BOOKS IN THIS SERIES

  BY JAMES DASHNER

  A Door in the Woods

  Book One of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  Gift of Ice

  Book Two of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  The Tower of Air

  Book Three of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  War of the Black Curtain

  Book Four of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  © 2005, 2012 James Dashner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, whether by graphic, visual, electronic, film, microfilm, tape recording, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief passages embodied in critical reviews and articles.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Cedar Fort, Inc., or any other entity.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-55517-879-6

  Published by Sweetwater Books, an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc.

  2373 W. 700 S., Springville, UT 84663

  Distributed by Cedar Fort, Inc., www.cedarfort.com

  Cover design by Rebecca Jensen

  Cover design © 2012 by Lyle Mortimer

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed on acid-free paper

  Dedicated to my kids.

  I saved the best for last.

  It seems that I thank the same people every time. But I truly mean it. My wife, Lynette, the Bahlmann family (Bob, Shirley, Zack, Brian, and Michael), Randall Spilker, Julie Wright, Judi and Angela Hansen—thanks for your time to edit and assist. Thanks for telling me not only when it was bad but also when it was good.

  I'm thankful for Cedar Fort and all the hard work they put into my series. I appreciate you treating me like family.

  Most of all, a big thanks to all of my readers. The past two years have been quite a trip. I've enjoyed the letters, the school visits, the signings—more than I can put into words. When I first started writing about Jimmy Fincher, patterned after a dorky kid from Georgia—me—I wouldn't have dreamed that someday other people would care a lick about it. I'm glad you do.

  Prologue

  1. Sleep

  2. Those Pesky Dreams

  3. Floating Lady

  4. Rope Climbing

  5. The Odd Present

  6. Breakfast of Champions

  7. Urgent Visitor

  8. Ocean Hopping

  9. Tanaka

  10. The Butterflies

  11. The Okisaru

  12. Going on a Drive

  13. Robed Death

  14. Flying Car

  15. Ghost or No Ghost

  16. The Plan Begins

  17. Into the Mountain

  18. Large Bedroom

  19. Japanese Spit

  20. Eye Shine

  21. Beds Arise

  22. Icy Prayer

  23. Up the Stairs

  24. Reunion

  25. Bad Nickname

  26. The Big Apple

  27. Floating Lady's Digs

  28. Inori

  29. Erifani Tup

  30. Mirror, Mirror

  31. The Farm

  32. Gift Number Four

  33. Flee

  34. Decision

  35. Gone South

  36. So, We Meet Again

  37. No Deal

  38. Gathering

  39. A Sword of Ice

  40. Charge

  41. Beast of Legend

  42. Colored Scales

  43. Body

  44. Knifepoint

  45. Note from the Dead

  46. Travel Plans

  47. The Half

  48. Warden of Dreams

  49. What it Means

  50. Raspy

  51. The Black Coma

  52. The Grand Exception

  53. Into the Yumeka

  54. Into the Stompers

  55. Dirty Hand

  56. Zombies

  57. Airplane

  58. No Parachute

  59. Teacher

  60. The Second Layer

  61. Next

  62. Mansion Again

  63. Weird Thing in a Chair

  64. Shadow

  65. Piggyback

  66. Deceived

  67. Yellow Goo

  68. Take to the Skies

  69. Soul Searching

  70. In the Bag

  71. Topsy-Turvy

  72. Good-bye

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  The sound of ripping could be heard from miles away.

  From the ground, the disturbance appeared to begin near a small patch of clouds, surrounded by the shadow-tainted blue of late morning. A vicious trail of black hurtled across the sky in a swath of destruction, devouring all color in its path. As a horrible tearing sound shattered the still silence of autumn, the dark line expanded, making a massive, black rent in the air. Anyone who was lucky enough to be free from the Black Coma and witness the Ripping saw it spread across the sky like a great sickness.

  And then the things started flying out of it.

  The woman sat and watched from her favorite spot atop the skyscraper. Her world had fallen into a frightening chaos. Even though she'd heard from her father over the years that it was coming, the fulfillment of such depressing foresight was still too horrible to fathom. She had always been known for her great sense of humor but saw no joke in this—the end of their lives.

  Her entire city, her entire world, was falling asleep. And this was no lame attempt at philosophical discussion or metaphor. It was quite literal. The streets were full of them—prostrate, closed-eyed, breathing people. They were all in the Coma, yet very much alive.

  She stood and walked back to the stairwell that led from the roof of the towering building down to her penthouse apartment. It was finally time to do something she had prepared for her whole life—ever since she'd abandoned the evil of her father.

  Once inside, she went to every window and pulled the drapes closed. She turned off all of the lights. She unplugged the phones, and locked her door.

  She then went into her bedroom, lay down, and closed her eyes. To many, it would look like sleep. To her, it was entering a world of madness. The Second Layer was always much worse than the First.

  It was time to summon the Red Disk.

