Rhodes picked himself up, checked his internal systems on The Grid, and looked around.

The burning wreckage of the Inviria spacecraft lay in pieces all around him. Fire billowed from torn hull sections. Entire burned-out decks of the ship lay smashed and destroyed on the grassy hills of……

Rhodes’s mind switched gears when he remembered. Stonebridge. He was still inside The Grid. This was all part of the Masks’ elaborately constructed dreamworld to keep Rhodes and the rest of Battalion 1 as prisoners.

He stood in one place as the puzzle pieces clicked together in his head. That ship—the ship he just destroyed—it was ten times the size of a Legion Duster.

A ship that big falling on top of him should have killed him. It would have killed him. He could only think of one reason why it didn’t. This wasn’t real. None of this was real.

Destroying that ship felt impossibly good. Everything about this world felt good—all except the part where he realized it was fake.

He didn’t feel any discomfort, distress, or frustration with his implants. They felt like a normal, natural part of him.

This was the first and only time and place he ever felt that. The drilling sensation of them eating into his flesh and bones—the brutal agony of his implants sinking their roots into his very being—it didn’t bother him here.

The food he ate and the beer he drank yesterday—even the sensation of sleeping on a pile of hay in the barn—it all felt intoxicatingly good.

It felt good to be human again. That was the bottom line. All those sensations—even the feeling that he was part of human life—it drugged him into craving more and more and more of this life. He never wanted it to stop.

Were the Masks drugging him right now? Was that part of this?

He didn’t remember even that he was in The Grid—not until now. The whole time he’d been fighting the Inviria—the rush of battle wiped his awareness that he wanted to resist and escape.

Now it all came back in a flash. He remembered every brutal detail of that Duster crashing on top of him. He remembered the Emal laser cutting off his arm. He remembered the certainty that he would never see his family again.

He’d been right about that. He woke up at Coleridge Station. How could he ever forget that?

The very pleasure and exhilaration of taking part in this fake world only made it more repulsive to him. He wanted to destroy it—but how?

Fisher adjusted The Grid to show Rhodes every part of the battle going on. The rest of the battalion went into a similar frenzy attacking different parts of the Inviria force.

Lauer went down on the ground in front of the advancing ground troops. He let loose his bloodlust and murderous rage on the aliens.

He rampaged through their ranks killing as many of them as he wanted to. They had to stop their advance toward Stonebridge to fight him instead.

Dietz and Thackery changed themselves into Strikers and raced back and forth across the battlefield hammering the enemy tanks. Rhinehart stood on the high ridgetop blowing up the artillery pieces one after the other.

Rhodes surveyed the battle without moving to get involved. He hesitated to deprive his people of this pleasure. When would they ever get a chance to feel it again?

How could he ask them to give this up for the torture of the real world? B was right about that.

If the battalion couldn’t escape from the Masks’ captivity, why not stay here?

He started to shake that idea out of his head when Oakes flew down to check on him. Oakes used his regular shape. He didn’t change his grid lines to make himself into any special fighting machine or murderous alien.

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He swiveled his feet forward and flared his boosters to slow his descent. He landed on the grass in front of Rhodes.

“Are you okay, Captain?” Oakes asked.

Rhodes nodded. He didn’t plan to look at Oakes at all. Everyone in the battalion was enjoying themselves way too much.

Something in Oakes’s dark eyes made Rhodes look up. Oakes studied Rhodes with the same questioning intensity Rhodes had come to expect from Fisher.

Oakes’s eyebrows darted together in the center. “Is anything wrong? Did you get hurt?”

Rhodes took way too long to decide what to say. “Do you remember…..?”

Oakes waited for Rhodes to say something. “Do I remember what?”

“Do you remember the way we used to sit and draw at the table at Coleridge Station? Do you remember that?”

Oakes opened his mouth to answer and stopped himself. He blinked at Rhodes, but Oakes didn’t see Rhodes anymore.

“Do you remember that picture you drew of the girl on the swing under the tree?” Rhodes asked.

