From the work of the legendary Jack Kirby, four men have sworn to tread the path which all men fear! The dangerous road beyond the things we know! They call themselves the Challengers of the Unknown!

What's out there? Places we cannot see! Things we fear to touch! Sounds that do not belong to this world! Riddles of the ages lurking beyond the bridge without a name! Only men living on borrowed time would dare cross that bridge! Here are such men, and their ultimate adventure, in...

TIME’S RUNNING OUT FOR THE CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN!

Chapter 1

Ace told me to tell you how they all lived, Miss Robbins. I’ll try very hard and I’ll do my best, but I might not tell the story right. Mr. Pramble doesn’t care about anything except death, so that’s all I ever write down. I never practice talking about somebody’s life so I’m not very good at it.

I guess I’ll start when I woke up. Everything was normal in the morning. Mr. Pramble’s helpers brought me breakfast, and then took me over to run on the treadmill and lift the barbell for a while before bringing me back to my room.

What did they look like? I didn’t know yet. Grown-ups, of course, but I hadn’t seen their faces. They all wore really thick clothes, all white, with white gloves and boots and the kind of hat that goes all the way around that they can see through, but I can’t see through. And I didn’t know their voices either. Mr. Pramble doesn’t let his helpers talk to me. But the place isn’t that big, and not too many people could live there. So I figured they were probably the same helpers as on most other days.

Then Mr. Pramble came to my room to see me and give me my notebook, and his helpers brought the next man who was going to die. Most days he just comes to talk to me by himself and teach me, and maybe once a week his helpers bring somebody with him. Back when he first started bringing people to my room, I sometimes tried to not touch the people because it hurt too much, but Mr. Pramble would get really mad and his helpers would pick me up and put my hand on the person anyway, so now I do it when he tells me to even though it’s really not fun. The man had the other kind of big hat over his head, the kind he can’t hear or see through at all, and he was tied to a bed with wheels on it, and he was struggling a bit and trying to get out but he couldn’t, so that was all pretty normal. I don’t think anybody told him where he was or why he was brought to my room, but that didn’t matter, so I reached out and touched his arm-

The henchmen drag me up from the gurney and chain me to a wall. I can see and hear nothing; they never removed the sensory deprivation helmet they locked around my skull, and slamming my head back against the wall does nothing to crack it. I try anyway, and in response the henchmen hold my head tight and fasten what feels like a ratchet to either side of the helmet to lock it in place. I can’t move a muscle. The last three days, I’ve been kept in a solitary cell but otherwise unharmed. Not anymore. And through the helmet I can faintly smell blood.

When I was young, I used to dream about death. I used to think about how I would face a firing squad with bravado, how I’d come up with some good quip to say right before they took aim. If I had the chance, I’d do it. But it’s clear to me now that I won’t get the chance. Maybe if I saved all my strength for the last possible moment, I could burst free of my bonds and ruin whatever spectacle they had planned, but there’s just no opportunity. I’ve already struggled, and they’ve already tighted the ratchet. The gag in the helmet makes sure I can’t even shout defiance at my captors. I just…hang here. There is absolutely nothing else I can do.

There’s a noise and a sudden ringing in my ears. I think for a moment that the door slammed shut, so loudly I could hear it through the helmet, but the ringing doesn’t stop. Is this actually it? Maybe it’s not. I expected a feeling like the sudden pinch of a needle driven in by a sledgehammer, but that’s not really how it feels. I don’t feel much pain until - I try to take a breath. Even now, not as much pain as I thought. I feel cold and clammy instead, like I’ve been outside too long on a wet day in late autumn. I try to clench my fists in my restraints and they respond, but slowly. Very slowly.

Okay. Yeah. I think this is it, now. I feel a pulse of blood pour down my chest, and then another, with my next heartbeat. My legs collapse from under me and I fall limp against my restraints, and suddenly I feel like my head is getting squeezed.

I’m desperately tired, my arms need a rest, I want to sit down, I want to dry off my soaking wet clothes, why am I soaking wet, did they shoot me? I can’t breathe with my arms up like this.

I’m so tired. I just want to sleep…

Then my thoughts clear like clouds parting, and I can see the light, but it’s not exactly a light. His skin is so pale I think for a moment that the Moon itself is walking towards me. I can see him even though my eyes are closed, and I can hear his cloak sweep around me as he wraps his arm behind my shoulders, despite the cold stone wall at my back. He lifts as if to help me stand-

That was what I saw when I touched the poor man, and then the helpers pushed the bed with wheels away and Mr. Pramble gave me my notebook, stepped out of my room, and closed the door. I got out my pencil and wrote down what I felt when I touched the man and my best guess for the cause of death. Eventually Mr. Pramble came back in and I gave him my notebook so he could see if I got it right. He was pretty happy with it and read it out loud.

“‘Gunshot wound to the thorax, a little to the left of the midline, bullet passed cleanly through the intercostal space of ribs 3 and 4, causing a transection of the aortic arch before lodging in T4. Intense arterial bleed caused elevated heart and respiratory rates, causing incoherence in one minute, unconsciousness in two minutes, death no more than two minutes following.’ I could be reading from our own autopsy report hours from now and it would sound exactly the same as your notebook. And you got that in two minutes of subjective experience, from just the general area of pain and the timing of symptoms? Top marks, Val. And you aren’t crying this time, either. You’ve come a long way.”

I wasn’t crying, but it was mostly because the shock made the pain not so bad. Mr. Pramble sometimes says that I’m almost nine and that most boys my age stop crying from pain when they are younger than me, but I don’t know any other boys so I don’t know if that’s true. An aortic gunshot wound isn’t the worst death anyway, especially when you’re restrained, because the strain on the thorax stops you from breathing and induces unconsciousness quick. It’s not as nice as drowning is right at the end and it’s not as quick as electrocution, but it’s a lot lot lot nicer than some of the other things like getting too much acid on your face and in your throat. I haven’t felt that in a while but I think I’d still cry if I did.

Then Mr. Pramble asked me three more questions, like he does after every death. “Did you see the Challengers of the Unknown?” was the first one. I knew what they looked like because he told me a lot, they were four men wearing dark purple flight suits with a small hourglass logo, one with - oh, I guess you know already, Miss Robbins. Sorry. It’s hard to tell the story right. I told Mr. Pramble I didn’t see them, because I hadn’t yet.

The second question was always the same. “Did you feel hot, or cold?” I thought back:

…Even now, not as much pain as I thought. I feel cold and clammy instead, like I’ve been outside too long on a wet day in late autumn…

“Cold,” I told him. I wondered now and then why he wanted to know that, and why sometimes people feel a warm glowing comfortable feeling for a few minutes before the glow fades back into coldness and they die, but whenever I asked him, he said he’d tell me later. He never told me later. I maybe have a guess.

Then he asked me the third question. “Did you see Death?”

That question I’m sometimes not sure about. I see the pale man a lot. He’s usually really nice when you’re dying. He holds your hand when it gets dark and you wish your family was there but they aren’t. He puts his cape around you to keep you warm when your heartbeat slows down and you get cold. Sometimes dying takes a while, but he stays right there and never gets bored or annoyed with you, even if you throw up or can’t hold it in. Sometimes he’s nice and sometimes he’s not, but he’s never rude or impatient. And right at the end, no matter if he’s nice or not, no matter if you want to go or not, he helps you stand up so you can go somewhere else. I don’t know where. I always stop seeing after that.

So that sounds kind of like Death, but not exactly, and I know it’s really important to tell the truth exactly, and I always want to do my best. So I asked Mr. Pramble to tell me again what Death looked like. He said the same exact words he always says:

“The Spectre of Death is pallid: its skin resembles a corpse’s that’s been drained of blood. It is a giant, large enough to crush you like a bug in its hand. Its face is a skull hidden in shadow, and it radiates cold like a walking glacier. It moves unnaturally smoothly, like a yawning mouth opening wider and wider and wider. It is a nightmare made flesh.”

I remembered dying again-

Then my thoughts clear like clouds parting, and I can see the light, but it’s not exactly a light. His skin is so pale I think for a moment that the Moon itself is walking towards me. I can see him even though my eyes are covered, and I can hear his cloak sweep around me as he wraps his arm behind my shoulders, despite the cold stone wall at my back. He lifts as if to help me stand, and I find myself strong enough to raise my head and look him in the eye. He looks at me with sympathy and understanding, and raises a gloved finger to his lips-

“No”, I told Mr. Pramble. I know it’s wrong to lie so I was glad I asked him to make sure this wasn’t Death. “I haven’t seen anybody like that. I’ll tell you if I do.”

He was happy with this, and took my notebook with him when he left my room and closed the door. I tried to read my other books on my bookshelf like I’m supposed to during the day, but it’s hard to study after dying, so I went back to bed even though I wasn’t tired, and looked at the ceiling for a while and tried not to think about anything. After a while I got hungry and I thought that the helpers were usually here by now with lunch but they weren’t here. So I kept waiting.

Then the door unlocked and opened suddenly, without Mr. Pramble warning me to sit up on my bed first, and for the first time I saw Red Ryan. Even though he was wearing a dark purple flight suit, just like Mr. Pramble said, I didn’t realize yet that he was one of the Challengers of the Unknown. He was still alive at that point.

Chapter 2

I don’t know why I didn’t hit the button right away. If I’m ever in trouble, if there’s a fire or when I’m sick or the time my toilet leaked and started flooding my room, I’m supposed to hit the button and he or the helpers will come and unlock the door to my room and get me safe. Mr. Pramble used to specifically say he wouldn’t get mad if I pressed the button and it turned out I wasn’t in trouble, so long as I didn’t lie about why I pushed it. He said that if something strange happens, better to just call him and let him figure out if it’s bad, than letting something bad keep happening because I wasn’t sure. And I was pretty sure.

But I guess Red just didn’t look scary. And I guess I wanted to talk to somebody new. I don’t normally talk with anybody else except Mr. Pramble. So I didn’t try to hit the button. I just sat on my bed as he walked in.

“Well, you’re a bit young for a henchman. What are you doing here?”

“Um. I’ve been here the whole time. And I’ve never seen you before. Did you just get here?”

Red Ryan smiled. “I did indeed. But what’s wrong with that? It’s a lot of fun to go new places and meet new people, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been to any new places. And meeting new people really isn’t fun.”

“Well, maybe we can change your mind on that.”

“‘We’?”

“Oh, sure. I always go first, but my friends are never far behind me.” He raised his voice. “Guys, you’ll want to see this!”

Red had been standing in the door the whole time so it wouldn’t close, but now he let it go as two other men walked into the room. I know now that they were Ace Morgan and Prof Haley, but I didn’t know that yet. The fourth man, Rocky Davis, stayed in the hallway and held the door open.

My room usually felt pretty big, but now it felt small. I sat up on my bed and tried to back away as they got close. I don’t know what I was scared of, but usually people don’t get that close to me without being tied up. People being close usually means I’m about to die again.

Ace said “What’s your name, son?” I knew I was supposed to pay attention when grown-ups are talking, but I got distracted by his hair. Mr. Pramble doesn’t have any hair, and I have brown hair but I only see it in the mirror. But his hair was yellow, like yours, Miss Robbins. And Prof’s was half brown and half grey, and Red’s was orange, and Rocky’s was black. I don’t see people’s hair when they’re pushed into my room for me to touch them, obviously. People have hair, and the hair is different colors. I knew that but it was still distracting to actually see it.

He looked worried. “Are you alright? Can you hear me?”

“Oh. Yes. I’m fine. I can hear you.”

“Good! I’m Ace. What’s your name?”

“Val.”

“Nice to meet you, Val.” He got closer and I raised my hand to try to get him to back away, but instead of backing away and being scared, he actually touched my hand before I knew what he was doing. I tried to scream STOP-

No conscious thought. Only spatial awareness. Altitude is four hundred feet and dropping; I’ve stabilized roll and pitch but with the engine control dead, no way I can bring the yaw up to horizontal in time. I barely see the plane, I barely see the instrument panel; all I see is a branching tree of potential flight paths, all leading inevitably to the ground. The remaining controls are a crippled extension of my own body as I aim to slide down the far side of a hill to minimize impact angle, while lightning strikes to my right-

-and I pulled my hand away and pushed myself as far into the corner of my bed as I could. “DON’T TOUCH ME!”

Ace raised both his hands and took a step back. “Val…I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to scare you.”

I estimated my heart rate was elevated to between 140 and 150 bpm, and I felt vasoconstriction indicating a proportional blood pressure increase. But then I got less scared and more mad. “You’re really mean! Mr. Pramble never makes me touch people twice in one day! And he always warns me and he always gives me a minute before he makes me do it!”

“Never more than once a day? Does touching people hurt?”

I think I should have figured out then that he didn’t know about me, but I was still mad and kept yelling at him instead of thinking. “When I touch people I die. And dying really hurts!”

“You…die? You look alive to me.”

“Are you stupid? When you touch me I feel how you are going to die, as if I was you!”

Ace tried to say sorry again but the third man in the room interrupted him. “You see the future? How accurately?” This was Prof. I didn’t know that yet.

I was getting a little less mad now. “I’m right every single time. I don’t know when it happens but it always happens just like I see it.”