  The birdcage looked like something you would pick up at any pet store, made of metal and about three feet tall. But instead of a bird, hundreds of butterflies swarmed and seethed within the cage, seeming to want nothing but to get out. Although the spaces between the bars of the cage would have allowed such an escape, the butterflies stayed within.

  Their owner's name was Tanaka, and the butterflies obeyed their master, even though he smelled like some raw combination of cabbage and underarms. And he wasn't the most handsome guy to ever grace the surface of the earth. Butterflies are very forgiving. That, or they have no sense of sight or smell. Or hearing for that matter. The man's voice was enough to drive a person to have their ears removed.

  He came to them in the morning, and asked for a creature to fly to him so he could show his friends the magic of the little wonders. One did, a small specimen with wings the color of the sun. It fluttered out and flew to its leader, landing softly on his hand. Then, the master spoke a command, and things changed.

  A bright light flashed and descended along a straight line from the man's hand where the butterfly had rested, all the way to the ground below it like some celestial yo-yo and then disappeared. What sat there in its place made the onlookers’ curiosity turn into something entirely different.

  For the first time in a while, their hearts stirred with the faintest glimmer of hope.

  On the other side of the planet, a man walked through the soggy fields of an abandoned farm. It was not the only spot in the world in which he currently existed, because the man could be in more than one place at the same time. Try explaining that to any one of the billions of normal people in the world, the man thought.

  It was strange indeed, and impossible for anyone to understand except himself. But it was real and true, and a part of his life. It was his life—his very existence.

  During his many strange and twisted years, he'd been called lots of things—most of them not very nice.

  Freak.

  Magician.

  Alien.

  Heck, one guy called him Satan once, which didn't make any sense. But to his friends, and to those who had been touched by his gift, he was known only by one name.

  They called him The Half.

  The world was falling asleep.

  The pace of it seemed to be quickening, people falling over left and right, sleeping in everything from gutters to pumpkin patches. Nothing would wake them up. Not shaking. Not water. Not even the classic of all wake-up classics—pinching—would make them stir. Things were getting bad.

  Which made it seem wrong that at the moment I was eating Doritos and watching Star Wars at my uncle's house on a big-screen TV. Seeing some gangly dude named Luke try to save the universe just wasn't as exciting as it used to be. I turned it off, got up from the couch, and headed to bed, hours after everyone else. With what was going on in the world, I was afraid of sleep.

  The stairs le
t out their creaking whine as I shuffled up them, eerie in the silence and darkness. I got the spooks and ran the rest of the way up the steps and down the hall and into the room that I shared with my older brother, Rusty. The pale moonlight from the window revealed his face, fast asleep. Not like the Coma of the Ka—there was a definite difference: his face didn't look like a ghost's.

  By habit, I reached under my bed on the other side of the room to make sure the leather carrying case holding the Red Disk was still there. It was. Trying my best to be quiet, I slipped under the covers of the bed, and laid my head down on the pillow. Rusty must not have been as asleep as I thought, because he woke up.

  “For the love, Jimmy, could you be any louder? It's hard enough to sleep as it is.”

  “Sorry, you pansy. Next time, I won't breathe or move my covers.”

  Rusty yawned and rolled over to face my bed. “What've you been doing?”

  “Trying to watch a movie, but I can't get my mind off things. I wonder what Tanaka and those guys are up to. They should've come back to us by now.”

  “They're fine, bro, quit worrying so much.”

  I made a disgusted face even though Rusty probably couldn't see it very well.

  “Not worry? They're fine? Did you drink a brewsky or something? The world isn't what I would call a very safe place to be right now. All we should do is worry, you idiot.”

  “With those things Tanaka found, I'd say he's safer than us by far. Even with your Gifts.” He emphasized the word with unveiled sarcasm.

  “Why'd you say it like that?”

  Rusty pushed himself up to lean on his elbow so I could see his face. “I'm just kidding. But it's kind of lame that you can only use the Anything four times. Well, two more times, now.”

  I couldn't have agreed more with him. The Anything was like a cruel trick—the ability to do almost anything, the solution to all of our problems, and yet I could only use it a limited number of times. Now that I had only two more chances, it almost seemed useless because I was so scared to waste its power. Especially since Farmer, who'd given me the Third Gift, had said that I must save one of its uses for the very end.

  “Well,” I replied to Rusty, “I haven't heard anyone complain when the Shield or Ice have saved them, have I?”

  Rusty flopped back down onto his bed. “You got me there, little bro.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Then Rusty surprised me when he started snoring. So much for the company.

  I shifted onto my side, and looked out the window. The swaying shadows of tree branches would be my only entertainment until sleep came. So, of course, my mind drifted back to the countless problems that consumed my life.

  Weeks had passed since we'd left behind the misty lands of Japan. Hood, with his magic Bender Ring, had been kind enough to take me and my family back to America. He then went with Tanaka to try and find Miyoko, Rayna, and the rest of the Alliance. With every passing day I grew more and more sick with worry about where they could be.

