He sat up, not realizing at first that he hadn’t been able to do that for a while. Hard, silvery bands were still fastened around his arms and legs like bracelets, but other than that, he was free to move. When all this dawned on his still-foggy mind, shock swam through him, and he looked at Chu sharply, expecting some sort of trick.
The man appeared numb to emotion at the moment, giving a quick nod and scrunching his eyes. All scientist. “The bands will still repress your Chi’karda, boy, so I wouldn’t try anything. But I think you’ll work with us regardless, once you take a peek over the edge of this canyon.”
Chu clicked a remote-control device in his hand, and the bands around Tick’s arms and legs sprung loose like coiled wires, popping off him and landing several feet away. On instinct, Tick reached for his Chi’karda, searching for that spark inside of him that was becoming more and more a part of his instincts. As simple as taking a deep breath. He sensed it—could feel it pooling deep inside of him—but barely, as if the pipe between him and the power was clogged.
But he wouldn’t have fought back anyway. Not yet. Not until he knew the best route to fixing all the things that had gone bad in the Realities.
He stood up slowly, fighting the imbalance caused by the never-ending quake that rattled the scorched land to which they’d come. He saw the coffinlike silver box that Chu had called the Bagger off to the side, a small opening on one end creating a window into darkness. He swore to understand what the thing was and how it worked some day. But again, not now. Not yet.
Chu was looking at him, his face hard and pinched. But there was also understanding there, as if he wanted to say that things were worse than any of them had imagined and that they needed to work together or die.
Jane stood next to him, her mask a blank expression.
“Something is blocking the Chi’karda here,” she said, her raw voice sounding full of pain. “The closer we came to this place, the weaker it got. Neither one of us is completely sure what’s going on, but it does remind me of something we’d studied long ago . . .” She nodded to her left, and Tick looked in that direction.
The Grand Canyon. At least, a part of it.
A few hundred feet away, the flat land beneath them ended in the jagged lip of a cliff. Tick only knew this because beyond it was open air and the sight of canyon walls. A sea of stratified rock, layer upon layer, every shade of red and brown and creamy white. Gray clouds churned in the sky, thicker and more erratic over the abyss closest to them. There was a strange blue light reflecting off the bottoms of the boiling vapors of clouds.
“Go and have a look,” Jane said, her tone sad and filled with dread. “We wanted you to know what’s at stake.”
Tick knew he had no choice. Feeling as if someone had draped a hundred pounds of wet cotton across his shoulders, he started walking toward the upper edge of the looming cliff.
Chapter 55
Let’s Move
Sato fought furiously. Wielding a Shurric provided by one of his soldiers, he aimed and fired the thumps of sound energy at creatures as they came close, barely having enough time to see them catapult away before he had to do it again. And again. The monstrous forms from the Void were relentless and numerous, and they seemed to have no concept of death as they charged in. As each one died, they dissolved into a wispy stream of smoke and shot toward the sky. Up there, they joined their dead in a massive, churning pool of clouds. The bright blue streak of the floating river cut through the gray.
The Fifth Army had spread into battle formation, still braced in a rough circle around Master George and the others in order to protect them. Many of the fangen—or creatures that had once been fangen and had been transformed into something worse—leaped into the air and tried to fly toward the middle, as if they knew the precious lives that waited there. The heart of the Realitants, and maybe the last hope in defeating this indescribable new enemy of Voids and mist and thunder and blue light.
Sato’s soldiers kept steadfast, picking off the creatures one by one. But they kept coming.
They kept coming, and there was no end in sight.
Tick looked down into the valley of the canyon and couldn’t believe what his own eyes reported back to his brain. The assault on his senses made him think it couldn’t be real. So many things were going on at once, and none of them made much sense. A thick, pulsing streak of blue light cut through the middle of the air like a floating river, running the length of the canyon just as the real river made of water did. A battle raged down there, and it appeared to involve the Fifth Army, judging from the tall human figures standing their ground in a circular formation. They fought creatures of gray, Voids no doubt. When they died, wisps of smoky mist shot up from the ground like ghosts trailing gray rags until they reached—and joined—the churning storm clouds that hung over everything.
Tick reached for his Chi’karda again, and it was even weaker than before. There, for sure. But mostly blocked. He could pull it out if he wanted to, try to use it, but only a little would come out at a time. It’d be pointless. The strangeness of everything around him was also affecting Chi’karda. A scary thought—he already felt helpless enough.
“The situation is even worse than we thought.”
Jane’s voice made him jump. He turned to see her standing right behind him, the wind whipping at the folds of her hood and robe. Chu was right next to her. Tick had been so engrossed with the haunted vision before him—and the sounds of thunder, so loud—that he hadn’t noticed them creep up.
“What’s going on?” he asked, hoping for answers but knowing they didn’t have them.
“The Realities are being ripped apart,” Jane said. “Things have escalated.”
“Escalated?” Tick repeated. “I’d agree.”
Jane nodded. “This is why you need to work with us. Chu and I can stop this madness. With your help.”
“So you guys keep saying,” Tick said spitefully. “I’ll only promise to help if you promise to quit being so . . . evil.”
