one last nervous look at Odd, Jeremy turned away from him and cupped his free hand around the receiver, talking low enough that Odd couldn’t hear. Odd thought this was a little off-brand for the boy. Sure, Jeremy could be a little jumpy and meticulously careful, but this secrecy was something new.

The conversation was not a long one, and Odd could tell just from looking at Jeremy’s back that it wasn’t going as well as he would have liked. After not even a minute, Jeremy hung up the phone with a sigh and turned toward Odd, his shoulders slumped. “I tried,” he said, eyes downcast, “but I couldn’t convince her that we could… I mean, my Mom’s always said that we can’t afford…”

Realization struck Odd. No wonder Jeremy was so nervous, he thought. He must have known what the answer would be before he even called. He understood a little of what Jeremy must feel; for his first two years at Kadic, his father had all but cut him off. “Jeremy,” he began kindly, “don’t worry. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Let me see what I can do.”

Jeremy looking on, Odd whipped out his phone and dialed a number he swore he would never call. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and Jeremy needed a cell phone.

After a few rings, a female voice answered. “This is the office of Frank Della Robbia, how may I direct your call?”

“Hey, Stella. It’s me.”

“Odd! It’s been so long! How the hell are ya?”

Odd couldn’t help but smile at the bubbly secretary’s greeting. He remembered well the many, many hours Stella had kept him entertained while his father and older sisters did their PR gimmicks. “You know me, I’m out here enjoying Cali living. I need to talk to my father, is he around?”

“You’re lucky. You caught him between meetings,” Stella answered. “Hang on, I’ll patch you through.”

“Thanks, Stella.”

There was a brief pause. Then Odd heard the dignified disdain that could only be his father. “Well, isn’t this a surprise. And in the middle of a school day, no less. Not cutting class again, are we?”

“No, sir. It’s my lunch period.”

“I had to ask,” his father said. “Old habits die hard. Now what do you want?”

Odd sighed. He hadn’t expected much, but he had been hoping for a better reception considering he hadn’t spoken to the man since Christmas. But than again, Frank Della Robbia had never been an affectionate father, especially with his least favorite child. “I want to buy a cell phone for a friend of mine.”

His father chuckled. “So, you’ve finally found yourself a girlfriend. It’s about damn time, too. What’s her name?”

“Aelita,” Odd replied, making Jeremy raise an eyebrow. It was the first thing that came to mind. As usual, the man could not have been more wrong, but Odd had learned long ago that it was best to correct his father as seldom as possible.

“Not a very common name. Alright. If I render you this service, what do you offer in return?”

“Really?” said Odd, bristling. “You want to make this a negotiation? I never ask you for anything. When have you ever denied Christina anything she wanted? Or Meghan?”

“Christina has never disgraced the Della Robbia name. Meghan has never been housed in juvenile hall. So I’ll ask again. What do you bring to the table?”

Odd sighed again. He knew what his father wanted. “I’ll give you straight B’s on my report card.” It was a stretch. For Odd, C’s were the norm.

“And one A,” his father countered. Odd could almost hear the man’s infuriating smile.

“Fine,” said Odd. “Straight B’s and one A.”

“And what will be the penalty for noncompliance?”

“If I don’t get the grades, I’ll… I’ll get some kind of job next summer. Pay you back in installments.”

“Was that so hard?” his father cossetted. “I’ll move the money into your account after my next meeting. I’ve got to go.” With a click, the line went dead.

“I love you, too,” Odd murmured, pocketing his phone.

Once he told Jeremy what had happened, the boy was nothing but grateful. “Thanks, Odd. You didn’t have to do that.”

“No big deal,” Odd said with a shrug. “You need a phone, so I got you a phone.”

Smiling, Jeremy clapped Odd on the back. “Well, if there is anything I can do, just let me know.”

Odd smirked, considering the deal he had just made. “Oh, you’ll be going through my homework from now on. I would not look good in a Starbucks apron.”

