He shot a glance at Paul, then Sofia, then at the stack of Gretel’s notes piled next to them. Paul was thrilled that the two of them were being entrusted with something so important.
“I need everyone in this room to understand the gravity of the decision I’ve made,” George continued. “Karma is nothing more than a concept. A theory. Even those I deemed experts on the mysterious substance were making educated guesses at best, dreamy wishes at worst. But they are people I trust implicitly. I believe their educated guesses may be more reliable than the most researched, documented theories of the world’s renowned scientists. In my heart, I believe this complicated device is going to do something extraordinary. And that it will help us.”
“Then let’s get on with it,” Paul muttered, trying to lighten the mood. “Time’s a wastin’. Isn’t that what they say?”
“Better to waste time than people’s bloomin’ lives, it is,” Mothball countered drily, her eyes not even looking up from the floor.
George cut in before Paul could respond. “I wouldn’t take this risk unless I thought the risk was worth it. I fear we’ve reached a time of desperation, and if we wait much longer, the damage may be too great to reverse. Especially with the troubling observations Master Sato made in the Thirteenth Reality.”
“Sofia and I will figure out what to do with it,” Paul urged. His hands were sweaty with anticipation. “Please just push the button. Please.”
“I need everyone here to—” George began.
Rutger cut him off. “Boss. You’re stalling. We wouldn’t all be sitting here on the floor like kids at bedtime if we weren’t committed. The boy is right. Push the button. We can trust Gretel that it will work.”
“Very well.”
George fidgeted in his seat, wrung his hands and cracked his knuckles, then wriggled some more. No one said a word, and Paul leaned forward. Their leader finally reached out and picked up the small metal box, gingerly, as though it were a bomb that might accidentally go off. He placed it on the floor again, right in front of his crossed legs.
“Here goes nothing,” he said. “Now, something I chose not to share with you, Master Paul, is that only two people in the Realities can push the button—me and Gretel. The device was built to read our DNA signature before it will compress. I must say, I’m quite proud that you didn’t fail my test and try to do it yourself.”
“Oh,” was all Paul said in response. Relief filled him from top to bottom.
“But once it’s pushed,” George continued, “I want you and Sofia to take it and keep it with you at all times as you study the power. The Karma will be focused on the source—the box itself—and, therefore, on whoever holds it.” He waited for Sofia’s nod. Then Paul’s. “Right. Here we go, then. May the Realities smile upon us on this troubled, troubled day.”
“And Karma,” Paul added.
Master George reached a hand to the box, pressed his thumb against the top of the button, waited a second, then pushed it all the way down.
Chapter 49
Bending and Warping
There was a very distinct click when the button went down. It was louder than it should’ve been, it seemed to Paul, the quick bang echoing off the ceiling of the room. There were no other sounds but the crackling of the fire. Everyone else was too busy holding their breath to make a noise, waiting to see what happened.
Master George had a wide look of expectation on his face, his eyebrows raised to their fullest. He slowly and carefully removed his thumb from the button and pulled his hand back into his lap. The button didn’t pop back up but instead remained inside the box, so that only the green circle of its top was visible. He handed it to Sofia.
“Hide this away,” the man said. “Guard it with your life.”
She nodded. “I feel something tingling across my skin.”
Paul felt it, too, just barely. He strained his ears to hear anything and his eyes to see anything. Sometimes Chi’karda presented itself in the form of an orange cloud or misty sparkles. He wondered if Karma would do the same sort of thing. He hoped so—he wouldn’t be able to stand it if all he felt was this tingle, no visible confirmation that something was happening. He stared, and listened, and felt with his other senses. Waited.
“I don’t think it—” Rutger began to say, but he was quickly silenced by shushes from the others in the room. Chagrined, the little man seemed to roll up into a tighter ball.
Master George held up a hand, palm out. “I believe something else is happening.”
There was a light rumbling in the distance, like the growl of thunder in an approaching storm. Paul and the others looked at each other with wide eyes. He wondered if they were as spooked as he was. He had a shivering chill going up and down his spine, as if someone had just said they’d seen a ghost walking down the hall and they were all now waiting for it to appear at the doorway.
The rumbling grew louder, and then the room began to shake. Just a slight tremor at first, barely noticeable. Paul put his hands on the carpet and felt a vibration that shot right up his bones. It strengthened until there wasn’t any doubt that something unusual was happening—the windows to the balcony rattled, and the picture of Muffintops that hung over the fireplace suddenly fell off its nail, crashing onto the floor. The glass in the frame broke.
Master George let out a little cry of surprise and struggled to his feet. Mothball helped him up as her long bones straightened out to stand up as well. Paul got up, he and Sofia leaning on each other for support. The shaking had escalated to an all-out earthquake, the floor jumping up and down as the walls seemed to bow in and out. There was almost something unnatural about it, as if the room was bending and stretching in impossible ways. He looked at the balcony, where the glass in the windows appeared to have had melted into a liquid, bubbling inward then back out again toward the canyon.
