Shurrics cocked and gripped in their hands, they searched and searched. They had to find where these monsters kept the kids.
When they reached a T, Mothball shone her flashlight both directions.
Sato asked, “Left or right?”
She didn’t answer, but instead held a finger up to her lips to shush him.
Sato nodded slightly and listened. The faintest sound floated through the cracking and roaring of shifting stone around them. He strained his ears to hear it, even closed his eyes for a second. A whimper. A cry. Moaning. Sobbing. After a few seconds, the sound cut off abruptly with a terror-filled shriek. Then silence.
Sato met Mothball’s dark gaze. “That way for sure.”
They went to the left.
~
Sofia sat next to Rutger, fascinated by all the blips and numbers and graphs and charts and squiggly lines on the computer screens. She didn’t know what all of it meant yet, and Rutger didn’t seem too keen on teaching her with everything that was going on.
“Okay,” he said. “I hope this doesn’t offend you, Sofia, but what I really need most from you is to run messages back and forth between me and Master George in the Control Room.”
It took all of her power not to growl at him like a wolf. No time for wounded pride. “Why don’t you have all this junk in the same place?”
Rutger snickered like she’d told a joke. “It used to fit,” was all he said.
“At least tell me what you’re doing and what he’s doing.”
Rutger waved his chubby little hand in the air; Sofia had no idea why.
“He’s in charge of organizing the rescue of the kids at the Factory. The Barrier Wand’s hooked in and set up to wink the nanolocators from the patches we gave Sato and his army. Sally, Priscilla, and a few other Realitants have set up shop in the Grand Canyon. That’s where the kids will be winked to. Not enough room here.”
“And your job?” she asked.
“Two main things. We’re tracking Tick and Mothball and Sato and his army. I’m also tapped into the meteorological reports and ocean monitoring stations. I don’t think there’s any doubt—we’re going to get hit by a massive tidal wave from one of these earthquakes. Not if, when.”
Sofia had been studying the screens as he spoke, and her eyes finally focused in on something she should’ve noticed from the very first. Sato and Mothball and the others had lots of information scrolling and blinking beneath their names. But not Tick.
His screen was blank from top to bottom. Nothing but black space.
She pointed at it. “What’s up with Tick?”
Rutger let out a long and dramatic sigh. “Well, Master George says he expected something like this, but it still makes my feet all itchy.”
Sofia felt something shrivel inside her. “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“According to this, Tick’s nanolocator is dead.”
~
Tick couldn’t believe it. A riddle.
Now he understood what the Haunce had meant when it said that somehow the healing of the Barriers would be presented to each of them in a form that would seem familiar. Symbolically. Tick thought it was almost like a video game—solving the riddle would be like maneuvering the joystick and pushing buttons on the controller, the complex processes and codes and circuits translating those movements into what he saw on the TV screen.
A riddle.
If anything had defined his journey so far as a Realitant, it had to be riddles.
And here he had another one. A doozy.
Concentrating, he read through it one more time:
Look at the following most carefully, as every line counts:
Be gone in times of death’s long passing.
Henry Atwood sliced his neck.
Hath reeds knocked against thee?
If our fathers knew, then winds, they blew.
The sixth of candles burned my eyes.
Horrors even among us.
Leigh tries to eat a stone.
The canine or the cat, it spat.
Pay attention to the ghoul that weeps.
Your number’s up, and it is missing. Wary the word second.
Shout out your answer.
A new line suddenly appeared at the very bottom of the page, the space blank one second, then filled with several words the next:
The universe ends in 11:58
And then, as impossible at it seemed, the written time at the end of the sentence started changing, ticking down like a digital clock.
11:57
11:56
11:55
11:54
Tick already had the riddle memorized. He closed his eyes and started thinking.
~
Sato heard more of the chilling sound bites over the now all-too-present quaking noises as he and Mothball stumbled their way down the tunnel and closer to a light source up ahead. Sato heard whimpers and cries for help—all of them the high-pitched voices of children. Anger stirred within him, almost completely obliterating the fear and trepidation he’d been feeling. And all the while, the threat of the entire Factory collapsing on top of them loomed over their heads—literally.
They came to a stony bend where the light grew stronger. Mothball stopped and crouched on the shaky ground right at the edge, her head just a few inches below Sato’s. He leaned against the wall beside her, his gut telling him they were on the cusp now of discovering the true horror of this place. He sensed the fear around the corner, as if the kids’ tears and sweat evaporated into a noxious cloud that poured through the opening he couldn’t see.
Mothball dared a peek. “Gotta be it,” she whispered. “Monster or two just ’round the corner, guardin’ a door. Lug a Squeezer, we should.”
Sato reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the small grenades in answer. “I’ll throw it. Soon as it pops, let’s charge in shooting the Shurrics.”
Mothball nodded then returned her attention forward, gripping the Shurric firmly, its business end pointed away, ready to shoot. Sato stepped away from the wall so he could have the right angle, then tossed the Squeezer around the corner.
It bounced off the far wall then hit the floor with a clang, disappearing from sight as it bounced forward. Seconds later it exploded, sending out a spray of small metal rods. Many of them clinked against the stone, but a few found their marks with a deadly thud. Two or three creatures howled an unearthly shriek.
“Go!” Sato yelled.
He moved to run around the corner, keeping Mothball to his right. He was about to pull the trigger of his Shurric when he saw two bear-like creatures sprawled on the ground, unmoving. A small lamp stood on a table, its glass broken in two places but still lit. Two chairs had toppled over, along with the guards.
