The Rift by J.T. Stoll Page A

on his desk, cupped his
face, and began idly bouncing his nose back and forth between his
index fingers. “Parts. I’m not sure how many lies James mixed in.
But I know he’s from another world and there’s some kind of war
going on, a war where we have to choose a side.”
    Pieter grabbed a little piece of paper and
wrote the password. “Exactly. How is that not weird? And how can
you just accept it?”
    Neil snatched the laptop back. “Of course it’s
weird. But look at the facts. You saw what these armors can do.
Either it’s some kind of super-secret military technology, or James
really comes from a world of magic. We saw two guys kill him last
night. The quicker you accept the facts, the quicker we act on
them.”
    A glint of passion shone in Neil’s eyes. Easy
for him to say. He was just… different. His mind worked a million
miles a minute. It took ideas and information, processed them, and
then just believed “the facts.” Something like a robot. It helped
him in school, but it probably, somewhere deep down, also explained
his perpetual singleness.
    “ Then, what don’t you
believe?”
    Neil folded up his laptop and tossed it onto
his bed. “I’m not sure which side to join. I mean, James seems to
work for someone named Rolland, but who’s to say Rolland is the
good guy? Consider this story. James, servant of the tyrannical
King Rolland, was tasked with a mission to begin a brutal campaign
of guerilla warfare against the heroic revolutionary, Terian.
Injured during the journey and with his companions slain, he gave
their weapons to the first people he found on Earth to prevent them
from falling into enemy hands.
    “ Furthermore, he came up with a
story about the ‘evil prince’ to get us to begin his guerilla
campaign for him. Thus, when Terian comes to Earth to seek help in
overthrowing his despot father, we will take up arms against him.
Different story depending on who tells it, eh? Given what we know,
do you see any reason that’s impossible?”
    “ Jed still tried to kill
us.”
    “ No, we tried to kill him . Maybe he was just defending himself.”
    “ You just had to make things hard,
didn’t you?”
    “ Of course. You don’t question
enough. America doesn’t need an autocrat like this so-called King
Rolland. Or maybe he’s the good guy. At this point, who
knows?”
    And that was the problem with Neil’s brain.
Just as easily as he could believe the facts, he could argue
himself into a circle.
    “ Okay, so how about we just back
off and watch what happens? Getting killed would, you know, spoil
my senior year,” Pieter said.
    In his mind, Jed taunted that he’d kill them
all.
    “ No good. We’ve got a bad guy who
knows our faces and maybe overheard our names. In a town this
small, he might find us. If you want out of this, we have to do
something about Jed.”
    “ You sound like you already have a
plan.”
    “ Scenarios,” Neil said. “Scenario
one: path of the chicken. If we ignore Jed and Dek, they either
kill us, or when Terian finally comes through—evil prince or not—he
knows who we are, and we get sucked into this thing. Running away
doesn’t keep us out of the battle.”
    Pieter stared at him.
    “ Come on, Pieter. You’re not an
idiot. You have to see the logic behind this.”
    Idly, Pieter flipped around in his hands the
piece of paper with his password on it. “I do, but…”
    But it was a lot to think about. And after
making a password for an email server in Panama, he couldn’t tell
what parts of this conversation came from Neil being paranoid and
what parts came from Neil being smart.
    “ But? Wait, Pieter, did you write
down your login and password?”
    “ Uh, yeah.”
    “ You can’t do that! Someone
might…”
    “ Neil! No one cares about an email
server in Panama! It’s not what we’re worried about.”
    Neil turned a pouty face to his laptop screen.
“Well… you should be. Fine, take your password. But memorize
it. Then burn it later. Now