“Okay, let’s not make a scene,” Ray said. “Take care of yourself for me, okay? And—” His voice caught. He cleared his throat and went on. “And when this is all over, let’s make a pact to meet back at Starbase Ace. We’ll order some Thai Fighter takeout and swap war stories. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said around the lump rising in my throat.

  Ray saluted me, and I saluted him back, even though I felt like a kid playing soldier.

  “The Force will be with you,” Ray said, giving my shoulder one last squeeze. “Always.”

  That was it. He turned and walked off, disappearing back the way we came. I stood for a moment, staring after him; then I glanced back over at the bank of elevators, where my fellow “Elite Recruit Candidates” continued to form an anxious queue.

  I FILED ONTO an elevator with fifteen other recruits. They varied drastically in age, gender, and ethnicity, but all of them wore a variation of the same dazed expression, which I knew was probably also mirrored on my own face.

  As the elevator descended, we all stood there in silence, staring at the ceiling, our shoes, or at the closed doors in front of us—anything to avoid making eye contact. I wondered where each of them had been and what they’d been doing earlier that morning, when an Earth Defense Alliance shuttle had appeared out of nowhere to shatter their notion of reality, yank them out of their lives, and bring them here.

  I also found myself wondering if I’d ever played Terra Firma or Armada with any of these people. It seemed possible—even probable. Hell, for all I knew, one of the people beside me could be the famed RedJive, in the flesh.

  The elevator car had no floor indicator or control panel, just a single down arrow that lit up and beeped about twice every second as the car descended deeper and deeper belowground. I counted over twenty of those beeps before the doors finally opened again.

  We stepped off the elevator into a large circular lobby that was already clogged with a procession of disoriented recruit candidates like ourselves. Most were dressed in their normal street clothes like me, but for a wide variety of different climates. I also spotted people in business suits, fast food uniforms, surgical scrubs, and one dazed-looking middle-aged woman who was wearing a wedding dress and still clutching her bridal bouquet.

  A line of EDA soldiers stationed around the lobby herded everyone through a long row of doors, into the adjacent sunken auditorium. As I filed into it with the others, I swiveled my head around to survey the layout. The enormous bowl-shaped auditorium had stadium-style seating that faced an enormous curved projection screen, making it look more like an IMAX theater than a top-secret underground briefing room. But the ceiling was a different story—it was a long, sloping grid of concrete waffle slabs, each reinforced with shock-absorption springs at its center. Like the rest of the base, the auditorium looked as if it had been built to withstand a direct nuclear blast on the surface above.

  I swept my gaze around the auditorium, trying to decide where I should sit. At the foot of the giant screen, I noticed a low rectangular stage with a podium at its center. The first thirty or so rows in front of it were already filled with nervous recruits, and a steady stream of new ones were filing in and filling up the rows behind them, one after another, the way we did at school assemblies. But a few dozen less conformist (or more antisocial) individuals had chosen to sit much farther back, either by themselves or in scattered small groups.

  I began to climb the nearest staircase, heading for the least populated seats in the upper third of the auditorium. Once I reached the nosebleed section, I began to look for a sufficiently isolated seat—then I froze in midstep.

  She was just off to my right, sitting all alone in a deserted row near the back, taking brazen pulls from a chrome hip flask painted to look like R2-D2. Even seated, I could tell she must be a few inches taller than me. Her pale, alabaster skin contrasted sharply with her dark clothing—black combat boots, black jeans, and a black tank top (which didn’t fully conceal the black bra she was wearing underneath). She had a spiky wave of black hair that was buzzed down one side and chin-length on the other. But the real kicker was her tattoos, on each arm: on the left was a beautiful seminude rendering of the comic book heroine Tank Girl, adorned in postapocalyptic rock lingerie and smooching an M16. On her right bicep, in stylized capital letters, were the words EL RIESGO SIEMPRE VIVE.

