“You cannot trust this intuition.” Chiun said. “You must not take foolish risks. What if you are wrong?”
“I went beyond the Void,” Remo declared flatly.
“Talk not of this now,” Chiun said quietly.
“There was nothing, Chiun. All my senses were stripped away from me. It was an absence of everything. It was the greatest agony I could imagine.”
“Remo, what is the purpose of this? Let us discuss it another time.”
“I’m not gonna live my life dodging it.”
“But why now?” Chiun demanded. But he could see that Remo had closed his eyes.
“Stop, young fool!”
Remo was conjuring the darkness of the Void in his memory, and then he beckoned to the absence of darkness that was beyond it. He felt the darkness drift away, replaced by nothing.
“Stop, imbecile! You would obligate me to drag your comatose white body back to the world above?”
Chiun’s discordant singsong faded away, and was replaced with the rush of blood in Remo’s own skull, and then that too went away, until there was nothing.
The rhythm of the river flow, the cool, aged scent of the rock and the water, these dimmed and were gone, and Remo was once again in nothingness. In this place he had spent days that felt like years. He remembered it now. It was endless. He had been unthinking but miserable. There was nothing for him to sense and even his memories were wiped away and inaccessible. He had nothing to cling to.
Then a voice came through the nothingness beyond the Void. The voice was not real sound, nor real words, but was a glimmer of something. He clung to the sweetly spoken words, and centered his entire being on them until, by the force of his will, he clarified the words.
It was a gentle, exquisite voice, a young woman, and the memory she spoke of was—-just the same. The floodgates opened and Remo was filled with memories of Freya, his daughter.
Vividly he saw beautiful Freya, the brilliant summer sun, the landscape of Arizona. He smelled the desert perfume, he heard the breeze and the voice of Freya as she spoke to the coyote she held in one hand….
That was how the emptiness beyond the Void was driven away, and now, as Remo Williams allowed himself to descend into the emptiness yet again, he conjured his memory of a memory.
He opened his eyes, surprising Chiun.
“I beat it, Little Father. It took me once, but I escaped it, and now I will always know how to escape it.”
“Cretin. You aged me ten years.”
“Don’t you see. Little Father? Going beyond the Void wasn’t all bad. It sucked at the time, but it made me strong in a new way. The nothingness won’t get me again.”
“Going into the nothingness cannot be a good thing.” Chiun declared.
“But it wasn’t fatal.”
Chiun looked away from his protégé. “You mean to comfort me, but you do not know how close it came to being fatal. For I did not know how to summon you home.”
But someone did, Remo Williams thought, and he heard again, like a waking dream, the sweet voice of Sarah Slate.
Remo crushed the glow stick and stepped off the trail into the water when they saw the first twinge of light filtering upriver, then they drifted with the current until they saw the sallow moon where the river emerged. They were at Fastbinder’s underground city.
“Chiun, remember how we thought this proton gizmo was some new kind of weapon that would neutralize us? A weapon custom-made for fighting Sinanju?”
“You were quite wrong. I said so when you first postulated this ridiculous notion and I say so now.”
“But for a while there you believed it, too,” Remo maintained.
“You are mistaken.”
“Whatever. What I’m trying to say is, if Fastbinder starts microwaving us with proton beams, let me handle it.”
“Glory hound,” Chiun sniffed.
The earth suffered a spasm at that moment, then behind them they heard the crash of a massive explosion, followed by the collapse of a thousand tons of solid rock.
“What have you done?” Fastbinder demanded, storming into the command center looking over the city.
Jack didn’t turn away from his panoramic view. “Blew the roof out of the Stinx River,” Jack answered vacantly. “I’m gonna stop those guys.”
“You can’t know if you got them—they could be anywhere in zee tunnel.”
“I’m not trying to bury them in the rock. I’m going to flood them out and slice them up. See?”
Fastbinder didn’t want to see, but he was drawn to the window, where the city lay before them, raw and exposed, more stark than he remembered ever seeing it before.
“Why is it so bright?” he demanded.
“The illumination grid is more complete than I let on,” Jack said without emotion. “We’ve got 687 functional lights.”
