The Blue Nowhere

polished by someone else. The cheesy breath.
    He decided that Sammie wasn’t like Jamie Turner, whom he’d been reluctant to kill because he reminded him so much of himself. No, this kid was like all the other little shits who’d made young Jon Patrick Holloway’s life at school pure hell.
    Taking some pictures of little Samantha before the trip to the basement and little Samantha after—now, that would give him a great deal of satisfaction.
    “You want to ride on Charizard, Uncle Irv?”
    “Who?” Phate asked.
    “Duh, my pony. The one Dad got me for my birthday. You were, like, there.”
    “Right. I forgot.”
    “Dad and me go riding sometimes. Charizard’s pretty cool. He knows his way back to the barn all by himself. Or, I know, you could take Dad’s horse and we could go around the lake together. If you can keep up.”
    Phate wondered if he could wait long enough to get the girl into the basement.
    Suddenly a loud beeping filled the car and, as the girl continued to prattle on about morphing dogs or lions or whatever, Phate pulled the pager off his belt and scrolled through the display.
    His reaction was an audible gasp.
    The gist of Shawn’s message was that Wyatt Gillette was at CCU headquarters.
    Phate felt the shock as if he’d touched a live wire. He had to pull off the road.
    Jesus in Heaven. . . . Gillette—Valleyman—was helping the cops! That’s why they’d learned so much about him and were so close on his trail. Instantly hundreds of memories from the Knights of Access days came back to him. The incredible hacks. The hours and hours of mad conversations, typing as fast as they could out of fear that an idea might escape. The paranoia. The risks. The exhilaration of going places online where nobody else could go.
    And just yesterday he’d been thinking about that article Gillette had written. He remembered the last line: Once you’ve spent time in the Blue Nowhere, you can never completely return to the Real World.
    Valleyman—whose childlike curiosity and dogged nature didn’t let him rest until he’d understood everything there was to know about something new to him.
    Valleyman—whose brilliance in writing code approached and sometimes surpassed Phate’s own.
    Valleyman—whose betrayal had destroyed Holloway’s life and shattered the Great Social Engineering. And who was alive now only because Phate hadn’t yet focused on killing him.
    “Uncle Irv, um, how come we’re stopped here? I mean, is there something wrong with the car?”
    He glanced at the girl. Then looked around the deserted road.
    “Well, Sammie, you know what—I think there may be. How ’bout you take a look?”
    “Um, me?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’m not sure what to do.”
    “Just see if the tire’s flat,” kindly Uncle Irv said. “Could you do that?”
    “I guess. Like, which tire?”
    “Right rear.”
    The girl looked left.
    Phate pointed the other way.
    “Um, okay, that one. What should I look for?”
    “Well, what would the Animorphs look for?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe if there was a nail in it or something.”
    “That’s good. Why don’t you look and see if there’s a nail.”
    “Okay.”
    Phate unhooked the girl’s seat belt.
    Then he reached across Sammie for the door handle.
    “I can do it myself,” she said defiantly. “You don’t have to.”
    “Okay.” Phate sat back and watched the girl fumble with the latch then push the door open.
    Sammie got out and walked to the back of the car. “It looks okay to me,” she called.
    “Good,” Phate called. And gunned the engine, racing forward. The door slammed shut and the tires sprayed Sammie with dust and gravel. She started to scream, “Wait, Uncle Irv . . .”
    Phate skidded onto the highway.
    The sobbing girl ran after the car but she was soon obscured by a huge cloud of dust from the spinning wheels. Phate, for his part, had stopped thinking about little Samantha Wingate the moment the door slammed.

CHAPTER 00010111 / TWENTY-THREE
    Renegade334: Triple-X, it’s me again. I want to talk to you. NBS.
    “The acronym means No bullshit,” Patricia Nolan explained to Frank Bishop as they gazed at the computer screen in front of Wyatt Gillette.
    Nolan had arrived from her hotel a few minutes before, as Gillette was hurrying to a nearby workstation. She’d hovered near him as if she was about to hug him good morning. But she seemed to sense his complete concentration and chose not to. She pulled up a chair and sat close