  Seeing her was almost as jarring as when I’d first glimpsed that Glaive Fighter the previous afternoon. I had fallen for Ellen gradually, over a period of months. But this—this was like taking a lightning bolt from Mjolnir straight to the forehead.

  I was still wondering if I had the courage to go sit near her when I realized I was already moving in that direction, as fast as my feet would carry me. As I climbed the stairs, it occurred to me that my emotions were probably not to be trusted under these heightened circumstances, but that thought was lost amid the influx of hormones flooding my brain as I made my way to the center of the row where she was sitting. I tried to convince myself that she looked like she could use some company—even though everything about her demeanor indicated the opposite.

  When I reached her seat, she ignored me, leaving me standing there waiting for her to acknowledge my existence. As she continued to stare at her lap, I looked down at what was holding her attention and saw that she’d cracked open her QComm and had its electronic innards arrayed on her thighs, like she was performing an autopsy on the device—which I figured she was, since it seemed doubtful she would ever be able to put it back together.

  But then she began to do just that, reassembling the QComm in seconds, with the speed and dexterity of a Marine field-stripping a weapon. When she finished putting it back together, she powered it on and watched the operating system reboot.

  Then she finally raised her eyes to meet mine. I pointed to the seat beside her.

  “Is it okay if I sit here?”

  I know it’s hard to believe, but I improvised this opening line right on the spot.

  She gave me a quick once-over before answering.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m having a private conversation with my droid. Isn’t that right, R2?” She raised her flask to her lips again, then waved it at the sea of empty seats spread out below us. “Why don’t you go find another female of the species to mack on?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Vasquez.” I nodded at her flask. “I’m just here to bum some of your booze.”

  She laughed, and I felt a sharp pain in the center of my chest. She glanced down at her El Riesgo Siempre Vive tattoo, clearly impressed that I knew its origin.

  “All right,” she said with an amused sigh. “Have a seat, baby face.”

  “Thanks, Grandma.” I took the seat next to her and propped my feet up on the seat back in front of me, like she was doing.

  “Did you just call me ‘Grandma’?”

  “Yeah, because just you called me ‘baby face.’ And it wounded my masculine pride.”

  She laughed again, louder this time, increasing the intensity of my chest pains.

  She was even more gorgeous up close, and her eyes, which I’d thought were brown, actually appeared to be more amber colored, and her gold irises were shot through with streaks of copper.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You have a young face. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen last month.”

  She smirked. “Too bad,” she said. “I kinda have a thing for jailbait.”

  “Great,” I said. “A pedophile with a drinking habit.”

  That got a third laugh—a snorting, girlish chuckle that disrupted my heart rate yet again. Then she glanced back down at her flask and addressed it in a confidential tone.

  “R2,” she muttered. “This dream just keeps getting weirder. Now a cute, wisecracking boy has shown up in it. What are the odds?”

  I almost asked if she meant me. Disaster averted.

  “I hate to break it to you,” I said. “But you’re not dreaming this.”

  “I’m not? How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I’m clearly the one who’s dreaming all of this,” I said. “How could you be dreaming this, when you’re just another figment of my imagination, like everyone else here?”

  “Well, I hate to break it to you,” she said, poking me with her flask and splashing some of its contents on my leg, “but I am not a figment of anyone’s imagination.”

  That’s a relief, I thought. But what I actually said was, “Unfortunately, neither am I.” Then I offered her a smile. “So all of this must really be happening right now. To both of us.”

  She nodded and took another drink. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I was afraid of.” Then she held out her flask, finally offering me a drink. But I shook my head.

  “You know, on second thought, maybe I should keep a clear head for the briefing,” I said. Then, as if that weren’t lame enough, I added, “I’m not old enough to drink, anyway.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “They’re about to tell us the world is ending, you realize?” she said. “You don’t want to be stone-cold sober for that shit, do you?”

  “You make a compelling argument,” I said, taking the flask from her.

  As I raised it to my lips, she began to chant “Breakin’-the-law-breakin’-the-law.”

