The Void of Mist and Thunder (The 13th Reality #4) (34 page)

“We must get down there straightaway,” George called over his shoulder as he headed for the hallway. “After a quick detour to grab my Barrier Wand, as we may have to get ourselves far from this place.”

Sofia stopped, and everyone looked back at her. “You guys go. I need to head to the operations center. I can feel . . . it. I can
feel
the Karma. I think if I can study Gretel’s notes—the whole team’s notes from that time—I can figure things out.”

“I’ll help you,” Paul added immediately. He felt it too. Even as Reality broke up all around him, he felt a power like electricity trickling through his veins.

Master George looked proud, shockingly not offering one ounce of protest. “Rutger,” he commanded. “Take them there at once. Give them access to everything. The others—with me.”

Paul’s heart leaped as Sofia grabbed the notes from the floor. They followed Rutger, fighting to keep their balance the whole way there.

Chu’s face was pale with terror.

Tick didn’t understand it. He’d thought the man was brave and ruthless, but now he looked like a toddler who’d lost his mommy at the shopping mall. He swayed on his feet as the entire room shook and wobbled, his eyes darting this way and that in a steady flare of panic. Jane was close to him but seemed much calmer as she mildly took a step when needed to keep herself from falling to the floor again.

And then there was Tick. Strapped to the bed, unable to even touch the slightest bit of his Chi’karda. The madness of everything seeming to have lost its solid structure was made ten times worse by the sounds of moaning and wailing that flew through the air. That, and the fact that Tick couldn’t do anything, not even run.

“You’ve gotta let me go!” he yelled at Chu, hoping to take advantage of the man’s obvious terror. “Something really bad is happening, and I can probably help stop it! Take these stupid things off of my body!”

“He’s right,” Jane said.

She didn’t shout the words, and Tick barely heard them, but Chu looked at her as if she’d gone crazy.

“You can’t be serious!” the man yelled. “You’ve seen what he can do! He’ll escape before we can count to three! You know that we need this boy’s power for our plans! He has to be contained until we’re ready!”

“And
then
?” Tick asked. “You think at the very end I’m just going to agree to do whatever you want?”

The disturbing sounds of people in pain and dying and suffering swirled through the room, joined by the creaks and groans of the building that shook around them. Everything in sight was twisted and bent, moving in impossible ways. Nothing made sense.

Jane’s mask remained expressionless as she stood there, trying to keep her balance. She looked back and forth between Tick and Chu. Back and forth, as if pondering some monumental decision.

Tick kept his eyes on her, feeling so helpless he thought his chest might implode from the rage and panic trapped inside him.

“Reginald,” she finally said, her raspy voice somehow cutting through the cacophony of haunts that floated in the air. “We need to leave for a few minutes to talk privately. We’ll come back and get him when we’re ready for his contribution.”

Chu nodded absently, his eyes showing that his mind was lost in deep thought.

“What?” Tick yelled. “What are you talking about? This is crazy! You guys have to let me go!”

Jane held out a scarred hand to Chu, and he took it. Both of them were still fighting to maintain their balance amidst the quaking, but managing well enough. Hand in hand, swaying, they walked to the door of the room, opened it, then exited into the hallway. Chu swung it closed behind them.

Leaving Tick all alone.

Paul was shocked he hadn’t fallen down yet, or tripped over Rutger. The entire headquarters shook like a baby’s rattle, and Paul’s brain was feeling like the stuff on the inside of the rattle. He stumbled left and right as he tried his best to move forward at a sharp clip. The three of them reached the data center, where Rutger was king. The short man pushed his way past Paul and Sofia and entered the room first, turning on lights and flipping the switches on monitors and machines.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Rutger said, all business now that he could actually contribute again. “It’s always in the numbers. Always.”

He climbed up onto his specially-made raised chair and focused on the largest screen in the room, which was several feet wide and already filled with flashing data and colors. Sofia stood right behind him, Paul at her shoulder.

“O . . . kay . . .” Rutger said slowly, drawing out the word as he quickly scanned the data splattered across the monitor. Paul did the same, but he knew the other two would come up with something interesting before he did.

Right on cue, Rutger started in with his findings. “Chi’karda levels are extremely low in a three- to four-mile radius around the canyon headquarters, and the pocket appears to stretch along the river in both directions—probably in line with that blue streak of . . . whatever we saw in the air. There’s also some kind of reading for a substance that our sensors can’t identify. It has mass, and it’s everywhere. My goodness, it’s
everywhere.
But . . .”

