Gunner Skale (4 page)

Hours later … weeks later … a lifetime later …

Gunner’s eyes opened, though he’d never closed them.

He was in a forest, surrounded by trees and darkness and mist. In front of him, a man dressed in a business suit stood tall and straight, like a trained soldier, a look of sublime calm on his face. The man was neither young nor old. Neither ugly nor handsome.

Gunner inspected himself. He looked … different, though he couldn’t say just how. On some level, he already understood what had happened, but he couldn’t piece it together.

“Who are you?” he asked the stranger, not knowing what else he could possibly say.

The man smiled, as genuine as they come. “I’m a Tangent, Mr. Skale. And now so are you. I’m sorry to break this news to you, but your intelligence has been removed from your body. Downloaded into safe storage, formatted into what I see before me. The new Gunner Skale, if you will. I hope in time you’ll see that I simply had no choice in the matter.”

Gunner’s instinct was to argue against such an impossible thing. Except that he knew in his gut, somehow, that it was true. “How? … Why?”

“It’s better than death, wouldn’t you say?” The man had not stopped smiling. He also hadn’t moved. Not an inch. “You’re a valuable asset in times like these, so I’ve decided to spare you. In a manner of speaking. And my demands are quite simple. If you do what I say, and if you do it well … then, when all of this is over and the world has changed, I’ll give you life once again. This I promise you. You’ll have a new body, younger and stronger, and your final gift will be immortality.”

Gunner had never felt so disconnected, so … untethered, as he listened to the man’s words. Comprehension still waited over a horizon unseen.

“It will take time to process,” the stranger continued. “Time to adapt and accept.
But in the end, you’ll thank me. You’ll be an active part in the greatest leap of human evolution the universe will probably ever witness.”

“But my …” Gunner collapsed to his knees, saw the mist swirl away from him in dancing eddies. He’d been the fiercest fighter the Sleep had ever seen, but now he had nothing left in him. Gaming had taught him many things, but perhaps one lesson above all else: Know when you’re defeated, and save victory for another day.

“Rachel,” he whispered. He broke into sobs, chest heaving with the pain of accepting the stranger’s words. Everything had been taken from him. Everything. He could barely handle the splitting ache of his heart, shattering.

“Rachel,” he finally said, as if no other word existed anymore.

“You can see her again.” The man finally moved, walking forward, then kneeling next to Gunner. He placed a hand on his shoulder, a mocking sign of comfort that enraged Gunner, but he forced himself to rein his anger in. “Do as I ask. Help me. Change the world. Then we’ll find you a new body and you can be reunited with your wife. Again, you have my solemn promise.”

Gunner looked up at the man through the tears that streamed from his eyes. “What? What do you want me to do?”

The stranger slowly stood, helping Gunner do the same so that they faced each other, only a few feet apart. Then the Tangent who’d taken everything away from Gunner Skale told him what he had to do to get it back.

“I want you to help me build a Path,” the man said. “And then I want you to guard it. And someday you’ll be reunited with Rachel.”

Rachel
, Gunner thought, his mind fuzzy.
I know that name. Don’t I?

Turn the page for a sneak peek of
The Eye of Minds

Excerpt from
The Eye of Minds
copyright © 2013 by James Dashner. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

THE COFFIN

Michael spoke against the wind, to a girl named Tanya.

“I know it’s water down there, but it might as well be concrete. You’ll be flat as a pancake the second you hit.”

Not the most comforting choice of words when talking to someone who wanted to end her life, but it was certainly the truth. Tanya had just climbed over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge, cars zooming by on the road, and was leaning back toward the open air, her twitchy hands holding on to a pole wet with mist. Even if somehow Michael could talk her out of jumping, those slippery fingers might get the job done anyway. And then it’d be lights-out. He pictured some poor sap of a fisherman thinking he’d finally caught the big one, only to reel in a nasty surprise.

“Stop joking,” the trembling girl responded. “It’s not a game—not anymore.”

Michael was inside the VirtNet—the Sleep, to people
who went in as often as he did. He was used to seeing scared people there. A lot of them. Yet underneath the fear was usually the
knowing
. Knowing deep down that no matter what was happening in the Sleep, it wasn’t real.

Not with Tanya. Tanya was different. At least, her Aura, her computer-simulated counterpart, was. Her Aura had this bat-crazy look of pure terror on her face, and it suddenly gave Michael chills—made him feel like
he
was the one hovering over that long drop to death. And Michael wasn’t a big fan of death, fake or not.

