The Blade of Shattered Hope (The 13th Reality #3) (15 page)

“Sorry, Sato,” Rutger said. “I didn’t mean it as an insult. The opposite, actually. I was impressed, and that made me curious as to what was behind it. I’ll shut up now.”

“That’d be perfect,” Sato said, trying to soften his words with a smile, trying to return to the good mood of his earlier determination to fight the Bugs and his excitement at spending the night in the Fifth Reality. “Seriously, I mean it, though. Tollaseat, I’m going to get permission from George to come back and help. Whatever I can do.”

Tollaseat bowed his head in a deep nod. “I’m quite honored, Master Sato. I’ll ask around town for ways you . . .”

He trailed off, slowly lowering his cup back to the small table next to his chair. He looked confused.

“What is it, dear?” Windasill asked.

“What?” He focused on her. “Oh, well, I just had a thought. People will see that Sato here is a dead ringer for our deceased leader. Don’t know how we can get around that.”

“Makes a good point, he does,” Mothball said. “Sato, not sure we can be doin’ that. Quite risky. Might make folks talk and wonder.”

Sato couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that very problem. How would that work to have someone come along who was the Alterant of your dead leader? He felt a pit of disappointment open up in his stomach.

“No matter,” Tollaseat said, waving his hand in the air. “Think on it, no rush. Things have been quite cool of late, not too many problems with the ruddy Bugs. Mayhaps when you get a bit older, look a bit different, when it’s . . . less obvious you’re not from these parts and couldn’t be him.”

Rutger suddenly chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Mothball asked.

Rutger shrugged. “Could be quite a sight. Those clowns seeing their victim come back from the dead. Maybe they’d—”

A loud, horrible crash and the crunch of shattered glass cut him off. Sato jumped up, looking over in time to see hundreds of shards from the big window that overlooked the front yard blow inward, the glass bouncing and clinking off furniture as it fell to the floor.

Mothball’s mom yelped; Tollaseat called out something, but Sato couldn’t tell what he’d said. Rutger, who had been the closest to the window, seemed too shocked to move. Pieces of glass glittered in his hair and on his shoulders.

Everyone stared at the empty window as if waiting for someone to jump up and explain what had happened. In the silence, Sato heard the distant sounds of glass breaking in other parts of the house. Then, from outside, came a low, repeating pulse of noise, some kind of deep buzz or static, surging in short waves. He almost
felt
it more than heard it with his ears.

“What’s going on?” Sato asked. “What is that noise?”

“No ruddy idea,” Mothball answered.

The sound grew and intensified, making Sato’s head hurt. “What shou—”

He fell to the floor as the whole house started to shake and tremble.

~

Tick sat still, transfixed by the humming, throbbing black tree. Its waves of energy were almost visible to some sixth sense he didn’t quite understand. Since the noise had started, none of his friends had said a word, and Tick was sure they were as mesmerized and scared as he was.

The man Jane had called Frazier Gunn was walking from screen to screen, flicking the thin metal bar of each spinner that was attached to the exact center. He moved on without even waiting to make sure the spinner worked. As if by magic, and certainly by a technology Tick didn’t understand, the metal rods spun faster and faster, despite the seeming lack of any motor.

A shimmering silver disk, maybe four inches wide, appeared. Once the spinner hit full speed, a much larger, red-tinted projection shot out, creating a wide, hazy circle that covered most of the screen behind it. Only the white corners of the squares were visible. Tick knew that soon those red circles would turn into video feeds, as clear in quality as any movie he’d ever seen.

Just as Frazier flicked the last spinner, Mistress Jane came over to Tick and the others, seemingly done with whatever she’d been doing to make the menacing black tree hum as it did. She stopped a few feet in front of their line of chairs, her red mask looking somewhat weary. She stared directly at Tick.

“I’m going to explain everything to you,” she said, her voice tight. Strained. “And this isn’t some example of the bad guys telling the good guys the whole
diabolical
plan just in time for them to escape and save the day. No, I
want
you to know. Every last detail. Once you do, and once you witness the extent of my power, I’ll set you free so you can tell the other Realitants and spread the word throughout each world. Everyone must know what I’m capable of, and the reasons why it must happen.”