He spun around in his chair and looked up at the others. “I’m not sure I can . . . I mean . . . it’ll take me some time, but . . .”

Paul knew the man was probably ashamed that he didn’t immediately know the explanation for the foreign force that permeated the air around the Grand Canyon. But Sofia latched on to the answer right away, excitement shining in her eyes.

“It’s Karma, Rutger. It has to be!”

Chapter 52

Down Below

Going down the elevator had been just about the scariest thing Mothball had ever done. The long ride to the bottom of the canyon floor had been riddled with sudden jolts and constant shaking, and even an unexpected drop of twenty feet or so that made everyone scream. Sally may have been the loudest, as shrill as the youngest girl on a roller coaster.

And those sounds. Like a crowd of people with the plague, waiting on death. She wanted the sounds to end, no matter what. Being in the tight confines of the elevator car made it that much worse, the noise amplified and echoing off the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Mothball had never felt such an instant rush of happiness as when they thumped onto the bottom and the doors of the lift slid open. Sunlight spilled in, though even the brightness of it looked somehow . . .
off,
like everything else. As if the light was too yellow, too disproportionate to the shadows it created.

Master George slipped through the opening as soon as the elevator doors opened wide enough, holding his Barrier Wand before him like it was a weapon. On the trip down, he’d done his best to examine the device and make adjustments to the dials and switches that ran along its one side. The button at the top—the one that would initiate the Chi’karda Drive and wink them to somewhere that was hopefully a lot safer—looked so enticing to Mothball that she almost reached out and pushed the ruddy thing herself.

They filed out of the elevator and stumbled their way along a narrow section of towering red and orange rock, finally emerging into the vast expanse of the canyon floor. Things looked just as wild there, but on a grander scale. The mighty cliffs that rose up from the rugged valley wobbled and bent and bubbled just as much as the walls inside the headquarters had, but the terror of the sight was magnified. If those cliffs cracked and crumbled, it’d be the end of the Realitants. And the end of the members of the Fifth Army, who bustled about the banks of the river, looking up at the one anomaly that outshone the rest.

The long rip in Reality ran the length of the valley, disappearing at both ends, and hovering in the air at least a hundred yards above the ground. It shone with a glowing blue light that pulsed every few seconds, its luminescence flashing more brilliantly before fading again.

And what Mothball and the others had seen from the balcony was still happening—odd-looking bodies were falling from the blue gash, but none of them had reached the canyon floor yet. About halfway down, they were whisked away—as if caught in a stiff wind or the gale of a hurricane—toward the cliff walls on both sides of the canyon. They perched by the hundreds on jutting rocks or held on to crevices in the stone with gangly arms and legs.

And they weren’t human.

Tick had finally closed his eyes, unable to take one more second of the troubling sights all around him as he lay helpless, strapped to the bed. But there was nothing he could do with his ears. Unable to use his hands to cover them, he had no choice but to listen to the awful wails and moans that streaked through the air and pounded his senses. It was as if he were in some experiment run by a madman to see how much he could scar a kid’s brain for life.

He tried his best to focus his mind on other things. On the odd exchange between Jane and Chu before they’d left him alone. She’d obviously been scheming inside that head of hers and had come to a big decision—something that obviously didn’t involve him yet. He hated to admit it, but he felt as if he had to place some hope in Jane, that she might turn back to those feelings she’d expressed before to him of wanting to do good. Tick didn’t see how it was possible to survive this mess unless she joined forces with him against Chu and all the weird things going on with Reality.

But the sick feeling in his stomach told him the chances of that happening seemed awfully slim. There’d been something sinister about the way she’d been looking back and forth between him and Chu right before they left. And the words she had said—and the way she’d said them—made it sound as if she was up to no good at all. Maybe she’d finally slipped past some threshold from which she’d never come back. Maybe Mistress Jane was finally evil through and through.

The door popped open to reveal Chu. His face was draped in shadow, but there was something about the way he stood in the midst of the shaking that told Tick that the man had moved past his panic attack and was back to business. His next words, shouted over the terrible sounds, removed all doubt.

“We’re putting you back in the Bagger, boy. Time to go for a little ride.”