A look of hurt flashed across Mistress Jane’s mask, but it vanished quickly. Chu rolled his eyes and chuckled, a sound that was thankfully whipped away by a surge of wind.
“Your word means nothing to me anyway,” Tick said, hearing the defeat in his own voice. “I’ll do whatever I can to help stop this craziness. But I swear I won’t let either one of you hurt more people in the end. I won’t!”
Jane looked at him with hard eyes, glaring through the holes of her mask. “So are you committed then?”
Tick wanted to howl mean words at her, but he simply shouted, “Yes!”
“Reginald?” Jane turned her gaze to the man. “Are you ready?”
“Of course.”
Jane pointed back in the direction from which they’d come. “We need to get a couple miles out at least, I’d guess. We can’t do anything—especially here—until we can find the full strength of Chi’karda. Come on.”
She pulled up the lower edges of her robe and started running, a sight that for some reason made Tick want to laugh. Instead, he shot a dirty look at Chu and sprinted after her, wondering if the old man could keep up.
Chapter 56
The Furious Beat of Wings
We need to make it to the wall!” Sato shouted.
His throat hurt like acid had been poured down his gullet; his voice was raw and scratchy as he continued to encourage and command his Fifth Army. The creatures of the Void kept coming in their onslaught of an attack, threatening to overwhelm Sato and the rest with sheer numbers. But the soldiers kept their composure and maintained their positions, firing Shurrics and throwing Ragers. With every monster killed, another wispy streak of mist shot toward the sky to join the ever-growing mass of storm clouds that boiled above them.
The ground shook beneath them; screams of pain and anger pierced the air; thunder rumbled and lightning flashed; things bent and twisted and bubbled in unnatural ways. And the gray creatures kept coming—fangen through the air and the others loping and le
aping across the dusty canyon floor.
Sato aimed his Shurric at a lanky, six-legged beast with a head that was all gaping jaws and teeth. He fired, then watched the thing disintegrate and swirl into smoke and be whisked away, flitting upward out of sight. He aimed at another monster—three legs, three arms, two heads. Fired. Killed it. Another one—a blur of arms and smoky fur and teeth. Shot and obliterated. Another, then another. The beasts of the Void were everywhere.
Sato was taking aim when claws ripped into his shirt, scratching his skin. He looked up at a fangen just as its claws clenched into a fist and gripped the material, yanking him upward. The Shurric slipped out of Sato’s hand. He reached out to grab it, but he was too late. It clattered against the head of one of his soldiers.
The creature flew farther up, keeping a tighter hold on him now with two clawed fists, its membranous wings flapping against the twisty, windy air. Sato flailed with his arms, trying to beat at the beast, to no avail. He changed his focus to the thing’s two-handed grip and tried to loosen the claws. They didn’t budge.
Sato reached up with his hands and gripped the fangen’s forearms. He held on tightly for leverage, then kicked up with his legs, smashing one of his feet into the beast’s face. It wailed a piercing cry and shook his body while it plummeted several yards, almost crashing into the soldiers below. But at the last second, it swooped up again, furiously beating its wings. Sato’s stomach pitched and twisted as badly as the morphing shapes of Reality all around them.
He gripped the fangen’s forearms again, kicked up with his legs. His foot connected again, and this time he threw his hands at the wings, catching one of them by the thin stretch of skin between two bones. He yanked on it with all of his weight, pulling downward.
The creature shrieked again as they both fell toward the ground once more. This time, they came within reach of two tall soldiers, who quickly dropped their weapons and grabbed the fangen, slamming it to the ground, freeing Sato. And then they took care of the beast.
Sato jumped to his feet, adrenaline screaming through his body.
An odd sound suddenly tore through the air, overpowering everything else. It wasn’t just that—all other noises seemed to cease at once, replaced by an overbearing, all- consuming sound that made everyone pause in whatever they’d been doing. Sato couldn’t help it any more than the others. He faced the open canyon that towered above him.
A tonal thrum, mixed with a sound like bending metal, rang throughout the valley, giving Sato the strange sense that his ears had been stuffed with cotton. He didn’t see anything different or unusual at first, other than both sides of the battle had stopped fighting. The soldiers of the Fifth Army had lowered their weapons, searching the sky to figure out what was going on. Most of the Void creatures had disappeared—when, Sato had no idea. But trails of mist were everywhere, all of them snaking their way toward the clouds.
His gaze lifted; he felt almost hypnotized by the warping and the bell-like sounds clanging through the valley. He was looking directly at the churning gray storm when it suddenly divided into countless tornadoes, funneling down like a hundred gray fingers.
And then Reality itself started to split at the seams.
Chapter 57
Gashes in the World
Paul’s eyes hurt from looking at so many screens in the operations center, and his stomach was queasy from the shaking—though he was getting used to it—but his heart had swelled about three sizes. They were making progress. Real progress. And he could feel the power of Karma working inside of him. His mind was filled with images that he knew didn’t originate from his own thoughts.
Sofia had worked the hardest of the three of them, searching and reading every last line of Gretel’s notes. She looked exhausted and had finally taken a seat across from Rutger and Paul.