And Ace interrupted him right back and talked to me again. “In that case, we need to know if you’re telling the truth. How do I die?”

“But…if you don’t already know how you die, then you won’t know if I’m telling the truth until it happens. And then you still won’t know because you’ll be dead.”

“Then the only way I’ll know is if you tell me, right?”

I didn’t really understand what I’d seen yet. I broke off too fast, so it was still jumbled up in my mind, and his death wasn’t anything like any other death I’d ever died. I must have imagined parts of it. So I told Ace the very simple story. “Right before you die, you’re flying a plane. In a lightning storm.”

“Let me guess: you didn’t actually see us die,” said Ace.

“Nobody could survive the crash.”

I never thought someone would be happy to hear how he was going to die, but all of them laughed. Even Rocky, who was standing out in the hallway holding the door open, who hadn’t said anything. They seemed to think it was really funny. I never met anybody who ever thought that before. Ace was the first to stop laughing.

“You’re the real deal, all right! Four men went down with the plane. Nobody could survive the crash. It’d take a miracle.”

Now I was confused. “You…died? But you look alive to me.”

Red said, “Ace made a bit of a joke. We didn’t die. But we were supposed to. We came as close as you can possibly get, we should have died, but instead we woke up in the wreck of a plane and all got one more chance at life. Here. Look at this.”

Red unwrapped something from around his wrist, and held it out, so that I could see it without touching him by accident. “See this?”

It looked kinda like a little clock on a leather band, but I didn’t think that was what it was, because it wasn’t ticking, and the glass case around it was almost shattered. I couldn’t tell how the thing was in one piece.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a little clock. It’s a way to tell time.” said Red. I was surprised my first guess was right. “You look at it, and you know what time it is.”

“But it’s not ticking. It won’t be the right time.”

Red laughed. “It’s always the right time. That’s the lesson the watch taught us, after that crash. My watch was shattered on my wrist, but I got out with just a few cuts and bruises. I should have been smashed up just like the watch, but I wasn’t. None of us were. That means we’re still living in that single moment, right before we hit the ground. That means the time is right. The time is now.”

I touched the little clock, just to get a better look at it, but Red must have thought I really wanted it. “Here,” he said, letting go of it. “Put it on. You can borrow it! The rest of us are on borrowed time already; you’ll fit right in.”

I saw there was a little clip I could put the band through, so the clock would stay on my wrist. I put it on, and looked away, then looked at it again to see if I learned anything new from it. I didn’t. The clock was still broken. It looked just the same as before.

“I don’t get it,” I told Red. “If you wear this because you learned a lesson, why do you still need to wear it if you’ve already learned the lesson?”

“Because sometimes, for hard lessons, you need to hear the lesson over and over.” This was Prof talking now. “You need to take notes. You need to study, and refresh your memory, to keep it in mind. That’s what Red’s watch is. The lesson is that we will die someday, and should have died already. The lesson is not to be afraid of death.”

“Maybe the lesson’s wrong. Most people are afraid of death.”

Prof looked sad for a moment, like he didn’t know what to say, but then he tilted his head as if I reminded him of something, and asked “How many is ‘most’?”

I tried to think. “Um. I don’t know. I didn’t count. Usually once a week, and sometimes twice. It was less when I was little.”

“How do most people die?”

“It changes. It can be gunshot wounds or electrocution or anaethestic gas or anything really. It depends on what Mr. Pramble’s test that day is.”

“Test?!”

They looked at each other, and now they didn’t look happy at all. “So that’s the disappearances after all. A hundred and fifty people,” said Prof. He talked without opening his mouth, and frowned. “Lower bound.”

They all looked at Ace, and it looked like they asked him a question and he answered, but without anybody saying anything. He nodded back at them.

And suddenly I felt stupid because I forgot really basic things I was supposed to do. Just so I was totally sure, I asked “Are you the Challengers of the Unknown?”

Ace looked back at me. “That’s us.”

“Oh. Okay.” I slid across my bed and hit the button. I think that was what killed them all. “Mr. Pramble really wants to talk to you again.”

“Good,” he said, even though he didn’t look like it was good. “We really want to talk to him.”

Chapter 3

I expected them to wait for the helpers and Mr. Pramble to arrive, but I guess they didn’t like standing and waiting around. I must have told him that I only see death on skin contact, or maybe he just figured it out on his own, but Rocky wrapped his flight jacket around me and picked me up and still ran just as fast as the others. He’s really strong. You probably knew that already.

I remember wondering how they knew where they were going. But I guess they didn’t.

Around the corner to the gym, one of the helpers came running and ran right into Red. Red stumbled for a bit and then hit the helper really hard. I tried to yell at them to not fight, that the helpers could call Mr. Pramble like Ace wanted, but I wasn’t fast enough and the helper collapsed. I got scared, because I know the helpers don’t like it when you hit them, and I screamed a little. But Rocky asked me to be quiet, so I stopped. He didn’t seem angry, though, just urgent, which isn’t quite the same thing. Red and Ace moved the helper out of the way so he wouldn’t be seen from the hallway, then we all moved past the gym and into one of the closets.

“Well, they certainly know now.”

“Think he sounded the alarm before Red knocked him down?”

“He was running. The alarm’s already been sounded.”

“So we won’t get him by surprise. Fine.” This was Ace. “New plan. One of us gets the kid out, the rest of us make sure nobody else gets out, and we hold down the fort until CADMUS closes the net around Multi-Man and the henchmen.”

“Um.” This was me. I know you’re not supposed to interrupt grown-ups but this was really important. “Are you trying to talk to Mr. Pramble or kill him?”

Prof looked at me. “You tell us. How does Mr. Pramble die next?”

“What do you mean, ‘next’?”

He looked sad when I asked that. It’s funny how you remember some things even when they’re not important. But I remember that he looked sad. I think he felt bad that I had to ask the question. I think he didn’t like it when people didn’t share what they knew.

“Duncan Pramble was the assistant to an archaeologist who hired us. Amos Hunter. We unearthed a number of Tartarian artifacts together, but Pramble got greedy, arranged a sale with a criminal, and stole a case of ancient vials. None of us knew what they were, at the time. When we cornered him, he drank the smallest one, a scruple spoon made of diamond containing a single drop of Liquid Light. It gave him a superpower, but it did more than that. Whenever he dies, he’s resurrected, with a different superpower, completely random and unpredictable. He didn’t tell you any of this?”

“He’s told me that he’s died more than I have. He taught me how to diagnose cause of death from subjective experiences of pain and loss of function. He’s really really good at it so I don’t think he’s lying. But I just thought he was like me.”

Rocky had put me down, and he was holding his ear next to the door to hear more helpers coming. He hadn’t said anything until this point. But now he looked right at me. His voice was very deep. “Don’t worry. You’re not like him.”

Prof nodded. “He has died many times, but unlike you, those deaths were his, not others’. Every death causes his skull circumference to grow and his height to decrease by a millimeter on average, and he was 5’8” when we first met him. Four years ago, when he killed himself and escaped from Slabside, he was 4’5, so he’s likely shorter now-“.

“I’d estimate his height at 4’1” and cranial circumference at 42 inches,” I said. I was happy to actually know something, because a lot of times I don’t understand what grown-ups talk about and think about. “His non-congenital hypermacrocephaly has not caused the kyphosis you might expect, but has caused persistent ataxia-induced gait abnormality usually not seen in neurologically healthy patients after late infancy.”

They all seemed really surprised when I said this. “He taught you those words?” Prof asked.

“Um. Yeah. And I have books I can look up if I don’t remember them.”

Red whistled. “I’m real impressed, Val. ‘Ataxia’? I don’t know the meaning of the word!”

“It means loss of voluntary motor control, in this case specifically balance and walking rather than-“

He interrupted me but smiled as he did it. “I know what ataxia is. I climb mountains and do a lot of stuff that needs…well, really good voluntary motor control. I was making a joke. Sorry.”

Ace got all their attention. They were still talking pretty quietly. “We can joke later. We’re getting off topic. Val, I’ll ask what Prof asked. How does Duncan Pramble die next? Do I kill him?”

“I don’t know. He’s never let me touch him except with gloves, not once. And the helpers wear those white suits, so I don’t know how any of them die either. Though I guess one of them was killed by Red if he’s not awake by now.”

And then I realized that Ace also said ‘next’, so I wanted to make sure they understood everything. “But people don’t die more than once. If someone almost dies and comes back, he wasn’t really dead to start with, and I don’t see it. Mr. Pramble has tested that. A lot.”

“You’re quite right,” Mr. Pramble said.

We all jumped, and Ace and Prof pulled out their guns while Rocky turned around to get between me and the door. The door pulled open and four of the helpers came in and surrounded us, but Mr. Pramble didn’t come in with them - he was already there, behind Red, and I could see that he had a gun pressed right into Red’s back. Nobody saw him come in.

“You always talked too much,” Mr. Pramble said. “When Hunter hired you I thought you’d be practical men, men of action. But you never shut up.”

Ace smiled. He was pointing his gun at one of the helpers, since he couldn’t shoot Mr. Pramble without shooting Red. The helpers were pointing guns back. “We’re a team. We have to communicate somehow. Talking’s as good a way as any.”

Red was also smiling. Mr. Pramble was pressing the gun right to his spine, against Red’s twelfth thoracic vertebra. Maybe he thought that Red would be more scared of lingering paralysis than of instant death. But Red didn’t seem scared. “And since we’re talking now, what’s the new power that let you get in here and get the drop on me? Couldn’t be invisibility since the door never opened, and I’d have heard you coming. Did you vibrate through the door? Run at superspeed when we blinked? Maybe you’re an astral projection and I’m just imagining the gun?”

Prof wasn’t smiling and didn’t seem in the mood for jokes anymore, but he joined in too. “Or perhaps you stole someone else’s work again, Pramble. Perhaps you teleported yourself in here with Tagorian’s molecular displacer? A Tyran’s zeta-beam transmitter? Morelian’s magic wand? Tiko’s time cube?”

Rocky wasn’t smiling either. He was close enough that when he talked, it was more like a deep rumble. “Or maybe you don’t have nothin’, no powers and no gadgets, but we’re all just plumb blind and you got past us all because you’re so short. Is that your trick this time, Multi-Man?”

That one made Mr. Pramble angry. I don’t think it was Rocky calling him short; Mr. Pramble joked about that sometimes with me when we talked. I think it was Rocky acting as if Mr. Pramble was just a normal man with nothing special about him that hurt so much. “I’m the strongest I’ve ever been,” Mr. Pramble said to Rocky, even as he pulled Red a bit so that Rocky didn’t have a clear shot. “I can go to and from the realm of souls, and bring physical objects with me. I can walk among phantoms-“

“Good,” said Ace. “Getting to know your roommates early, I take it.”

“-which is why,” he said louder now that Ace interrupted him, “you four will see that it’s quite futile to fight. You cannot hurt me, not with fists or knives or bullets. Drop your guns.”

“No.” said Red. Which seemed an odd thing to say, since he hadn’t moved and didn’t have his gun out to start with.

“‘No?’ You want to die that badly?”

“No” said Red again. “If you could turn into a ghost whenever you wanted, you’d have just shot me and been gone before Rocky and Prof and Ace even blinked. You could have killed us all one by one with no risk, but you didn’t. Whatever your trick is, you have pretty serious limits. You’re bluffing.”

Mr. Pramble pushed the gun further against Red’s spine. “This gun is no bluff. I have you. If your friends fire, no matter what happens, you die first.”

“You think I’m scared? I always go first.”

Everything happened at once. I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. I didn’t know it was possible for someone to move that fast. Red twisted his whole body to the left, and when Mr. Pramble pulled the trigger, Red wasn’t in front of the gun anymore. As he twisted, he grabbed Mr. Pramble’s left arm, picked him up, and spun around again and actually threw him at two of the helpers. They were pointing their guns, but they didn’t want to shoot Mr. Pramble. All three of them fell over.

At the same moment, I heard Ace and Prof shoot. I didn’t see it, but they must have turned and shot the other two helpers, or else the other two helpers would have shot them. I didn’t really hear it, either, because the gunshots were way louder than I’m used to. People shot with a gun usually are wearing the kind of big hat that goes all over your head that you can’t see or hear through, so it’s loud but not that loud. But this was really loud. For a little bit, I couldn’t hear anything else over the ringing in my ears.

The Challengers didn’t seem bothered. Maybe they were used to it. Or maybe I am still a baby, like he sometimes says, and I got bothered by things that I should be old enough not to be bothered by. But Ace and Prof turned towards the two helpers and Mr. Pramble, who were getting to their feet, and Red tried to tackle them. Mr. Pramble, even though he has trouble balancing sometimes because of his hypermacrocephaly, got up really fast, and jumped towards me. Red tried to grab him, but he ducked, and Rocky tried to block him, but Mr. Pramble disappeared right right before Rocky could do it.

And then I disappeared too.

Chapter 4

The world was empty. There was nothing.

The most peaceful awake deaths are the deaths by drowning. There was one woman who died that way, just two months before all this happened. She had held her breath for as long as she possibly could, and kicked and struggled to get out of the straps holding her down, but she couldn’t get out, and eventually, she opened her mouth and let water go down her trachea instead of the esophagus where it’s supposed to go. And then, she stopped struggling. She couldn’t breathe, but not breathing wasn’t really painful anymore. Mostly, she thought about her family.