On their trek across campus to the gymnasium, Odd and Jeremy reunited with Ulrich. The brunette stood at the top of the stairs to Lower Campus, leaning casually against the railing with his arms folded across his chest. “Got everything figured out?” he asked.

Jeremy chortled. “Odd’s dating Aelita now, and he might have to be a Walmart greeter. But yes, I’m getting a phone.”

At the befuddled look on Ulrich’s face, Odd quickly said, “I’ll explain later. What about Kiwi? Did you give him that treat like I asked?”

Ulrich rolled his eyes, clearly catching his second meaning. “He wasn’t hungry. And frankly, I don’t think Kiwi appreciated you making assumptions about what he wanted without asking him first.”

There was a moment between the roommates as they traded icy looks, with Jeremy looking on, trying in vain to understand it all. Then Odd relented with a crooked smile. “It’s okay. Not a mistake I’ll be making again, trust me.” Ulrich nodded, his expression softening.

With one last perplexed look from Jeremy, the trio made their way down the stairs, Odd bringing up the rear. Slipping his phone out of his pocket, his fingers quickly tapped out another message.

He tucked his phone away.

It had been Sammy’s idea in the first place. Try to set Ulrich up with someone, she had said. Then maybe it won’t be so bad. If Ulrich was dating—off the market, as Sammy liked to say—then perhaps Odd wouldn’t suffer so much. The notion was shaky at best; in Odd’s experience, attraction had little to do with whether or not the person he liked was in a relationship. But it was worth a shot. Because the absolute worst part about having a crush on your roommate is knowing that you should never, ever, ever act on it. Maybe knowing that he couldn’t would make it easier.

Sammy was the only friend he kept in contact with from back home, the only one who really mattered. They were kindred spirits, Odd and Sammy. Like Odd, she came from one of New York City’s most elite families; like Odd, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with the family that raised her. From the moment they met, Odd knew it would be a historic friendship. They did everything together. His best childhood memories were of sneaking out late at night to meet up with Sammy, exploring the city, feeling like the whole world was at their fingertips. When Odd took up graffiti as a way to express himself, it was Sammy who kept him grounded, kept him from straying down a darker path. And she was also the only person in the world who knew his secret. That he was… well, gay.

Admitting it to himself had been a long, meandering journey of denial and self-doubt. He was never very interested in girls? That’s okay, he just hadn’t found the right girl yet. That strange obsession with Legolas from Lord of the Rings? Well, it must be because Orlando Bloom is such a great actor… But gay? Oh no, not Odd. He couldn’t possibly be gay. Gay was an insult slung in school locker rooms. An “alternative lifestyle.” A choice. And Odd never made that choice. Why would he? Who would ever choose to be a social pariah?

So he went about his developmental years, filled with straight-insistence and deeply buried gay-shame, with the constant thread of near-crippling anxiety running throughout. Truthfully, he didn’t fully accept his sexuality until one crisp winter evening spent with Sammy in her family’s mountain cottage. It had been a long, exhausting day of skiing, and conversation had dwindled, both of them gazing out over a roaring fire.

That’s when Sammy just said it. “Odd… you’re gay, aren’t you.”

Odd looked at her, then back to the dancing orange flames. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

And that was that. Everything clicked. Maybe Odd just needed to hear it from someone else. Sometimes he wondered whether or not he would still be “straight” if Sammy hadn’t said anything.

To everyone else, though, that’s what he was. Straight. Normal. And he’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much. Perhaps someday he’d be okay with making it public… or at least telling his other friends. But for now…

For now, Odd resigned himself to continuing the charade. It wasn’t authentic, it wasn’t honest, and it sure as hell wasn’t satisfying.

But at least it wasn’t rejection.

“Odd, you coming?”

Odd looked up to find he had stopped halfway down the stairs; Ulrich and Jeremy waited at the bottom, the former with a quirk of a smile on his face and his hands on his hips. “What’s gotten into you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you go this long without cracking a joke.”

Goading his feet forward, Odd forced a smile. “Why bother when you’re doing all the work for me? Have you seen your face? That joke practically writes itself.”

