Stu slowly put down the controller and turned to look at his friend. "You're sure?"

  Zach nodded sadly. "Yeah."

  "You're sure it was her?"

  "I know what Berly looks like."

  He struggled to absorb this. "Where...where did you see them?"

  "That little cafe across the street from Phil's."

  "And you're sure they were...together?"

  "Well, it's not like I saw them making out right in front of me, but they were obviously on a date."

  "Are you sure?"

  Zach sighed. "Is it really that hard to believe? She dumped you six months ago."

  "We were together for two years!"

  "So?"

  "So I thought..." He deflated. Six months was a pretty long time; the fact that Berly had started dating other people shouldn't have been so shocking. "I don't know what I thought. What about the guy? What did he look like?"

  "He looked like he had a real job," Zach said dryly, sitting down and picking up another controller. "Don't torture yourself, man. If I had known you were going to react like this I wouldn't have brought it up in the first place."

  Stu took a moment to collect himself, then picked up the controller and unpaused the game. "Two years," he muttered.

  "Two years," Zach echoed. "For what it's worth, I never liked Berly all that much to begin with."

  "You didn't know her like I did," he said wistfully.

  "She dumped you."

  Stu didn't have to be reminded; the day she had dumped him had been one of the worst days of his life. He had expected to build a future with her; he had expected to spend the rest of his life with her. And then, out of nowhere, she had ripped his heart out, stomped on it, and walked away. The last thing she had said to him, before leaving, had hit him hard: "I'm sorry, Stu. But you need to grow up."

  The words had hurt him then, but they made him angry now. What did she mean, grow up? He had his own apartment, didn't he? He had a job, didn't he? True, the apartment was a converted attic space over his parents' garage, and the job was a part-time gig fixing PC's at Phil's Computer Repair, but what was wrong with that?

  And what was wrong with playing video games? It was his hobby. He enjoyed it.

  He sighed.

  * * *

  He spent the rest of the day brooding, and the rest of the evening playing games, finally falling asleep with the controller still in his hands. When he woke up, he remembered the conversation he had had with Zach, and so to distract himself, he fired up the game again and kept right on playing into the afternoon, only stopping for lunch (a hot dog) and a few quick trips to the bathroom. Around 2:00 he got a call from Zach.

  "Where are you?"

  "Home."

  "I thought you had agreed to take my shift today at Phil's."

  "Oh. I forgot."

  "What have you been doing?"

  "Just...you know, playing some games."

  Zach made a disgusted noise. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you've been spending way too much time playing games lately. Get down here. I have to pick up my sister from the airport."

  "Yeah, yeah." He turned off the game, took a very quick shower, and rode down to Phil's on his bike. It wasn't far; the shop was only three or four blocks from his house. He had been working at Phil's for almost twelve years now -- Phil, who was Zach's uncle, had offered him the job right out of high school. It was a small repair shop sandwiched between a motorcycle shop and a Starbucks, and business was usually slow, but that suited Stu just fine.

  Berly, of course, had liked to complain about the job. "You're smart," she had told him more than once. "You could be doing so much more with your life!" And so on. He had never taken the complaints all that seriously, but his lack of ambition had obviously bothered Berly.

  He liked his job, though, even if it was just part-time. He liked his coworkers. He even liked Phil, although the old guy was admittedly a little grouchy.

  He threw a glance at the cafe across the street on his way to the shop. He imagined Berly having coffee in there with some guy.

  Annoyed at himself, he dismissed all these thoughts with a shake of his head and continued on his way. He met Zach on the sidewalk -- he was already heading out -- and entered the shop through the back, determined to focus on his work and forget about his stupid ex-girlfriend.

  It was another slow day in the shop, though. He spent an hour reinstalling Windows in a couple of old machines and getting rid of some malware in another, but that was all there was to do. He picked up a magazine, sat behind the counter, and started killing some time.

  About twenty minutes later he heard the bell over the door jangle. Looking up, he saw that two men had entered: one was a tall, dark, square-jawed fellow, who looked like a real-life Superman; the other man was shorter and chubbier, with a receding harline. Both men were professionally dressed, wearing dark suits and sunglasses. They looked like FBI agents or something.

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  "Can I help you?" Stu asked.

  "Maybe," the taller man said. He took off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of ice-blue eyes. "We're looking for Stuart Brakely."

  "I'm Stuart," he answered, before he could think better of it. What did these guys want with him? Were they cops? Was he in trouble? He tried to think of a reason why the cops, or the FBI, or whoever these people were, would want to talk to him, but he couldn't remember having broken any laws recently. Well, he had downloaded some pirated games the other day, but...

  The other man pulled a photograph out of his pocket and looked at it. He looked at Stu, looked at the photo, and nodded. "That's him."

  "You want to do a DNA test?"

  "No need. It's obviously him." He showed the photo to the other man.

  "Finally," the tall man sighed. He turned to Stu. "All right, then. You're coming with us."

  "Who are you people?" Stu asked. He was starting to panic now. "Have I done something wrong?"

  "Not exactly," the shorter man said. "But you're coming with us, anyway."

  "I'm going to need to see some ID or something," Stu said cautiously. "I don't--"

  The taller man reached over the counter and snatched him by the collar. Stu couldn't believe how fast the man was; his arm had shot out at lightning speed, before he had had any chance of reacting. The man dragged him bodily over the counter, as though he weighed nothing, and twisted his arm behind his back. Stu struggled to get free -- having his arm twisted around like that was painful -- but the big guy was inhumanly strong. "What is this about?" he wailed. "What did I do?"

  "Shut up," the Superman told him. "Get the car, Wayman."

