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  But now he had no choice. He had no idea who these four individuals were, but he felt certain that he had to stick by them. What was it that the woman had called him? Bereft? Somehow, he had become implicated in their misadventure, and he knew full well that there was no time and no way to explain the truth to the cops behind him clutching their . . . what were they? Machine guns?

  The four running figures ahead of him were starting to gain ground, and David felt a swelling panic. What if they lost him? What if he was left alone to face these strange police officers with their strange weapons?

  David heard a soft pop behind him and then the sound of air rushing past his ears.

  Bullets. The officers had opened fire.

  He risked turning to look, and found that the officers, several hundred yards behind him, had raised the long, sleek barrels of their guns.

  Again, he heard the soft popping sounds, and his eyes widened as he watched the officers sighting over the gun barrels, clearly aiming for him.

  He turned away again, intent on pouring all of his energy into running faster than he had ever run before.

  Again, a pop, and again a burst of air rushing past his ear.

  Just ahead of him, one of the running men threw both hands into the air. His forward momentum had been arrested mid-sprint, so that one leg was thrust ahead of the other. His body curved in an exaggerated, graceful arc, almost like a dancer standing poised in the middle of a backbend. His chest and arms lifted skyward and his head fell back, eyes wide and staring.

  Then, David saw the cause of this sudden contortion.

  At the center of the man’s back was a hole the size of a golf ball. It ran all the way through him, so that David could see clearly, through the hole, the street beyond.

  The man crumpled in stages. First, his knees buckled and gave out, striking the sidewalk heavily; then, he folded at the waist. He seemed to fall in slow motion, and as he did, David watched in horror as the hole in the center of his back expanded.

  There was no blood, no gore. Just a hole, spreading rapidly, like fire, across the man’s midsection.

  In an instant, the man was on the ground, and David was passing him, running even faster now, gasping audibly in his strain and terror. As he passed, he looked down at the man’s crumpled form, and saw that the hole was still spreading, so that it was almost taking over the man’s body. Now there was sinew and muscle and flesh—now there wasn’t. He was literally disappearing from the center of himself.

  “I can’t get hit!” David thought wildly. These weapons weren’t just lethal; they could actually wipe him away, as if he had never been.

  But as soon as the thought entered David’s mind, a second followed on its heels: “I don’t have to get hit! I don’t even have to be here! This is a game.” A kind of hysterical joy coursed through David’s veins. He could not only escape these police officers and their horrifying guns, he could escape this world entirely.

  A high, whining squeal filled David’s ears. Another siren? Another beetle-like police vehicle gliding onto the scene?

  But no, this sound was coming from over his head. David looked up and saw a black form silhouetted against the sky. It was massive, with long wings spread like sails, blocking out the sunlight.

  “What the hell kind of bird is that?” David thought, intrigued despite himself and forgetting for a moment his realization that this was a game, a world he could enter and exit at will.

  The bird cried again, shrill and piercing, almost like a human scream.

  Squinting, David made out more of its form. It had a long, slender neck and an even longer bill, tapering to a razor-sharp point. Its wings were black and thick and leathery, not so much feathered as webbed, like the wings of a bat.

  Where had he seen anything like this strange creature before? Then he realized. He recognized the bird because he had seen it in the children’s science books that Malcolm had loved so much as a little boy. This was a pterodactyl. A dinosaur.

  As if naming the creature had made it more real, the instant David realized what it was, it swooped in midair and began diving downward toward the running people in front of him, now three and not four.

  And the instant the pterodactyl swooped, another pop sounded and David watched in agony as a hole appeared in the back of one of the running people, one of the women this time. This wasn’t the woman who had called to him, but she too had a graying braid running down her back and long, lean limbs. Just as the fallen man had before her, her body tensed and arced as the projectile struck her and bore its way cleanly through her body. Instantly, the hole began to widen and gape, eating its way through her and turning her back, belly, sides, and torso into nothingness. She sagged and fell.

