The Blade of Shattered Hope

“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.

Mistress Jane finally looked away from Tick, taking in each of his friends one by one with her mad gaze. Then she settled back on him. “I don’t expect you to comprehend the workings of the Blade of Shattered Hope. Just know this, and know it well so you can spread the word: the Blade is a series of dark matter components, linked by my Alterants to create the greatest flow of Chi’karda since the beginning of time and space. And when I tap into that power and give the order to sever the Fifth Reality, the dark matter will consume the Fifth like a black hole. The Fifth will cease to exist—along with every man, woman, child, beast, insect, and plant living there. That is what you are about to witness.”

Tick couldn’t hold back anymore. “How can you do something like this? You’re always spewing this garbage about wanting to do good, but now you suddenly think it’s okay to kill billions of people?”

“Yes, Atticus, you’re absolutely correct.”

She turned and motioned to the closest screen, where moving images had now appeared in the spinner’s projected circle. A woman sat huddled on another odd black sculpture—this one had a solid top and bottom connected by dozens of curved, twisty rods. The lady was dirty and appeared to be terrified and hungry, but Tick could tell she was an Alterant of Jane. He remembered his time with the “real” Jane at Chu’s mountainous palace. This lady had the same black hair, the same eyes, the same face.

Tick looked at the other screens and saw similar video feeds. More Alterants, more black sculptures. Each woman had her own unique attributes, but there was enough there to see that all of them were Jane’s inter-Reality twins. In one of the video feeds, the image shook, as if the person holding the camera was doing some kind of jig. The Alterant was screaming uncontrollably, trying to free herself from the chains binding her to the dark black object below her. Then the other video feeds started to shake as well, one by one, worsening every time Tick looked at a new screen.