Ulrich perked an eyebrow before smiling and saying, “That’s the Odd I know.”

Odd’s smile lasted until the moment Ulrich and Jeremy turned back around. It slid off his face with a sigh. At least it wasn’t rejection.

Chapter Text

For the rest of the school day, Jeremy was itching to get to work. He had several theories he was ready to implement in order to isolate and remove XANA, but there was no way for him to begin without returning to the lab at the factory. Yet there was still much to do before Jeremy would get a chance. They had already agreed to meet after class to show Yumi the passage through the tunnel in the park—it was the last piece of information she needed in case XANA decided to attack—and after that, Odd and Ulrich were going to take him downtown to get his cell phone.

When the last bell rang, Jeremy saw his mood mirrored in the faces of Odd and Ulrich. It wasn’t quite the pure joy that they felt upon first discovering the virtual world—even though Lyoko was still relatively new to them, there was more to it than that. There was a determination, a sense of duty to it all now. Yes there was still an undertone of general excitement, but now that XANA had revealed himself, they knew what they were up against. They knew the stakes.

Outside, the rain had stopped, driven away by a stiff wind that was already working to dry the pavement. Fairweather clouds scudded across the clear blue sky. The trio found Yumi leaning against a tree, waiting for them.

“I thought that bell would never ring,” she said, straightening.

“You’re one to complain,” Odd countered. “I didn’t see you sitting through Ms. Belefonte’s snooze-fest. Very few people can make Shakespeare sound interesting, and she’s not one of them.”

“Study hall turns into a free period on Friday,” Yumi said with a shrug. “Perks of being a sophomore, I guess. What about you? I thought you and Ulrich have soccer to get to.”

Ulrich shook his head. “No practice on Fridays.” He turned to Jeremy. “Looks like we found the perfect day to head to the factory—you know, for that schedule you’re gonna make. Plenty of time and no school to worry about the next day.”

Smirking, Jeremy pushed his messenger bag further up on his shoulder. “Plenty of time, sure, but not if we spend it all here. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

With that, the four left for the park.

The walk to Lower Campus was fairly uneventful—few teams held practice on Friday, so the athletic fields were practically deserted. Strangely, Jeremy caught a glimpse of Herb, one of Sissy’s stooges. Though he could usually be found nipping at Sissy’s heels, the rangy boy was instead loping around on his own. And if that wasn’t odd enough, once Herb realized that he had been spotted, he abruptly made an about-face and disappeared around the corner of the gymnasium. That was weird. I wonder what he’s up to… With a shake of the head, Jeremy put the boy out of his mind and strode under the arch of Rosetree Park.

Once they were down in the sewers, Yumi seemed nearly as excited about the passage as she was about Lyoko itself, looking around in wonder.

Seeing her face light up, Odd gave a wry smile. “Either Yumi has a secret passion for waste management, or I’m missing something here.”

Yumi fixed Odd with a dry look, then grinned. “No, Odd. No, I don’t think you know just how much of a goldmine you have here.”

“Like I said,” Jeremy said, “it’s the quickest route to the factory.”

“And it would be even quicker,” Yumi added, “if you stashed your skateboards down here.”

“But what about XANA?” Jeremy asked. “As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of those dogs was to block our path to the factory. He kept us from the sewer without breaking a sweat.”

Yumi just shook her head. “Think about it. This”—she swept a hand across their dank surroundings—“this has to run all across the city, right? We should be mapping it out, looking for other convenient entry points. I bet there’s even a few on campus.”

“That… is a really good idea,” Jeremy said, impressed. Why didn’t I think of that?

Ulrich also seemed to be seeing the pungent sewers in a fresh light. “XANA might have kept us from the tunnel in the park, but imagine if we knew ten other ways in. He would have had to stretch his resources so thin that it would’ve been a cakewalk.”

Odd grinned. “I’d like to see him try.”

Yumi’s wasn’t the only good idea to be had. On their way through the sewers, Ulrich announced that he had decided to keep a log book, citing the need to keep a record in case something bad was to happen. “Expect the best, but prepare for the worst, right?” Then he shrugged and added, “Anyway, it might make for a good book someday. Once it is all over, that is.”