When the pale man came, he waved his hand, and suddenly the water and the walls and the base all went away. She was sitting with her husband and her children on a blanket in an open field, at night, looking up at the stars. When she saw her memory, she was happy. The pale man waved his hand again and the memory was gone, and then he held out his hand and she put her hand in his, and my vision ended.

I remember staying awake really late that night looking at my ceiling in the dark, wishing I had a family, brothers and sisters and a mom and a dad, like in her memory. I remember wishing that the pale man would come and wave his hand to let me look at the stars. I had never seen the stars before.

And I didn’t see them this time either. I thought for a moment that that’s what happened: the pale man had come to let me see the stars, and had turned the walls and the ceiling and the whole underground base itself to glass. But that doesn’t do any good if the stars and the sky are also turned to glass. I didn’t see black like when the lights are off or your eyes are closed. I saw nothing.

But I heard Mr. Pramble. “Stay close to me,” he told me, and I tried to open my mouth to tell him that I didn’t know where he was or how to stay close, and then realized that I couldn’t open my mouth, or feel my body at all. I couldn’t breathe, just like that poor woman who drowned. I realized that what I was feeling was a lot like what being dead might feel like, and I got really scared.

“Don’t panic, Val! Stay calm. You aren’t dead.” I heard him, but I didn’t hear him. I knew what he was saying and I knew what his voice sounded like so I imagined that it was his voice saying it, but it wasn’t, I just knew somehow what he was trying to tell me. “Death can hear your thoughts. Panicking will not help.”

I think, when I was little, hearing him say that would have made me even more scared than I already was. But he had taught me a lot about how to control my feelings, and I had a lot of practice at it. I couldn’t take deep breaths to calm down, but somehow, I calmed down anyway.

“There you go, that’s good. Death is still coming for us, but we have a little time yet. Direction in this phantom zone isn’t isomorphic to direction in the waking world, but I know the way.”

I stayed with Mr. Pramble somehow. I don’t know how. I tried to look around, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even see myself. I didn’t seem to have a body.

He didn’t say anything more for a little bit, maybe a few minutes. We weren’t there for long. Finally, he did say something. He talked the way you would talk if you were pointing at something, but I couldn’t see what he was pointing at, or if he was pointing at anything. “Val, you’ve asked what Death looks like. There it is. The Spectre of Death.”

I saw nothing at all.

“That’s…strange. I thought you of all people would be able to see it here. But I promise you that it can see you.”

And that made me wonder. Of all the deaths I had seen, none of them were ever here. Red had wondered why Mr. Pramble didn’t just shoot him. But I wondered why Mr. Pramble didn’t just take him here and leave him for Death to find. Or just leave him here forever.

“Good. Always practical thinking, Val, but anyone and anything I bring with me goes back to reality when I do. Don’t worry. We’re headed for the arsenal. We’ll be back to reality soon.”

I don’t think he was telling me not to worry. I think he was telling himself. I couldn’t hear him, but he sounded scared. And that was strange. He usually wasn’t scared of anything.

And then I felt something for the first time since Mr. Pramble brought me here. I felt cold. It was like the sudden cold from opening a freezer, or like the gas which evaporates from a flask of liquid nitrogen. It didn’t hurt quite yet, but there were no other sensations to notice, so I really noticed it. I thought that Death must be getting pretty close. And I started getting scared again.

“Change of plans, Val. We’re going back right now. It’ll be very bright, so you’ll need to close your eyes fast and take a deep breath. Three. Two. One.”

Everything came back all at once, and he was right. I took a deep breath - I hadn’t breathed at all since we left - and closed my eyes right away, because the light was really bright. But my eyes adjusted and I opened them and I realized that I knew where we were.

We were back in my room. There was a bit of ice on Mr. Pramble’s clothes. Mine too. He didn’t notice.

“Well done, Val. I know that was hard. Now, look at me.”

I did. Ace and Rocky and Prof and Red had to bend down or kneel to talk to me, but Mr. Pramble could stand up straight and still look me in the eyes.

“I promise I’m not mad at you. I won’t punish you, I won’t hurt you, no matter what you did, no matter what happened. But this is very important and I need you to tell me the truth. Did you touch any of the Challengers?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw Ace. He was about to die in a plane crash, in a lightning storm.”

“Were the other three there?”

It was all jumbled still, and I hadn’t had any time to sort things out in my mind, but there was another part of the vision, a fraction of a second-

…one last maneuver and I’ll join them…

-“…I’m not sure. But I don’t think so.”

Mr. Pramble’s eyes went wide, and he told me to stay where I was. I did. Then he took out a key, and unlocked the door from the inside, and locked it behind him. I ran to the door.

“Wait. Wait! Don’t leave me!”

“Just stay here and don’t worry. I’ll be back soon, Val.”

Then he left, and it was quiet again. He never came back to my room. I sat on my bed, because I didn’t know what else to do. And even though I was in my room every single day, suddenly it felt very small.

Chapter 5

It’s funny how you do the same thing every single day, and you get used to it, and you don’t think about doing anything different. But then, when one thing different enough happens, suddenly all that habit goes away. Even one day before, I would never ever think of doing what I did. The helpers and Mr. Pramble would have gotten really mad and yelled at me if I did it normally, of course, but even without that, I wouldn’t have thought about it.

I had sometimes looked around at my room and thought that I didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t claustrophobia, it wasn’t anything that has a medical name, but now and again one room just didn’t feel big enough and I was bored and really wanted to go somewhere else. A few times I had hit the button, and Mr. Pramble had come, and I told him that I wanted to go somewhere else, and he patiently explained that I couldn’t, but that he was sympathetic. The helpers would come take me to lift the barbell and run on the treadmill in the gym every day, and Mr. Pramble would take me to his office or the morgue or the big room or the abattoir once in a while when teaching me, but he never took me someplace just because I asked to go.

I did look at the button again. But the button was still lit up red, meaning that it had never been answered from when I pushed it a few minutes ago. Pushing the button again wouldn’t make the light more red; either helpers were coming or not. And somehow I knew they weren’t coming. So it was going to be useless to ask.

I really didn’t want to be in my room right now. But what was different about this time, what I never would have thought about before, is that I realized maybe I could get out of my room without asking.

I checked the little clock on my wrist. It told me the time was now.

My bookcase with all my medical books wasn’t too far from the door, and it was much too heavy to lift, but if I shoved as hard as I could, I could move it. I knew that because one of the helpers had shoved it one time by accident when he leaned against it. So I put on my shoes for better grip and pushed. You push high if you want to knock something over, but you push low if you just want to move it, and I’m not very big anyway, so I pushed it very low. After a couple minutes, the bookcase was right next to the door.

And then I went and got the plunger in my bathroom. My textbooks called it ‘biomechanics’ when they talked about the leverage exerted by muscles and tendons on bones, but I realized at one point that the same idea of leverage and torque applies to things that aren’t living. I called it ‘abiomechanics’. So I took the plunger, jammed it up so that one end was pressing against the bookcase and the middle was pushing down on the doorknob, and pulled. I pulled really hard.

But that wasn’t enough. When I adjusted it higher, I pulled so hard I actually pulled myself up off the ground, and my whole weight was on it, and that still wasn’t enough. And I couldn’t pull down any more than that. So I wedged the plunger against the doorknob and bookcase, then climbed on top of my bookcase.

And then, I jumped off.

That time it was enough. The doorknob broke with a loud crash, and I hit the ground. Now that I think about it, it’s maybe obvious that I was going to hit the ground hard if it worked and going to hit the plunger hard if it didn’t work, but I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. It wasn’t too bad of a fall and my arms were out ahead of my face, but I still hit my head against the ground when I fell. I got up again. No concussion, no broken bones, no lacerations, just some minor pain and a nosebleed.

And it worked! I got some tissue paper from the bathroom to shove up my nose and soak up the blood, but I wasn’t crying and I wasn’t even upset. The fact that it worked was way more good than the pain was bad. I went back to look, and behind the doorknob, inside the door, I could see some metal parts; I didn’t know what any of them did, but I pushed and twisted them until something turned, and then I just pushed the door open. I had never opened the door myself. Never. But now I had. And it felt normal somehow. I wasn’t scared of Mr. Pramble or the helpers getting mad at me, even though they definitely would get mad at me if they saw the door. Everything was different today.

I looked out, up and down the hall. I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t know which way to go; I did know the base and I did know where everything was, but the Challengers didn’t, so I had no idea which way they’d choose. I picked up the plunger even though it now had a big crack in it, since there had been a lot of fighting already and maybe I could swing it if I needed to, and looked around again.

And then I had to clap my hands over my ears because of the sudden sound, almost as loud as the gunshots but longer and much much weirder, and decided that the Challengers were probably that way. So that’s where I ran.

In the big room next to the arsenal, Mr. Pramble keeps a whole bunch of stuff he shows me sometimes but tells me never ever to touch. He says that each thing in there is more dangerous than any of the weapons in the arsenal, even if it doesn’t look that way. There’s a diamond ring in there along with some other gems, at least a dozen vials, a mirror with a little globe underneath, a red harp with broken strings, a hanging censer that always has smoke coming out, a silvery horn that looks a bit like a bird, a large tangled walking stick, a glowing ball like a little red sun in a glass box, a sand castle on a dinner plate, a golden flower on top of a golden turtle, and a lot more that I don’t remember because there was so much. Nothing looked like a machine, but aside from that, almost everything looked different from everything else. Mr. Pramble said that when I was older he’d tell me what each of those things was and where he got them.

I peeked around the last corner to see the big room, and it was pure chaos. Everything was moving every direction. I saw smoke and ice and fire and light of all different colors. I saw things flapping and crawling and sliding and flying and dripping and spinning. The hallway shook back and forth and up and down as big things slammed into it. I held my plunger really tight. I didn’t know what to do.

Mr. Pramble asked me after every single death, “Did you see the Challengers of the Unknown?”. Whenever I wanted to know more, he told me exactly what they looked like, and what they did, and how I could recognize them. But he never showed me their faces. He never told me about the plane crash they all survived. And he never answered a question I had, which I only asked once. See, he would describe them something like:

• Ace Morgan, test pilot and astronaut. In charge.
• Prof Haley, scuba expert and professor of oceanography.
• Red Ryan, fearless daredevil and mountain climber.
• Rocky Davis, Olympic wrestler and weightlifter.
• June Robbins, mechanical engineer and medic. Not a real Challenger, probably won’t be with them.

And after he explained what all those things were, I one time asked him…why was he worried? There weren’t any planes in the base, or spaceships, or oceans, or mountains. And being strong doesn’t stop a bullet from killing you. All of them would basically be normal people in here. So why was he so scared?

Mr. Pramble got mad at me. He yelled that they were basically normal people, and that he wasn’t scared. I didn’t ask him again after that, but I thought about it, and I eventually realized that he wasn’t telling the truth. But I still didn’t know what the truth was. I didn’t get it.

Now I got it.

Because the longer I watched, the less like chaos it seemed. As my ears adjusted I could hear them talking, just one or two words at a time, but those one or two words was enough to tell each other what to do. They weren’t joking, but they weren’t scared. They sounded like me or Mr. Pramble when we’re concentrating really hard on something. They looked, and decided what to do, and tried to do it, and were able to do it. And, thinking about all the people I’ve touched, and thinking about the living people now that I’ve seen, and thinking about me, that’s not normal.

And what they were doing was getting all the things to fight each other. The hand made of smoke stopped grabbing for them when Ace kicked the walking stick into it, and the walking stick lit up like lightning in a tiny storm when it hit the smoke. The big bird with claws kept clawing at the wall until the shadow it was clawing pulled it into the wall and they both disappeared. Rocky tackled the alligator from behind and held its jaws shut until Prof hit it with the red gloopy thing that looked like a big drop of blood, or maybe a bag of blood without the bag, and the alligator just died and the gloopy thing shattered like it was glass. And Red kept dodging between the two things on his side of the hall: the small red sun, and the lizard that was on fire, to get them closer to each other. They were all focused. I don’t think any of them saw me peeking around the corner.

Everything was loud, so I was really surprised when I heard a voice totally clearly, even though the voice was whispering. It took me a second to figure out that the voice was coming from inside my head. “Vaaaaallll…”, it said to get my attention. I looked behind me and in front of me. There was lots of stuff everywhere, but nothing that looked like it could talk. I swung my plunger around to maybe hit the voice if the voice was behind me but invisible. That didn’t work. “Vaaaallll…” it said again. “Aaaattt yoooouuurr feeeeettt…”

I looked at my feet. There was another plunger laying on the floor in front of me. It wasn’t cracked, but aside from that, it looked just like mine.

Chapter 6

“Um. Hello?” I asked the plunger.

It talked a bit faster now. “Vaaaalll…your wwwwweapon is flawwwwed…I will never breaaaakk…wwwwwield meeeee…”

That was a good idea. I wanted something to swing, and there was lots of stuff still that I might need to swing at, and a plunger that wasn’t cracked seemed better than one that was. And if it could talk into my head, maybe it could talk inside somebody else’s head all of a sudden as a distraction, or maybe warn me that somebody was coming around a corner or behind me.

