The Leveller - Julia Durango Page 0,45

with an axe to grind. They’re hackers, not kidnappers. She’s lying.”

“It’s the truth,” Kora cries. “The LEGION you know—the amateur hackers and gamers—they’re just a front, a source of data for the Legionnaires.”

“Who?” I ask, my mind going a hundred miles a minute.

“The Legionnaires,” she repeats. “I don’t know their real names or what they look like—no one does. But they’ve sworn to use any means necessary to bring down the MEEP.”

“But why would they do that?” Wyn asks. “Kora, you know what the MEEP can do, what it can be . . . once my dad and his scientists work out the glitches, it could change the world!”

Kora’s eyes fill with a mixture of pity and sadness now as she answers Wyn. “All your father has done, Wyn, is invent a form of mind control . . . mental slavery disguised as a game. Don’t you see? Diego Salvador is the world’s new Oppenheimer, only instead of creating an atomic bomb, he’s created something even worse, something even more dangerous. One day your father’s toy will control us, or kill us all.”

Wyn is shaking his head, his eyes wild with disbelief. “That’s a lie! You can’t believe that!”

“I’m sorry, I never thought it would come to this,” Kora continues, the pity in her eyes now replaced by tears. “I never thought you’d get hurt. I just wanted to stop your father. Now please, let me go! They’ll be coming!” Her voice is almost a sob now and her whole body is shaking beneath me. “8-9-7—”

I slap my hand back over her mouth.

“Nixy—” Wyn starts, but I don’t let him finish.

“We’re not done yet. How do we get to the Landing, Kora? Where’d you hide the portal?”

Kora opens and closes her mouth a few times, like a fish. Her eyes stare straight up, almost glassy looking. She looks like she’s about to have a seizure, but that’s impossible. She’s an avatar. Maybe she’s bluffing, trying to throw us off balance so she can blurt out the numbers.

“Where’s the portal, Kora?”

“Please,” she says in a strangled gasp. “They’re hurting me.”

“Nixy, stop!” Wyn says, taking Kora’s face between his hands. “Kora, are you okay? What’s happening to you?”

Kora’s body takes on a shimmery quality, like it might disappear any moment. We don’t have time for this. I shove Wyn away from her. “The portal, Kora,” I yell, my face just inches above hers. “Where is it?”

Her eyes roll a bit, but then they find me and she looks straight at me.

“Black,” she whispers, as her body convulses once, then fades beneath me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“WE’LL THINK MORE CLEARLY ONCE WE’VE HAD SOME SLEEP,” WYN says, squeezing my hand.

We are walking through the lobby of the Hotel Nacional again. I’m a little more alert than I was last night when we were here, though equally distraught. I admit, I had a good cry in the Tropicana dressing room after Kora disappeared. I’m not sure exactly what happened to her, but there’s a pretty good chance she wasn’t lying. Which means there is a pretty good chance she’s hurt, maybe even dead, and it’s my fault.

I’m also pretty sure that if we are up against stone-cold killers, we are never getting back home.

As we go up the elevator, I feel Wyn’s eyes on me, deliberating, trying to decide what to do with me next. I don’t blame him. I’m a bundle of raw feelings and my brain’s on overdrive. Part of me feels like knocking down a few walls again to relieve my frustration. The other part of me wants to pull a Rip Van Winkle and sleep for the next hundred years.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” he says quietly.

“I trapped her here while someone in the real world was killing her,” I finally say, as the elevator doors open.

“We don’t know what truly happened, Nixy. Maybe she’s still alive,” Wyn says, but I can tell by his voice he doesn’t believe it. Neither do I. We both felt the presence of death in that dressing room, something permanent when Kora’s body disappeared. Besides, she never activated her return frequency code. And she’d been terrified. Which means either someone summoned her back remotely, or . . . she really died.

We stop by one of the hotel rooms to get blankets and pillows, and head to the rooftop.

“You know we don’t have time for this,” I say as Wyn pulls two recliners side by side and faces them toward the west.

“There’s nothing else