An uneasy feeling replaced the immediate panic from the quake. If this was the good Karma Paul had hoped for, then he wanted to go back in time and throw that box in the river.
The room swayed side to side, up and down, with no sign of stopping. The small group of Realitants had so far stood together in a daze, balancing, maybe hoping it would end. The distant sound of thunder had been replaced with something more sinister: a long, shrill whine like the high-pitched whistle of an old steam train. But intermixed with that were more disturbing noises that cut in and out—moans and groans and screams that weren’t quite human.
Paul was beginning to feel dizzy and queasy, and not just from the jolting movement. He was sick that maybe he’d talked George into doing something terrible.
As if on cue, their leader finally took charge.
“Keep hold of each other!” he shouted over the increasing noise. “I don’t think—rather I hope this isn’t related to the Karma box. I’m quite sure of it. I believe we are experiencing a disturbance like the ones that have been happening since the incident with the Blade of Shattered Hope. I want to look outside, see what’s going on. But we mustn’t separate! Does everyone understand?”
The scene was absurd. The whole room was shaking and bending and warping in impossible ways, and the Realitants looked like old daredevils trying to balance on a high tightrope. But they all nodded their assent and held hands with each other: Mothball, Rutger, Sally, Sato, Sofia, and Paul, all in a row. Mothball held on to George as he started making his way to the balcony.
As they stumbled toward the sliding glass door, everything intensified. The walls bubbled in and out more deeply, the sight of it so disorienting that Paul was starting to wonder if maybe they’d been drugged or something. The floor bounced and rippled, making it impossible to walk a straight line. If they hadn’t been holding hands, each one of them would’ve been sprawled across the carpet. And the noises, awful and disturbing, were also increasing in pitch and volume. It was like a soundtrack for a haunted house, moans and groans and squeals.
George reached the door and paused. With the glass bending and warping, it seemed impossible
that it could slide open. But he reached out anyway, grabbed the handle, and pushed all of his weight onto it. The door opened easily, sliding all the way to the left—even as it continued to ripple in crazy ways.
The old man turned and shouted back at them over the terrible chorus of sounds. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this! Something is wrong with Reality!”
“Ya think?” Paul murmured, but he was pretty sure no one heard him. What had they done? What had pushing that button done to Reality? It couldn’t be a coincidence.
George turned back to the balcony, which looked like something seen through a sheen of water. It definitely didn’t seem like a safe place to go right then, but George walked out onto the wavy, bouncy surface of the balcony floor, still holding hands with Mothball behind him, reaching out with his other hand to grab the railing. It was as shifty and rippling as everything else, but it had to be better than nothing.
When he touched the railing and took hold of it, an odd thing happened. Beginning at his hand, a distinct bulge of warped Reality shot up his arm and through his body like a wave of energy. It went down his other arm then hit Mothball, doing the same thing to her. The ball of power proceeded to go through every single Realitant like a snake swallowing a baseball until it passed through Sofia and shot up Paul’s arm. He almost let go of Sofia’s hand but didn’t. He felt nothing more than a tickle and a surge of static electricity along his skin, his hair shooting up on end. But then the energy traveled down his other arm and disappeared.
Master George was still clasping the rail of the balcony, and even that was a weird sight. The rail was moving, wavering like a mirage, but the old man’s arm seemed to be solid. Two things happening at once? That wasn’t possible. George faced the open air of the canyon, and looks of confusion passed down the Realitants. Clearly no one understood the anomaly that had passed through their bodies.
“Everyone!” George snapped, his voice muted against the awful noises that still haunted the air. “Everyone up here to have a look! Quickly, now!”
The motion of the room—the entire building, in fact—was still intense, jumping and rippling, an earthquake mixed with hallucination. But Paul and the other Realitants fought against it and surged forward, through the open door to the balcony. They crowded close, maneuvering so that each person could look over the railing and see what Master George saw.
Two seconds earlier, Paul had thought there was no way things could get worse. But he’d been terribly wrong. He stared out at the valley of the Grand Canyon and forgot all about the rocking movement around him.
Slicing its way through midair, running between the tall, rocky walls, was a floating river. Just a hundred feet or so above the raging waters of the Colorado River, there was a wide, bright gap of intense blueness. It was long and stretched in both directions, as if a giant knife had cut through Reality and the wound bled glowing blue blood. It was the same blue glow that Sato had described dropping the centipede into.
“The Fourth Dimension has ripped open into this Reality!” George shouted.
People started falling from the rent in the air.
Chapter 50
Odd Couple
There’d been a very long talk.
Tick lay there awkwardly, feeling like a spectator at a silent film, as Jane and Chu whispered with each other. His face was tense, and hers—the mask—showed no expression at all. On and on they talked, but Tick couldn’t hear a word they said. He was getting closer and closer to giving in to his instincts and just unleashing his Chi’karda with every bit of strength he had. How could it be any worse than letting Chu do whatever he wanted with him?
Finally, Tick couldn’t take it anymore.
“You two need to listen to me,” he said, trying to sound more patient and reasonable than he felt. “Bad things are going on, and we all know they’re getting worse. It’s just like in the Nonex. We can’t fight each other until we make things right again in the Realities. I promise not to fight if you will.”