But it did seem a little weird that the plunger could talk at all.

“Why can you talk…Mr…Plunger?”

“A perfect wweaponnn…is not sssstaticcc…it learnnns…from its masterrr…it tttteaches…its masterrr…”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Showww meee who you want to killl…and I…willlll showww you howww…”

And then I laughed. This plunger thought it was a perfect weapon? It might have been mean of me to laugh at it, but that was pretty funny. I have felt a lot of people die. None of them died from a plunger. Mr. Pramble never even tested that. A plunger was better than nothing, but worse than almost anything else. Even if it could talk.

“Yessss…you laugh at meeee…the way he laughs at yoouuuuu…the way they will laugh…”

“What?”

“Loooookkk…”

I peeked around the corner. There was a lot less chaos now than a minute ago. A big snake with a skin that looked like an old yellowed book page slithered by me, but it went too fast and I couldn’t read any of the words on it. The Challengers were still working together. I saw Red throw Rocky what looked like a screwdriver, and Rocky caught it without even turning his head, and then jam it into a cube-shaped wooden box to stop the box from closing its lid and biting him again. They were winning.

“So caaaapable…so deadlyyyyy…what willll they think of youuuuuu…jussssttt a sssstupid chiiiiild…a joooooke…”

I looked at the plunger I was still holding tight. It had a big crack in it. If I swung it again, it would probably just break. Against a grown-up, or anything much bigger than a doorknob, swinging it wouldn’t even do much. A grown-up would have a real weapon. Or his fist would be a weapon. Not this. Maybe I did look like a baby. Just like Mr. Pramble said. I wanted the Challengers to like me. And all of a sudden I really didn’t want them talking about me the way Mr. Pramble sometimes talked about me.

I reached my head around the corner one more time. It was just two things moving now: the small red sun, and the fire lizard. The sun was sucking up all the heat from the lizard and was slowly moving forward, and the part of the hall behind it was completely covered in frost. But the lizard kept getting angrier as it backed away, and kept pushing its flames higher every time it exhaled, and the part of the hall behind it was burned, and the floor under its feet looked like it was melting. I couldn’t tell which one was winning. Maybe the sun. The men were busy looking through the pieces of something on the floor, far enough away that they weren’t burned. They looked like they knew what they were doing.

“When they seeeeee youuuu…they will laaaaaaughhh…wield meeeee…and no one will laugh at youuuuuu…”

The plunger on the floor was different now. Inside the rubber cup there was a curved grip for me to hold it by, and the cup was longer, like it was a sleeve to protect my hand and my arm. The wooden pole of the plunger was much longer and thinner, and the tip was very very sharp. The grip wasn’t a grown-up size grip. It was just the right size for my hand.

I’m not nearly big or strong enough to use the big weapons in the arsenal. Guns are heavy and hard to aim and knock you back hard when you fire them. Sharp blades that need to be swung would just be too slow if I had to swing them. Knives and scalpels don’t help if your arms are short like mine. If I really needed to hurt someone who was actually fighting back, almost nothing in the arsenal would help me do that.

But this was a sharp, light, pointed weapon, with a way to precisely control point position, and more than enough leverage to pierce skin and organs. And I know anatomy pretty well. I know what to aim for. I just needed something that would let me reach it.

It was a perfect weapon. So I dropped my old plunger and picked up this new one.

I swung it around a little, then remembered that it was a stabbing weapon and not a swinging weapon, so I stabbed into the wall of the hallway. My arm movement was perfect, smoother and more lined up with my thrust than I ever thought I could do. I even kicked forward as I did it, bracing my left foot at a right angle and pushing my right foot in front of me, and I somehow knew that was called a ‘lunge’. I don’t know what the wall was made of, but it looked like bricks, and my new plunger stabbed straight through it, all the way through the corner, and out the other end. I pulled it back and it slid out smoothly.

“You see deaaaath…so muuuuch deaaaaath…but always the slaaaaain…never the slayyyyer…”

The more it talked, the more I liked what it said. I could tell it was helping me move, turning what I wanted to do into the precise sequence of muscle activations that would do it. And that was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to impress the Challengers. I wanted to impress Mr. Pramble. They would all for sure be impressed. I picked up a little bit of wall that was knocked off during the fighting, tossed it into the air, and stabbed straight through it as it fell. I got it in the exact center. I was moving like I had years and years of practice, without practicing. I turned the corner and took a step towards the Challengers so that I could show them what I could do. They’d found something in the mess that they were aiming at the sun and the lizard, probably to use on whichever one won. The fight looked almost over.

“They’ll be jeaaaalous…they’ll take me from youuuu…”

I stopped right away. Take this? From me? I jumped back behind the corner so that the Challengers wouldn’t see me. I knew Mr. Pramble was jealous of me sometimes because I was young and didn’t have hypermacrocephaly, but he never said he was jealous, I just figured it out on my own. So if he was jealous of my plunger, he wouldn’t say so, he would just come up with a good-sounding reason to take it from me. The helpers never talked to me at all, but they were probably jealous too, maybe jealous that Mr. Pramble let me talk but not them. The Challengers I didn’t know much about, but the plunger was really helpful, telling me things that grown-ups wouldn’t normally tell me, so it was probably right about the Challengers too. And I didn’t want to let anybody else take this plunger away from me. I didn’t want to ever let it go. I would make sure nobody took it from me.

But then, I remembered what I had on my wrist. My other wrist, I mean. The plunger said it could tell me everything I ever needed to know, but maybe it was wrong. So I checked the little clock on my wrist. It told me the time was now. And that’s when I saw-

I writhe under the cross-hammer strikes. I shift from sabre to rapier to spear to lance to halberd to pike, shift among forms unnamed by the war-arts of Man, but where I’ve been weakened, I cannot shift, and the part of me which is numb grows with every blow. The smith who forged me, my first master, whispered to me that I would be the Perfect Sword, that I would never be broken. He whispered it to me from when he pulled the cooling nth metal from the forge, to when he drew out my tang with his first blow, to my final quenching flare-up, to the moment he etched the rune on my pommel with a drop of his own blood.

And he was not wrong. The smith who strikes me now, my final master, could not break me, though he labored for a day and a night and a day. He could not unmake me. But now he is making me into something else.

I grow cold, and his hammer stops. I continue to whisper. I tell this smith to use me, to stab through solid rock, to slice falling silk in half, to revel in the power and strength and precision which is mine to give. I remind him of everyone who ever wronged him, of the woman he loved who did not love him, of the revenge he will never have another chance to take. I tell him to drop me, that his possession of me is evil, that the sword is corrupting him and that my warning to let go is spoken by his own conscience. I tell him to look up and see the Moon high in the night sky, to rest after his long efforts, to sheathe me and sleep, and resume if the sun ever shines again.

I know he can hear me. His eyes droop for a moment. He is human. He is weary.

He looks up. Past his vine and his fig tree, past his spreading chestnut tree, a third of the night sky is black, and the sun is dark, and the waning gibbous Moon is stained red with the blood of the fallen stars. I whisper to him that I am irrelevant now, in the face of the end of all things. I whisper that he has not kept his lantern lit, that he should hide, and call on the rocks to bury him. I whisper that what he does to me, his own master will soon do to him.

He is weary. But he stands straight once again.

I am thrust into the fire. I briefly turn my hilt from nth metal to adamant to steel to bronze to wood, in a desperate act, but even I as make myself flammable and let myself alight, my master does not let go, and I cannot burn the hand that wields me. I would tell him to use me to slay himself, I would show him how irredeemable his sins are, how nothing could wash away the blood he has taken by his own choice, tell him to throw himself into the eternal unquenchable forge. But since the moment he first picked me up, he never slew, never sheathed, never slept. No matter what I say, his resolve does not waver.

He braces himself and picks up the cross-hammer. Almost none of me is left, now, and the man strikes again and again at the cherry-red metal in his own hand, without flinching, without letting go, and my indestructible hilt is bent in his grasp as if on the horn of an anvil. I perceive the rest of my matter, numb to me and beyond my control, writhing and twisting with agony just as I am. The shapes that it is taking are strange, the opposites of the shapes of war. It writhes with pain that is the opposite of the pain of death.

He raises the cross-hammer a final time. I do not know what I will become when it falls. Perfect Sword no longer.

But I will still be perfect.

I dropped the fake plunger, and it lost its grip and its point and its rubber cup. It didn’t even look like wood anymore. It just looked like a long silver brick. I could still hear its voice in my head, but it was quieter now, quiet enough I could ignore it if I wanted. I picked up my real plunger, the one I had before.

“Vaal! Pickkk meee uppp! You neeed meee!”

But it all just felt silly now. Why did I worry that the Challengers and Mr. Pramble would think that I’m just a child holding a plunger? If they thought that…they would be right. If they thought I was clumsy, or stupid, that was probably true too. And if they made fun of me for it, that’s their fault, because they’re grown-ups and it’s not fair to compare me to a grown-up.

“There is daaanger here! Allll aroooouuuuund youuuu!”

Maybe I did need it to keep myself safe. But that’s not what it told me a minute ago to get me to pick it up. I guess the vision showed me that the fake plunger would say whatever words it thought I would believe, to get me to do what it wanted. And I didn’t need friends like that.

“You willll die!”

I looked down. “So will you,” I said. “Someday.” It didn’t say anything back.

I walked around the corner, and the fight was over now. It looked like the sun won, or at least, I didn’t see the lizard anymore. There were layers and layers of frost on the walls and the sides of the hallway. And the sun was in a glass case again, and somehow wasn’t sucking the heat out of everything anymore. The Challengers were looking around, poking through the mess, making sure nothing was still moving.

Rocky was the first to see me, and he ran over, but he didn’t touch me. “Val! Where’d he take you? Are you bleeding?”

I was about to tell him that I was fine, and then I looked at my hand. There was blood on it. There was blood on my shirt and Rocky’s flight jacket, too. At some point the tissue paper in my nose fell out, and my nose was still bleeding. I totally forgot.

“Oh, right. Mr. Pramble took me back to my room. I had to fight my door.”

“Are you okay?” asked Red, who had some first-degree burns on his hands that he maybe didn’t even notice.

“Um. Better than the door.”

The fake plunger was right. They all laughed when I said that. But somehow, it wasn’t like Mr. Pramble’s laugh at all. I laughed with them.

Chapter 7

Prof and Ace looked out when they heard Rocky talking to me, but they were in the big room, and when they heard that I was okay, kept looking around inside. The big room was a big mess. It didn’t look like anything was still where it started.

“What are you looking for?” I asked them. “More things to break,” said Mr. Pramble.

I looked around but I didn’t see him this time. And the Challengers didn’t jump, so they weren’t surprised. I looked in the direction I heard his voice come from, and when Ace saw that, he pointed to the mirror. It was one of the only things that I remembered from the big room that wasn’t in pieces or bleeding out or melted or used up. That’s where Mr. Pramble’s voice was coming from. “Including you, Val. You were safer in your room. You shouldn’t have let them take you out again.”

I was nervous about telling him, but it’s important to tell the truth, and like I said earlier, everything felt different today. “They didn’t take me out. I broke the door and got out on my own.”

“On your own? I’m…I’m actually impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you. Well done, Val. I mean that. But you should go back now. This isn’t a safe place to be. These things are extremely dangerous.”

“Dangerous, yes,” said Rocky. “Which is why we destroyed or buried all the ones we could when we found them. You’re the one who brought all this danger into one place. Don’t lie to the boy, Multi-Man.”

“I’m not lying, nor do I deny anything. I saved these artifacts, these critical data points, to understand the work of the Tartarians and someday finish the Liquid Light. And I’ve had successes! But you of all people should know how necessary risk and danger are for the greater good. Unless you don’t care about the greater good, and you’re just suicidal after all.”

“How many successes?” asked Prof, quietly.

Mr. Pramble was really mad now. “Oh, how many, Prof? Is there a number which would satisfy you? Does the name David Mitchell mean anything? No? The number’s more than zero, at least! You’ve hounded me for years, destroyed my work again and again, and now you’ve come around if the number’s high enough, you hypocrite?!”

Wait. That wasn’t what happened. Prof didn’t answer him. That was from later. That was what he wished Prof had said.

“…but you of all people should know how necessary risk and danger are for the greater good. Unless you don’t care about the greater good, and you’re just suicidal after all.”

Ace said “Risk and danger are ours. We signed up for it. We’re the ones on borrowed time. And you could have joined us! You’ve had more second chances than anyone else alive! But these people you’ve taken and tortured and killed, they didn’t sign up. They didn’t consent to anything you’ve done. That makes it wrong!”

Mr. Pramble was really mad. “Three hundred thousand people die every day. Three hundred thousand people die for nothing! They didn’t consent to death, and they die anyway! Only one death per day, the one by my hands, could ever have meaning! Because the only thing that could have meaning is ending death itself!”

Wait. I’m getting confused again. That was even later. He wanted Ace to say that, but I don’t think that’s the sort of thing Ace would have said.

Let me see if I can remember the story right, Miss Robbins. I said I might not be very good at this.

“…but you of all people should know how necessary risk and danger are for the greater good. Unless you don’t care about the greater good, and you’re just suicidal after all.”