She paused, and the eyes of her mask, dark and deep, never wavered from Tick. “Correction. I’m going to set
most
of you free to spread the word. Atticus stays with me.”

Tick stood up, not sure where the courage came from. “What? Why? You promised you’d let me and my family go if I didn’t try to stop you.”

Jane’s scarred hand shot out from beneath the folds of her robe, her palm outward. At the same instant, Tick flew backward, hit by an unseen force that thumped him in the chest. He fell into his chair and toppled over, banging his head against the dusty, hard ground. Shaking it off, he scrambled to his feet and picked up his chair. Glaring at Jane, he took a seat, hating himself for being such a wimp. Not an ounce of Chi’karda flickered inside him.

Jane’s mask was a sneer. “I never made any such promise of letting
you
free, Atticus. Only your family. Now stay silent, or I’ll get rid of one of your sisters.”

Tick gripped the sides of his chair to stop his hands from shaking. He had to do something. This wasn’t right, letting this woman treat them this way. He had to do something!

Jane continued with her speech as if nothing had happened. “What you’ll be witnessing today is the first fully functional use of the most mysterious substance in the universe. Most scientists throughout the Realities don’t even know what it
is,
much less how to use it.”

“What are you talking about?” Master George said.

Jane didn’t take her eyes off Tick, answering her former boss without so much as the courtesy of a glance. “George, as usual, you speak to me with your condescending, I-know-more-than-you-do arrogance. Now shut up.”

Tick looked over at Master George, shocked at how childishly rude Jane’s command had been. The old man glowered, his face redder than ever, his lips quivering despite being pressed together so hard they were almost white. But he didn’t say anything.

“The Blade Tree before you,” Jane continued, her expression still angry, “is made from the substance I was trying to tell you about before being so rudely interrupted. No tool of modern science could’ve accomplished such a thing as creating this object, I assure you. It took my ever-growing skills—fostered from my connection with the Thirteenth Reality—along with the additional powers granted to me by being unified with Chu’s Dark Infinity, and an understanding of physics only my innate brilliance combined with a lifetime of study could accomplish.”

She leaned closer to Tick. “Think on this, Atticus. As great as my gifts over Chi’karda have become, I could not have done this without the catalyst and boosting power of Chu’s failed mechanism. In many ways, you are my partner. Think on that as you see what’s about to happen.”

She knelt down before him, reached out her disgusting right hand, and placed it on Tick’s knee. Even through his jeans, he could feel the roughness of her palm, the tiny pricks of metal jutting out from her skin. Though every instinct told him to get up, scream, and run as far away as possible, he refused to cower away from her.

Jane’s mask melted and flowed into an evil grin.

“Yes, Atticus,” she said in a mockingly gentle voice. “Think on what you did to me as you watch billions of people in the Fifth Reality die.”

Tick had hoped deep down that she hadn’t meant it when she’d said her plan was to destroy an entire planet. But the demented tone of her next statement erased all doubt—and hope.

“Billions, Atticus. Billions.”

~

The constant, terrible, pulsing waves of sound increased in volume, rattling Sato’s skull as the earthquake’s intensity slowly escalated.

He crawled toward Windasill, unable to get back to his feet. The house shook like a ship at sea, thrown about by massive waves and wind. Things crashed all around them: lamps, dishes, picture frames, decorative trinkets of glass. Their remains littered the floor, sharp and vicious. Sato picked through the wreckage, ignoring the pricks of pain, the feel of moistness on his palms. He refused to look down, hoping it was sweat, not blood.

He’d seen Windasill fall but hadn’t heard a peep from her since. With no idea where Mothball, Rutger, and Tollaseat had gone off to, Sato could only think to try to help where he could. Windasill.

He rounded an overturned cabinet, the large wooden drawers spilling out. Windasill was on the floor, lying on her side, a trickle of blood running from her mouth. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell with deep breaths.

