“Listen to me,” he said, his voice straining from the internal effort of holding back the Chi’karda burning within him. “If you kill my sister—”

“What?” Jane snapped, taking a step forward. “What, Atticus? What will you do?”

“Then I won’t care what happens anymore,” Tick said. “If you kill Kayla, I won’t care about anything. I’ll build up this Chi’karda until it’s a million times stronger than it was back at Chu’s mountain. I’ll build and build, and then I’ll let it all out. I’ll throw it all at you.”

Jane shook her head. “So selfish, so . . . weak. You can still save your other sister and your parents. And you can help me achieve great things in the Realities, if you’d just grow up and see things with a bigger perspective.”

Tick hated her. Oh, how he hated her. “Don’t say another word to me! Tell him not to kill my sister. Now!”

“No.”

She said it so simply, so nonchalantly. But Tick couldn’t back down—he had to reverse the threat here. The power burned and boiled inside his chest. “I’ll count to three. Stop Frazier, or I’ll throw it all at you. Every ounce of it. Even if it kills me.”

“No,” she said again.

The Chi’karda was starting to overpower him. He felt his hands begin to shake. He quickly stepped forward and gripped the back of a chair to steady himself. “One,” he said as calmly as he could.

Jane did nothing, just kept staring at him with a blank expression on her mask.

“Two,” Tick said. Fear filled him. He didn’t know if he had the courage to go through with his threat.

“Three,” Jane said for him.

Tick’s fingers tightened on the chair. He looked down to see that they’d actually sunk into the metal, warping it. He had to do this. He had to—

“Mistress Jane!” a man’s voice yelled.

Tick’s head snapped up to see Frazier run frantically around the computer tables, heading straight for them.

“Mistress!” the man shouted again. “Something’s wrong!” He pulled up, panting with deep breaths.

“Speak!” Jane yelled back at him.

Frazier held his hands up to his ears as if his head were about to explode. His eyes were lit with panic. “They’re all gone—all of them. Everything’s gone crazy with the earthquakes and lightning . . . but there’s no doubt. I can’t find them anywhere. None of them!”

“What are you saying?” Jane insisted.

Frazier turned to look at Tick. “His sisters. His parents. They’ve all disappeared.”

Chapter 24

Colored Marble Tiles

The scream had barely escaped Sato’s mouth before the excruciating pain vanished, gone in an instant. It didn’t fade or slowly feel better. One second he felt like his entire body was on fire, horrible burns eating away at his skin, the next second he was perfectly fine. He collapsed to the rock-hard ground anyway, the mental shock of the pain bad enough. The air around him was gray and dull, twilight’s last moments before full night.

On his back, he held up his hands even though he dreaded what he might see. Blood and red blisters at best. Black, charred flesh at worse. But instead, in the faint glow of the light around him, he saw smooth, healthy skin, not a blemish or a scrape or a bruise.

What had happened? He remembered the earthquake, then bolts of lightning striking everywhere, and people disappearing when struck. Then the world had lit up, exploded in fire, as if he himself had been . . .

Sucking in a gasp, he sat up, then scrambled to his feet. He turned in a slow circle, looking all around him. With each second, with each revolution, his eyes grew wider and wider. He saw no sign of the homes and trees and stone walls of the Fifth Reality. He’d been taken to another place. Even though the light was dim, he had no doubt of it.

He stood on a vast, flat ground made of a hard substance and checkered with large squares of differing colors. It seemed to stretch in every direction as far as he could see, with no breaks of any kind. He knelt down and felt the floor. It was cool to the touch. Marble, maybe. The light wasn’t strong enough for him to see if the floor had the familiar pattern of that stone.

He stood back up and looked above him. Though the marble floor beneath him would suggest that he was inside a building of some sort, no other evidence supported it. No roof hung above him—just blank, unblemished air. No stars, no clouds, no planes in the sky. The perimeter around him was just as gray and lifeless. The floor went on forever, with no walls or fences or trees. No mountains in the distance. No furniture.

That was all; a marble floor with countless squares of color, stretching to infinity in every direction and a lifeless sky that seemed the definition of nothing.

I’m dreaming, he thought. Or maybe he was dead. Though he’d never learned much about religion and the afterlife, he couldn’t help but think of the possibility that he’d died and was in some sort of waiting room for souls. Certainly no place like this existed in the real world, no matter which Reality.

He heard a humming sound behind him and turned quickly to check it out.

Twenty or thirty feet away, a figure lay crumpled on the floor. It was a girl with curly blonde hair, her clothes filthy and torn. She had black smudges on her bare skin. She looked to be about his same age. She twitched a little and let out a low groan.

“Hey!” Sato yelled, cringing when it came out so harshly. “Are you okay? Do you know where we are?”

The girl glanced at him when she heard his voice, her eyes filled with fear. “Hello?” she called back weakly.

Sato ran to her, sure he must be in a dream after all. He approached her and knelt on the ground, putting a hand out to touch her shoulder softly.

“You okay?” he asked again. “I don’t know how we got here.”

He looked around again, scanning their surroundings to see if anything had changed. Still nothing but colored marble tiles going forever and a sky of dead air. He returned his attention to the girl.

“My name’s Sato,” he said, hoping the girl would snap out of her daze and help him understand what was going on. She looked up, and he saw tears streaking down her cheeks.

“I’m Lisa,” she said, stifling a sob. “Have you seen my sister?”

At first, Tick felt the slightest hint of hope at Frazier’s words, but it didn’t last long. He remembered the horrible images of destruction on the screens, recognizing that the man had said his sisters and parents had vanished after mentioning earthquakes and lightning.