Sato slowly got to his feet, nausea and despair threatening to consume him. In the understatement of his young life, he told himself he had seen enough.

“I’m sorry he’s doing this to you,” he half-whispered. “Fight it if you can. I promise we’ll try to save you.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He turned and ran.

Behind him, he heard the piercing cry of Renee’s voice, echoing up and through the air as if she’d used a bullhorn. “He has my blood in his right pocket! Don’t let him leave with it!”

And then came the sound of hundreds of people running and screaming in a synchronized cry of pursuit.

~

“Can you pull him out yet?” Master George asked for the twentieth time in the last ten minutes, pacing the floor of the command room.

“No,” Rutger replied, his eyes riveted to the nanolocator monitor. “But his heart rate is spiking again—I didn’t think it could possibly get higher, but now it’s in the danger zone.” In his hands, Rutger held the Barrier Wand, programmed to wink Sato back from the mountaintop.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Master George whispered under his breath.

“Should’ve gone with ’im, I should,” Mothball said from her chair in the corner. “Bugger, I should’ve ruddy gone with ’im.”

Master George stopped, turning toward his tall friend. “Perhaps, my good Mothball, perhaps. However, we all agreed that this was the perfect opportunity for Sato to snap out of the haze of his past and find himself. If you were there to save him, he might never truly join us.”

“He needs to make it back to the execution cliff,” Rutger said. “Until then, there’s nothing I can do.”

“He’ll make it,” Master George said. “I know it. And when he returns, he’ll truly be a Realitant, the shade of his parents’ death no longer a crutch to bind him in shadow.”

“Very poetic,” Rutger muttered. “But the way his heart’s racing, we’ll need to give him a transplant as soon as he gets back.”

“Just keep that Wand ready, Rutger. Keep it ready.”

~

Sato gasped for breath as he ran through the dimly lit tunnel; it hadn’t seemed so long the first time he’d walked through its winding path. The escalating screams behind him brought horrible images to his mind of what would happen if he were caught. Every muscle in his body begged him to stop, but he kept running, limping slightly from the pain in his shins, especially on his right leg.

Worried the blood-filled syringe in his right pocket might break, he reached in and pulled it out, gripping the plastic cylinder once again like a dagger in his hand. It almost slipped from the sweat on his palm—he shifted it to his left hand while he wiped his fingers dry, then switched back.

He kept running.