Sofia elbowed Paul in the arm. “Way to go, smarty.”
“You, too, Godzilla,” he replied. “Your comment was worse than mine.”
Tick couldn’t remember a time when he’d been less in the mood to listen to his friends fight. “Guys! You think this is all some kind of stupid joke?” As soon as the words were out, he regretted them. Especially when he saw the look on their faces—shock, mixed with a little hurt.
“What crawled up your pants and started biting?” Paul asked.
“Tick’s right,” Sofia said, her eyes never leaving Tick’s. “His family’s been taken. I can’t imagine . . . what that must be like. We need to take things more seriously.”
She looked away, and Tick saw an expression he couldn’t quite identify come over her face. Regret? Longing? Whatever it was, it was something to do with her, not him. He thought about all her comments in the past, the subtle remarks here and there about her family—none of them very nice. Maybe she was wishing she had parents and siblings whom, if taken, she’d worry about as much as he was worried about his. The twisted thought added to his sadness.
“Well, we still have to be ourselves,” Paul said. “Tick, dude, sorry, but if we get all mopey, then we might as well just give up and die. You know I don’t think this is all a joke, man. Give me a break.”
Tick looked at him, surprised at the angry tone of his voice. Paul was always laid back, taking what came at him. Even his sparring words with Sofia were always filled with obvious jest.
Tick shook his head. “Okay, whatever. This is all stupid anyway. We’re sitting here in a soap opera while Jane’s planning something diabolical. What are we gonna do?”
Master George was still in the corner, but he turned around to face them. “We need to stay on our guard and look for the first opportunity that comes along. I’ve no idea what that may be, and I’ve no idea what we’ll do. But something will come along, and we must be ready.”
“What about Tick’s family?” Sofia asked.
Tick had been wondering the same thing, but reality hit him then. He didn’t know what it was—maybe it was the distressed look on Master George’s face, maybe it was something in what he’d said. Either way, Tick realized a heavy truth. This wasn’t just about him and his parents and his sisters. Jane was planning the single worst thing to ever happen to humans in the history of the universe. At least, that’s what it sounded like. Her plan involved destroying an entire world full of people.
Could he really put his family above that? If it really came down to choosing between them and dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives, what would he do? What should he do?
He wanted to scream. No one should have to make decisions like this, especially not a fourteen-year-old kid. In that instant, his hatred for Jane changed into something more powerful, more acute. Every single molecule in his body wanted her dead.
“Tick?” Paul asked. “What are you staring at?”
Tick realized his eyes were focused on a greasy, dark smear on the stone on the opposite wall. He shook his head, scrambling the thoughts in his mind. “Sorry. Just thinking.”
Master George walked back to him and the others. He held a hand out and squeezed Tick’s shoulder. “Master Atticus. I give you my word that I will do everything in my power to help save your family. I will give my life, if necessary. But in return, you must promise me that you’ll look at the bigger picture and do whatever it takes to stop Jane before she does something apocalyptic. I know her, my good man, and when she says she’ll destroy the Fifth Reality, she means it. She has no reason to boast with lies. We’re talking about billions of lives, Atticus. Billions.”
Tick couldn’t meet his gaze. He couldn’t promise himself or anyone else that he’d be able to make the right choice if it came down to that. All he could see in his mind were his parents, Lisa, and . . .
Kayla. Thinking of little Kayla just about shattered his heart.
Unable to do anything else, he nodded.
“Very well,” Master George said. “We can only take things step by—”
tingle
“—step.”
In the small blip of time between his last two words, everything changed. As Tick was looking at their leader and listening to him speak, he felt the familiar tingle shoot down the back of his neck. The room around them disappeared, replaced by red rock.
He noticed the others spin around, just as he did, to see where Jane had brought them with her strange winking powers. They were in the middle of a desert, towering spires of stone standing all around them, jutting up from a natural rock wall that more or less encircled them. Tick couldn’t see one plant, not one weed, or anything close to the color green or even brown. Everything was reddish-orange, jagged and rough, all sharp corners and cracks and crevices. Desolation.
The sun was behind a massive tower of stone, but the heat was suffocating. Tick already felt himself sweating.
“I don’t see any tombstones,” Paul muttered, and Tick couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or making a very good point.
“Realities help us,” Master George said. “If she can wink people to anywhere she wants so easily . . . Let’s hope a lot of poor saps were killed here at some point in history.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Sofia said.
Just then, Mistress Jane appeared in front of them. As always with winking, there was no puff of smoke, no flash of light or sound. One second she wasn’t there, and the next second she was, dressed in her usual yellow garb and her shiny red mask. Her face was pulled into a genuine smile. It gave Tick the creeps.
“Looks like I miscalculated a bit,” she said. “Guess I’m not perfect after all. We need to be on the other side of that.”
She pointed at the stone face to their right. The wall was maybe forty feet high, with several spires of rock stretching toward the sky from its top edge. Though it had a menacing feel to it, the slope didn’t seem too steep, and Tick thought they could probably climb it pretty easily.
“Follow me,” Jane said as she headed in that direction, lifting up the bottom folds of her robe as she walked and carefully avoiding chunks of rock strewn about the desert floor. “And remember, Atticus—don’t try anything.”
When neither Tick nor anyone else made a move, Jane stopped. Her body stiffened, and some kind of unspoken warning seemed to flow from her, back at them like a misty spray of poison. She didn’t need to say a word.