She stood up, though Tick could barely see her. His vision blurred, dark specks swirling like a cloud of stinging gnats. He felt his life slipping away, a physical dwindling as if he were made of sand and it was slowly leaking out of a puncture in some outer skin. He thought of soulikens and how those small and permanent stamps of electric pulses and energy might be the very thing he felt seeping out of him into . . . wherever they went. His Alterants’ soulikens had come to him, according to the Haunce. Maybe now they would go to that odd, ghostly creature of eternity.

Jane was walking away, stabbing her Staff into the mud.

Tick hated her.

Life was running away from him. He closed his eyes, wondering if he would ever open them again. What he saw appear out of the patchy darkness was Kayla. And Lisa. His parents. Paul and Sofia and Sato. He saw them as if he looked at a TV screen.

The Chi’karda exploded within him.

No build-up this time. No slow burn that escalated like stoked flames. It was an absolute detonation of power. His whole body became a conflagration, a perfect and consuming inferno of force and might. He didn’t know he’d done it, but he was suddenly standing. A tornado of orange, fiery air swirled around him. He heard himself speak as if he were an outside observer.

“Jane, you’re not going anywhere.”

Chapter 59

Fists of Chi’karda

The fangen attacked Sato just as he landed on his twentieth compartment. Sharp claws dug into his shoulders and yanked him backward. Sato spun, swinging with a fist. He made contact, thumping the creature’s face. With a horrible shriek, it let go and fell away, its thin, translucent wings flapping weakly.

Sato knew there were more fangen, that this would be a tricky task indeed. He quickly stuck a nanolocator patch onto the tiny boy shivering on the stone then moved to jump to the next rectangular hole. He was in midflight when a fangen swooped in and grabbed him, pulling his body out to the middle of the chamber, its legs wrapped around him as it tried to bite his neck.

Sato clutched the top of the creature’s head by a tuft of diseased-looking hair and pushed its gaping mouth full of teeth away. Then he punched it, slipping around its body in that moment of weakness so he was on the thing’s back. They hovered over the abyss.

“Take me back to that hole!” Sato screamed in its ear, pointing to the place he’d been going. “Take me now, or I’ll snap your neck!” He wrapped his hands around the thin pole of the fangen’s neck and started squeezing.

The creature had to have some instinct to survive, some will to live. Making sounds like a strangled banshee, it flew toward the place indicated. Sato jumped off and into the inset compartment as soon as he was close enough. He pivoted and kicked out, connecting with the fangen’s stomach. It squawked and pulled back, choking and coughing.

Sato pulled out a patch and stuck it to the little girl next to him. He readied for the next one. Nothing about this was going to be very easy. He jumped.

Womp. Womp. Womp.

Surging throbs of Chi’karda sent waves of energy thumping away from Tick. He could feel its vibrations in the air, in the ground, in the forest behind him, shaking the deepest parts of the wood in the trees. His senses had heightened, almost unbearably so; the smells of mud and pine, the feel of the breeze, every sound amplified tenfold, the crisp clarity of his vision. It all felt wonderful and terrible at the same time.

Jane had stopped when he told her she wasn’t going anywhere, probably consumed by curiosity. And, Tick hoped, a little scared. She turned around to face him, standing about thirty yards away.

“You can’t handle that much Chi’karda,” she said; Tick heard each word as if she’d spoken it directly into his ear. “It’ll burn you to a crisp if you don’t let it go. Release it, Atticus. Or you’ll kill countless others along with . . .”

She faltered, her mask shifting downward just slightly, but enough to show she was looking at Tick’s stomach. His eyes fell to see what had caught her attention, and he almost cried out in shock.

The wooden hilt of the knife smoldered, slowly inching its way as if by magic out of his skin. The long blade followed, glowing a hot red. The whole area sizzled like a cooking steak, small wisps of smoke rising from the wound. The knife finally came all the way out and fell to the ground with a thump and another sizzle as it hit the wet mud. Tick watched in shock as the slice in his skin healed back together in a matter of seconds. He felt an intense burning where the wound had been, stronger even than the Chi’karda raging through his entire body.

His dad had once told him how he’d seemed to defy death several times as a kid. What it all meant, Tick didn’t know. Maybe his ability over Chi’karda went way further than he ever dreamed or hoped.

He looked back at Jane, quickly wiping the look of surprise from his face. “I’m getting control of it!” he shouted. “And you know I’m more powerful than you are! Give up. Now. Or I’ll blow you up along with everything else in the Factory.”

Jane’s fingers tightened around her Staff. “You’re an idiot child, Atticus. I wanted to kill you with subtle ease and avoid the destruction you might inflict if you let loose your chaotic abilities. But I’ll do it this way if I have to. I’ll never sleep in my bed again until I know the Realities are rid of Atticus Higginbottom. You’re about to die, boy. I hope you’ve enjoyed your short time alive.”

Tick’s anger built with every word she said, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He collected his power by thinking it, imagined what he wanted in his mind, like gathering a mental snowball with mental hands. The Chi’karda burned and roiled inside him, resisting as he compacted it tighter and tighter, compressing it into a dangerous and unstable sphere of pure energy. He saw the fiery orange cloud seeping back into his skin, like smoke in reverse.

Straining with the effort, he spoke through his trembling concentration. “I think I’ll keep living.” With a terrible scream, he threw his coiled power—all of it—at Jane.

A boom like a thousand strikes of lightning shook the world around him. Mud and dirt exploded from the ground in a straight path to Jane, as if it were a crowded minefield and every last mine went off at once. A visible wave of

orange-tinged air slammed against her body, throwing her twenty feet into the air. She flew backward until she landed far on the other side of the broken wooden fence, her Staff broken into several pieces.