The men, who Scott recognized from Director Kilmer’s briefing as the commander and deputy commander, swiveled in their red padded chair. He expected their faces to be as crazed as the guards’ upstairs, but their visages were grim. The gray-haired commander frowned.

  “This is a secure area,” he said. “How did you gain access?”

  Janis stepped forward. “The guards let us in. We were sent to tell you that the order to launch was in error. We need to abort it right away.”

  The commander shook his head. “A Soviet nuclear strike is incoming. We received verification three minutes ago. The automatic launch sequence has begun. We’re holding to protocol.”

  The deputy commander peered past his superior. “Better strap yourselves in.”

  “Wait,” Scott said, his face turning prickly-hot. “Automatic launch sequence begun?”

  “Affirmative,” the commander replied and turned back to his console.

  We’re too late?

  It seemed impossible. Scott’s gaze flew from the two commanders to the open and empty red lockbox above them to the two keys in their respective launch switches to the switches themselves, showing all ten missiles engaged, to the green lights indicating missile activation, and finally to the narrow countdown panel with the scrambling red numbers.

  Eighty-eight seconds.

  “What does that mean?” Janis asked.

  “The instructions have already been sent to the missiles,” Scott said, seating himself in front of the control center’s backup console, which was positioned at a right angle to the others. He began flipping switches, bringing it into service. “The commander’s right. They can’t abort the launch. And neither can I—not through the main server. I’m going to have to go missile to missile, all ten of them. Access their computers. Blow them if I have to.”

  He closed his eyes and concentrated into the system. His consciousness compressed to a skull-crushing point, then burst into the buzzing circuits beyond. Without his helmet, the process was slower, his perceptions duller. He was a step above a blind man sweeping the sidewalk with a white cane.

  Where are you? Where are you?

  His stick hit something: the backbone cable to the missile launch sites.

  Bingo.

  From faraway, he heard Janis’s voice: “What are you doing here?”

  It took Scott a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking to him. She was posing the question to whoever had just entered the capsule. But he couldn’t think about that, not with the seconds dwindling away. He raced along the cable until the roar of energy and electrical data occluded all else.

  Even Janis’s cry.

  Janis felt his presence before she saw him. The air inside her suit had begun to prickle. She thought it was her hyperawareness of the digital countdown—a true Doomsday Clock—and the two commanders operating under the mistaken belief that they were launching a counterstrike in response to an impending Soviet first strike. Trips had planted those fears, no doubt, but where was he?

  Janis turned from Scott’s bowed head to the destroyed blast door.

  She stiffened at the sight of someone standing inside the doorway, a bloodied arm hanging at his side.

  Tyler stared back at her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  You should be upstairs with the others, getting treated.

  But she didn’t say it. Tyler was no longer wearing his helmet, and Janis could see in his red-rimmed eyes that he wasn’t himself. Without moving her gaze, Janis activated the microphone inside her helmet.

  “We’re inside the launch control center,” she said. “Launch has been activated. I repeat, launch has been activated. Scott is inside the system now, attempting to disable the missiles.”

  “Copy,” Agent Steel responded. “Have Jesse secure the elevator. Tyler has been compromised.”

  “He’s already—”

  A white bolt cracked from Tyler’s hand. For Janis, the initial shock was like grabbing a thousand-volt cable in both hands. Her muscles seized into sharp fists, arching her back and squeezing a ragged cry from her body. Static exploded from her helmet’s earpiece, then her helmet fell silent.

  Janis collapsed to her knees, smoke rising from her suit—the suit that had just spared her life. Tyler stepped toward her, his face wincing with pain. His right shoulder looked raw, chewed up.

  Have to keep him from Scott, Janis thought groggily.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. You’re not taking me anywhere.”

  “Tyler, listen to me. I’m Janis Graystone. Janis Graystone.” Beyond the door she could see one of Jesse’s giant boots, its sole angled toward her. Tyler must have tagged him from behind. She wondered if Tyler had done the same upstairs to Creed and her sister.

  He took another step forward. “You’re not going to control me anymore.”

  “I’m not one of Them, Tyler. I’m a friend of yours. I live in your neighborhood. When we were kids, we built a fort together in the woods, remember? You cut palmetto fronds, and we used them for the roof.”

  She needed to get inside his head, but her own head felt like it had been walloped by a sack of bricks. Hurt to think. She had to keep talking, though, keep him away from Scott.

  “This morning we drove to Tallahassee. You told me about your dream of writing music. You showed me that song you’ve been working on, about nuclear ruin and heroes who don’t exist. Tyler, we are those heroes.”

  But Janis could tell he wasn’t hearing her, wasn’t even seeing her.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he repeated, his voice regressing in years, becoming smaller.

  The blown speaker inside Janis’s earpiece crackled. A voice, barely audible, fizzled beside her ear. “…consider him extremely dangerous,” Agent Steel was saying. “Shoot to kill.”

  She’s talking to her team. She’s talking about Tyler!

