Before anyone could respond, a man burst through a wall of thick foliage fronting two large trees, hurtling himself forward until he lost his balance and fell onto the steep slope that led up to the road. As soon as the skinny, dark-haired man hit the ground, he scrambled to his hands and feet and started clawing his way toward them. With growing dread, Tick stared at the stranger’s tattered clothes and bloody splotches on his shirt.
Just a few feet away, the man finally reached the road and stood up, lifting his head enough to be seen clearly for the first time. Disheveled, dirty hair framed an olive-skinned face covered with terrible scratches and terror alive in his eyes.
Tick sucked in a huge gulp of air, half-relieved and half-shocked.
It was Mr. Chu, his science teacher.
Chapter
6
~
Intense Pain
Mr. Chu!” Tick yelled, running forward to help his favorite teacher, who looked ready to collapse. Sofia moved to assist, both of them grabbing an arm of Mr. Chu and lowering him to the shoulder of the road. The poor man crumpled into a ball, great heaves of breath making his chest rise and fall as his eyes darted between Tick, Sofia, and Paul. A leather satchel was slung over Mr. Chu’s shoulders with a thin strap, its bulky, sharp-angled contents clanking when it hit the ground.
“What happened?” Tick asked, fighting the panic he felt. What if he’s dying? Did someone out there attack him? He couldn’t help but look up at the trees, which suddenly seemed dark and ominous.
“Atticus . . .” Mr. Chu said with a dry rasp.
Tick knelt on one knee, lowering his head until he was close to Mr. Chu’s face. “What happened to you, Mr. Chu?”
“Atticus . . . I barely escaped . . .” A racking cough exploded from his lungs, shaking his entire body.
“Escaped?” Tick repeated. “From what?”
Sofia and Paul knelt right behind the teacher, both of them looking at Tick with wide, confused eyes. So far, a car had yet to pass by the woods, and Tick hoped one did soon so they could ask for help.
“From . . .” Mr. Chu whispered, starting to gain control of his breath. “From . . . a very bad man. Looks like me. Is me.”
Tick exchanged a puzzled look with his friends. He’d never seen his teacher like this, or heard him say such crazy things. He’d never seen anyone act like this. An idea hit him. “Do either one of you have a cell phone?”
Mr. Chu’s hand shot out and grabbed Tick’s shirt, pulling him closer with surprising force. “No!” he yelled, a sharpness narrowing his eyes with a clarity that hadn’t been there moments earlier. “Help me back into the woods—we need to hide.”
“Mr. Chu, I don’t—”
“Just help me!”
With a grunt and another dry, loud cough, Mr. Chu pushed himself back into a sitting position, then held up his hands. Tick and Paul lifted the miserable man to his feet and wrapped his arms around their shoulders. Then, half-carrying, half-dragging Mr. Chu, the three of them stumbled down the small slope and entered the woods, Sofia right behind.
They made their way past a few smaller trees and then rounded a massive, towering oak, finally finding a secluded patch of ivy-strewn forest floor with enough room for all of them to sit. Specks of sunlight littered the ground, the call of birds in the air far too cheerful for the situation. The smells of pine and earth and wood were strong—scents that Tick loved but for some reason made him uneasy at the moment.
They settled into a circle, facing each other. Mr. Chu appeared to be gaining his strength back with every passing minute, though his hands shook with apparent fear; a small drip of drool crawled down his chin. No one said a word, a silent understanding hanging in the air that Mr. Chu would tell them what was going on when he was good and ready.
“It was terrible,” he finally whispered, barely audible.
“What was?” Sofia asked. Tick cringed; it seemed like a really bad time for her usual impatience.
Mr. Chu continued to stare at the ground in front of him. “These men . . . with some kind of electricity weapon, kidnapped me and took me to a place that was like the barracks of a battleship—metallic and cold. They . . . did things to me. . . . Unspeakable things.” He quit talking.
“Who were they?” Tick asked. His mind couldn’t settle on any possible reason someone might want to take Mr. Chu, who was one of the nicest people Tick knew.
“It was . . . him.” Mr. Chu squeezed his eyes closed as if in pain.
“Him?” Paul asked. “Who’s him?”
“The other me. The bad me.”
Tick felt his breath catch in his throat. An Alterant Mr. Chu?
Tick looked at Sofia; she mouthed the word psycho. A storm of anger surged inside Tick. His face flushed hot, and for the first time since he’d known her, he wanted to scream in fury at Sofia. This was one of his favorite people she was talking about. He was just about to say something nasty when Mr. Chu unexpectedly shot up from the ground to his feet.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered, twisting and turning, searching the surrounding forest.
Tick stood, as did Paul and Sofia, the three of them looking for any sign of what had alarmed the teacher.
“Did you hear that?” Mr. Chu repeated.
“No,” Tick answered. “What was it?”
