The Blade of Shattered Hope

Could he really put his family above that? If it really came down to choosing between them and dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives, what would he do? What should he do?

He wanted to scream. No one should have to make decisions like this, especially not a fourteen-year-old kid. In that instant, his hatred for Jane changed into something more powerful, more acute. Every single molecule in his body wanted her dead.

“Tick?” Paul asked. “What are you staring at?”

Tick realized his eyes were focused on a greasy, dark smear on the stone on the opposite wall. He shook his head, scrambling the thoughts in his mind. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

Master George walked back to him and the others. He held a hand out and squeezed Tick’s shoulder. “Master Atticus. I give you my word that I will do everything in my power to help save your family. I will give my life, if necessary. But in return, you must promise me that you’ll look at the bigger picture and do whatever it takes to stop Jane before she does something apocalyptic. I know her, my good man, and when she says she’ll destroy the Fifth Reality, she means it. She has no reason to boast with lies. We’re talking about billions of lives, Atticus. Billions.”

Tick couldn’t meet his gaze. He couldn’t promise himself or anyone else that he’d be able to make the right choice if it came down to that. All he could see in his mind were his parents, Lisa, and . . .

Kayla. Thinking of little Kayla just about shattered his heart.

Unable to do anything else, he nodded.

“Very well,” Master George said. “We can only take things step by—”

tingle

“—step.”

In the small blip of time between his last two words, everything changed. As Tick was looking at their leader and listening to him speak, he felt the familiar tingle shoot down the back of his neck. The room around them disappeared, replaced by red rock.

He noticed the others spin around, just as he did, to see where Jane had brought them with her strange winking powers. They were in the middle of a desert, towering spires of stone standing all around them, jutting up from a natural rock wall that more or less encircled them. Tick couldn’t see one plant, not one weed, or anything close to the color green or even brown. Everything was reddish-orange, jagged and rough, all sharp corners and cracks and crevices. Desolation.

The sun was behind a massive tower of stone, but the heat was suffocating. Tick already felt himself sweating.

“I don’t see any tombstones,” Paul muttered, and Tick couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or making a very good point.

“Realities help us,” Master George said. “If she can wink people to anywhere she wants so easily . . . Let’s hope a lot of poor saps were killed here at some point in history.”

“That’s a cheerful thought,” Sofia said.

Just then, Mistress Jane appeared in front of them. As always with winking, there was no puff of smoke, no flash of light or sound. One second she wasn’t there, and the next second she was, dressed in her usual yellow garb and her shiny red mask. Her face was pulled into a genuine smile. It gave Tick the creeps.

“Looks like I miscalculated a bit,” she said. “Guess I’m not perfect after all. We need to be on the other side of that.”

She pointed at the stone face to their right. The wall was maybe forty feet high, with several spires of rock stretching toward the sky from its top edge. Though it had a menacing feel to it, the slope didn’t seem too steep, and Tick thought they could probably climb it pretty easily.

“Follow me,” Jane said as she headed in that direction, lifting up the bottom folds of her robe as she walked and carefully avoiding chunks of rock strewn about the desert floor. “And remember, Atticus—don’t try anything.”

When neither Tick nor anyone else made a move, Jane stopped. Her body stiffened, and some kind of unspoken warning seemed to flow from her, back at them like a misty spray of poison. She didn’t need to say a word.

As one, Tick and his friends stepped forward and followed her.

Chapter 19

The Black Tree

The heat was stifling, an invisible fire that suffused the air of the world, filling Tick’s lungs with every breath he took. Once they reached the slope of the red wall, he realized it was much steeper than it had originally looked. Amazed at how easily Jane scooted up its face, he determined to do just as well.

Grabbing rocks that blistered with heat and finding footholds aplenty in the cracked and creviced stone, he found climbing wasn’t so bad. About halfway up the wall, he looked down to see Paul and Sofia right below him. Master George was struggling a little, mainly because he was trying to keep his suit from getting dirty, but the darker patches of sweat under his arms revealed that his suit would need a good wash anyway—though Tick doubted they’d be seeing a Laundromat on the other side of this wall.

What am I thinking about? Tick asked himself as he continued to climb. Laundry? Sweaty armpits? He needed to stay focused.

Jane reached the top ridge above him and disappeared from sight, kicking a trickle of rocks down the slope with her last steps. Tick squeezed his eyes shut until the rocks passed; a couple of pebbles nicked his forehead. He pulled himself up the last few feet and stood on the top edge of the wall, taking in the sight before him. Sofia thumped the back of his leg.

“Scoot over, Tick,” she said. “Give us some room here.”

Tick stepped forward, too focused on the strange setting below him to respond to Sofia. The ground slowly sloped from where he stood, leading to a wide depression surrounded by squat, scraggly trees that barely clung to life, their sparse leaves more brown than green. Scattered across the dusty ground of the natural bowl formation were several groups of people, each group focusing and working on various stations that couldn’t possibly have looked more out of place.

Computers and monitors covered tables scattered around the ground. Other platforms held large, silver machines he’d never seen before, each one loaded with odd appendages and dials and switches. Several viewing screens had been set up, tall and square and white, perched precariously on metal stands. Tick feared the slightest wind would topple them over. In the middle of each screen, Tick saw something he recognized: a small metal rod attached with a suction cup.

Spinners. Devices from the Fourth Reality, spinners used some kind of laser technology to project pictures and video. Jane had said she wanted them to witness something, but Tick hadn’t thought they’d be watching it like that.