Ulrich looked embarrassed by his own admission, but Odd took it in stride, playfully nudging his roommate in the shoulder. “Okay, Stephen King, but I better see a cut of those royalty checks. Nobody uses this beautiful likeness for free.”

Odd’s own breakthrough came once they had crossed the bridge and entered the factory complex. “You know,” he began, “this should be like a fortress for us. XANA shouldn’t be able to take it over with a pack of mangy mutts.” The blonde pointed up toward a corner of the vast room. “Do you think those still work?”

Squinting into the darkness, Jeremy was just able to make out what Odd was indicating—an old surveillance camera. He turned to the blonde with a smile. “That’s perfect, Odd. Great find!” If there was one camera, there were bound to be others scattered throughout the facility. Even if they had fallen into disrepair, Jeremy should be able to get them up and running again for relatively cheap. Yet another tool we can use to combat XANA… Remembering the snarling Great Dane that led the blitz down into the lab, he shivered. We need all the tools we can get.

They made their way into the elevator quickly, and when it stopped outside the lab, Jeremy showed Yumi the passcode to get inside. Before the great metal doors had stilled, he was already slipping F.H.’s journal out of his bag, crossing around to the monitors. “You guys head down to the scanners.” He turned, smiling, to where Aelita was waiting, sitting cross-legged inside a tower. “It’s time to take a look under the hood and see what this puppy can do—”

“Uh, Einstein, aren’t you forgetting something?” Odd interrupted.

Jeremy’s eyes flashed between Aelita and the blonde. “Oh… right. Sorry, Odd. I just…” He trailed off. There was no way he was going to finish that sentence with I saw Aelita and all rational thought left my brain.

He turned back to Aelita. “We have to do some preparations on Earth in case XANA decides to attack. Nobody’s coming to join you on Lyoko today. I’m sorry, Aelita.”

Aelita gave a smile. “You don’t have to apologize to me, Jeremy. I can go without company for a little while longer. Besides, we will have plenty of time to spend together when you get back to your dorm.” Oblivious to the effect this had on Jeremy, she continued. “And I want to make sure everything is still quiet here on Lyoko. I’ll see you later.” With that, Aelita broke the connection, and her visage on the monitor disappeared.

Cheeks slightly warm, Jeremy turned to the others, stifling a sigh. Yumi and Ulrich, at least, had the decency to keep their faces studiously blank, but Odd’s bore a smile on the point of laughing. Lucky for Jeremy, the blonde kept his mouth shut.

Jeremy sighed, pushing past them on the way back to the elevator. “Time to go,” he said a little too heartily. “The day is still young.”

From the factory, Yumi split from the others. Ulrich and Odd led Jeremy downtown, so she was left alone to make the trek back through the sewers to campus. Which was fine by her—she may as well get used to the route. It was tiresome, though, having to climb all the way up to Upper Campus just so she could sign out at the security booth and then make the six-block journey back home.

A full hour had passed by the time Yumi finally pulled the front door closed behind her. She shrugged off her backpack and deposited it at the foot of the stairs, taking a deep breath and looking around.

The house was abnormally quiet. By now, her younger brother, Hiroki, usually would have taken control of the living room, filling the downstairs with the clamor of whatever video game he happened to be playing. The fact that Hiroki was away on his fieldtrip meant that Yumi could expect some peace and quiet in the house for once. Her father accompanying him made it all the more likely that it would stay that way.

“I’m home,” she called out.

“In the kitchen!” came her mother’s muffled reply.

Crossing the empty living room, Yumi threw open the door to the kitchen and was greeted by the sight of her mother in her yellow apron, placing raw chicken cutlets into a glass pan, humming to herself. That she was in the kitchen at all was a surprise—her mother found cooking to be a tolerable activity, at best. Rarely would she ever make the effort on a Friday after a long work week, and it was even stranger considering Yumi and her mother were the only ones home.