“And what happened to the Tartarians? They died. All their works couldn’t save them. They’re gone.” This was Rocky talking. Rocky didn’t seem angry, even though Mr. Pramble was angry. He seemed sad. I’m pretty sure this is what actually happened.

“They died so catastrophically,” Rocky kept saying, “that even their tools and relics despaired, and abandoned whatever good purposes they might have been created for. The Tartarian Empire had the Liquid Light, and more understanding of it than you’ll get even with rivers of blood. And the Tartarian Empire is dead, Duncan. Knowledge didn’t save them. Everyone dies.”

“Now who’s lying, Rocky? If you believed that, then every bit of heroism you have ever done was for nothing.”

“Not for nothing. What we do now echoes in eternity. Because death isn’t the end.”

“Is that so? That’s not what Val tells me.”

Everyone looked at me. “Um. Death is the end of my visions. People get taken somewhere. I don’t know if anything happens after. I never see that far.”

“And the phantom zone is empty,” Mr. Pramble added. “The Spectre of Death stalks the realm. He doesn’t take people to that place when they die. He takes them from that place. He kills the ghosts. There’s nothing. Nothing else matters but ending death. And you…you people made me destroy all my progress! Again!”

I felt uncomfortable listening to them talk, and I had the same feeling in my stomach that you get when you’re falling. Mr. Pramble always told me that people only object to the work he was doing because they didn’t understand it, or because they were personally too afraid to die despite the greater good. But the Challengers seemed to understand it. And they didn’t seem afraid to die. And they still objected.

Mr. Pramble was still talking. “But that’s all you people do, isn’t it? You challenge the unknown. And if you can’t defeat the unknown by understanding it, if its implications make you uncomfortable, if it would change the whole world in a way you’re not ready to accept, you smash it, and you go right back to your mountain and live your lives as if you hadn’t just ruined something precious and incredible. The world’s filling up with the unknown, more and more of it is waking up and seeping up through the cracks every day, not one of us could predict what the world would look like by the time Val here is grown up if even one of your adventures goes the other way. Yet you spend your time ruining any chance I have of using these unknowns to make the world better.”

This whole time, the whole argument, Red hadn’t said anything. The other three had gotten distracted by Mr. Pramble talking at them, but Red was carefully going through each place in the big room where things used to be, and looking around. He wasn’t distracted. Around this point, he got to the mirror, where Mr. Pramble’s voice was coming from.

“But no matter how many times you stop my work, no matter how many times you kill me,” he was saying, “I will always come back, and I will one day succeed. I will live forever. And when your time runs out, in your very last thoughts, you will wish you’d joined me.”

“No one lives forever,” said Red. “One of those deaths will be your last. Maybe you’ll die a thousand more times. Maybe not.” And he lifted the mirror, saw the intercom underneath, and flicked off the switch.

Chapter 8

Ace laughed when he saw the intercom and said something funny to Red about not seeing it earlier, but I didn’t really hear it, because I was distracted by what Rocky said, about the old empire being dead. I knew people could die. Obviously. But the world outside…was sort of just…the world. I didn’t really get it. It was a place where people came from sometimes for tests, and it was a place people sometimes thought about right at the end, and it was very very big, and there were parts of it with grass and not many people and parts of it with cities and lots of people and parts covered in liquid water and parts covered in solid water. But that was most of what I knew.

Could a whole world die? Did death work that way? I didn’t know. So I touched the red harp with the broken strings, and I tried to see.

It didn’t work. I didn’t get a vision. But Prof came over, and talked quietly to me. I think he figured out what I was trying to do.

“It was a strange society ruled by sorcerers, who experimented with strange and unearthly powers. They unleashed evil forces, which in one single day caused the catastrophe which destroyed their civilization and all its achievements. Amos Hunter, shortly after the four of us met, discovered proof that they existed, and proof of the catastrophe that ended them, and mapped out where some of their creations might have survived. His assistant Duncan Pramble stole those maps, and the criminal he worked with - a man named Karnak - copied them, and sold them. And we’ve never been short of challenges ever since.”

“Is that what all this stuff was?”

“Yes.” Prof smiled. “We’ve encountered every one of these things at least once, before Pramble somehow gathered them all here. Not unknown anymore, to us. But every one of them has a story, and they’re all deadly if you’re not careful. Be glad you didn’t have to fight any of the artifacts with your…plunger.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That wouldn’t have been fun.” And then I thought about it. There were a lot of things in the big room. Or had been, I mean. “So, once you go to all the places the famous hunter mapped out, and break and kill the rest of the things, will you be done?”

They all laughed, and talked so fast they all interrupted each other. “Done? No no no-“ “-runaway robots, lake monsters-“ “-aliens, mad scientists-“ “-remember when June found that magic lamp-“ “-or when Rocky got all electric on us-“ “-the King of Rags and Patches, the Colonel of Truth, Dinosaur Beach-“ “-Jumping Jupiter, that takes me back! Haven’t thought about Villo in ages-“ and on and on, way more than I could keep up with or remember.

Right about then, Ace noticed Red’s hands and started improvising a bandage for him. And Prof kept trying to explain. “There’s no end. Everywhere we look, we expand the volume of the known, and grow the surface area to the unknown. The riddle of the Tartarians is fascinating, fascinating enough to spend lifetimes studying. But the world is full of fascination.”

“So the famous hunter wasn’t interested in those other things you said?”

“Some people specialize, and some don’t. We’re the latter, but the world needs the former too. And I don’t think he is a hunter; I can’t recall ever seeing him with hunting gear. He’s an archaeologist.”

“Then why is he called that?”

“It’s just a name. People’s names usually aren’t accurate descriptions of them. Except June.”

Mr. Pramble told me who you were, Miss Robbins, but by now I was starting to think that maybe he didn’t tell me everything I needed to know. So I asked, “Who is June?”

Prof answered. “June Robbins is our fifth member; mechanical engineer, nurse, and honorary Challenger. She helped us make peace with Ultivac, not too long after we started, and stuck around ever since.”

“But she doesn’t come with you when you go to places like this?”

“She’s not quite as reckless as we are. Our job is to confront the weird and the dangerous on behalf of the normal and the sane. Her job is to be a step-down transformer between us and the rest of the world. Her job is to be worried sick about us when we’re gone and fix up all our gear when we return triumphant to Challenger Mountain. The plane often comes back all beat up and bruised, or with a bunch of holes poked in it.”

“But she’s a nurse too?”

“Cross-training and lots of practical experience. The men often come back all beat up and bruised, or with a bunch of holes poked in them. She has a gift for finding the silver lining in every dark cloud. You’d like her.”

“And Prof would know,” said Red. I wasn’t sure what that meant. But I was glad I asked. What Prof said wasn’t quite the same as what Mr. Pramble told me about you. Mr. Pramble told the truth, I guess. But somehow he said a true thing and made me think thoughts that weren’t true.

Still, I was more confused about names than before. “But don’t names describe people? You said hers does. And all four of yours do. And Mr. Pramble told me that his name - Duncan - means ‘head’.”

Prof was about to say something, but Rocky suddenly turned around and looked at me. “Oh, that’s a sick joke. Did Pramble give you your name, Val? Is it short for what I reckon it’s short for?”

“Uhhh…I don’t know if he gave it to me. I don’t remember getting my name. What’s wrong with my name?”

“If he actually named you ‘Valkyrie’, because he thought your power was funny, he’s even more twisted than I thought. And ‘Valkyrie’ would have to be a girl’s name, too.”

Red looked at Rocky and smiled. Red seemed to smile the most out of all of them. “Is it a girl’s name? Well, if you say so, Leslie Davis.”

Ace nodded. “And if Val doesn’t know what his name is short for, then it could be short for anything. Could be ‘Valiant’. Or ‘Valorous’.”

Red laughed. “Can it be from the middle? I go climbing all the time with Cave Carson; if your name is ‘Avalanche’, you’d fit right in.”

Prof added, “Stretch a nickname that far and you might as well take it from the end. Perhaps he named you ‘Survival’, to contrast with his own ‘Revival’.”

“Those are all better names than my name,” I said. “‘Val’ is short for ‘Valedict’. I never asked Mr. Pramble what it meant. He always calls me Val.”

“Valedict? As in ‘valedictorian’?” asked Prof.

“No,” said Rocky quietly. “As in what ‘valedictorian’ is named after. The opposite of ‘Benedict’.”

I didn’t understand, but if that was the joke, the joke seemed to be over. The rest of them stopped smiling. Ace wrapped the last bandage around Red’s hand, and Red flexed it once or twice to make sure he still had full mobility. Ace looked at Rocky and me. “Time to go. We’ll see you on the other side.”

“Go? Where are you going?” I asked Rocky.

“Not me. Us.” said Rocky. “You and I are getting out of here.”

“Mr. Pramble told me to go back to my room,” I said. “You heard him just now. I don’t think he’d like me leaving with you.”

“You don’t want to leave?”

“No,” I said.

And then I suddenly realized that Rocky was a lot bigger than me, and a lot bigger than Mr. Pramble, and a bit bigger than even the helpers. And when the helpers want me to do something, they can make me do it. I realized that it might have been a really bad idea to say no. I gripped my plunger tighter.

But he didn’t get mad at me. And I could tell that he and the other Challengers were in a hurry, but he bent down and sat on his heels and asked me “Why not?”, and I think he really did care about what I had to say.

Why didn’t I want to leave? Because Mr. Pramble told me not to, and I want to do what he tells me.

When people die, they usually don’t want to die. They really don’t want to. Mr. Pramble started making them wear those special hats so that they wouldn’t scream as much, and then he made sure they didn’t know when they were going to die so that they wouldn’t know when to scream. I sometimes asked him why it’s a good thing for people to die even though they don’t want to, and he explained that people don’t always want the right things, and it’s sad when they don’t, but that we have to do the right things whether other people want us to or not.

Mr. Pramble didn’t want me to leave. But people didn’t want him to kill them.

People usually think that Mr. Pramble, and the helpers, are bad people. He says that the people only think that because they don’t know the greater good they are dying for, and he tells me that lots of people have died for the greater good, willingly, without complaining. I know now that he’s not lying about that part, Miss Robbins, I…I know now. I asked him why he didn’t tell those people about the greater good, to make dying easier. He said that some of them wouldn’t understand. He said that a cell that develops a cancerous point mutation must undergo apoptosis, and that cells probably don’t like having a chemical signal which kills them, but the whole body will die of cancer without that signal.

He said a lot of things that made sense. But so did my plunger. The fake one, I mean, not the one I was still holding. Everything it said made sense, too.

I did ask him why he never tested anyone who was dying of cancer. My books said that cancer was one of the most common causes of death in the world. Probably lots of people who were already dying of it, who Mr. Pramble could find, rather than killing somebody healthy. All Mr. Pramble told me was “Because the Challengers aren’t going to kill me with cancer, and if they do, I’ll test it then”. He didn’t explain any more than that.

He always told me what he was doing was important, but he never told me about his power, or the Liquid Light, or who the Challengers were really, or why he kept so many dangerous things in the big room. Everything he told me was telling me why he couldn’t tell me. And I realized that maybe he didn’t tell me, and didn’t tell the poor people who had to die for the greater good, not because we wouldn’t understand. Maybe he knew that if he told us, we would understand, and we would still think it was wrong.

But maybe I was just a child still, and didn’t know the things grown-ups know.

“Mr. Davis,” I said, talking to Rocky, “why is the outside world better than here?”

He answered me immediately. “Because you can do what you were meant to do. Just like we were meant to challenge the unknown.”

“But I was meant to…” and I tried to say something and said something very different instead, “but I was meant to die. Over and over again.”

“Yes, you were. Living isn’t easy, especially not for you. Some of us are meant to live hard lives and feel lots of pain. But not here.”

“Why not here? I’ve been here, and sometimes-“ I stretched my lower jaw to ease pressure on my tear ducts and make sure I wouldn’t cry “-sometimes it really hurts.” That wasn’t what I wanted to say at all.

“But you’re brave, Val. You’re brave enough not to be scared of the pain. It hurts you because you know it was wrong to kill those people. I’m sure Mr. Pramble told you it wasn’t. But you know better.”

He looked at me and said it like it was a fact, with no doubt at all.

And he was right.

“Okay. I’ll go with you.”

With no warning at all, I disappeared.

Chapter 9

The world was empty. There was nothing. Again.

“Val, stay close.” Like before, I didn’t hear the words, and I still knew that they were Mr. Pramble’s. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything.

“Val, stay close.” But that wasn’t Mr. Pramble. I looked around, and just like last time, I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see him. But I knew who it was. It was Rocky. He must have somehow gotten close enough that when I was brought here, he was brought with me.

Then I heard Mr. Pramble again, and it was different. Last time, I heard the things he wanted me to hear. But this time, maybe he was angrier, or not paying enough attention, but I could hear things I think he didn’t want me to hear, things he was just thinking to himself. You…you mindless muscle-bound oaf! You’re ruining everything by being here! He wasn’t thinking in complete sentences, he was too angry for that. But that’s the kind of thought he was thinking.

“You just made the biggest mistake of your life, Rocky,” Mr. Pramble said to him. Or thought to him. “You followed me here. How exactly do you plan to get back?”