Sato looked at the wooden door they’d been guarding. “A Rager ought to—”
Heavy thumps from Mothball’s Shurric cut him off, like invisible lightning and soundless thunder—felt, more than heard. On her third shot, the door exploded with a spray of splinters, flying away from them several feet before falling into some kind of abyss. Sato waited and watched, but he never heard the wooden shards hit anything below.
He exchanged a puzzled look with Mothball then warily crept toward the gaping doorway—he didn’t want a sudden uptick in the never-ending quake’s strength to send him over the edge—his Shurric armed and ready. He reached the threshold of the door and saw that the other side had no floor, only a sheer drop-off with no bottom in sight as far as he could tell. He slowly leaned his head out to get a better look.
They’d reached a vast, round chamber, at least one hundred feet in diameter, that tunneled toward the depths below, narrowing into a hole of blackness far, far down. Along the walls of the chamber were countless rectangular compartments, alcoves set deeper into the stone and open-faced. Inside those compartments were filthy mattresses with thin, ratty blankets. And on top of those nasty beds lay the most terrified-looking children Sato had ever seen.
~
“Oh, no.”
Rutger hadn’t spoken in awhile, and Sofia realized she’d kind of fallen into a daze, worried about Tick and what it meant that his nanolocator had died. And why Master George seemed to think that was okay, or at least expected.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Rutger turned away from the busy computer screens, scratching his nose as he stared at the floor. “It’s a big one. A really big one.”
“What is?” Sofia insisted, almost reaching out and shaking his shoulders.
Rutger looked at her, the usual sparkle in his eyes gone. “A massive tidal wave. Bigger than anything I’ve ever heard of. It’s completely destroyed several monitoring stations. And I know enough to see it’s gonna hit us dead on!”
Sofia choked on several attempts to ask the obvious questions, but finally managed to speak. “When? How long?”
“Thirty minutes.”
~
7:32
7:31
7:30
7:29
Tick had given up on the closed-eyes thinking bit. It wasn’t working. Not at all. The lines of the riddle didn’t make any sense whatsoever. None.
Something told him there was a visual aspect to it. Something in the first and last line appeared to be instructional, not part of the riddle itself. He forced himself to pretend he didn’t have it memorized and read it from beginning to end once again.
Look at the following most carefully, as every line counts:
Be gone in times of death’s long passing.
Henry Atwood sliced his neck.
Hath reeds knocked against thee?
If our fathers knew, then winds, they blew.
The sixth of candles burned my eyes.
Horrors even among us.
Leigh tries to eat a stone.
The canine or the cat, it spat.
Pay attention to the ghoul that weeps.
Your number’s up, and it is missing. Wary the word second.
Shout out your answer.
5:47
5:46
5:45
5:44
His mind continued churning, pressing, scrambling, processing. There was definitely something visual about the riddle.
Look carefully.
Every line counts.
Your number’s up. It is missing. The word second.
Look. Line. Counts. Number. Missing. Second.
His thoughts honed in on those six words. Somehow he knew they meant everything.
~
There were a lot of things Sato didn’t understand as he stood on that dangerous ledge, staring at the curved walls of cubbyholes filled with children. He had questions aplenty. Like why they were kept in such an odd location, why there weren’t any ladders, how the children were used in the first place, where they came from. Plenty of things to wonder and ponder and feel disgust over.
But with the whole Factory shaking and ready to collapse at any second, there was only one thing that mattered: getting the nanolocator patches on every kid in sight.
“Divvy them up,” he told Mothball, holding out his hand. “We don’t have much time.”
“Got no ladders or steps,” she replied as she put a huge handful of the patches into his hand. “Got no rope. Whatcha ruddy thinkin’ we’ll do, fly around like birdies to save ’em?”
Sato slipped the square pieces of paper into his pocket and gave her a glare so hard that she took a full step backward. He was instantly filled with shame, but he said what he felt anyway. “Yes, Mothball. We’ll fly if that’s what we have to do.”
Without waiting for a response, he turned until his back was to the abyss behind him, his toes balanced on the former threshold of the door. He crouched down, then let himself slip over the edge.
~
Sato put his hands out, letting the pads of his fingers and palms scrape along the surface of the stone wall as he fell. He focused his concentration so he would be ready for the first opportunity to grab onto something. Fighting off the terrifying panic, he felt as if each nanosecond seemed to beat out a long rhythm.
Bumps and cracks and knobs of rock tore at his skin, but his attempts to grip them proved worthless. The dark surface of the wall suddenly lightened, and he found himself staring into one of the rectangle cubbyholes at a small boy curled up into a ball on his ragged mattress, shaking from the earthquake or bodily ills, or both.
Sato threw his arms forward, hitting the lower floor of the compartment with a terrible bite of pain. His downward movement slammed to a momentary stop, but then he was slipping again, desperately grasping with his fingers for anything to hold onto. A curl of loose blanket, a moist wrinkle of mattress—gone as soon as he touched them. He was just about to fall completely away when his right foot landed on a jutting outcrop of rock; a jolt shivered through every nerve.
Crying out from the pain and shock of his sudden stop, he was still able to take advantage of the moment and adjust his grip on the lower flat edge of stone with his arms. Breathing heavily, Sato couldn’t help but pause to make sure it was really true—that he’d really stopped himself from plummeting to his death far below. Hanging there, he looked up to see Mothball looking down on him from twenty feet above.
“A might risky that was,” she called out, though a huge smile draped her homely face. Before he could respond, she reared back and took a giant leap to the side, sliding down the stone face as he had done until she caught the next compartment over—with a lot more grace and fewer bruises and scratches, no doubt.