He watched the rapid progression of expressions crossing Oakes’s face. It was all in there. All of Oakes’s memories were still in there waiting to break out.

Oakes finally glanced around the battlefield and his features hardened into a mask of cruel recognition. “What the hell?” he snarled.

“We gotta get out of here,” Rhodes murmured. “We have to find a way to break out of The Grid even if it means we suffer on the outside. We can’t stay here.”

Oakes compressed his lips. He didn’t look at Rhodes again. Oakes’s dark eyes traced the battle in every detail.

The eight members of Battalion 1 shouldn’t have been able to defeat the Inviria single-handedly, but they did.

Rhodes didn’t see any townsfolk getting involved in the battle. The big cannons no longer fired from Stonebridge to defend the town.

Battalion 1 was out here fighting alone, but the eight of them still put a dent in the aliens’ assault. That would not have been possible in the real world.

Lauer drew enough of the ground troops to himself and killed hundreds of them. Some had been far enough away to keep advancing on the town. They all stopped what they were doing to come after him—a single man.

Rhinehart had no problem destroying all the artillery. Dietz and Thackery had fun bombing the tanks into oblivion.

“How are we supposed to get out of this?” Oakes asked.

“I’m not sure,” Rhodes replied. “Fisher thinks there might be a way to use our grid lines to tear all of this down.”

“But then we’d be back with the Masks—wherever that is,” Oakes pointed out. “How would we get out of that? We’d be just as stuck. We might as well stay here until we figure it out.”

Rhodes started to answer, but just then, Coulter and Fuentes flew overhead coming from farther east. Rhodes didn’t see what they were doing before now.

“We’re being ordered to fall back to Fort Bastion,” Coulter announced.

Rhodes checked on Fisher. Fisher didn’t contradict the order. God only knew where it came from.

Rhodes didn’t ask that. Fisher would have told him if the battalion received any order—from anywhere.

Rhodes interfaced with the rest of the battalion. “Pull out. We’ve done enough here. We’re heading back.”

He launched his boosters and Oakes went with him. Rhodes, Oakes, Coulter, and Fuentes flew back toward Stonebridge. The others caught up along the way.

Rhodes surveyed the countryside as he left the alien battle behind. He still didn’t see any other people on the Stonebridge side. No townspeople made it out this far to fight the Inviria.

He also didn’t see any Legion soldiers. Nothing about this battle looked like a real battle. There weren’t enough people involved.

There certainly weren’t enough people involved to carry out such a decisive victory against such an overwhelming alien invasion force.

He didn’t mention that out loud. He flew west over the hills toward Stonebridge, but the town wasn’t there anymore. Not even the road leading to the town was there anymore.

The countryside spread out before him in a smooth, uninterrupted carpet of green grass, softly rolling hills, wooded riverbanks, and taller mountains glowing with light in the distance.

The battalion came out to fight this battle in the early morning. The battalion had been out there no longer than twenty minutes, but now the sun was going down again.

The last rays of light cast gleaming pastel colors on the clouds and mountaintops. Everything about this place radiated unimaginable beauty.

It was almost too beautiful. It looked like a painting. It was too beautiful to be real.

Some forgotten part of Rhodes’s mind told him where the go. He flew over the terrain where Stonebridge should have been. The bridge wasn’t there anymore, either.

Not one wheel rut or footprint showed any sign that the town had ever been there—probably because it never had been.

The stream bubbled over rocks as if no human being had ever set foot there. Grass grew thick along the bank.

He kept going until he spotted a Legion base in the distance. It sprawled across the landscape in the same configuration as every other Legion base.

Fort Bastion had the same layout as Coleridge Station except that Coleridge Station was in space somewhere. Fort Bastion sat on the ground.

Dozens of Legion spacecraft hovered around the fort, floated down to land at its many loading docks, and launched back into space. A million lights twinkled from the fort’s countless windows.

Rhodes didn’t question where he was going or why. Everything about this felt normal and natural. He’d never done anything else all his life.

End of Chapter 13.