“You think we can do this?” Sato asked, climbing up into the inset hole. The chamber still shook around him, but he’d almost gotten used to it, his body adapting to its movements.
“Like ya said,” Mothball responded. “We’ll ruddy fly if we have to.”
Sato scooted close to the boy sitting there, his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes filled with a hope that almost broke Sato’s heart. The boy wore a dirty shirt and shorts, his hair messed and greasy.
“You okay?” Sato asked. “We’re here to take you away. Save you.”
The boy didn’t answer, but the slightest hint of a smile graced his face.
“This is gonna surprise you, but in a few seconds you’ll be far away from here.” Sato took one of the nanolocator patches out of his pocket and slapped it on the boy’s bare leg.
An instant later, the kid disappeared.
~
1:45
1:44
1:43
1:42
Tick couldn’t help but stare at the dwindling time as it ticked toward the annihilation of the entire universe. His mind wanted him to waste his brain power wondering how all of time and eternity could be dependent on him solving a stupid riddle. He pushed the question away again and again. Pushed away thoughts of what Jane and the Haunce were doing and whether his efforts would matter anyway.
1:21
1:20
“Stop it, Tick!” he yelled to the empty forest. “Think!”
The answer floated just outside his sphere of concentration. He was almost there.
Every line counts.
Counts.
Nine sentences that made no sense at all or seemed to be related to each other in any way.
Number’s up.
Number.
0:46
0:45
Sweat soaked his forehead, his armpits, his hands. The cold air did nothing to help.
0:40
0:39
Wary the word second.
Second.
Second word.
0:31
0:30
It all came together so instantly, so unexpectedly, that he felt a lump explode in his throat, racking him with a coughing fit. As he hacked the air through his sore throat, he focused on the words of the riddle. His eyes played tricks, making the answer appear as if the letters themselves had magically changed to help him out. He finally quit coughing and couldn’t believe now that he hadn’t seen it all from the very beginning:
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.
0:10
0:09
The second word of each sentence contained at least part of the numbers he was supposed to look for. To count. And yes, a number was missing.
0:04
0:03
Tick sucked in a quick breath of air then screamed as loudly as possible.
“Five! The answer is five!”
The forest around him sucked away into blackness as once again he exploded into trillions of pieces.
~
Sofia followed Rutger into the main Control Room, where Master George was waving his arms like the conductor of the world’s largest symphony. Despite all their troubles crashing down at once, a small snicker escaped Sofia. She quickly coughed to cover it up, but Paul—sitting nearby with worry on his face—noticed and broke a half-smile that looked more like a wince.
“George!” Rutger barked. “Most of the earthquakes have stopped, but it’s too late for that wave. It’s gonna be here in fifteen minutes!”
Their leader shot them a quick glance then returned his gaze to the rapidly blinking screens in front of him. “My heart can barely stand this confounded predicament!”
“What’s the latest with Sato?” Rutger asked as he and Sofia moved closer.
Master George pointed to a series of purple lines that kept appearing then disappearing. Unlike the indicators for Sato and Mothball above them, these had no names attached. “They’re doing it. They’re doing it! We’ve already winked ten children to the Grand Canyon, where Priscilla and Sally have several doctors on hand.”
Rutger let out a sigh that sounded like he’d lost every ounce of hope. “We won’t survive it,” he said in a tight whisper.
“What’s that?” Master George asked, finally giving his full attention to his partner.
“The wave. There’s no way we can survive it. It’s too big. We . . .” Rutger looked at the floor.
“What? Spit it out, man!”
“We have to leave. This location—and us with it—has zero chance of making it through the wave’s power. It’ll rip our cabling technology to shreds, then pick us up and slam us into shore. We have to leave.”
Sofia felt that shrinking sensation in her gut again. She half-expected Master George to argue, to say it would be okay, maybe express disbelief or babble about how life’s unfair. Instead, he accepted the truth and immediately moved to what needed to be done. Sofia was impressed.
“Then we can only hope they reach every child in time—we don’t have things properly set up at the Grand Canyon to wink them in from that location. We’ll wait here, monitoring the situation and managing the nanolocator patches. At least we have a bit of good news—if the earthquakes have stopped, then Atticus and Jane must’ve done their job.”
Sofia’s heart lifted, but then she remembered their own problem. “What about the wave?” she asked, her eyes meeting Paul’s, sharing a look that said so much with no need for words.
Master George puffed his chest out and folded his hands on his belly. “The four of us will wink away the second before it hits. It’s time for us to be very brave.”
~
Tick found himself back in that outer-space-like void of lights and streaks and glowing, brilliant orbs. He couldn’t feel his body, didn’t understand what or where or anything else. But he knew they’d done it even before the Haunce spoke to them.
“Through your efforts and power, we have healed the Barriers of the Realities. We will send you back now. Your worlds are not destroyed, but they have still seen great, great devastation. The healing of such things does not rest in our hands. We say farewell.”
The universe spun. Everything changed, and Tick felt the pressure of crushing diamonds.
~
Sato put everything out of his mind. The fear. The soreness of his entire body. His hunger, his exhaustion. From somewhere deep in his cells and molecules and tissue, he sucked out the adrenaline he needed to keep moving.
From one inset compartment to the next, he jumped. They were about four feet apart side to side, a little less up and down. Each and every time, for one frightening second, he thought he wouldn’t make it and instead would plummet to the unseen depths far below. But so far he’d landed each and every time, gripping and pushing and pulling, squirming his way to the children without falling to his death. Mothball was doing the same, working the other side of the stony, rounded chamber.