  I gave her a pleading look. “Please—don’t make me shoot this out my nose, okay?”

  She nodded solemnly and raised three fingers. “Girl Scout’s honor.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I find it hard to believe that you were ever a Girl Scout.”

  Her eyes narrowed, then she reached out and rolled down her striped knee sock, revealing a dark green Girl Scouts of America logo tattooed on her left calf.

  “I stand corrected,” I said. “Are you hiding any other cool tattoos?”

  She punched me in the shoulder—hard—then pointed at the flask, still in my hand. “Quit stalling, baby face. Bottoms up.”

  I took a small sip—but I still swallowed enough of the burning liquid to make me wince and cough. I didn’t know enough about liquor to discern what she had in there, but my guess would have been rocket fuel mixed with a finger or two of paint thinner. I knew she was still watching me, so I forced myself to choke down a second, longer drink. Then I passed the flask back to her, all smooth-like, even though my eyes were watering and my throat felt like I’d just downed a shot of molten lava.

  “Thank you,” I said hoarsely.

  “I’m Alexis Larkin.” She stuck out her hand. “But my friends call me Lex.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lex.” I felt a small static shock as we shook hands. “I’m Zack—Zack Lightman,” I said, stuttering through my own name.

  She grinned and reached for the flask, which I gladly handed back to her. “So, where do you hail from, Zack-Zack Lightman?”

  “It’s just one Zack,” I said, laughing. “I’m from Portland, Oregon. What about you?”

  “Texas,” she said softly. “I live in Austin.” Her expression darkened, and she took another drink—wincing at this one. “And I was just there, less than an hour ago, debugging subroutines in my cubicle, when a motherfucking Earth Defense Alliance shuttle suddenly shows up and lands right outside my office building! I figured I must be losing it. Now I’m not sure what to think.”

  She shivered and rubbed her bare shoulders.

  “It’s cold as balls in here!” she said. “And I left my sweater in a different time zone.”

  I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Crom, then opened my backpack and handed her my father’s jacket.

  “Wow,” she said. “Badass. Thank you.” She spent a few seconds admiring the patches; then she drew the jacket across her shoulders like a shawl.

  “Where do you work?”

  “At a software company. We make apps and operating systems for mobile devices. It was surreal when the shuttle landed outside our offices, because a lot of my coworkers are gamers, too. So a lot of us recognized the shuttle right away, even before we saw the Earth Defense Alliance crest on its hull. None of us could believe what we were seeing.”

  “What happened?”

  “We all ran outside to the parking lot. Then two people wearing suits—a man and a woman—stepped out of the shuttle and asked for me by my full name, which was weirdly humiliating, like getting called to the principal’s office or something. They said they needed my ‘assistance with a matter of urgent national security.’ What was I supposed to do? They were riding around in a spaceship from a videogame, and I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life wondering what it looked like on the inside, or where it was going to take me—so I went with them.” She nodded at our surroundings. “Now I’m in a top-secret government base somewhere in the middle of fucking Iowa, waiting to find out what the hell is happening. In short—I’m totally losing my shit.”

  She said all of this in a very calm, steady voice.

  I nodded. “I think we’re actually somewhere in the middle of fucking Nebraska.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “Because Ray—the EDA agent who brought me here—said this was Nebraska.”

  “The jokers who brought me here wouldn’t tell me shit,” she said.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I may have been given special treatment, but it seemed doubtful that all of the other recruit candidates in that auditorium had been mentored and watched over by an undercover EDA agent who had been stationed in their hometown for the past six years.

  Lex glanced back down at her QComm, which had finished rebooting, and thumbed through the icons on its display.

  “They better make good on their promise to unlock these things,” she said. “I don’t want my grandma to get too worried about me. She tends to do that if I don’t call her every day—” Lex dialed a number on the QComm from memory, but a red X appeared on the display, along with a message that said, “Access to Civilian Networks Locked.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she muttered, scowling at the QComm before she slid it into her pocket.