Tick didn’t like saying the words; he didn’t want to work with Jane or Chu, but maybe he had no other choice. He wished he could find a way to get out of his restraints so he could use his Chi’karda again.
Both Jane and Chu looked over at him. Jane’s mask actually pulled up into a slight grin.
“Let me go,” Tick pleaded. “I swear on my family I won’t try anything. I won’t hurt anybody. And I’ll stay here while we talk everything out.” He winced at that last sentence. Now he was trying too hard.
“Pipe down while the adults talk,” Chu said. If he’d said it angrily, or meanly, Tick would’ve been okay with it. But he said it like he actually thought of Tick like a child, and that boiled his insides. He almost felt steam coming out of his ears.
“Please,” Tick said. “You know I can help.”
Chu looked back at Jane as if he hadn’t heard him. “Ever since this . . . opportunity presented itself in your Thirteenth Reality, my people have been working on a device that can harness the power of the Void, adapting it. We can do it, Mistress Jane. We can become one with it. We can meld ourselves to Reality. Just like we discussed. Things have come to fruition faster than we could’ve ever dreamed.”
Jane nodded her head slowly. “Don’t double cross me, Chu. I’m warning you.”
Something snapped inside of Tick. It was like a bunch of valves had been holding back the flow of Chi’karda inside him, and they all broke at once. The power almost burst out of him, but somehow he grabbed it at the last second, held it at bay. But he couldn’t keep the words from tumbling out.
“That’s enough!” he yelled. “I swear, if you two don’t stop acting like I’m not here, I’m going to let it all out, no matter what happens. It’s like a dam over here, and it’s about to break! Take these straps off of me. Now!”
His heart raced, and he could feel his limbs shaking, the blood rushing to his head and face. Heat ebbed along his skin, as if his pores were straining from exertion, the orange might of Chi’karda trying to burst through.
“Let me go!” he shouted.
He saw a flash of fear in Chu’s eyes before the man tried to hide it. Jane was no longer smiling. But neither one of them moved.
“Let me—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. A sudden jolt hit the room, shaking it so intensely and violently that all other thoughts vanished from Tick’s mind, as instant as the flip of a light switch. The overpowering surge of Chi’karda disappeared as well, making him feel empty and scared. The room slammed toward the side, then sprang back the next second. Chu and Jane both fell down, sprawling over each other in a tangle of arms, legs, and the folds of her yellow robe.
It all happened so fast, like a speed bump in time. The room had barely stabilized before it began to shake again, this time more steadily, growing in strength. Chu and Jane were scrambling to get to their feet, reaching out to hold on to Tick’s bed. Things fell off the shelves, rattled across the floor. Tick was helpless, holding on to the sheets as if they’d give him any protection—the straps held him down as firmly as ever.
And the Chi’karda really was gone. Completely. He even reached for it again, wanting to feel its power and comfort, but it was like something had blocked it within him. He couldn’t find a single trace.
He was looking at Chu when everything in the room went completely crazy. Walls started bubbling outward, and the floor looked as if it had turned into liquid, waves running through the tile without breaking them. The bed jumped up and slammed back down again, and Jane and Chu lost their balance, sprawling out on the rippling floor once more. The ceiling bulged in the middle, as if water were collecting there. None of it seemed physically possible.
And then the horrible sounds started.
Chapter 51
Holding Hands
Paul had never seen Master George move so fast.
The old man seemed to lose thirty years in age once he spotted the frightening and impossible sight of bodies falling from a long, blue
rent in the air. He turned on his heels and bolted back through the balcony door, pulling everyone else along with him as best he could. They eventually all made it—struggling against the disorienting sights that continued to warp and bend all around them—Sofia and Paul at the tail end. The Realitants were still holding hands, helping each other as they took turns losing and regaining their balance.
“We must get down there straightaway,” George called over his shoulder as he headed for the hallway. “After a quick detour to grab my Barrier Wand, as we may have to get ourselves far from this place.”
Sofia stopped, and everyone looked back at her. “You guys go. I need to head to the operations center. I can feel . . . it. I can feel the Karma. I think if I can study Gretel’s notes—the whole team’s notes from that time—I can figure things out.”
“I’ll help you,” Paul added immediately. He felt it too. Even as Reality broke up all around him, he felt a power like electricity trickling through his veins.
Master George looked proud, shockingly not offering one ounce of protest. “Rutger,” he commanded. “Take them there at once. Give them access to everything. The others—with me.”
Paul’s heart leaped as Sofia grabbed the notes from the floor. They followed Rutger, fighting to keep their balance the whole way there.
Chu’s face was pale with terror.
Tick didn’t understand it. He’d thought the man was brave and ruthless, but now he looked like a toddler who’d lost his mommy at the shopping mall. He swayed on his feet as the entire room shook and wobbled, his eyes darting this way and that in a steady flare of panic. Jane was close to him but seemed much calmer as she mildly took a step when needed to keep herself from falling to the floor again.