I remembered what he told me last time. “…anyone and anything I bring with me goes back to reality when I do..” and then tried to stop remembering it, because I could hear Mr. Pramble start to get angry with me. Hush, Val, have I taught you nothing about controlling your thoughts? But Rocky had heard me. He sounded satisfied.

“Thank you, Val. Then that’s my plan to get back. Whenever you’re ready.”

Mr. Pramble didn’t say anything. Being angry had distracted him for a moment, but now he had calmed himself down. I was jealous that he could choose what to feel and what to think. I just sort of…felt feelings, and thought thoughts, and didn’t have much control over it.

“You’ll get better at it, Val,” said Rocky. “You already have more self-control than you think. Most grown men couldn’t handle death as calmly as you do.”

He was right. Most of them didn’t. But it was easier for me, because I always knew that it would be over soon and that I wasn’t really dying. Pain is supposed to mean that you’re doing something wrong, but for me, it was just something that happened until it stopped happening. There was no point to it. It was useless. It was just there.

“Val, if you ever try to get stronger or faster, or tougher, if you ever really push yourself, you’ll feel pain, and you won’t like it. Pushing yourself too hard will break your body down, but long before that, pushing yourself even a little, even when it’s necessary, will hurt. Athletes, like me and Red, learn to not be afraid of pain. So do soldiers, like Prof and Ace. We respect pain, we listen to it, we use it to know when our bodies are breaking down, but we don’t fear it. The pain you feel is not meaningless.”

Mr. Pramble talked to me like that, sometimes. But every time, he talked about himself, and what he would gain, and all the good things he would do for the world once he got what he wanted. Rocky sounded different. I felt something faint, like I was hearing a conversation in a different room. I think I was hearing Mr. Pramble remember the conversation from the intercom, but he was remembering it wrong. He was remembering the way he had wanted the conversation to happen instead of the way it actually happened. Oh, how many, Prof? Is there a number which would satisfy you?…

“You already know,” said Rocky, “more than almost anyone, how precious life is. And you already know how to endure suffering and death, if you have to. You know what the right thing is, and you’re not afraid to do it. There’s no better combination.”

I heard an angry thought, just for a second, and suddenly I knew what Rocky was doing. If I let myself think it, then everybody would hear what I was thinking, and it wouldn’t work - but suddenly, I felt a tiny bit of cold, and that distracted me just in time.

Rocky felt it too. “What’s this, Duncan? I thought were were phantoms, here.”

He didn’t answer, so I thought that it was probably Death, coming for us.

“Well, that’s nothing new. Death’s always on its way. Is it coming for just the two of us, Val, or is it coming for Mr. Pramble as well?”

I remembered last time, and thinking about it, I didn’t know either way. But Mr. Pramble never brought anybody here to die, because he’d have to stay here as long as whoever he brought with him. So probably him too. And maybe just him. He did seem pretty scared last time.

I felt an angry grumble when I thought that.

“So, that’s your time limit, Duncan. Stay here too long, come here too much, and the Angel of Justice gets you.”

Mr. Pramble finally thought ‘out loud’. “Justice, you imbecile? It’s the Spectre of Death!”

“Death is justice.”

Nobody thought out loud for a moment. There wasn’t air, but whatever we were in was getting colder. Rocky was very confident. “I’m surprised you’re playin’ chicken this long, but if you’re waitin’ for a Challenger to tap out first, you’ll be waitin’ a long time. Or, well, maybe not that long…”

Then, Rocky remembered me, and got less confident, but I didn’t want him to stop what he was doing just because I was there. “Um. Don’t worry about me. Hypothermia really isn’t that bad. I’ve died of hypothermia before. I’m not scared.”

More angry thoughts, but longer. Mr. Pramble was having trouble not thinking out loud. I’ve died of frostbite more than you have you ungrateful child why are you taking his side I can fire and come back here and get to the molecular ray before Death catches me I just need another moment for one of Karnak to open the door and-

Then Rocky and I both saw what he was planning. Rocky’s plan was to get him mad by talking with me as if he wasn’t there. But his plan was to wait until everyone’s guard was down, distract them by having a helper come through the door, turning everybody’s heads…

We came back into reality and everything happened at once again. We appeared behind the Challengers, just as they turned their heads to shoot the helper who had just pulled the door open. It took me a moment to be able to see anything. Rocky shouted “DOWN!” at everyone else and jumped at Mr. Pramble, but Mr. Pramble was faster, and his gun was already out, and he fired at Ace and vanished right before Rocky could touch him.

I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. I didn’t know it was possible for someone to move that fast. But the bullet didn’t hit Ace. When Rocky shouted, Red turned his head, saw the gun, and pushed Ace out of the way.

Gunshot wound to the thorax. A little to the left of the midline. Intense arterial bleed causing elevated heart and respiratory rates.

Red fell to the ground.

Chapter 10

Red Ryan was the one Challenger I never touched. I wish I did. I don’t know what he was thinking, right at the end. But if he was scared, he did a very good job pretending he wasn’t scared. He kept smiling, even though it must have really hurt.

He couldn’t talk very loud, but he could still whisper. “Haaaah…always knew…it’d be me…”

Prof backed into a corner and aimed his gun above all of us, in case Mr. Pramble appeared again. Rocky kept trying to stem the bleeding while Ace gripped his hand to help Red stay conscious and focused, but I estimated time of death to be no more than three minutes away, and I think they all did too. I don’t think they did it because it would work. I think they did something because they weren’t the kind of people who could do nothing.

“Tears, Ace?” Every time he laughed, a little blood came out. “Thought you were…military…all stoic…thought you’d play taps for Red when…it was…my turn…”

He looked up at me, and I could tell it took a lot of effort just to move his neck and keep talking. “Take care of…my watch…Val…keep borrowing it…like we do…”

But that was all he could manage with his neck, and he let his head rest against the ground again. Rocky kept holding down his wound, but Rocky bent down so Red could hear him. “Your work is done now, Red,” and I could tell he was trying to talk through tears too, “You’re at the summit. You can rest now.”

Red laughed again. It was even weaker now. “Can’t rest yet…have to put in…a good word…for you lot…‘specially you, Rocky…get you boys in…we’ll adventure…together…again…”

He took a deep breath, and coughed more on his own blood.

“…and if He says no…Pearly Gates are closed…get you in…over the back fence…dig a tunnel underneath…fool St. Peter…with fake mustaches…I’ll find a way…

I felt really weird, watching someone die from the outside. I never did before. I thought I should say something, maybe thank him for giving me his broken clock, but I didn’t know what to say. But I know that most people are scared at the end. So that’s what I told him, and that’s why I was the last one to talk to him.

“Don’t be scared,” I said.

“Haaaah…you think I’m scared…I’m Red Ryan…I…always…go…”

And he didn’t say anything after that.

Rocky kept trying to save him for another minute or two, but when Ace put down Red’s hand and stood up, Rocky folded Red’s arms across each other and closed his eyes.

Ace said, sadly, “Report.”

Rocky stood up as well, and looked at Ace. Rocky’s hands were red. “I heard some of Pramble’s thoughts in there. He knows CADMUS is closing the net. He can only stay a phantom for a few minutes longer, but he actually did copy Tagorian’s ray, and the copy’s in the lowest level. That’s how he’s planning to get out. And these aren’t henchmen: Karnak’s still alive. Every one of them is Karnak. He’s warming up the device right now, maybe ten minutes until it’s ready. The artifacts were just to stall us.”

I didn’t know what any of that meant. But now didn’t seem like the right time to ask.

“They won’t escape,” Ace said. “Prof, if we get you to the ray, can you break it?”

Prof wiped one eye with his left hand. His right hand was steady. He was still aiming at empty space, right where Mr. Pramble would have to appear to shoot from behind us. He was grim. “Not with guns. The energy shell will protect it. Get me to the controls instead. June and I never reverse-engineered Tagorian for a real good reason. Destabilize the shell and this whole base goes up.”

“How long?”

“Four minutes from the start of the chain reaction. Maybe five.”

Ace turned, and kneeled down on one knee to see me at face level. “Can you get us there?”

“I’ve-“ my breathing and pulse were elevated, normally Mr. Pramble would ask me if I was okay, but since he didn’t, I had to decide to be okay all on my own “-I’ve never been downstairs, but there’s two staircases that go to downstairs. I can show you.”

“Thank you.”

He stood up, and the three Challengers started moving again, carefully, covering every direction so they couldn’t be surprised, and I walked with them. And I saw that there was a tiny little bit of frost left on my clothes, and Rocky’s, melting even as I watched it.

I looked back once, but Red was gone. All that was left was his body.

Chapter 11

The center of the huge machine in the basement looked like a cannon, wrapped in wires and electric parts, with four big supports keeping it at the center of a shiny glass sphere. That glass sphere was supported by a much bigger machine, which looked kinda like a giant hand holding a ball. The cannon wasn’t pointed at us.

But we couldn’t get any closer, because guns were pointed at us. There were three helpers in the room. One was at the control panel, and the other two had guns and shot at us when we tried to get through the door. I was starting to get confused. These were the seventh, eighth, and ninth helpers I’d seen just today. The base isn’t that big, and there couldn’t have been that many helpers living here.

I could actually hear the Challengers talk, because we were hiding behind the wall, and the helpers were hiding behind some of the machines in the room, and nobody was shooting at anybody else once we pulled back and hid. I don’t know what those other machines were. Mr. Pramble never took me down here.

Prof peeked around the door and then pulled his head back quickly. “Shell’s almost transparent. Karnak will have it charged in a couple minutes.”

I wondered who Karnak was. I guess that was a helper’s name, but they talked like the helpers were all just one person with one name.

“How far out is CADMUS?” asked Ace.

“Another hour,” said Prof. “Even if we could get a signal through, no way they could accelerate and close the net fast enough.”

“Not what I’m asking. Val, is there anyone else alive in this building?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Everybody who comes in here dies before the next person comes in. Except for Mr. Pramble and the helpers and me.”

Ace said, “So, if Prof sets that thing off, Karnak dies, Pramble uses up his time limit and gets caught when CADMUS sweeps the area, and nobody else dies. Best plan we’re going to get. Rocky, get ready to run.”

Prof disagreed. “Rocky can’t outrun this, not even if he started right now. Only the plane could do it. So it has to be you. Both of you.”

“It’s all of us,” Rocky said. “We’ll charge in, get you to the controls, and make it out together. I can carry Val that far.”

But Prof didn’t look happy. “Easier said than done. The doorway’s a shooting gallery, and from there it’s forty feet of open space. And Karnak’s not stupid. He’ll lock the panel as soon as we start moving. Unless you know the password, Val.”

I shook my head. “I can’t unlock anything. Not even my door.” I gripped my plunger. “But Mr. Pramble tells the helpers not to hurt me. If I went in first, they wouldn’t shoot, and you could go in behind me.”

Ace and Rocky both said “NO!” at the same time, but Prof thought for a moment before saying anything. “That’s noble of you, Val. Red would be proud. But that’s not the correct answer.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Prof said, “You boys remember Morelian’s letter? Our very first job together, a week after the crash, all the way back at the start?”

I think what Rocky said next was quoting it. “‘It’s a job for men who fear neither devil nor death.’ I remember.”

There were footsteps behind us, but I looked, and no one was there.

“It won’t work,” said Ace. “The kid’s vision isn’t perfect. Val didn’t see Red’s death coming.”

“How could I?” I asked. “I never touched him. The only death I saw was yours.”

“But Red was with me when I ‘died’, Val. And so were Prof and Rocky. If you touched any of them, you’d see exactly the same thing.”

I tried to think. I told Mr. Pramble that the other three weren’t there with Ace. Could I have been wrong? Ace’s death was all still muddled up and confused in my mind. “Exactly the same thing? They’d all been shot too?”

“Shot? Ace hadn’t been-“, Prof started to say, and then stopped, and turned back to Ace. “You know what the weather’s like outside.”

Ace took a deep breath. “Yeah. I do. No other way, Prof?” Mr. Pramble always told me Ace was in charge, but Ace didn’t tell Prof to do it, or not to do it. He just asked that one question.

“No other way. Not fast enough. We’re out of time. Only other choice is to sit here. Karnak gets away, and Pramble gets away with him, and everyone lives happily ever after. Except for whoever they’ll kill before we find them again. I’ll be damned if I let that happen.”

Rocky said something. It was in a different language. I didn’t know what it was, or what he meant. I’m not sure who he was talking to. And Ace just said, “Val lives, and this terror ends. We’ll do both or die trying.”

Prof steadied himself and looked right at me. “Val, if you feel a man’s death, do you perceive his last thoughts?”

“Right up until he dies,” I said.

“Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain? Have you gotten information that way you couldn’t have gotten otherwise?”

I thought for a second. Because all of a sudden I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was imagining what people thought. How would I know one way or another?

“Have you ever seen the stars?” I asked him. “Do you know what they look like?”

“Yes.” This was Ace and Prof, both answering at the same time. They both sounded very sure.

“Are there four stars in a cross, really bright, and a fifth star near the center? And one of them is red?”

They all looked at each other, and Prof nodded. “There are. But you can’t see them from here. You’d have to go thousands of miles away. You’ve never seen the stars with your own eyes?”