Sinking into one of two barstools, Yumi swung her legs under the counter and folded her hands on top of the beige tile, watching her mother go about her work. Akiko Ishiyama was of average height, if slight, with jet black hair drawn behind her ears into a loose bun. She had a casual grace of movement that was on full display as she skirted around the small kitchen, first washing her hands in the stainless-steel sink, then crossing the kitchen to begin chopping carrots on a cutting board, every motion effortlessly precise. There was a general kindness to her mother’s appearance. She was kind, in truth, but there was also a firmness to the woman, a stubbornness and a strength of conviction that lay just beneath the surface. Like silk wrapped around steel. After all, there was a reason she had survived so long as a political aide in such a cutthroat industry.

“You’re in a good mood today,” Yumi said after a moment. “And cooking on a Friday? What’s the occasion?”

Her mother flashed a smile, then turned her attention back on the carrots. “Nothing special,” she answered. “I thought it might be nice for a change. Better than that disgusting takeout your father brings home.”

Yumi couldn’t help but notice how her mother laced “your father” with almost as much loathing as she did “disgusting.” And suddenly, her mother’s good mood didn’t seem so strange after all. Yumi shook her head to herself, shying away from the implications there. It doesn’t matter why she’s in a good mood, she thought, as long as you use it.

Not wasting any time, she dove right into it. “I was thinking about joining the French club.”

“That sounds nice,” her mother said idly.

“The only problem,” Yumi continued, “is that the meetings are at night. Eight to ten in the library.”

Her mother’s knife stilled for a moment before resuming its thumping rhythm. “Well, I suppose if it’s for your education… How often does the club meet?”

“Every night of the week.”

The chopping stopped again; this time her mother turned and looked at Yumi skeptically. “Every night?”

Yumi faltered for a moment under the weight of her mother’s gaze. “It’s a very… dedicated club.” Her mother raised an eyebrow. Panicking, Yumi began to ramble through the excuse she had already prepared. “And it has to be. Mademoiselle Poissant said this year will be extremely hard. I didn’t want to tell you this, but I’m already struggling as it is, and it’s only week two. I’m afraid I might fall behind without some extra studying—”

Her mother sighed; Yumi fell silent instantly. “I don’t think it would hurt to push your curfew out a little bit,” her mother began. “You are old enough now… Still, it’s the kind of thing I should run by your father first.” She felt her mother’s scowl, even if she couldn’t see it.

Yumi winced. Her father wouldn’t be back for almost a week. A week of missed opportunity to learn and train on Lyoko. “He isn’t here,” she began, thinking quickly. “Besides, you know how he gets. He’d just find some way to turn it into a big fight.”

Suddenly, Yumi’s mother put the knife down and spun to face Yumi with a shrewd grin. “Oh, what the hell. You’re right. I say you can stay out until eleven, and if your father doesn’t like it, he’ll just have to get over it.”

Yumi returned her mother’s grin, rising to her feet. “Oh, thank you! I promise you won’t regret it.” Crossing the kitchen, she leaned in to give her mother a quick peck on the cheek.

Her mother gave a bark of a laugh, a hint of sternness creeping back into her expression. “I better not. And all of this extra work better be reflected in your grades, too, or you’ll have me and your father to answer to.” With that, she went back to her cooking.

Relieved, Yumi left the kitchen, her happiness only mildly spoiled by the fact that she had basically just exploited the rift in her parents’ marriage to extend her curfew. And she had lied. She hated lying, especially to her parents. Well, okay. Little white lies were fine—what kid doesn’t lie to their parents every now and then?—but this left a sour taste in her mouth, even if it was necessary. It’s for the greater good, Yumi assured herself, taking her bag in hand and starting up the wooden stairs. Lyoko is worth it… I hope.

The first thing Jeremy did when he got back to his dorm was contact Aelita, of course. Only once the pink-haired AI was on his monitor did he thoroughly investigate his new prize.

“So that’s what a cell phone looks like. It’s… strange.”