  The pterodactyl dove and screamed.

  “Enough!” David thought to himself. “This game is insane. It’s far too violent; it’s far too real. I’m forbidding Malcolm from playing it.”

  He put his hands to his face to rip off the goggles . . . and touched skin.

  He felt again, disbelieving.

  There were no goggles over his eyes. No headphones over his ears. No headset at all.

  His hands traced and slapped over his whole body, wildly, desperately, searching for the headset, the gloves, the belts that held him on the treadpad, anything that he could tear away to end this madness.

  There was nothing there. He could not remove the VR equipment. He was trapped in the game.

  black shadow passed over David, and he looked up, his hands still clawing uselessly over his head and body, searching for the VR equipment. The pterodactyl was now close, no more than twenty feet above him. And David saw for the first time a human rider huddled on the pterodactyl’s back.

  The rider held his legs bent and pressed tightly against the pterodactyl’s flanks, and he was leaning into the side of the beast’s neck, like a jockey in the final sprint of a horserace, lowering his body against the horse to cut wind resistance.

  David only had a moment to take in this strange sight before he heard a shriek.

  “Bereft!”

  It was the woman who had first called to him. She and her final remaining companion had paused a few yards ahead of him and were looking back at him wildly.

  “Hurry, Bereft!” She shouted.

  In that instant, David heard another pop as a projectile from the police officers’ mysterious weapons whizzed passed his ear. It struck the man ahead of David in his side, bore a clean hole through him, and before David had even registered the sound of his own gasp, the man had crumpled unnaturally in on himself as his torso began to dissolve.

  The woman let out a strangled cry, then immediately turned from her fallen companion and held out a hand to David.

  “Run!” She called.

  And David did. Overhead, he could hear a sinister whooshing as the pterodactyl beat its wings, flying lower toward the woman with the silver streak in her braid. The walls of the buildings on either side of them seemed to constrain its broad wingspan, and it screamed in frustration, unable to dive lower to the ground.

  David could still hear the soft pops behind him of the police weapons.

  “Can they hit me?” he thought desperately. “Am I still in a game, or is this real? Am I going to die?”

  A moment later, the silver-braided woman skidded to a halt on the shining metal sidewalk. She slid a gleaming black device, like a baton, out of her sleeve and waved it over the sidewalk. A hole appeared in the ground before her. She looked back at David once, her eyes narrowed and intense, and then she jumped into the hole.

  David didn’t think. Two steps later and the hole was directly before him, its black mouth gaping. He had too much momentum to stop; and besides, the pterodactyl was screaming above him and the cops were firing behind him.

  He half-fell, half-jumped into the hole.

  He hadn’t had time to consider how far he might fall or what might break his fall, and within moments, he had cause to regret this. He seemed to be plummeting a vast d
istance—a back-breaking distance. He had stumbled into the hole so quickly that he hadn’t had time to make sure he dropped straight in, feet-first. Instead, he tumbled end over end. As he felt his body twisting downward, he searched frantically to see where he might land, but everything was blackness. He tried to crane upward again to see the daylight above him through the opening of the hole, but it had disappeared. The sidewalk had somehow closed again overhead. As the seconds expanded and David’s stomach dropped sickeningly with gravity’s pull, he lost all sense of his own body in space.

  And then, David landed.

  David felt his body collide with a soft, flexible surface that seemed to embrace and envelop him as the momentum he had gathered during the fall drove him downward. It was almost as if he had tumbled into a giant featherbed. There was absolutely no shock in his landing; he felt himself gently cushioned by this odd, soft surface, and at the same time buoyed up. He looked around and splayed his hands out beside him, trying to feel what material had broken his fall. He was still very much in darkness, sprawled on his back, stunned and bewildered.

  “Quickly!” A voice called, somewhere to his left. “Get up, you’re unhurt.”

  He felt a hand grasp his wrist and pull him to his feet. He stepped awkwardly off whatever platform he had landed on; it was so compressible underfoot that he nearly lost his balance.

