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Back Reunion Save as PDF
Chapters (62)
  1. Cover
  2. Full Page Image
  3. Introduction
  4. Advance Praise for Reunion
  5. Dedication
  6. Map
  7. Quote
  8. Prologue
  9. All About Eric Weiss
  10. The Young Magician
  11. From the Wikipedia entry for Middleton:
  12. Where They Used to Live
  13. All About Carrie Keene
  14. The Girl Detective
  15. All About Alana Bright
  16. The Warrior Princess
  17. All About Daniel Sharp IV
  18. The Boy Genius
  19. I’ve Done My Part
  20. The Only Warrior Left
  21. The World Beneath the World
  22. Even Less Fun Now
  23. The Flawless Performance of Innumerable Lines of Code
  24. Like Time-Lapse Photography
  25. You Don’t Have to Go Home but You Can’t Stay Here
  26. This is Where She Gets It
  27. I Never Believed in Prophecies
  28. Normal People Stumble Along
  29. INTERLUDE: The Case of the Candy Cult
  30. That’s How Her Story Ought to Go
  31. Normal Is Whatever You Grow Up With
  32. Even Good Kids Have Their Limits
  33. INTERLUDE: The Menace of the Middleton Monster
  34. Alanis Morissette Irony or the Other Kind
  35. What You Want Is Not the Most Important Thing
  36. INTERLUDE: Trapped in the Goblin’s Lair
  37. The Slowest Person in the Room
  38. INTERLUDE: The Final Secret of Dr. Sax
  39. All Part of King Jeremy’s Land
  40. INTERLUDE: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
  41. You Breathed It In, All the Time
  42. INTERLUDE: What Happened
  43. Danny Sharp Doesn’t Believe in Ghosts
  44. Ice and Bottles of Zima
  45. You Were Right All Along
  46. A Lot of Sacrificing to Do Tonight
  47. You Walked Right into It
  48. How Magic Works
  49. Was This Your Master Plan
  50. This Time, I Swear, We Can Do It Right
  51. You’d Think He Would Know Better
  52. Fresh Blood on Its Hands
  53. Any One of a Thousand Different Men
  54. The End of the World over There
  55. These Are Not Ideal Conditions
  56. Lightning and Thunder, Demons and Angels
  57. Into the Jaws of the Dragon
  58. Unafraid at Sunset
  59. Epilogue
  60. Acknowledgments
  61. About the Author
  62. Other Works by Christopher Farnsworth

Danny reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone. The computer-generated face of Dr. Sax stares back at him from the screen. Sax has been riding along with him the entire time.

Danny throws his phone to the ground, cracking it in half. He stomps on it with his heel.

“You know what I love about you, Dr. Sax?” he says to the empty air in the warehouse. “You are so desperately insecure. You always have to tell me how smart you are. Alive or dead. Nothing changes. You tell me your master plan, like I’m going to stand by and let it happen.”

Silence. Then the cold, electronic rasp of Sax’s laughter once again.

“Do you think I would have told you any of this if you could stop it? You’re too late, Danny. You are twenty years too late. We have started the ritual. And I have already taken everything from you. You have no more toys left to play with, no more gadgets, no one riding to the rescue. Your daddy won’t bail you out this time, and I already own your best friend.”

“Buzz? Buzz was never my best friend.”

“I didn’t mean Buzz.”

There is the sound of an electric motor whirring to life. The squeak of treads grabbing as something moves forward.

Danny knows those sounds.

The pile of scrap metal moves again. More pieces topple to the floor as something lurches forward, out of the darkness.

Two round LED lights gleam and swivel, then lock on Danny.

Danny doesn’t know what this feeling in his chest is. If he was that kind of person, he’d say it was heartbreak.

The figure rolls out of the gloom and crosses the warehouse, humming and clicking.

RANN-D. Danny’s real best friend. The one made out of metal and computer chips and engine parts and lines of code. The one that could never be hurt, that would never die on him, or go away. Until it did.

The video screen in the chest of the robot switches on, and the digital face of Sax looks down on Danny and emulates a smile.

“There’s no getting out of this, Danny. Not this time.”

RANN-D’s mechanical arms lock around him, lifting him from the floor.

“This time,” Sax says, “you lose.”

25

Ice and Bottles of Zima