“Windasill!” he yelled. When she didn’t respond, he lurched forward. He felt like he was trying to move with three extra arms and legs. Thumping to the floor next to her, he smashed his nose against the ground. Somehow, despite the world shaking all around him, he got his arms around her and lifted her head into his lap as he sat up.

“Windasill!” he shouted again.

A moan escaped her, and her eyes flickered open. “What’s happening?” she whispered.

Sato wouldn’t have understood if he hadn’t been able to see her lips mouth the words. “I don’t know!” he shouted back. “I—”

“Sato!”

Mothball’s voice. He turned his head to see her and Rutger at the front door, the two of them clutching the doorframe as their bodies swayed back and forth, constantly bumping into each other. He could see past them to the trees whipping in the wind. The sky was dark, only a few stars barely bright enough to flicker.

How had he gotten here? He thought he’d been moving toward the kitchen, toward the back of the house. “Where’s your dad?” he yelled, completely disoriented.

“Out in the yard! Come on!” Mothball let go of the doorframe and stumbled toward him, her tall body losing the balance battle as she toppled to the floor, almost on top of her mom. She quickly got her hands and feet under her and began helping him with Windasill.

Like three drunken sailors, they got up, shuffled to the door, glass crunching under their feet with every heavy step. Rutger did what he could, reaching out and holding onto clothes, pulling, pushing. Soon they were all outside, where at least the danger of a house falling down on top of them was eliminated.

Sato drew in ragged breaths, his chest heaving as he released Windasill into Mothball’s care. He spread his feet in the grass of the front yard, putting his hands on his knees to keep his balance as best he could. The earthquake rumbled on, distant sounds of destruction wafting through the night: crunching wood and breaking glass, alarms blaring and people screaming.

Sato couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The trees seemed to be jumping up and down. The yard looked like a bed of thin grass growing on a lake, rippling in waves that made him queasy. The road and driveway did the same, cracking and crumpling.

Through it all, suffusing it all, was that sound, thrumming and humming and buzzing, like horns and bees and gongs amplified a thousand fold. Sato’s head felt split in two, pain lancing into his eyeballs. He’d lived in Japan most of his life and endured a dozen or so earthquakes. But nothing like this. Not even close.

All he could think was that the world was coming to an end.

~

“Dark Matter,” Jane said after letting her statement about killing billions of people sink in. She was acting as though she’d merely announced she was having layoffs at the fangen factory. Tick realized he was more scared of Jane’s insanity than he was of her powers over Chi’karda.

“What do you mean,
dark matter?
” Master George asked. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe your fancy tree statue is made of dark matter. Impossible. Utterly impossible, and you’ve now proven yourself quite mad. As if we needed any further proof on the matter.”

“Dark matter,” Jane repeated, as if she hadn’t heard Master George. “It makes up more than seventy percent of the universe and yet, until recently, no one could determine its nature. I’ll spare you hours of lecture and say this—by combining the powers of Chi’karda with the non-baryonic dark energy, I can eliminate the electromagnetic forces holding the Fifth Reality together. I can ignite extreme entropy. In other words, I can dissolve it into floating atomic gunk.”

Tick knew a little about dark matter, mostly from a couple of books he’d read. But they had been science fiction stories that didn’t really explain what it
was
exactly, just made up some cool uses for it. Destructive uses. Cataclysmic destruction. If Jane was serious about what she could do with it . . .

“The connections between my dark matter components are already strengthening, channeling through the hub of the black tree, magnified by my Alterants, each one of whom is set up in her own Reality, in these same coordinates. The soulikens are strong in these Alterants of mine, just as I knew they would be. Our genetic makeup is almost perfectly compatible. Any one of them could have done what I have done in the Thirteenth, if only they’d been given the opportunity.”

Her voice grew quiet. “The Chi’karda is flowing, my friends, flowing on a scale I doubt you could scarcely comprehend. Soon the dark matter will be linked, and the Blade will do its slicing.”

Dark matter. Alterants. Soulikens. Chi’karda. Blade.
Jane’s words bounced around inside Tick’s mind, trying to sort themselves into something that made sense. But it wasn’t working. He felt completely confused and out of his league. Jane was up to something monstrous.