Free Daniel X: Game Over by James Patterson, Ned Rust

grabbed me with one hand and flung me across the room into a Noguchi glass coffee table, which promptly shattered.
    “Ouch. What the
heck?!
”
    I struggled to my feet, anger boiling inside me. It wasone thing to keep me on my toes, but it was another to take advantage of a tired kid who’d already had a pretty rough day.
    “Look, Dad. That wasn’t funny, and—”
    “You might want to dive through, Daniel,” he suggested.
    “Dive through? What’s that supposed to mean?”
    By way of reply, he deftly aimed the Opus 24/24 at me and squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 28

     

 
    WAIT A
SECOND,
I thought.
Actually, wait a
whole bunch
of seconds.
    Though my recollection is hazy at best, when I was just two—and he was still alive—my father had taught me how it’s possible to
dive through
the surface of time.
    It’s something I recently pulled off while in the grips of a man-eating space anemone that had disguised itself as a van. And of course there was that time I managed to put myself back quite a few centuries, all the way to the time of King Arthur…
    Anyhow, I’m not good at explaining the physics of the time-travel process, but suffice it to say it’s pretty taxing. The power to dive through the current, the fabric of the here and now, comes straight out of your emotions. Soyou’ve got to be really riled up when you do it. Freaked out about something like, oh, say, your father firing the cruelest weapon ever created
right at your head.
    Even as the Opus 24/24 discharged—a plasma pulse of pure pain erupting from its wicked, sawtooth muzzle—I dove through the space-time continuum and put the entire situation on standby.
    It’s pretty intense, really, to have everything in the world suddenly stop and hang in the air like you’re walking around in a museum diorama. Intense, but also a little lonely, and
quiet
like you wouldn’t believe.
    “Very good, Daniel,” my father said stepping back from the still-frozen Opus 24/24. “But what do you do if your
opponent
is also able to manipulate time?” He walked around the floating weapon, as if to emphasize his point.
    “Look, Dad. It’s one thing to give me fighting tips and keep me on my guard and all that, but I need some rest right now. I’ll have you over after I’ve taken a nap, okay?”
    “You’re not answering my question, Daniel. Do you know for certain that Number 7 or Number 8 can’t stop time?”
    “No. I mean, we know almost nothing about them, but I don’t think—”
    “Oh, you
don’t think?
” he said mockingly, waving his arms and somehow casting us both backward in time, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster.
    In a blink, we were watching my arrival at the hotel, and then the guest before me, a businessman of some sort, and then back to the one before that, and the one before that and then—
bam!
—there were soldiers around. American soldiers. And there was some military dude I recognized in khakis smoking a corncob pipe. General Douglas MacArthur? The man who’d been entrusted with Japan’s recovery after World War II and had helped start the nation on one of the world’s most remarkable comebacks of all time.
    I could have yelled hello, but then—
bam!
—the hotel was being built, and we were hovering in the air over the horses and carts of the nineteenth-century construction crew, and then—
bam!
—we were hovering over the previous building on the site, maybe a hotel too but shorter? and then—
bam!
—we were back back to when the site was occupied by a small, curved-roof house and there was a big stone castle not far away. Just then the earth started to shake. I looked off in the distance and saw a huge black cloud exploding out of Mount Fuji—it must be the famous eruption of 1707!
    Before I could scramble for cover—
bam!
—we were at a camp of ancient Japanese soldiers armed with wooden spears and polished stone axes, and then—
bam!
—back to pristine forest. And then—
bam!
—back to some sort