He spared a glance for the latest kid he’d found—a shaky, pale girl whose eyes were open and focused on his. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re here to rescue you.” He’d always wanted to say that to someone.
He slapped a nanolocator patch on her arm, no longer waiting to watch as the kids vanished from sight, winked away by Master George. Already on the move, he crouched on the far end, ready to leap for the next hole, when he noticed two things at the same time that made him pause.
One, the shaking and quaking had stopped completely.
And two, he heard the distant sounds of flapping wings and a chattering, cackling chorus of grunts and squeals coming from below. He looked down.
Several fangen—those horrible creations of Jane’s they’d fought at her castle when George sent them to steal her Barrier Wand—were flying through the murky darkness, coming up toward him.
Sato jumped to the next compartment.
~
Tick blinked, dazzled by the light of the sun directly overhead. He stood in the mud just outside the broken and jumbled heap of wood that had once been the fence
surrounding the Factory. Mistress Jane stood right in front of him, her expressionless red mask only inches from his face.
For the briefest of moments, he forgot that she was his bitter, bitter enemy.
“I can’t believe we did it,” he said, not ashamed of the childlike wonder in his voice. They had, after all, just saved the entire universe. “All I had to do was solve a riddle—seems crazy. What did the Haunce make you do?”
Jane’s mask broke into a smile so full of genuine kindness that Tick wondered if the whole experience had maybe changed something inside her. “Isn’t it wonderful, Atticus? What does it say about our species that you and I could put aside our hatred for each other and work for the greater good? We should both feel very proud.”
Tick let out an uneasy laugh, not sure how he felt about the way she was acting. “It’s definitely pretty cool. So . . . you didn’t answer my question. What did you have to do? How did you do your part?”
Jane’s mask kept smiling. “Ah, yes. It was quite an amazing thing. The Haunce had me work through my master plan for how to achieve the Utopian Reality I’ve always wanted. What an invigorating experience it was to focus my mind and faculties in such a heightened, rushed state of anxiety.” She moved even closer to him, almost touching.
Tick didn’t know what to think. Maybe she—
A burst of pain exploded in his stomach, a wrenching, twisting stab of fire and needles. He stumbled back two steps and looked down. The hilt of a large knife jutted from his abdomen, a dark red bloodstain soaking his shirt, spreading.
Choking and sputtering a cough, he raised his eyes to Jane, whose now-angry mask matched the color of the growing stain around the knife.
“My plan started with something just like that,” she said.
~
Tick fell to his knees, both hands gripped around the hilt of the knife, his hands wet with warm blood. He didn’t dare pull it out. Clumpy fluid lodged in his throat, cutting off his breath along with the panic that choked him. He tried to suck down air through his nose, but it ended in a cough every time. Bugs of light swam in front of his eyes.
He couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what he’d say if he could.
Jane crouched down to the ground, the mud caking her robe. “Subtle. That’s what I told Frazier. I knew I had to wait until the right moment when you weren’t on guard and ready to strike back with your Chi’karda. A knife deep to the stomach—such a simple and beautiful thing. So old-fashioned. It’s almost impossible to find help in time. You’re dying, Atticus. Tick. Nothing can help you now.”
Tick collapsed to the side, and a fresh, striking burst of pain burrowed through his entire body, as if the knife had sprouted steely vines that coursed through his insides. On the outer rim of his consciousness, he realized he’d never come close to understanding the fear of dying. Death had never truly seemed real. And now it was here, ready to drag him away like a stolen bag of gold.
Jane leaned over until the cool metal of her mask touched his ear. She whispered, “The rest of my plan is for the good of mankind and the Realities. Except for one thing, one item on the list—revenge, Atticus. Revenge. I want your last thought in life to be this: to know that I will hunt down each and every member of your family and kill them. Your friends as well. I’ll kill them just like I did you. Good-bye.”
She stood up, though Tick could barely see her. His vision blurred, dark specks swirling like a cloud of stinging gnats. He felt his life slipping away, a physical dwindling as if he were made of sand and it was slowly leaking out of a puncture in some outer skin. He thought of soulikens and how those small and permanent stamps of electric pulses and energy might be the very thing he felt seeping out of him into . . . wherever they went. His Alterants’ soulikens had come to him, according to the Haunce. Maybe now they would go to that odd, ghostly creature of eternity.
Jane was walking away, stabbing her Staff into the mud.
Tick hated her.
Life was running away from him. He closed his eyes, wondering if he would ever open them again. What he saw appear out of the patchy darkness was Kayla. And Lisa. His parents. Paul and Sofia and Sato. He saw them as if he looked at a TV screen.
The Chi’karda exploded within him.
No build-up this time. No slow burn that escalated like stoked flames. It was an absolute detonation of power. His whole body became a conflagration, a perfect and consuming inferno of force and might. He didn’t know he’d done it, but he was suddenly standing. A tornado of orange, fiery air swirled around him. He heard himself speak as if he were an outside observer.
“Jane, you’re not going anywhere.”
~
The fangen attacked Sato just as he landed on his twentieth compartment. Sharp claws dug into his shoulders and yanked him backward. Sato spun, swinging with a fist. He made contact, thumping the creature’s face. With a horrible shriek, it let go and fell away, its thin, translucent wings flapping weakly.