  Everything was just plain bizarre, no doubt about it. Chaos was building even as those who remained awake tried to keep the world moving along. The latest estimates showed that roughly half the world was now in a coma, the other half trying to figure out how to avoid it. But there was no escape, I knew that now. The dark Shadow Ka were fully formed, and it would not be long before their influence conquered the rest of us. The sky was gray with their strange, lingering taint on the world.

  And yet there was nothing I could do. Despite my Gifts, despite all I knew, there was nothing. Not until I discovered the secret of the Red Disk and found the Dream Warden. All of which came down to some guy or gal or monster named Erifani Tup.

  Oh criminy, the thought of it all gave me a headache every time.

  I shifted around and faced the wall, and finally let my eyes close. But it didn't make everything go away. It's hard to think of much else when you've been told that you're the only hope to save an entire world. Even if you don't want to be.

  We hadn't seen a Shadow Ka since Japan. Our plan to go to Uncle Darin's house in South Carolina and hole up there until we could figure out what to do next seemed to have worked—even though he hadn't shown up since we'd arrived. We didn't say it, but we knew that he was probably out there, somewhere, in the Black Coma. His house was out in the country, away from the major population centers where the Ka were wreaking the most havoc. It had bought us some time—time that was now wasting away …

  Something snapped outside the window.

  My head popped off the pillow, and my ears strained to hear something more. It had sounded like someone breaking a big stick over their knee, but then it was silent.

  I should look out the window, I thought. Nah, it's probably nothing. Maybe if I hear it again…

  More thoughts flew through my mind. Farmer, the old Giver, whom I had not seen since receiving the Third Gift. Joseph, who was sleeping down the hall, still holding back secrets. The Stompers. They were literally our worst nightmares according to Farmer. Now what in the heck was that supposed to mean? So little made sense.

  In the haze of my weariness, I thought I heard another sound outside. It was faint, probably just the wind …

  Too tired to get worked up about it all over again, I finally drifted into sleep.

  This time, I knew I was dreaming.

  I'm clinging to a rope, thick, coarse, with climbing knots about every three feet. It reminds me of the rope in gym class, the one we were challenged to climb all the way to the top of. There had been a red bell up there, and anyone who rang it was an instant stud. I guess I was more of a slowly developing stud.

  The rope is swaying just a little. My hands grip one of the knots; my feet are planted on another. I am surrounded by darkness, but for some reason I can still see my body and the rope just fine. Above me, it goes on forever, ascending to the black sky until it disappears. The same is true below. I can see no end to the rope, and no ground. I'm in the middle of nothingness, hanging on a rope.

  I'm glad it's a dream.

  This brings on the thought of Stompers and nightmares, giving me chills.

  Not knowing what else to do, I begin to climb. Why I decide to go up instead of down is a mystery, but for some reason it makes sense. Reaching up with my left hand, I grab the next knot and pull myself up, securing my feet on the closest knot to them. Next, I reach up with my right hand, and do the process again. Left hand, right hand, pull up my feet and secure them. It's kind of fun.

  I climb on. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Nothing is changing. Thirty minutes. My arms are tired, my hands sore from the rough rope. My feet ache from the unnatural gripping motions as I climb.

  And then everything changes.

  Something seemed to warp the air around me, jarring the fabric of reality for just a moment, and then I knew that I was awake. But I was not in my bed.

  I clung to the rope, terrified now that the dream state seemed to have evaporated. It was impossible to explain, but I was no longer dreaming. It was … different. The air took on real substance, the feel of the rope no longer had a fakeness to it. It was real. I was hanging onto a rope in the middle of a literal nowhere.

  Looking around now with a renewed desperation, I could see nothing. Darkness. Yet the rope glowed, revealing itself forever above and below me. Panic inched up my spine, and my hands began to sweat. What is happening to me?

  I reached up and started climbing. Down seemed better now, but I had already come so far. Maybe it was all an illusion, and I would reach some magical world soon, filled with Munchkins and tin men. Arms aching, palms raw, feet cramped, I climbed.

  Sweat trickled into my eyes, stinging like the dickens. I squinted, trying to squeeze out the pain. Firming my left-handed grip on the rope, I let go with my right hand and rubbed my eyes with a circling motion. It helped, and as I put my hand back onto the nearest knot, I opened my eyes.

  There was a woman floating in the air before me.

  It would have seemed pretty normal under usual dream conditions. Endless ropes in blackness, floating women—nothing was weird when you dreamed. But I could not get over the feeling that I was awake, and seeing the woman froze my heart for just a second.

  She was very ordinary looking. Not fat, not skinny, brown hair, brown eyes, normal mom-like clothes. Her face was pleasant and kind, and for that I was glad. She didn't have wings, so her floating trick had to be magic.