  “Yep,” he heard the voice say again, almost merrily, “gets a little wobbly, I know, but insulfoam certainly makes a good landing pad.”

  “Insulfoam?” David wondered. His feet were now on solid ground. He squinted around, and his eyes slowly adjusted.

  The woman with the silver-streaked braid was standing beside him, very close so that they could see each other in the darkness. Her hand was still closed securely around his wrist.

  “Are you all right?” She asked, urgently. She had a curious, lilting accent that David couldn’t quite place. She had almost rolled—or, perhaps, tapped was more accurate—the “r” in “right.” Was she Irish? That wasn’t quite it.

  David realized that he was just staring at her.

  “Yes—yes,” he stammered. Then it occurred to him that this wasn’t the truth at all. He was unhurt physically, sure, but what the hell had just happened to him?

  “What was that up there? Where are we? Who are you?” He began, the words tumbling out of him in a jumble of both shock and palpable relief that the immediate danger seemed to have passed.

  “Easy now,” the woman said. “Let’s get back to the bunker.” David tried again, uselessly, to place her accent. This time she had dropped the final “r” in “bunker,” so that her pronunciation sounded vaguely of the antebellum south. Or . . . Cockney? This was not an accent he had ever heard before.

  Without another word, the woman tugged on his arm, leading him firmly through the darkness. He looked behind him and saw that the strange material on which he had landed—the “insulfoam,” had she said?—was shaped in a large, flat square, and stood about two feet high. It was surrounded on three sides by black, slick walls that rose endlessly upward into the shaft through which they had plummeted.

  Ahead of them was a long, black-walled passageway.

  The woman walked quickly ahead of him, still pulling him by the arm as if she feared that he couldn’t quite be trusted to put one foot in front of the other on his own. Which was probably accurate. Questions were flooding David’s mind, one after another.

  How could he turn off this game and get himself back to Lila’s house, back to the real world? Or was he at Lila’s? That is to say . . . was his body still in Lila’s basement while his mind was lost in this alternate reality?

  “Quickly now,” the woman urged him, pulling David back into the moment. He quickened his pace, not wanting to disappoint her. She had, after all, saved his life back there. He felt urgently that she was his only ally, his only lifeline in whatever this strange misadventure was that had befallen him.

  The passageway opened into a second corridor, this one much wider, with a higher ceiling. Recessed lights were built into the ceiling, and David blinked, his eyes aching against their glare. A little jolt of recognition ran through him as he noticed that these lights were the exact same design that he had seen in the basement of that strange VR version of Lila’s house, when he first put on the goggles.

  That felt like a lifetime ago. And yet, it couldn’t have been more than an hour since he had first arrived at Lila’s to pick up Malcolm.

  The thought was oddly comforting. Surely Lila would notice soon that he hadn’t returned from the basement. Maybe she would come downstairs and pull the goggles off him herself. Maybe she could get him out of here.

  “In you go,” the silver-braided woman said. David squinted through the glare of the overhead lights and saw that they were standing beside a set of train tracks. Or something like train tracks. They were thinner than any tracks David knew, rising up from the shiny black floor of the passageway like blades.

  Resting on the tracks was a semi-spherical vehicle. It looked a great deal like the hover-cars David had seen above ground, gleaming black and dome-shaped. Like those vehicles, it had no appreciable doors or windows, but it did have wheels, six almost delicate metal discs that balanced gingerly on the tracks.

  David stared, unsure how to obey the woman’s command.

  “How do I go . . . ‘in’?” David asked finally. He had no idea how or where the vehicle admitted passengers, but that wasn’t the only source of his hesitation. He still didn’t know whether what was happening to him was real, or if he was just trapped by his own ignorance of the VR system’s functioning. Maybe there was a very simple mechanism to end the game, and he just didn’t know what it was. Or maybe he needed to get back to the VR version of Lila’s house, which had been his entry point into this world. Perhaps it was some kind of portal that could take him home again? But to get there, he would have to go back through the hostile cops . . .