“Something’s out there. What was I thinking? What was I thinking!” Yelling the last word, Mr. Chu knelt down beside his leather satchel and opened it up, rummaging inside before pulling out three strange objects. “They followed me here. How could I be such an idiot?”
As Mr. Chu got back to his feet, Tick finally heard it. Coming from deeper in the woods, it sounded like hundreds of spinning circular saws, sharp and shrill, accompanied by the horrible crunching and breaking of trees, as if King Kong himself were trampling through the forest with the world’s largest electric razor buzzing at full speed.
“What the heck is that?” Paul asked, a look of alarm spreading across his face that Tick thought must surely mirror his own.
Sofia took a few steps toward the sound, rising onto her tiptoes and tilting her head as if that would help her hear better. “That doesn’t sound good,” she finally said.
Paul rolled his eyes and stomped his foot, clearly impatient to be away from this place. Tick felt a thick veil of creepiness hanging over him.
“They let me go; they let me go,” Mr. Chu murmured, handling the objects he’d pulled from his bag. Tick got a good look at them for the first time, but had no clue what they were. All he could see were a bunch of cloth straps and pieces of dull metal.
“They let me go. . . . They knew I’d come to you. I’m such an idiot! Atticus, I’m so sorry.”
Something was wrong about the whole situation, and Tick knew it wasn’t just the rush of ominous sounds that were growing louder by the second, filling the air with horrible screeches of metal and the splintering crack of wood. Nor was it just the overall strangeness of Mr. Chu’s sudden appearance. Something was wrong, out of place—but Tick couldn’t pinpoint it exactly.
“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” Paul said.
“Won’t do any good,” Mr. Chu replied, stepping close to Tick. He stretched out one of the things in his hands, two strips of cloth attached to a circular ring of metal in the middle. “Until we get these on you, they’ll follow you wherever you go, until you’re dead.”
Mr. Chu grabbed Tick’s right arm and started wrapping the cloth strips around his bicep. Tick was so stunned by the odd situation that he didn’t move or resist. In a matter of seconds, Mr. Chu had snapped the metal ring around Tick’s elbow, and wrapped the attached strips of cloth, like sticky gauze, in candy-cane fashion down the length of his entire arm.
“What . . . what are you doing? What is this thing?” A sick, uneasy feeling spread through Tick and he started to sweat.
“Yeah, what is that?” Sofia asked.
“You all have to put them on,” Mr. Chu answered.
But when he stepped
toward Sofia, she swiped his arms away and held up her fists. “You aren’t touching me, you crazy old man.”
The sounds—the spinning saws, the crunching and crashing of trees, a mechanical roar that sounded like something out of an old sci-fi movie—it was all coming very close, very fast. Though Tick couldn’t see anything yet, he could feel whatever was approaching, as if it were pushing the very air away as it rushed through the woods.
Mr. Chu tried again to wrap his gadget around Sofia’s arm, but she swatted him away, then actually swung a fist at his face, barely missing. “I said, stay away!” she screamed at him.
Mr. Chu turned toward Tick, his face intense. “Atticus, I’ve known you and your family for a long time. I taught your sister, I taught you. We’re friends, are we not?”
“Yeah.” Tick looked at Sofia, then Paul. His head swam in confusion. How could this be happening? Why did he feel so . . . wrong? Was this a dream?
“They’ll be here in seconds. If we put these devices on our arms, they won’t see us. Do you hear me?”
Tick didn’t say anything.
“Just wink us away again!” Paul said. “You can do it, Tick. Concentrate and wink us away. Forget this dude.”
“Give me a break,” Tick said. “I have no clue how I did that.”
“Just try,” Sofia said in a calm voice, as if she were trying to talk someone out of jumping off a skyscraper. Tick barely heard her over the mechanical chorus of horrible sounds.
“Atticus!” Mr. Chu yelled. “We have only seconds left! They . . . are going . . . to eat us . . . alive!” He pointed toward the sounds with every pause, his voice filled with fire.
“Just do it!” Tick finally said. “Sofia, just let him do it!”
“Tick, you expect me to trust this nut—”
“Just do it!”
Completely surprising Tick, she obeyed with a huff, sticking her arm out to Mr. Chu. He quickly wrapped the second device on her arm, just as he’d done with Tick. Nearby, a thunderous, ear-splitting crack of wood was followed by the sound of a tree crashing to the forest floor. The mechanical sounds whirred and buzzed, roaring like monstrous robots.
Mr. Chu worked feverishly, wrapping the third and final . . . whatever it was . . . on Paul’s right arm, who protested the entire time that this was crazy and stupid and that they should run.
“What about you?” Tick asked Mr. Chu.
His teacher pulled out a small, rectangular object from his pocket that looked like a TV remote control. He looked down at it as his finger searched for one of the many buttons scattered in rows across its front side. Then he looked up at Tick.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. He held up the small remote device and pushed the button.
In that instant, a pain like nothing Tick had ever experienced or thought possible lanced through his body from head to toe, and the world spun away, leaving him in darkness and agony.