Flipping his cell phone open, he ran his fingers over the buttons, a blue backlight illuminating the numbers. He could have gone with a smart phone—Odd’s father had put enough money in his account to buy five iPhones—but he decided against it, opting for an older flip model instead. He might be accepting charity, but his pride would only let him take that so far.

“What’s so strange about it?”

Aelita frowned at the device. “The whole concept is strange. Using a—a plastic thing to talk across distances… That’s what you said it was made of, right? Plastic?”

Jeremy pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “A plastic shell that houses small metal components to make it function. But essentially, yes.”

“Yes… well, I guess it is strange to me because I have no need of such a device. I can talk to you at any moment, and all I need to do is speak.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Jeremy countered. “Technically speaking, you are speaking to me through a device. Without the speakers on my laptop or PC—or the supercomputer for that matter—I wouldn’t be able to hear you at all. And in the same way, it takes a microphone for me to communicate with you.”

“There’s still so much of your world that I don’t understand. Sometimes the distance between us can seem a little…” Aelita searched around for the right word.

“Daunting?” Jeremy suggested.

Aelita smiled. “Yes. Daunting.” She paused, reflective. “You know Jeremy, I am grateful just to know you. You are the reason why I am alive. Before you turned on the supercomputer, I suppose I must have existed in some form. A stasis of some sort, forever preserved. And then I woke up. And you were there. You gave me a name… ‘Maya’.” Aelita chuckled, mirrored by Jeremy. “You taught me all about your world… your Earth. And you brought me friends. Ulrich, Odd… even Yumi.”

Then her smile fell away. “But sometimes—a lot of the time, really—I wish there wasn’t this… this daunting divide between us. I live for the moments I get to spend with the others here on Lyoko, for the moments I can talk to you, but we’re in two separate worlds. And I wish I could step into your world the way you can step into mine.”

Jeremy froze, eyes going wide. It was as if someone had slapped him across the face. “Of course…” he said, half to himself.

Aelita’s gaze became questioning. “What is it, Jeremy?”

“I could do it,” he said softly. His mind was already racing.

“Do what?”

“The scanners take a physical body and transform it into data, recontextualizing it within the confines of a virtual envelope. But what if it can be reversed?”

A slow realization came over Aelita. “Jeremy, you’re not actually suggesting…”

Excited, Jeremy stood up from his chair, pressing his face closer to the monitor. “…that theoretically speaking, one should be able to take a virtual envelope, analyze the component data, and actualize a physical form…”

“A real body constructed solely from virtual data…”

“Materialization.”

A ringing silence filled the room. Jeremy could hardly believe the words that had just come out of his mouth. By the awestruck look on Aelita’s face, neither could she.

For several heartbeats, neither of them said a word. Then the full implications of what Jeremy had just said washed over them both. It was ludicrous. Absolutely insane. But not impossible, he thought, a tremulous grin spreading his lips.

“Do you really think you can do it?” Aelita breathed.

Jeremy paused, considering. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Theoretically, it should be possible. But I barely know how to use the supercomputer. I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface…” He found himself sinking back into his chair, fingers kneading at his temples. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Disappointment shadowed Aelita’s face, just for a moment, before she managed to cover it with a smile. “It’s alright, Jeremy. It was a nice thought.”

It felt like a physical blow, that moment when the hope of a new life left Aelita’s eyes. Jeremy would give anything to never see it happen again. Anything.

Suddenly, Jeremy stood once more, feet carrying him to his closet for a jacket and then back to his desk, stooping low to gather his messenger bag. When he straightened, Aelita wore a questioning frown.

“Jeremy, what are you doing?”

“I can do it, Aelita. I don’t know how, yet, but I’ll get there. I can feel it.” He grinned. “Aelita, I’m going to bring you to Earth.”

Pulling himself onto the concrete surface of the bridge, Odd sighed, leaning against a wooden crate while Ulrich surfaced behind him, turning away from the light of the rising sun. “Sunrise on a Saturday,” he said, trying not to squint. “I always figured it must happen, but I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed it firsthand.”

“Sunrise? It takes a minor miracle just to get you out of bed before noon.”

