Lisa saw him and broke apart from the vise of her dad’s arms. “Mom, Dad—this is Tick’s friend Sato.” She reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him closer for the introductions.
“I’m Edgar,” her dad said, taking Sato’s hand and shaking it vigorously. “I don’t know where we are or how we got here, but I’m honored to meet one of my son’s partners in crime.”
“Nice . . . nice to meet you,” Sato managed to mumble. Everything suddenly felt like a dream.
Tick’s mom pulled Sato into a long hug, then looked at him as she squeezed his shoulders. “I’m Lorena, and it’s an honor indeed. Atticus told us about your parents and what happened to them. I was so sorry to hear the news. Your mom and I were dear, dear friends for many years. But after I left the Realitants, I had no choice but to lose touch with her. It has been one of the biggest regrets of my life.”
Sato raised his eyebrows. “Why’d you have to do that? Why couldn’t you stay friends?”
Lorena looked at the ground for a second, a flash of fear on her face. But then she returned her gaze to him and her eyes were filled with resolve. “Because Jane said she’d kill me if I ever contacted a Realitant again. She was scared I’d tell them about the Thirteenth Reality before she was ready.”
Chapter 29
The Only Hope
Tick spent a long minute simply staring at the shifting faces of the glowing Haunce. Their eyes stared back, full of scrutiny and concern, waiting to hear his reaction to the pronouncement that Tick was the only one who could save the Realities from ripping apart and ceasing to exist forever. No pressure, right?
He decided to show how much he’d grown up in the last year or so. “Okay. I’m not gonna sit here and waste time. It’s hard for me to believe I could do anything to stop or reverse what Jane’s done. But you obviously know what you’re talking about—I mean, you’re a billion ghosts crammed into the space of a water heater. That’s a lot of brains. So what am I supposed to do?”
The Haunce laughed just as its face morphed into that of a young woman with dark eyes. The sound was like electronic music. When the face changed to an old man with a mustache, the Haunce began speaking again. “No brains here, Atticus. At least not physically. But our combined knowledge is here all the same, stored on countless imprints of soulikens. But there will be time for school lessons later. You are correct that we should not waste any more time. We must get to the heart of the matter, and quickly.”
Tick nodded, half-fascinated and half-terrified of what he was about to hear.
The Haunce continued, the faces forever shifting. “Atticus, we have been observing the Realities for many years—living them, breathing them, being them. We exist in the boundaries and seams that keep the Realities together and apart, united but separate, all things balanced as they should be. At times, we have intervened, but only in extreme cases of need. Never before has the need been so great as it is now.
“The seams are splitting. Dark matter is consuming them, triggering chain reactions of heightened entropy and introducing fragmentation on a level never seen. We believe there is only one way to stop it.”
“How does it involve me?” Tick asked.
The Haunce’s current face—a boy, maybe only ten years old—frowned at the interruption, then the expression smoothed away like rippling water. “As we said, we have been observing the Realities for countless centuries. And in all that time, there have been only two people with a concentration of soulikens and Chi’karda levels similar to ours. You are one of those people, Atticus. And Mistress Jane is the other. We do not yet understand how the two of you came to possess this power or why you both came to exist in the same period of time. But it will take your combined powers to reverse what has happened today.”
Tick had to bite his lip. He wanted to shout a million questions, refute the Haunce’s words. If saving the Realities depended on him and Jane—depended on their cooperation—then the battle was over before it had begun.
The glowing orb of the Haunce flexed, as if taking a deep breath. “We must rebind the seams of the Realities and restore stability to the inner workings of quantum physics. To do so, we will need to harness an unprecedented amount of Chi’karda. And to do that, we will need four components.”
The Haunce paused, and Tick felt the agony of each passing second.
“In all of the Realities of the Multiverse there is a place where the Chi’karda levels are exponentially higher than at any other place. So concentrated, in fact, it makes the Realitant headquarters in the Bermuda Triangle look like a spark of static compared to a lightning storm. You and Mistress Jane must join us there.”
“Is it the place in the desert?” Tick asked. “Where Jane had that black tree? The dark matter, the Blade of Shattered Hope?”
The Haunce—now showing the face of an older, homely woman—slowly shook its head. “No. Jane chose that spot because it best fit her needs for linking the different elements of the Blade. Because she had an Alterant of herself in the same place in all thirteen Realities, it was more a matter of the substance of the Blade than it was of Chi’karda.”
“Then where do we have to go?” Tick was saving the biggest and most obvious question for last: How in the world would they get Jane to cooperate with them?
“There’s a place in the Thirteenth Reality where . . .” The Haunce faltered. The face of an Indian woman, the red dot on her forehead looking almost black against the blue glow of her skin, wore a look of complete sadness. “It is a place of atrocities and horror. We are sorry; it is hard for us to talk about it.” Another long pause.
Tick didn’t know if he wanted to hear the answer. After millennia of observing the world and all the things humans had done—both good and bad—the Haunce was having difficulty talking about a place to which Tick had to go. The thought was terrifying.
The Haunce finally continued, the look of sadness now draped across the face of a young Asian man. “We do not know why evil things have always been drawn to this
particular spot in the Thirteenth Reality. There have been thousands upon thousands of deaths there—perhaps millions. The Chi’karda levels created by those tragedies is unsurpassed.”
Tick swallowed a big lump, then took a guess. “It’s where Jane’s castle is, isn’t it?”
The eyes of a little girl met Tick’s. “No. Not there. Somewhere much, much worse.”