Game Over by Andrew Klavan Page A

.”
    But before he could, the door came open. Miss Ferris was standing there. Her expression—if you could call it an expression—was the same as always: no expression at all.
    â€œIt’s about time you got here,” she said in that flat, toneless voice of hers. “Get inside. This is an emergency.”

13. EMERGENCY
    â€œWHAT’S GOING ON?”
    As they traveled down in the elevator, Rick’s father took off his watch cap and stuffed it into his overcoat pocket. He pulled his scarf down and started to unbutton his coat. His glasses cleared. He looked like himself again: an absentminded egghead. He looked at Miss Ferris, waiting for an answer.
    The small, tense, compact woman stared at the door blankly, her lips pressed together to make a thin line. It was odd, thought Rick, stealing a glance at her. Somehow, he had come to like this woman. When he had first become a MindWarrior, he had thought she had no emotions, that she was cold and uncaring. Now, though, he was no longer sure. He thought maybe the truth was: she forced her emotions down so she could do the difficult things she had to do. It wasn’t that she didn’t care whether or not Rick died in the Realm. It was that she cared so much she couldn’t show it, not even to herself.
    That was his guess, anyway.
    â€œThere was a major breach in our security last night,”she said. She spoke with as much emotion as the lady in a GPS when she tells you to turn left. “Someone hacked their way into Commander Mars’ computer.”
    Rick and his father exchanged a quick, secret glance. That was Rick! Rick was the emergency! Rick’s lips parted. He was about to admit the truth. But his father gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head: Wait. They still didn’t know whom to trust around here. Rick kept silent.
    â€œNo one could have gotten in there without setting off alarms in the compound,” Miss Ferris went on. “And no one should have been able to get into the computer itself. That means it must’ve been Kurodar. If Kurodar’s mind has somehow gotten into our compound . . .” She let the sentence trail off, then in the same flat tone, she said: “Well, it would be a disaster.”
    Again Rick met his father’s eyes behind Miss Ferris’s back. He didn’t want the whole compound to go on red alert because of him. But he could tell by the expression in his father’s eyes that he wanted him to keep quiet, so he did.
    â€œSo what are we going to do about it?” was all he said.
    Miss Ferris gave him a brief, blank glance over her shoulder. “We’re sending you back into the Realm to see what you can find out.”
    The elevator touched down. Miss Ferris strode out and headed down the hall. Rick and his father had to hurry to keep up. She was a small woman, but she took long strides.
    â€œI thought Mars was reluctant to send Rick back in,”the Traveler said to her back. “I thought he was afraid Rick’s mind may have been compromised somehow when he ran through the Breach.”
    â€œIt’s a chance we have to take,” she said, marching ahead.
    They came into the Portal Room. The techies were already there, four men and two women, each in his or her seat, before his or her screen and keyboard. They all looked like they’d been dragged out of bed to be here. Hair uncombed. One guy with his shirt buttoned wrong. All of them blinking at their machines as if they were dazed.
    In the wall at the head of the room was the device Rick always thought of as the glass coffin: the portal into the MindWar Realm. It was a box with a transparent lid, the insides lined with a kind of thin metal. When Rick lay down in the box, the metal wrapped itself around him, and he felt all these pinpricks as the device plugged him into the MindWar system. He hated it. He hated getting in there. It made him claustrophobic. It made him sweat.
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