Odd shrugged. “Yeah, well, I need my beauty sleep.”

Ulrich gave Odd an exaggerated once-over, smirking. “Apparently it isn’t working.”

Ouch, Odd thought. Joke or not, that one stung. With one last flat stare for Ulrich, Odd started across the bridge. “And you’re sure Jeremy didn’t say anything about why he’s dragging us to the factory at seven in the morning?”

Ulrich caught up to him, shaking his head. “He said he didn’t want to do it over the phone. That he thought it would be better if we ‘did this in person,’ whatever the hell that means.”

“I guess we’re about to find out.”

Crossing under the threshold, Odd felt an immediate relief as his tired eyes met the cool darkness of the factory interior. That’s better… He snatched one of the three ropes dangling from the rafters, sliding down to the main floor of the complex, Ulrich right by his side. Then they were in the elevator headed down.

When the doors opened, they found Yumi lounging against the back of Jeremy’s chair, yawning into her hand. In front of her, Jeremy sat hunched over the keyboard, his fingers flying across the keys. “Ah,” he began, without stopping or looking up. “It’s about time you got here.” He couldn’t see Yumi roll her eyes behind him.

Odd loped over to Jeremy’s side. Aelita was present in her usual spot on the central monitor, sitting inside a tower. The rest of the display was littered with lines of programming language and strings of binary that Odd couldn’t even begin to fathom. Open next to the keyboard was F.H.’s rumpled journal, as well as several pieces of loose-leaf paper in Jeremy’s own messy script.

“You’re lucky we’re here at all,” Odd said. “If I knew you were gonna drag us here at bumblefuck o’clock, I wouldn’t have stayed up all night playing Space Force 5.”

“Correction,” Ulrich put in. “You wouldn’t have stayed up all night getting your ass beat at Space Force 5.”

Jeremy finished his typing, running a hand through his hair and leaning back against the chair. To Odd, the boy looked even worse for wear than Odd felt, his eyes a bloodshot pink throughout with an impressive array of bags beneath them. For all that, though, the smile he wore nearly split his face in two.

“At least you slept at all, Odd,” Jeremy said. “I’ve been up all night, familiarizing myself with the supercomputer. With Aelita’s help, of course.”

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Aelita added.

“Progress with what, exactly?” Odd asked.

Yumi chuckled dryly. “I’ve been trying to get it out of him for the last half hour, but he wouldn’t say anything without you two.”

“You’re all here now, and that’s all that matters,” Jeremy said with finality. “We have sort of a good-news-bad-news situation. We’ll start with the bad, and since Aelita was the one to discover it, I think she should be the one to explain.”

Aelita nodded. “Jeremy and I were looking for XANA within Lyoko’s source code. After all, in order to delete XANA, the first thing we needed to do was find him. What we found was… complicated.”

“More complicated than I expected to find, and that’s saying something,” Jeremy added.

“Not only is XANA a vastly complex program that operates across the entirety of the virtual network, but several core functions of Lyoko itself are derived from the XANA program.”

Odd looked to Ulrich and Yumi, both of whom looked as confused as he was. “And in layman’s terms, that means…?” Odd asked.

“It means,” Jeremy said, “that XANA cannot be separated from Lyoko without causing significant, possibly irreparable damage to the entire virtual world. At least, not without reconfiguring almost all of Lyoko’s source code, which will take time.”

“How much time are we talking?” Yumi asked.

Jeremy shrugged. “Best-case scenario? A year, maybe two.”

“A year?” Odd and Ulrich said together.

Jeremy nodded.

“Well that settles it,” Yumi said, face falling. “An attack or two is one thing—we can’t fend off XANA for a whole year. We have to shut it all down.”

Odd felt like a weight had settled in the pit of his stomach. Turn off the supercomputer. Lose Aelita and Lyoko. It was unthinkable… But he found himself nodding sadly. “Jeremy… I hate to say it, but she’s right. There’s too much that could go wrong…”

He went to place a comforting hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, only to find the boy was in no need of comforting. In fact, Jeremy and Aelita were shooting secretive smiles at each other; Aelita was outright laughing.