“Karma,” Sofia said, almost reverently. She held the gray box with the pressed green button in her hands. “I thought Chi’karda was like magic. Karma’s even beyond how we thought the world worked.”
“It’s pretty cool,” Paul agreed. “I think you’re right that it’s the cause of all the weirdness around us. For some reason, Karma wants things escalated. Like maybe our window of opportunity is going to be short. Whatever it is.”
Rutger slapped his thighs. “Are we all agreed on the findings, then? Our theories about what’s happened so far, and where we think it’s leading us?”
Instead of answering, Sofia looked at Paul. “What do you see in your mind, right now?”
“The place where Jane’s castle used to be,” Paul said with a smile. They’d had this conversation a dozen times already, and the answer was always the same.
“The Thirteenth Reality,” Sofia responded. “Me too.”
“Me too,” Rutger added.
They all kept seeing the same vision in their heads. Karma was communicating with them. And they knew what it meant.
“Let’s run through our data one last time,” Sofia ordered.
Tick had jogged or walked at least a couple of miles when everything changed again. At first, it was just an odd feeling, his ears popping, the drop of his stomach. But then a sound like bells and twisting metal filled the air and everything went dead silent for a few seconds; the quiet almost made him fall down, he’d grown so used to his eardrums being pounded. But then a new noise started up, and he and Mistress Jane and Reginald Chu stopped moving and looked back toward the gaping canyon they’d left behind. There was something incredibly mesmerizing about the . . . music that floated along the wind.
“What’s going on back there?” Chu asked, his voice full of irritation as if all the crazy stuff was putting a chink in his plans. Which was true, Tick admitted.
“It’s changing,” Jane announced.
Chu scoffed. “Thank you for that scientific assessment.”
Tick ignored them both, staring at the massive disk of clouds that spun above the canyon in the distance. Lightning flashed, but no thunder rumbled away from it. The bluish light that shone out of the strange floating river—which was not visible from where he stood—reflected off the bottom of the brewing storm. A buzzy, relaxed tingling went through his body and across his skin. A part of him wanted to lie down and take a nap.
“Atticus,” Chu said, his words muffled slightly as if he were outside a bubble. As if they weren’t worthy enough to overcome the sweet sounds wafting from the canyon. “What’s that look in your eyes? What do you know about what’s happening over there?”
“Nothing,” Tick said softly, though he doubted they heard him. “Nothing.”
Things changed then, so abruptly that Tick stumbled backward, falling to the ground as his eyes widened in astonishment. The slowly spinning mass of clouds instantly transformed into countless towering funnels, the roar of the twisting tornadoes wiping out the peaceful sounds from before. The clouds dropped then, falling like arrows toward the valley floor below. Quick bursts of lightning arced through the gray mist of the funnels, and this time, the thunder was loud and cracking. When the tornadoes vanished from sight beneath the upper lips of the canyon walls, Tick readied himself to stand and pull himself together.
But another sight in the sky made him stop cold. Gashes in Reality ripped open all over the place, streaks of dark and light that tore across the air. Some were a few feet long, others in the hundreds. The ground shook, and the sounds of breaking and cracking rocked the land.
Tick pressed his hands against the hard dirt to steady himself as he focused on the gaps that littered the sky. At first he’d only noticed that they didn’t look the same, that they had varying shades of color and light, but as he got over his initial shock and peered closer, he could see that the rips in Reality were actually windows to other worlds.
Through the one closest to him, he saw buildings and cars and people—a city at night. The darkness of the scene made it hard to see much, but there seemed to be a huge traffic jam and people running down the sidewalks. Another gash nearby revealed a field of crops and a
farmhouse during the brightness of day. Yet another showed a jungle or rainforest, thick with trees and vines and foliage. All the rents in the sky showed something different: a desert, a mountain peak, a neighborhood with damaged homes, people packed inside a mall—many of them huddled together as if they were cold, several views of lands with broken trees or floods.
Tick’s mind was overrun with all the information he was witnessing. He tried to process it, understand it. A blue river of light that hovered above ground, creatures from the Void, Reality looking warped and weird, churning clouds and lightning and tornadoes, rips in the air that led to other Realities, more earthquakes. His Chi’karda being held back from him somehow. What did it mean? What did it all mean?
Someone shook his shoulders and snapped him out of the trance he’d fallen into, gaping at the gashes in the air. He looked up to see Jane, her red mask pulled tightly into a look of concern.
“We need to get out of here,” she said, her scratchy voice somehow cutting through the din of terrible noises that rattled the world around them.
“What’s happening?” Tick asked. In that instant he almost forgot all the things he hated about the woman kneeling beside him and holding on to him with scarred hands.
Her mask relaxed into a neutral expression, but with her so close, Tick could see directly into her eyes behind it. And there was cold, hard fear there. She leaned in closer to whisper in his ear.
“I can sense a force here that we studied long ago. A project that I was led to believe had been abandoned because of its danger. Apparently not. And that only makes our mission more paramount.”
After a long pause, the noise and shaking and ripped seams in Reality glaring at the forefront once more, she finally spoke again. And even though Tick didn’t really know what she was talking about, the icy tone in her voice made his blood run cold.