  Janis activated her microphone to warn them away, but that component of her communication system was fried. She disconnected her helmet from the battery pack and released the valves. Cool air slipped in. Removing her protective helmet would be a huge risk, but she wasn’t going to get through to Tyler otherwise. Not with the capsule’s overhead lights dimming her visor, making it nearly opaque. She needed to see into his eyes and for him to see into hers.

  Electricity crackled from Tyler’s hands.

  Janis took another breath, then pulled off her helmet.

  Missile number one, I presume.

  Gabriella had warned him not to waste precious time with inner dialogue, but Scott was too hopped up to silence himself. He slipped into the umbilical cord that connected the stub cable with the head of a ballistic missile. The computer seated inside was small but humming away, cycling through the launch and navigation instructions just uploaded from the control center. The same control center where Scott’s body was slumped at a console.

  No time to deprogram it, he thought, not without my helmet.

  He found the computer’s box-shaped power supply and focused into it. A red point appeared behind his closed eyes. The point grew to an orb, transitioning to orange then white, becoming hotter. A familiar fuzziness began to spot over his thoughts. He released his hold.

  The blast blew him back into the umbilical cord.

  Gathering himself, Scott slipped into the computer again to make sure it was out of commission. It was. He replicated the feat at the other onsite missiles, ticking off the second and third subtasks in his mind.

  But he didn’t celebrate.

  With half the time gone by his estimation, he had disabled less than a third of the missiles. Which meant that if he proceeded at the same pace, he would succeed in knocking out six while leaving four active for launch.

  Going to have to spread myself more thinly.

  He backtracked down the cable until he reached the junction where the cable split, the backbone returning to the control center, four smaller cables stubbing off to the various missile sites, miles apart. Scott sped down the second of the four runs. At the new missile site, he allowed his awareness to split to the three missile heads. As he accessed the missile computers through their umbilical cords, a diffusion of information bombarded him. It was like trying to watch three different television stations at once, but Scott had no choice.

  He felt his focus wavering. Concentrate, damn it.

  Finding the computers’ respective power supplies, he gathered his energy. The red point took longer to appear in his mind’s eye, longer to grow, longer to shift colors. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!

  The shock of the simultaneous blasts nearly blew Scott from the entire system.

  He clawed frantically for a hold, for anything, as the system blinked from his awareness. For an instant, he felt himself rematerializing back in the launch control center, the metal desk cold under his arms, his head prickling with returning consciousness. But then he was in the system again. He reoriented himself before speeding back to the backbone cable.

  By Scott’s estimation, he had disabled those rockets in half the time it had taken him to disable the first three. That might have been cause for celebration, but four rockets still remained.

  At two separate sites.

  Mentally, Scott took a tremulous breath.

  It was going to be close.

  Janis waded through a fog, her arms outstretched. Only it wasn’t a fog. She was immersed in a whispering static, like a black and white television with no reception. And she couldn’t see where she was going.

  One moment I’m staring into Tyler’s eyes, and the next, I’m … here.

  Wherever here was. The disorientation and mounting fear she felt reminded her of her first out of body experiences. She asked herself the same question: Am I dead?

  Had Tyler electrocuted her?

  She thought about that morning on the tailgate of his truck, the way he had inspected her knot, and she shook her head. No matter what Trips had done, Janis wouldn’t allow herself to believe Tyler capable of murder. His rough exterior sheltered a gentle soul. But maybe she just didn’t want to believe because she knew that if he had electrocuted her, Scott would be next. Scott, who was sitting defenseless at the console, the fate of millions of lives in his hands.

  At that thought, Janis stopped wandering and centered herself, just as Mrs. Fern had taught her. In her mind, she visualized Tyler’s blue eyes, living mandalas. She pictured his eyes as they had looked when she’d asked him for a copy of his poem. Reticent and glancing but bolstered by a certain passion.

  The whispering thinned around her. The fog of static parted, revealing a wedge of night.

  She stepped into Tyler’s backyard.

  “Janis!” a boy cried.

  She could see by the patterns in the loose earth that he had been backpedaling from a hole near a row of what looked like azalea bushes. Beside the hole, a shovel stood plunged in a large dirt pile. She recognized the boy, of course. Recognized the grave, if only from Tyler’s account. But she was not prepared for the nightmare rising from the oblong hole.

  “Keep him away from me,” Tyler said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Janis tried to block out the image of Tyler’s father, how his skin had burned away from his cheeks and shoulders to reveal meaty striations of charred muscle; how the tissue had broken away from his teeth, creating a permanent grin.

  Trips was playing on Tyler’s greatest fear, convincing him that his father had survived that night, that he had climbed from the grave Tyler had dug for him.

  Janis rushed to the twelve-year-old boy and knelt beside him.

  “This isn’t real,” she said. “None of this ever happened, and it’s not happening now.”

  But even as she spoke, she could feel the damp earth beneath her knees. Could feel the chill of the night air. Gooseflesh sprouted over her bony arms, and only then did she realize she was twelve too, wearing knee-high socks and her old purple Jordache tennis shirt.

  Tyler stared past her shoulder. “Tell him, Janis. Tell him I didn’t mean to.”