Odd raised an eyebrow, hand instead moving to his hip. “I don’t see what’s so funny.”

“That’s because I haven’t gotten to the good news yet,” Jeremy said, eyes bright. He went to speak again, but broke off with another smile for Aelita.

Ulrich frowned. “Well? Out with it.”

“I think I can bring Aelita to Earth.”

It took Odd a few seconds for the words to sink in; whatever he thought he might hear, that definitely wasn’t it. He looked, stunned, from Ulrich and Yumi, both of whom stared at Jeremy in openmouthed shock, to Aelita, whose pure joy practically radiated from the monitor. And he found himself smiling too, a bubbly laugh threatening to escaping his lips.

Ulrich was the voice of reason. “To Earth? How is that even possible?”

Jeremy glanced at Aelita, hesitating only a moment. “I ran some tests, and I’m almost certain it is possible to construct a material body for her using the scanners. As for how… I don’t know for sure, but F.H. left a few breadcrumbs for me to follow. I have some idea of where to start, at least.” His face adopted a more serious edge. “I expect it would take me a few months minimum to get a program up and running. Aelita suspects XANA will have ample opportunity to launch attacks within that timeframe.” He shifted in the chair, a nervous gaze taking them all in. “I know it’s not ideal, but it’s a far cry from the years it might take to delete XANA from the system. So… what do you think?”

Odd spoke up immediately. “I say we go for it. Aelita’s practically human already. If Jeremy says he can do it, then it’s a no-brainer.”

Ulrich was slower to come around, though he looked as if he were convincing himself. “Aelita here on Earth… Yeah, that could work. We materialize Aelita, then shut down the supercomputer and stop XANA for good.” He frowned slightly. “Then what? We would need to get her a social security number somehow, maybe a passport. And we’d definitely want to get her enrolled in our school…”

“If Jeremy’s right, we’ll have months to iron out the details,” Yumi cut in. “In the meantime, the biggest problem is XANA. Can we keep him at bay for that long?”

“Of course we can,” said Odd. “We’ve already faced him down once, and that was before we knew there even was a XANA. I’d like to see him try now that we know he’s coming. Bring it on!”

“Thanks, Odd,” Aelita said. A hint of worry quelled her smile. “But I’m not sure any of you realize how much of a threat XANA poses to your world. It will be dangerous. I don’t want to see any of you become hurt because of me.”

“There’s a risk,” Ulrich began, “but I think we should take it.” He grinned. “You’re basically an honorary human being from this point on, Aelita. Now we just have to do the work to make it happen.”

“See Aelita?” Jeremy said, folding his hands behind his head. “I told you they wouldn’t hesitate to help. But, uh, speaking of doing the work… guys, you okay to head for the scanners? If you’re up for it.”

Odd groaned, thinking longingly of his empty bed. “Well, I guess that is what I just signed up for.” He stretched his arms over his head. “Yeah, I’m game. Nothing like a jog through the Mountain Sector to wake me up.”

Jeremy turned to the monitor. “Aelita?”

“Give me a few minutes, and I’ll meet you there.” She stood, stepping back from the holographic interface. “See you soon.” With that, she terminated the connection.

For a long moment, the four of them looked at the now-empty monitor. Then Jeremy broke the silence. “You heard the girl,” he said, his fingers resuming their swift keystrokes. “Get to the scanners. I have some things I want to try that you might find interesting.” His mischievous smile spoke volumes.

“We just agreed to turn Aelita into a human being,” Yumi said wryly, starting for the elevator. “I’m not sure how much more ‘interesting’ I can handle.”

As Odd followed her and Ulrich inside, he had to put a hand against the wall to steady himself as a sudden chill ran down his spine. Turning Aelita into a human being, he thought, shaking his head to himself. To think that just a week ago I was worried about homework…

The doors sealed them in, and the elevator started down, carrying them toward the scanners and their newfound purpose.

Chapter Text

Chapter under construction - gotta change a few things, then reposting. Sorry!