  The woman was giving him a curious look.

  “Not much of a tramcar rider, are you?” she asked. “Just step forward.”

  With no other option before him, David did as she said. He stepped up to the vehicle, and as he approached, it split seamlessly open, its dome splaying outward like beetle wings. David watched in awe as soft light poured out of the dome. Peering in, he could see that the vehicle held two large, white seats and a dashboard of glowing buttons and screens.

  “In you go,” the woman said again, and David stepped up into the vehicle, wondering all the while if he was only worsening his predicament by delving deeper into this VR version of Flint.

  He slid gingerly into one of the high-backed seats, made of a firm, leather-like material that felt soft and smooth under his fingertips. The woman sat down beside him.

  She drew the black baton that she had used to open the sidewalk out of her sleeve again and waved it over the dashboard. With a soft, mechanical whir, the beetle wings closed over them, and instantly, David felt himself thrust backward into his seat as they took off down the tracks, accelerating dramatically in only a few seconds.

  David looked around, discovering that the tramcar’s domed shell was entirely transparent. It seemed to function like a two-way mirror: from the outside, it was an opaque, reflective black. From the inside, its passengers could see outward in any direction.

  David watched transfixed as the black walls of the tunnel streamed past him. It was impossible to guess the tramcar’s speed; it glided silently and smoothly on the tracks, and there were no features on the tunnel walls that David could use as points of reference. Nevertheless, his body was pressed firmly backwards into his seat by the force of the tramcar’s acceleration. This was certainly faster than he had ever traveled in a wheeled vehicle, even counting the high-speed ICE trains he had taken as a backpacking student in Germany.

  What was this bizarre world where advanced transportation technology coexisted with dinosaurs?

  David was just mustering the courage—and trying to find t
he words—to ask the silver-braided woman where he was, when she spoke softly.

  “I’m sorry you got wrapped up in this,” she said in her gentle lilt. “You were truly in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “That’s definitely true,” David said with a wave of irrational hilarity. He had no idea what place and time he was in, but “wrong” pretty much summed it up.

  The woman seemed to have mistaken his irony for a rebuke. She looked at him with genuine concern. For the first time, in the soft light of the tramcar, David was truly able to take in her features. She was probably in her early forties, despite the shock of premature gray that ran through her otherwise jet-black hair from her right temple all the way to the tip of her long, shining braid. Her eyes were wide-set, almond-shaped, and a deep brown. She had a heart-shaped face with smooth, largely unlined skin, except for a few traces of her age at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Her skin was a very pale reddish tan, almost like whiskey. Had David encountered her in his own world, he would have guessed that she was American Indian.

  She continued, her voice apologetic, “We chose a bank well clear of the Bereft Quadrant because we didn’t want anyone to be inadvertently implicated in the mission. And then there you were when we came out—you were the only Bereft within a dozen city blocks, I’m sure. I made a split-second call; it seemed clear to me that the police would assume you were with us. And so . . . now I think it’s best if you lie low in the bunker. At least for a while. They might have a description out on you, and there’s no way they’ll accept your story that you were a bystander.”

  David didn’t know what to say. What was that word she kept using for him? Bereft? What was she implying? What did he look bereft of?

  “What were you doing in the Immortal District, anyway?” the woman asked.

  David was caught off-guard. He hadn’t expected her to question him. She was the one who wasn’t making any sense.

  “I—I don’t know,” he said lamely. It had suddenly occurred to him that it might not be safe to tell her that he had no idea where he was, let alone that he had come from another world. But David was not exactly a smooth liar. If he so much as wanted to cancel an appointment with an accounting client without a decent excuse, he’d find himself stumbling over explanations, backtracking and stammering and sweating. He was at a total loss now to improvise some kind of identity for himself, especially given that he was completely ignorant of what might or might not be acceptable in this world.