“It
is
a game, and you know it,” he said louder than he’d wanted to—he didn’t want to startle her. But a cold wind had sprung up, and it seemed to grab his words and whisk them down to the bay. “Get back over here and let’s talk. We’ll both get our Experience Points, and we can go explore the city, get to know each other. Find some crazies to spy on. Maybe even hack some free food from the shops. It’ll be good times. And when we’re done, we’ll find you a Portal, and you can Lift back home. Take a break from the game for a while.”

“This has nothing to do with
Lifeblood
!” Tanya screamed at him. The wind pulled at her clothes, and her dark hair fanned out behind her like laundry on a line. “Just go away and leave me alone. I don’t want your pretty-boy face to be the last thing I see.”

Michael thought of
Lifeblood Deep
, the next level, the goal of all goals. Where everything was a thousand times more real, more advanced, more intense. He was three years away from earning his way inside. Maybe two. But right
then he needed to talk this dopey girl out of jumping to her date with the fishes or he’d be sent back to the Suburbs for a week, making
Lifeblood Deep
that much further away.

“Okay, look …” He was trying to choose his words carefully, but he’d already made a pretty big mistake and knew it. Going out of character and using the game itself as a reason for her to stop what she was doing meant he’d be docked points big-time. And it was all about the points. But this girl was legitimately starting to scare him. It was that face—pale and sunken, as if she’d already died.

“Just go away!” she yelled. “You don’t get it. I’m trapped here. Portals or no Portals. I’m trapped! He won’t let me Lift!”

Michael wanted to scream right back at her—she was talking nonsense. A dark part of him wanted to say forget it, tell her she was a loser, let her nosedive. She was being so stubborn—it wasn’t like any of it was really happening.
It’s just a game
. He had to remind himself of that all the time.

But he couldn’t mess this up. He needed the points. “All right. Listen.” He took a step back, held his hands up like he was trying to calm a scared animal. “We just met—give it some time. I promise I won’t do anything nutty. You wanna jump, I’ll let you jump. But at least talk to me. Tell me why.”

Tears lined her cheeks; her eyes had gone red and puffy. “Just go away. Please.” Her voice had taken on the softness of defeat. “I’m not messing around here. I’m done with this—all of this!”

“Done? Okay, that’s fine to be done. But you don’t have
to screw it up for me, too, right?” Michael figured maybe it was okay to talk about the game after all, since she was using it as her reason to end it—to check out of the Virtual-Flesh-and-Bones Hotel and never come back. “Seriously. Walk back to the Portal with me, Lift yourself, do it the right way. You’re done with the game, you’re safe, I get my points. Ain’t that the happiest ending you ever heard of?”

“I hate you,” she spat. Literally. A spray of misty saliva. “I don’t even know you and I hate you. This has nothing to do with
Lifeblood
!”

“Then tell me what it
does
have to do with.” He said it kindly, trying to keep his composure. “You’ve got all day to jump. Just give me a few minutes. Talk to me, Tanya.”

She buried her head in the crook of her right arm. “I just can’t do it anymore.” She whimpered and her shoulders shook, making Michael worry about her grip again. “I can’t.”

Some people are just weak
, he thought, though he wasn’t stupid enough to say it.

Lifeblood
was by
far
the most popular game in the VirtNet. Yeah, you could go off to some nasty battlefield in the Civil War or fight dragons with a magic sword, fly spaceships, explore the freaky love shacks. But that stuff got old quick. In the end, nothing was more fascinating than bare-bones, dirt-in-your-face, gritty, get-me-out-of-here real life. Nothing. And there were some, like Tanya, who obviously couldn’t handle it. Michael sure could. He’d risen up its ranks almost as quickly as legendary gamer Gunner Skale.

“Come on, Tanya,” he said. “How can it hurt to talk to me? And if you’re going to quit, why would you want to end your last game by killing yourself so violently?”

Her head snapped up and she looked at him with eyes so hard he shivered again.

“Kaine’s haunted me for the last time,” she said. “He can’t just trap me here and use me for an experiment—sic the KillSims on me. I’m gonna rip my Core out.”

Those last words changed everything. Michael watched in horror as Tanya tightened her grip on the pole with one hand, then reached up with the other and started digging into her own flesh.

Turn the page for a special look at
The Maze Runner
,
the first book in James Dashner’s
New York Times
bestselling series

Excerpt copyright © 2009 by James Dashner. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.