  “Tyler, look at me. None of this is real. You’re not twelve. You’re not at your house. You’re fifteen years old, and you’re in Missouri. We were sent here to prevent a missile launch. Trips is making you see and experience things that aren’t real.”

  Tyler’s gaze wandered across her eyes before darting past her shoulder again. Something shuffled over the loose earth. Tyler shoved himself backward, boyish muscles leaping from his bruised torso and thighs. A whimper crept from his lips.

  She took the sides of his face in her hands. “Ignore him, Tyler. Look at me. Focus on me. Just me.”

  His tear-brimmed eyes strained, trying to see past her.

  “Right here, Tyler.”

  He whimpered again.

  I’m not reaching him this time.

  Not only had his fear regressed him to his twelve-year-old psyche, it had stripped away his defenses. In a flash, Janis saw everything. Experienced everything. The gut-pounding fear the nights his father came home intoxicated. The heavy footfalls on the stairs. The wall-rattling shouting and pounding. The fear for his mother’s safety, for her life. The beatings he and his brother suffered. And now this: the terror of what he had done to that same man.

  Janis choked on a sob. “Tyler, look at me.”

  But he wouldn’t.

  How much more of this can he take before his mind snaps, like the guards’ upstairs?

  She wasn’t going to wait to find out. In a moment of intuition, she pulled his face to hers and kissed his mouth. Amid the horror, she had picked up something else—a small and guarded thought that uplifted Tyler in his darkest moments and delivered him from the inescapable horrors between his walls. She had picked up his crush on a certain redheaded girl.

  Tyler’s lips relaxed beneath hers.

  “Are you with me?” she asked when they separated.

  A certain intelligence and self-possession took hold of Tyler’s young face. He nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “We’re leaving this place. We’re going back to the present.”

  He nodded again, but when she went to help him to his feet, his body stiffened.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What is it?”

  “Behind you,” he whispered.

  “Tyler, it’s not real.”

  “No, Janis, he’s behind you.”

  A rotten morgue-like stench filled Janis’s nostrils. At the same moment she saw that they were back in the launch control center, both of them fifteen years old and in their Champions-issued jumpsuits, two sets of cold, slick fingers wrapped around her throat.

  Grasping the clenching hands, Janis craned her eyes to the right, but her assailant remained beyond her vision. A phlegmy cough erupted behind her. And now roaches flapped past her face, gathering in a thickening swarm. In her suffocating panic, Janis’s eyes shot everywhere, at last freezing on the red countdown above the commanders’ consoles.

  Less than ten seconds until launch.

  39

  Scott recovered from the blast of three more missile computers.

  One left.

  Head clearing, he raced down the stub to the backbone, performing a sharp eighty-degree maneuver. The final stub lead to the most remote site, seven miles from the control center. It featured one rocket, but it was the largest: a Viper III, holding eight warheads. Scott didn’t know which city it had been reprogrammed to hit. But with that kind of payload, the missile would decimate the city and all but the remotest suburbs. Millions dead. Millions more maimed.

  You were the one who wanted to be a superhero, he told himself, faint with the thought. Well, here ya go.

  And here was the umbilical cord to the missile.

  He shot through the cord to the missile’s computer. The configuration was slightly different than the others, and it required an extra second for him to locate the power supply—an extra second he couldn’t spare. But he had the power supply now. He was around it, gathering his energy into the computer’s life force.

  Blow this one, and you’re done.

  The orb in his mind’s eye shifted from red to orange. His head felt thick, his thoughts less distinct. Just another second and he would complete his final subtask. He would incinerate this baby, and they could all go home. At that thought, a tremulous joy—no, elation—rose inside him.

  The orange orb verged on white. And then…

  Scott was back in the umbilical cord.

  What?

  He hadn’t released his energy, hadn’t blown the power supply. He tried to dart back into the computer, but there was no computer. The stub just ended. Which could only mean one thing.

  Oh shit.

  Through the flapping and chattering of roaches, another burst of coughing broke out. A ropey string of phlegm landed across Janis’s cheek. Grimacing, she tried to work her fingers beneath the ones strangling her. But Trips’s grip was soulless, unrelenting.

  Must have been hiding up in the escape hatch, she thought. Manipulating the guards, the commanders, Tyler. Doing it all from the shadows. Like the cockroaches he’s spawning in my mind.

  Tucking her chin to her faltering windpipe, Janis made a fist with one hand. Her punch was blind, and its angle—up and behind her—deprived the punch of force, but it landed. Her knuckles slammed into a soft layer of skin, stopping cold against what felt like metal.

  An Artificial, she remembered. The plate’s guarding his circuitry, what gives him his powers.

  She punched again, her knuckles smarting from the impact. And a third time. And a fourth. By the fifth punch, she could feel the skin splitting over her knuckles. She imagined a red smear on Trips’s right temple. But her blows were losing force, slipping more than impacting.

  And his grip was becoming stronger.

  Tyler… she thought dimly, tears leaking from her eyes. One of his blasts could short Trips’s circuitry. Put him out of commission.

  But Trips was probably back in her friend’s amygdalae, paralyzing him with images of his father. Janis managed a final, futile punch before hooking her fingers above Trips’s.