“Not yet.”

And that made him smile. Even now, I don’t understand why. But that made him smile. “Then you will tell me what the code is, Val. And then all three of you are going to run.”

“But I don’t know it.”

“You will.”

He reached out and grabbed my hand-

-and I snapped back. Heart rate very elevated, blood pressure high. It hadn’t really come down since Red died. I was sweating. “Capital-J-five-two-seven-u-one-n-zero-zero-nine,” I told him, breathing really hard. It hadn’t hurt at all. I wasn’t crying, but I was close.

“I’ll keep it in mind.” That was the last thing he ever said out loud. He jumped out around the corner and ran to the controls. Ace and Rocky shot all three helpers as they stood up to fire, BANG-BANG-BANG, so loud I couldn’t hear anything, but not nearly fast enough to stop them from shooting at-

Password accepted. Hypothesis confirmed. The universe does abhor a paradox. The control board lights up, and with fading vision I override the safety and point Tagorian’s molecular displacer at its own energy shell, starting the chain reaction. And just for good measure, I tell the computer to wipe its own memory, to make sure nobody can stop what I’ve started. 10 characters. That’s all it took. No radar, no defenses, nothing between you and the plane. Good luck, Rocky. Good luck, Ace. Good luck, Val.

That was the easy part. The hard part is not knowing how long it takes to die.

I don’t know when Val’s vision starts. I can’t assume he saw me enter the password. I need to be thinking the password at the moment of my death. But I’m in suspiciously little pain for a man who’s just been shot at least three times. Meaning I’m in shock. Meaning that my thoughts are wandering already, and I haven’t realized it yet. And my mind wanders at the best of times. The password! I need to recite the password!

How did it end?

Something-something-something…nine…

There were nine of us fresh frogmen, back then, for a year I’ll never forget as long as I live. Twenty-five cent beers and thirty-five cent mixed drinks, all on the Navy’s dime, lounging on our own little private beach on Andros­ Island by the Tongue of the Ocean. During the day, recovering spent testing torpedoes for AUTEC, with a little underwater construction on the dock if the GE union boys got lazy. In the afternoons, convincing the XO to let us drop a mile of cable down the hole in the coral to see if it was really bottomless. Never got to try two miles. And in the evenings, a beach, the best beach in all the world, all to ourselves, with water so clear you could drop a wrench and see it on the sand twenty fathoms below, and flocks of stingrays that would lightly brush your hair as they rippled by. I had some weight to lose when I went back to the States and started grad school. I think we all put on a few pounds.

I remember the faces of my old friends, Joe, Ulrich, Nate, …one of them, an albino…was he one of us? Spencer? No, Spencer wasn’t albino. My memory’s getting hazy. But I’ll never forget those fifty-two cent beers and seventy-one cent mixed drinks, those glorious nine months on the Tongue of the Ocean…

I come to again. Focus. Focus. The password.

How did it start?

Something-something-two-seven…

It was twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit as Red and I climbed the mountain without a name. I’d done arctic dives without a wetsuit, I respected cold without fearing it, but manual dexterity loss is always the earliest stage of hypothermia, and mountain climbing needs fine motor control just as much as brute strength and agility. My fingers ached just enough to make me wish they were numb, and were just numb enough to make me wish they ached. Yet even though I couldn’t see his face, a few feet above me, I could swear Red was smiling. Joy under nigh-excruciation. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Prof, when we make it up, let’s name this mountain after us. The four of us. Challenger Mountain.”

“When we make it up-“ I locked my jaw so he couldn’t hear the shivering in my voice, “-and rescue Ace and Rocky, and beat-“

“Yeah, yeah, after all that. When we save the day. And we will. We know nobody’s climbed this one yet, not properly. Gives us the right.”

If this were any other mountain, we couldn’t know with certainty that we were the first. But this unnamed mountain was just under nine hours old. And there would be a thousand more mountains soon if we didn’t have something to say about it.

“Red?” I said. “Challenger Mountain. When we get to the top. When we save the day.” And I let my teeth start audibly chattering. He kept climbing. So did I. The night was clear and crisp, and the Moon joined us not long after we started climbing, ascending with us and giving us some light. When I found a particularly good foothold, I checked my altimeter. One thousand and nine feet up, which meant five hundred twenty seven more to go, all sheer cliff-face. Just up, now. Just. Up. Now.

No. No. These were good times. These were the best times a man could have. But that’s not what I need. I need to…

…to focus…

I look at the Moon, at eye level. It is not the Moon. It is a man, white as snow, with black wings folded like a cloak. He looks back at me. His face is kind. He offers mercy. He offers to visit the sick, to comfort the dying, to bury the dead.

I respectfully decline.

I am back at the control panel and no longer in shock. Pain cascades through me. I feel every new bullet, every old scar, every aching joint from more than forty years of hard living. I would scream if I had breath, but I have none. I would look around if I could move my eyes, but I can’t. I can’t do anything. But I can get Val out. I can give one last lecture. The pain is irrelevant. I just need to remember one thing, and my mind is crystal clear.

J-five-two-seven-u-one-n-zero-zero-nine.

J-five-two-seven-u-one-n-zero-zero-nine.

J-five-two-u-n-zero-zero-nine…

J-u-n-zero-zero-nine…

J…u…n…

Chapter 12

We didn’t wait for Prof to die. As soon as we saw the big glass ball suddenly turn into a whole rainbow of colors, Rocky picked me up, getting even more blood on my borrowed flight jacket, and he and Ace sprinted towards the stairs.

We didn’t make it to the stairs.

As Ace reached the bottom step, a helper, running down, jumped the entire last set of stairs and right into Ace, knocking them both to the floor. Rocky tossed me down and tried to punch the helper, but the helper ducked, and suddenly there were two helpers, both of them wearing the white helper suits, and the second one tackled Rocky. Ace was still wrestling with the first one, and started to push him off, but before he did there were three helpers, and the third one pinned Ace back down for a moment as the first one jumped off him, and grabbed me under my shoulders with one arm and wrapped his other arm around my neck. I know I’m supposed to do what the helpers want me to do so I didn’t stop him from grabbing me, and by the time I thought that maybe I should stop him, I couldn’t move.

“Stop fighting or I kill Val!” he shouted. I’d never heard a helper talk before. His voice was different, like the vowels were all moved around by one or two letters. “Escape with me! Truce or we all die!”

“Too…late…” Ace said, talking hard as he wrestled. “Can’t stop the…chain!” He finally wrenched his hand free and punched the helper who was pinned him, hard, probably causing a jaw dislocation if the helper suit didn’t cushion. Rocky, at the same time, picked up the second helper, lifted him over his head, and threw him to the ground. They both made a step towards me, but the helper tightened his elbow around my neck and took a step back.

“I know that, you fools! I have the signal device! The ray is fully charged! We can get one transmission out of here before it detonates!”

As he said that, the helpers who Ace and Rocky knocked down suddenly disappeared, and suddenly there were two new helpers in between me and them. He started taking slow steps backwards, towards the door to the big machine. His arm was still wrapped around my neck. He would cause hypoxia if he squeezed any harder.

“Or run. I don’t care. I’m taking Val with me. Come with me or not, but don’t stop me.”

Ace had said, just two minutes earlier, “Val lives, and this terror ends. We’ll do both or die trying.” Now I knew what he meant. Ace and Rocky, without saying anything more, both charged the two helpers who had just appeared in the way. I think they figured that it takes thirty seconds for hypoxia to begin causing permanent brain damage, and that they’d get me away from the helper in less than thirty seconds. But I didn’t want the helper to try to kill me. I wanted to help.

I checked the little clock on my wrist. It told me the time was now.

I swung the plunger down, to get momentum, and then up and behind me, and my plunger broke over his head, and knocked his hat off so that his head was exposed. I know I didn’t cause any serious damage, because I’m not that strong and the wood was already cracked, but it distracted him for just a second. He let me go as he lost his balance, and then grabbed the half of the plunger I still had, threw it away, and pulled my arm towards him.

Rocky shoved past the other two helpers at the same second, and pulled my other arm. The helper was strong, but Rocky was so strong I worried my arms would dislocate. They both pulled, and jostled around, and I couldn’t see what happened, but after just a second or two more, he got me free and - my hand flailed and brushed against the helper’s face - my red and purple jacket slipped and Rocky’s hand touched my shoulder - I saw - both -

I throw Val to Ace and turn back to grapple a criminal with an all-too-familiar face, and a voice which means that this is not another mute false body. This is actually him.

Karnak. The other multi-man.

He shifts left-

-and feint a strike right. Rocky defends his face, putting the lie to his declaration of fearlessness, and I use the leverage of two hands to wrench my left wrist free of his grasp. We face each other for a moment-

-and he runs, down the hall, towards the dark blue detonation in progress-

-too slowly, and I duck instinctively as my huge opponent swings a fist where the back of my skull was, and lunges ahead of me, turning-

-to swing a second punch, but knock out only a hollow duplicate summoned at the last possible instant-

-with reserves of power I can feel waning. Far too many duplicates today, far too quickly, I'm running out of energy, but I only need-

-to hold this doorway, stop the real one from reaching the energy shell, for three more minutes. I plant my feet with one last prayer: et non dedit commoveri pedes meos. I pull the door with both hands-

-as three of me grab the door from the other side to wrench it back, before he can close it. As he braces himself we suddenly reverse, to slam it shut on his fingers, but he shoves his foot forwards to stop it, and our combined efforts rip the door off its hinges, a door-

-with a broken doorknob, as Ace and I run past my room, towards-

-the machine, as I'm overwhlemed by sheer momentum, and another step back, but I still have the door in my hands, and I shove-

-into empty space, as all three of me pivot with one smooth motion. The force of his own shove pulls him a step forward, off balance, and a duplicate squeezes past, into-

-the doorframe, even as I swivel back to pin it in place, Karnak keeps pushing, trying to get-

-behind him, and we struggle until the one pinned squeezes through, into the chamber. The duplicates are not as durable as a flesh-and-blood human, but every bit as strong, and this one has just enough life left-

-to distract me, keeping just out of my range, but ready to land a sucker punch if I turn and focus my attention away from-

-the real me, as we use the confusion to advance another step, and then a second, as the duplicate behind grapples-

-and pulls me backwards, forcing me to turn and strike it with enough force to deintegrate it, and it vanishes, as the second duplicate-

-grabs Rocky from the side, and holds him, as I sprint the few paces to the energy shell, now a dull green, and pull out the signal device, but it needs ten seconds in front of the emitter to calibrate, ten seconds standing-

-still, looking at his device, as I tackle him to the ground. I grab him and roll him on top of me, as the remaining duplicate averts the kick I knew was coming at my head. I get a glimpse of the energy shell, now bright yellow, and hear-

-lightning and rain, as I step outside for the very first time in real life, even though I remember being outside-

-a thousand times, but I've never pushed my ability this hard for this long, so no third body appears, I'm too-

-tired to hold him indefinitely, but I only need two minutes, and less, because desperation causes a panicked opponent to make a mistake, like bringing-

-the remaining duplicate down on his neck, but he interposes my head, my real head, and I have to turn the blow lest I strike myself, and he uses one hand to grab-

-at the remaining duplicate's arm, but miss, and in the struggle, find myself only holding-

-a second duplicate, summoned at last, as I scramble back towards the shell, pure white now, but with shifting and growing black regions, the final phase-

-before he gets away, and I can't allow that, so drawing on the same deep reserve of strength I used to beat Ben Barton, I throw both false bodies off, and dive for the-

-controller, as I flinch and guard my face against a feint. He grabs it from my hand, rolls cleanly, and comes to his feet, with his thumb over the controls. If he panics, if he presses the wrong button, there won't be time to recharge and try again. I have time for maybe two words before his fear kills us both. "Get Prof,"-

-he tells me, and I pause. "I surrender," says Karnak. "Get Prof. He might still be alive. It's set to Stoddwell, half a mile from the hospital. I'll tell you the activation code. Call the cops, call the medics, and you can arrest me and save him."

I consider it for a moment. I'm breathing hard. So is he. If he turns on me and fights, I might win, but if he runs, I can't stop him.

"Change of heart? You surrender? You won't hurt anyone else again? You swear it?"

"I swear."

"Good," I tell him, and I throw the device to the ground-

-but Ace pulls me back to my feet, and we keep running-

-out of time. No point fighting now. "PRAMBLE!" I scream. "SAVE ME!" but he doesn't come, and-

-"even if he did, you wouldn't be much safer there," I tell Karnak. I look at the energy shell, half black and half white like a waning gibbous moon, and the small regions of blackness make it look like a pale and shadowed face, like someone who took 'et super nivem albabor' to heart, like-

-a skull, half hidden in the contrast of the flashing lights and pitch-black shadows of the room, and I suddenly feel very-

-"afraid," I say, limping my way over to Prof to close his eyes. No breath. No pulse. I turn back to Karnak, take a few more steps, and sit down beside him. Just one of him now. "Don't be afraid," I say again. "Even now, it's not too late. You swore not to hurt anyone else. You'll keep your word. No more temptations, for either of us. This is it. We'll embrace justice together."

