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could come back hours from now and pick up the same sentence at a later stage and get the general idea of what the kid was thinking about.
    Which would be Christmas, of course. Because while in MindWar, everything was bizarreness and danger 24/7, here in RL—Real Life—Christmas was only a week and a half away. The thought of the presents and the food, not to mention the food and the presents, pretty much dominated every second of Raider’s waking consciousness.
    Mom had done everything she could to keep RL as normal as possible. As soon as they’d moved into their little green-and-white barracks house in the MindWar compound, she hurried to decorate it with family photos and homey furniture to make it look like their old house back in Putnam Hills. Now, too, she had somehow managed to put out their usual Christmas decorations: the white fairy lights around the windows, the frosted angels on the glass, the manger scene on the lampstand in the living room, and, of course, the tree, which Rick, Raider, and Dad had cut down in the surrounding forest and which now stood in the living room corner. After Rick had managed—just barely—to escape the Realm last time, they had all celebrated by breaking out their boxes of old ornaments and hanging them from the branches. Even Rick himselfhad to admit the decorated tree achieved a high level of Christmas awesomeness.
    But the moment Rick stepped out of the house, this homey atmosphere vanished. The MindWar compound was a secret military installation hidden in a vast, dense forest owned by the federal government. On the surface, it was a collection of barracks surrounded by barbed wire, with guard towers here and there, armed guards inside the glassed cubicles on top. It looked pretty much like any Army camp and about as un-Christmassy as you could get. But that was only on the surface. Most of the place was underground and even less Christmassy, if that was possible: just a vast network of buried windowless corridors and rooms housing the people and technology required to send MindWarriors into Kurodar’s universe.
    Or MindWarrior, singular. Rick was now the only one. But there had been three others before him, as he’d now discovered . . . and that was the other thing on his mind, the other thing he needed to talk to his dad about.
    So he headed for the infirmary.
    It was cold outside now, really cold. The sky was uniformly gray and there were flurries of snow in the air. The surrounding forest was pale green, the leafless trees sapping the color from the interspersed firs and hemlocks and pines. The usual security teams stationed outside some of the more important buildings had gone indoors. Only the tower guards and the guards around the perimeter remained visible.
    The infirmary was a large barracks against the fence on one side of the compound. It looked the same as most of the other barracks except it was painted light red instead of green and white and there was a red cross over the entrance. The guards now stationed just within the door did not even flinch as Rick walked by them. Everyone knew him here. In a way, he was the reason why the entire camp existed.
    With a nod to the receptionist at the front desk, he continued down the narrow hallway to the Recovery Wing. His father was already there, in the waiting area outside the last room in the barracks. Rick had expected that. But he had not expected to see Professor Jameson with him.
    Jameson, his dad’s old friend, had been the head of the Physics Department at Putnam Hills University where his dad had worked. The two scientists had been working on CBI—computer-brain interface—the possibilities of linking the human imagination with computers. It was during that work that Rick’s dad stumbled on Kurodar’s Realm. Having alerted his old college girlfriend Leila Kent, now an intelligence officer in the State Department, the Traveler had gone underground to invent the