  The shorter man, Wayman, left the shop and brought a car around front. "Let's go," the taller man said. He muscled Stu out the door and threw him into the backseat of the car; Stu tried to yell, but the guy clamped a hand over his mouth until he was secure. He jumped in the passenger seat, alongside Wayman, and then they were off, speeding down the street.

  "Who the hell are you?" Stu demanded of the men. "Where are you taking me?"

  They ignored him. Instead, they started talking to each other: "When's our next window?" Wayman asked.

  "About twenty minutes," the big guy answered. He was fiddling with something that looked like an antique radio. "I'll let Dr. Snowe know we're coming."

  Stu, who was now pretty well convinced that these two weren't cops or government agents -- they hadn't even cuffed him -- checked the doors, but they were locked. He considered kicking out a window, but the car was just hitting forty miles per hour and Stu wasn't sure he liked the idea of throwing himself out the window of a moving car.

  He might have tried climbing into the front seat and battling Wayman and the other guy, but he didn't want them crashing the car, and he was wary of the big guy besides, whose strength and speed were like nothing he had ever seen before. So, taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down, and went back to asking questions. "Who are you?" he asked again, this time in a more measured voice.

  "I'm Wayman," the driver replied, "and this is Virge." The big guy, Virge, acknowledged that with a grim nod. "We're taking you to Dr. Snowe."

  "Who's Dr. Snowe?"

  "You'll find out."

  "Are you guys in the mafia or something? What do you want with me?"

  "It's complicated," Wayman said. "Just relax. Everything's going to be fine."

  "Shut up for a minute," Virge said. He was still fiddling with the weird radio. "I'm having trouble tuning him in."

  Realizing that the men were not going to answer any more of his questions, Stu sat back and tried to get a grip on the situation. What in the world was going on? The men had been looking for him specifically, but why? Stu's life was very boring -- he had never been in trouble with the law, he didn't associate with criminals, he had never made a nuisance of himself online, and he spent most of his time in his attic apartment, playing video games. He just wasn't an important person. What could these people possibly want with him?

  And who the hell was Dr. Snowe?

  Wayman drove them a few miles out of town and into some kind of derelict industrial park, full of crumbling concrete buildings and weedy parking lots. What were they doing here? Were they planning on killing him and dumping his body out here? He started to panic. He was sweating now, and his breathing was ragged. He had to get away. He resolved to try to make a break for it as soon as they let him out of the car.

  Wayman parked the car in one of the weedy parking lots. Virge handed him the radio-thing, then got out, opened up a back door, and dragged Stu out of the car and onto his feet. "Let's go," he said, and he started marching him towards one of the abandoned factory buildings.

  Virge was gripping him by the shoulder, but not very hard. He took another deep breath, and then, having gathered up his courage, he whirled around threw a punch right at the man's face.

  Stu wasn't exactly the athletic type, but he was just shy of six feet tall and he was decently strong. The punch he threw should have at least stunned Virge long enough for him to wriggle out of his grip and run away...but to Stu's astonishment, the taller man didn't even blink. In fact, Stu's fist merely bounced off his face as though it were made of stone. It hurt.

  Virge responded by manhandling him again, twisting his arm around to his back. "Knock it off," he said, as though Stu was merely a bratty kid who had started acting up. And he continued marching him into the building.

  Stu swallowed hard. Virge's strength and speed had already impressed him, but this...how could the man have absorbed his punch like that? He hadn't even flinched! Was he a pro boxer or something?

  Wayman slid open a garage door and the three of them went inside, into a cavernous factory. Most of the machines had been removed at some point, so the factory floor was just a huge empty expanse now, which smelled like dust and fuel oil.

  The radio the men had been playing with suddenly started making a whistling sound. "That's him," Wayman said. He turned some dials on the radio and spoke into it: "Dr. Snowe? Can you hear me?"

  "Wayman?" a male voice answered. It was very staticky.

  "We've got him, Dr. Snowe. We need you to open a gate on these--"

  "He's here, Wayman," the voice said. "He's broken into the lab."

  Wayman paled. "Dread?"

  "He'll be here soon. I can open up a gate, but I don't have time to calculate your landing coordinates. You could up end up anywhere; you could end up on the other side of the world. You could end up in the middle of the ocean."

  Virge exchanged a glance with Wayman. "We don't have a choice."

  "All right. I'm opening the gate now."

  "Dr. Snowe..."

  "Don't worry about me. Rico's already prepared an escape route. Just get him to Lon Halos, as quickly as you can." Stu could hear screaming in the background now, coming over the radio.

  "Stay safe," Virge said grimly.

  "Just get him to Lon Halos," he said again. "Everything depends on it." And the transmission ended there.

  Virge and Wayman both went silent. "Dread," Wayman muttered after a moment. "He must have found a way to break through Ula's electric shell."

  "We don't have time to worry about it," Virge said. "Are you ready? Do you have everything?"

  He checked his pockets. "I think so."

  "What's going on?" Stu asked. "Who was that guy on the radio? What are you all talking about..." But he stopped there, trailing off, because something amazing, something incredible, something unbelievable, was now taking place right in front of his eyes: the air in the middle of the room had started folding in on itself, curving and curving and finally splitting itself open into a jagged hole. It was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen in his life -- it was as though someone, or something, had just ripped open a hole in reality itself.

  Stu's mouth fell open at the sight. What was he seeing here? Some kind of magic? Some kind of crazy technology?

  Virge and Wayman, on the other hand, were unsurprised; they had evidently been expecting this. "Let's go," Virge said, pushing him in the direction of the weird disturbance.

  "What is that thing?" Stu asked, trying in vain to free himself from Virge's grip. He had no desire to get close to it, whatever it was. The reality-hole was the most frightening real-life phenomenon he had ever seen, and there seemed to be nothing on the other side of it but utter darkness.

  "It's our ticket home," Virge said. And he pushed him through it.