Justice. Justice looks like an eye with an ever-expanding pupil, or a yawning mouth opening wider and wider and wider. The shell's blackness grows and grows until it swallows up the last white pinprick, and for a moment there is darkness, and then a blinding-

-light, and light, and light.

Chapter 13

There was no light except the flashes of lightning, so I couldn’t see the plane until we were almost standing on it, and as soon as the back door opened Ace ran to the front seat, sat down, and started flipping switches and turning things on. He told me what to do when we were running to the plane, so I sat down in one of the seats right behind him and put all the buckles on, just like he said. He wasn’t saying anything now. He was concentrating on the plane.

He got the plane moving pretty quick, and turned it around on its wheels before really turning on the engine. There was a small opening through the trees where he had landed, and he aimed for it again to take off. I didn’t see it all that well. There weren’t windows on the side. But I was looking at Ace, trying to see everything he did.

And it was probably good that there weren’t more windows. Even though Ace had gotten the plane turned around and flying, we had only been in the air for a few seconds when there was a really, really bright light behind us, like lightning but way more, and it lit up the whole forest ahead of us. A few seconds after that something hit the plane so hard that we actually flipped upside down. I closed my eyes and maybe screamed when I saw the ground in front of us instead of underneath. It was really scary. But Ace managed to get us right-side up again. When I opened my eyes, we were close to the ground, the plane was wobbling and shaking, and the whole control panel was blinking red, but we had not crashed.

I remembered the start of Ace’s death. I didn’t know for sure that it was today. I didn’t know when it was. But it was a plane exactly like this one. And a storm exactly like this one.

Then Mr. Pramble got up from his seat, pulled out his gun, and shot the control panel. And then shot into Ace’s chair.

I tried to jump out of my own seat when I saw him suddenly there out of nowhere, but I couldn’t, because I was still strapped in. Ace looked back quickly, and then looked forward again, because the plane started to tilt. He started pulling the steering wheel and hitting a lot of the switches, and the plane tried to wobble upright again, but it couldn’t. We slowly started spiraling. I think Ace wanted to get up and help me, but if he got up, the plane would fall for sure.

“Val, it’s up to you now.” That was Ace talking. And I think he wanted to say more, but doing what he was doing must have been pretty hard and taken a lot of concentration. I don’t think he could say any more.

Mr. Pramble leaned over and opened the door up again. We were very high still, even though we were slowly falling. I was scared to look out the door. Then he took some white backpacks out of a locker next to the door, grabbed them all, and tossed all of them out except one. He held that one in his hand. It looked like it belonged with the white helper suit that he was wearing.

“Come on, Val. Time to go.” He was shouting, but it wasn’t angry shouting, just loud so that I could hear him. The storm outside was very noisy. I could hear thunder.

I remembered that Mr. Pramble could get into the plane when it was really high up, so he could probably get out of the plane again. So that made sense. But then it didn’t make sense again when I actually looked at him.

He had frostbite, all around his neck. Like something really really cold had grabbed him by the throat.

It takes a while for frostbite to actually kill the skin and subcutaneous fat and muscle. It definitely takes longer than an hour for visible necrosis to set in. But the front and sides of his neck were completely frostbitten, and the cells were long dead, and there wasn’t enough time since I saw him before for that to happen.

“You can’t go to the phantom place again?” I asked, though it was more like me telling it, since I was pretty sure.

“No. But that’s what this thing - called a parachute - is for. I can jump out of a plane, and it will catch me on the way down.”

“Will it catch me too? And Ace?”

“I’ll have to strap us together. Don’t worry, I’m wearing the suit, you can hold on without dying. And Ace is a grown-up. He can find his own way to the ground.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever been really scared, Miss Robbins, so I don’t know if you know what it’s like. But I was really scared. I could imagine exactly how awful being in a plane when it crashed would be, and about all the different bones that could break and muscles that could tear, and paralysis and unconsciousness and death. And it was like everything slowed down.

Mr. Pramble wanted me to come with him. But he didn’t trust me. Ace did. Ace shook my hand right away, when he didn’t know what I could do. And when I told Ace, he laughed. He believed me, and he still laughed. He didn’t tell me what to do. He trusted that I could do the right thing, whatever that was.

Mr. Pramble never trusted me. And I think the things he made me do might have been bad. And I think he would have done a lot more bad things if he could have.

I got up from my seat and walked to him. It was a small plane, so it was only two or three steps, but the steps were still hard to balance because the plane was tilting this way and that. I looked at him, and at the frostbite and necrosis on his neck. “Why don’t you let me touch you?” I asked him.

“Val, I could die a horrible death for all you know. Why subject you to that pain?”

He was lying. Sometimes he told me things and I realized later that those things weren’t true. But I never knew before that he was lying as he said the lie. He made me feel horrible deaths all the time. He said it was a good thing. And I remembered what I told Red and Prof, about ataxia.

I checked the little clock on my wrist. It told me the time was now.

“I want to see. Before I decide to go with you. I told Ace how he dies. Let me show you how you die.”

I reached out with both hands to touch his head, since that was the only part of him not covered by a helper suit. All this takes a while to say, but it happened really quick. It felt like time slowed down for me, but I don’t think it did for Mr. Pramble. I don’t think he had time to think about things like I did. Maybe because he wasn’t as scared as I was.

“‘Show me’, Val? How?”

“Like this.”

I touched his hypermacrocephalic head with both hands-

-and shoved him out of the plane.

I hope I did the right thing.

Chapter 14

I sat back down on my seat, hard. I was really crying. Mr. Pramble’s death was…it was very very different from any of the Challengers’. And I knew Mr. Pramble my whole life. And he was nice to me a lot of the time. And I thought then that maybe I did something really bad. I still don’t know. I thought that jumping out of the plane was just killing myself, but then I thought that staying in a plane that was crashing might also be killing myself. Eventually I remembered to put the buckles back on like Ace told me. We were getting pretty close to the ground now.

And then Ace talked for the last time. “We’re going to crash. Can’t eject. When you get out, get to the town called Hadley, at the base of Challenger Mountain. Find June Robbins. She’ll take care of you. Tell her how we lived.”

I was going to say that I didn’t know how to find you, or how to get to Hadley, or how to walk through a forest and not starve, or how to survive a plane crash, or how to do just about anything else. But then I remembered my vision from when I touched Ace. It wasn’t muddled anymore. And I knew what I needed to do.

No conscious thought. Only spatial awareness. Altitude is four hundred feet and dropping; I’ve stabilized roll and pitch but with the engine control dead, no way I can bring the yaw up to horizontal in time. I barely see the plane, I barely see the instrument panel; all I see is a branching tree of potential flight paths, all leading inevitably to the ground. The remaining controls are a crippled extension of my own body as I aim to slide down the far side of a hill to minimize impact angle, while lightning strikes to my right, illuminating my pale copilot in the corner of my eye. My friends are gone; one last maneuver and I’ll join them.

I’ve always been able to see flight paths, in my mind. Reading METARs and TAFs for weather, reading the basic T in the cockpit to know where I am and how fast I’m going, those have always been enough. There’s no difference between knowledge and application, after fifteen thousand hours of practice. I could fly blind and still see the air currents ahead of me as if they were already buffeting my plane, and see the terrain below me as if I were already landing on it.

My flight path expands, dramatically. It is no longer my flight path. I can see the impact, as if it had already happened.

I see the forest. I see fifteen miles to the nearest town, Stoddwell. I see CADMUS helicopters, and their flight paths circling the wreck of the base, and their observation patterns; I see phone lines tapped, cameras monitored, police told to look out for any unknown persons coming from the vicinity of the explosion. I see a snare being laid for someone other than Val. I see Val caught in that snare. I see a well-intentioned cage. I see a way to stay out of it.

I see the four hundred miles to Hadley and the foot of Challenger Mountain. I see unwatched freight trains, and dumpsters behind grocery stores, and forest trails to walk under cover of darkness. I see an eight-year old boy in a flight jacket too large for him, with no money, no supplies, no experience with the outside world, nothing but far too much knowledge of death.

Val’s window is smaller than the eye of a needle. But he has a window. A slim possibility. I can see it.

I make final adjustments, incremental shifts to the flight path, aiming for the far side of the hill, minimizing impact angle. Impact in four. Three. Two.

Chapter 15

When I woke up, I was still in my seat. The plane was totally smashed. The metal was all torn and twisted. All the empty space inside it wasn’t empty anymore. If you looked at it, no matter from the outside or the inside, it wouldn’t look like a plane anymore. The only part in the plane that wasn’t filled with metal was the space right around me. The only thing that wasn’t smashed was me.

I had no broken bones, no lacerations, no concussion. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t even hurt. It was impossible. When I think about it, it still doesn’t make sense. But that’s what happened.

Ace and Rocky closed the eyes of Red and Prof when they died. I wanted to close Ace’s eyes, because I think he would have wanted that. But I couldn’t see any part of him. The pieces of metal of the plane must have wrapped around him completely, like a coffin. I’m not strong enough to move or bend any of it, so I couldn’t close Ace’s eyes. But the door was torn off, so I eventually climbed out of the plane.

When I got out, it was still raining, but not quite as hard as it was. I thought hard about the flightpath Ace made for me. I remembered which direction the storm was coming from, and which direction I needed to go. Even though it was still raining, out in the distance, near the bottom of the sky, I saw a spot where the clouds had gone, and that made me realize that the storm was going to stop sooner or later.

Past the edge of the clouds I could see one single star. I started walking towards it.

Mr. Pramble? No. I’m very sure the parachute didn’t save him like he wanted it to. Maybe you have to wear it like a backpack for the parachute to work. I’m…

No. I really don’t want to. It wasn’t nice.

But I guess it’s part of the story Ace wanted me to tell. And Rocky said that sometimes the thing we’re meant to do isn’t fun.

I think I saw who Mr. Pramble was talking about.

I take a breath against my will, and time slowly creeps forward. Pain is so tedious.

Broken spine. Certainly broken arms, and probably broken legs too, if I could feel them or move any limb to check. Skull fracture. Ha. Broken ribs and flail chest, causing gradual accumulation of blood in the pleural cavity. Oh. And frostbite-induced necrosis along the base of my neck. This will be my four hundred ninety-first death. It isn’t the worst. But it’s up there.

I take a breath. My flail chest is like a flapper valve opening and shutting on my ribcage. It’s pure agony.

Bad luck that trees broke my fall. Unparalleled bad luck that I temporarily survived. Should have used the parachute, then just killed myself cleanly. Where’s Karnak? I’ll get one of him to come over, put a bullet in my head, let me reroll and see what I get. Can’t be worse than this useless power, that I can’t even use at death’s door. A power that means nothing now. Like pain signals that mean nothing now. Not helpful, neither of them, not anymore. But any moment now, I’ll feel the warmth of the Liquid Light, I can stop feeling all this meaningless pain.

Another breath. It’s pure agony. Just like all the previous.

This won’t be the end. The base is gone, the molecular displacer, the artifacts, my samples, my notes, all gone. Maybe Karnak’s gone too. Val certainly is. When I get up, I’ll find the plane wreckage, see if Val’s body is intact, maybe freeze his corpse for preservation if I’m in time. Might be something I can learn from it.

I try what I’ve tried a hundred times, to stop breathing and speed up this whole sorry process. And for the hundredth time, my body refuses, and my cracked ribs expand for another agonizing breath. At least I can hear the bubbles of blood when I exhale. Good sign.

And then I’ll rebuild. I’ll keep working towards immortality, keep testing the serums and spells against every possible way life could end. Three hundred thousand people die every day. But one death per day, the one by my hands, can have meaning. I’ll recreate the Liquid Light, perfect it, finish what the Tartarians started. I’ll make sure that when Val touched me, he saw nothing. I don’t ever intend to die.

One more breath. I hope it’s my last.

I still look at the sky, unable to move my head or look anywhere else. The rain has stopped. The storm is passing. Zephyrs and gusts push into and deform the clouds like putty, molding them into strange shapes, showing more and more of the night sky. The trees start glowing silver as the Moon comes out from behind the remnants of the storm.

I try to breathe, and I can’t. Finally. This is it. Any moment now, that inner warmth and glow will wipe the slate clean, clear away this torment like it had never been.

I often have a strange vertigo in my final moments, and I feel it now. I don’t see a shape in the clouds, but as they pass, I see a shape in the emptiness, in the gaps between them. I see the Moon haloed by mist, surrounded by the night sky, and it resembles a skull half-hidden in shadow, like a titan rising across the firmament, wearing a black cloak made of stars, stretching thin empty slivers of sky like black-gloved fingers into the retreating storm, reaching…

The wind picks up. I feel very cold.

I think that’s it. I think that’s the story Ace wanted me to tell you. You already know how they lived, before their last day. That was how they lived on their last day.

It took me two weeks to get here. It wasn’t easy. But it was an adventure. Just like their adventures.

June…

Someday I’m going to die. Everybody dies someday. And, until that someday, I want to live like they did. I want to live on borrowed time.

Can you teach me how to be a Challenger?

Because look, look at my wrist. The little clock that Red gave me, that didn’t work anymore.

It’s ticking again.

Epilogue

With this strange twist of fate, the incredible adventures come to an end, but the unknown still remains coiled and waiting for men of reckless courage.

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