  “Are you and your grandma close?” I asked, just to hear her talk some more.

  She nodded. “My folks both died in a car crash when I was little. My grandpa had already passed, so my grandma raised me by herself.” She met my gaze. “How about you, Zack? Anyone back at home you’re worried about? Anybody who’ll be worried about you?”

  I nodded. “My mom.” I pictured her face. “She’s a nurse. It’s just the two of us.”

  Lex nodded, as if I’d explained everything. We both fell silent for a moment. I suddenly found myself wishing Cruz and Diehl were there with me. The insanity of this experience would have been much easier to handle with my two best friends around.

  But even though the Mikes were skilled at both Terra Firma and Armada, their rankings apparently weren’t high enough in either game to merit an invitation to these strange proceedings.

  “Lex?”

  “Zack?”

  “Do you play Terra Firma and Armada?”

  “TF.”

  “How good are you at it?” I asked. “Are you one of the Thirty Dozen?”

  She nodded. “I’m currently ranked seventeenth,” she said, far too nonchalantly. “But I’ve been as high as fifteenth. Those standings fluctuate a lot.”

  I whistled low, impressed. “Damn, woman,” I said. “What’s your call sign?”

  “Lexecutioner,” she said. “It’s a portmanteau. What’s yours?”

  “IronBeagle,” I told her, wincing at how dorky it sounded in my ears. “It’s a—”

  “It’s fantastic!” she said. “I love that flick, as cheesy as it is. And my grandma used to play that Snoopy vs. the Red Baron album every Christmas.”

  I did a double-take at her. No one had ever gotten the Iron Eagle/Peanuts mash-up in my call sign without me first having to explain it to them—including Cruz and Diehl. I felt a strong urge to reach out and touch her shoulder, to confirm that she was real.

  “You’re not in the Thirty Dozen, otherwise I’d recognize your call sign,” she said. “You must play Armada?”

  I nodded, trying to hide my disappointment. “Not your game?”

  She shook her head. “Flight simulators give me vertigo. I prefer to throw down with my feet on the ground.” She pointed a thumb at herself. “You put me at the controls of a giant battle mech, I will crush my enemies and see them driven before me.”

  I grinned. “What about the lamentations of their women?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, chuckling. “Their women lamentate all over the place. That goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

  We both laughed loudly, drawing annoyed stares from those seated within earshot. We appeared to be the only two people in that auditorium who were in a laughing mood—which made us laugh even louder.

  When we regained our composure, Lex upended her flask and let the last few drops inside fall onto her outstretched tongue. Then she screwed the cap back on and stowed the flask in her jeans.

  “ ‘I’ve lost R2,’ ” she quoted, before mimicking the little blue droid’s famous whistling sigh. This time, I was the one who snorted out an unexpected laugh.

  “So spill it, Star Lord,” she said. “What’s your player ranking?”

  “My Terra Firma ranking is too abysmal to say out loud,” I said, laying on the false modesty with a trowel. “But in the Armada rankings I’m currently sixth.”

  Her eyes widened, and she swiveled her head around to stare at me.

  “Sixth place?” she repeated. “In the world? No bullshit?”

  I crossed my heart, but did not hope to die.

  “That’s some serious bill-paying skillage,” she said. “Color me impressed, Zack-Zack Lightman.”

  “Color me flattered, Miss Larkin,” I replied. “But you’d be a lot less impressed if you’d ever seen me play Terra Firma. I’m okay in an ATHID, but I can’t drive a Sentinel to save my ass. I always end up stomping on a tenement full of civilians; then I get demoted back to the infantry.”

  “Doh! Collateral and property damage! You like to double down, eh?”

  Before I could answer, the lights in the auditorium dimmed and a hush fell over the audience. I felt Lex grab my forearm and squeeze it tightly enough to cut off my circulation. I stared straight ahead, clutching the armrests of my seat, trembling with a lifetime’s worth of accumulated anticipation as the screen in front of us was illuminated.