Chapter
7
~
Master George’s
Interview Room
Sato was bored out of his mind.
The Big Meeting wasn’t for another couple of days, but Realitants had been arriving at the Grand Canyon Center from all over the world—well, worlds—since last week. And George made Sato sit with every last one of them, sometimes for hours, asking them questions, gathering information on their assigned areas, looking for clues on the strange happenings in the Realities. As if the long, tedious interviews weren’t enough, Sato then had to compile everything into very specifically outlined reports for George’s later analysis.
As Mothball would’ve said, it was driving Sato batty.
A lot had changed in the last few months—since the day in the Thirteenth Reality when everything he’d thought and felt for years had been turned upside down. The pain of losing his parents hadn’t faded—it never would—but the anger and drive for vengeance he’d fostered and groomed for so long had been . . . altered, forged into an entirely different sword. In many ways, Sato thought that was a bad thing, not a good thing. He felt more lost than ever, floating in a pool of confusion and misdirection. The sword wasn’t as sharp as it used to be.
Tick had done this to him. Tick had changed everything, forever.
And Sato didn’t know how he felt about that.
A knock at the door snapped him to attention; he realized he’d been staring at a small smudge on the wall to the right of his desk. At the moment, Sato felt for all the world like he and the dirty spot shared a lot in common.
Though he already knew the answer, Sato asked anyway. “Who is it?”
“It’s me—who else?” replied the muffled voice of Rutger. “Do you really have to keep the door closed? My poor knuckles are getting bruised from knocking every time.”
Yeah, right, Sato thought. You’ve got enough cushion on those hands to protect you from a sledgehammer. “Hold on.”
Sato quickly gathered his latest notes and reports and filed them away in his desk drawers. Though he’d acted the part of a trusting friend to Rutger for weeks, he still had his doubts about the short, fat man. Anyone can be a spy.
He stood up and walked over to the wooden door, slightly warped from a small leak that had crept through the tons of solid rock above them. He unlocked the door and yanked it open, jerking it harder than necessary.
Sato looked forward with a glazed expression, then left and right, as if searching for someone. Finally, he slowly lowered his gaze until he met Rutger’s eyes. “Oh, it’s you. Down there.”
“Very funny, very funny.” Rutger’s short, round body barely fit in the hallway. He took in a deep breath, inflating himself even larger than he’d been a second earlier. “At least it was funny the first hundred times. Come on. Our next visitor has arrived.”
Grumbling inside—no, screaming inside—Sato stepped into the hall, turned and closed the door, and then locked it. Without a word to Rutger, he walked toward the welcoming room at a brisk pace, knowing the poor little man could never keep up on his tiny legs.
When Rutger yelled, “Wait up!” from behind, the briefest hint of a smile flashed across Sato’s face before he swiped it away with his trademark scowl.
~
“Ah, Master Sato!” George said, his usual jovial self, when Sato entered the room. Even though it was August, large flames licked and spit at the air inside the stone fireplace, warming the room to an uncomfortable level. A couple of nice leather couches hugged the walls; an armchair was set at the perfect angle for someone to sit by the fire and read a book. But at the moment, the only other two people in the room were standing next to the small window that overlooked the canyon river far below.
George stood to the right of the window, dressed in his Tuesday Suit, which only varied from his Monday Suit in that it was a very dark blue instead of a very dark black. One of his hands was outstretched toward Sato, the other toward the stranger standing to the left of the window. “Sato, I would like you to meet a very dear friend of mine, Quinton Hallenhaffer.”
The man bowed his head in greeting, and Sato couldn’t believe the guy could take himself seriously. He wore a twisty turban on his head made up of no less than ten different colors, all of them bright and swirling in a whirlpool pattern so that it looked like Mr. Hallenhaffer had ribbons for hair and had been caught in a tornado. The rest of his clothes were no different—a loose robe with dozens of colors splashed about with no definite pattern, purple gloves, and red shoes that appeared to be made out of wood.
Sato gave a curt nod. “I’m ready for the debriefing.”
George’s face flushed redder than usual. “Er, yes, Sato—though I think we could show our guest a little more, er, courtesy . . .”
“Oh, it’s all right, George,” Quinton said, waving at the air as if to swat away gnats. He had a trilling, lilting voice, like he couldn’t decide whether to sing or talk. “The boy obviously means business, which is what we need in the new Realitants, don’t you think?”
“Yes, ind
eed,” George replied, giving the slightest frown of disapproval. “If Sato is anything, he is straight to the point.” George clapped his hands once. “Very well, then. I’ll leave you two alone. Quinton, please fill Sato in on any information you may have gathered since we last met. I have other things to attend to.”
After George left the room, Sato sat down on one of the couches, gesturing for Mr. Hallenhaffer to sit across from him on the other couch. Once settled, Sato asked the question he’d been asking first ever since the fourth such interview, when a common theme had become evident.
“Are people going insane in your Reality? Lots of people?”
~
Rutger was spouting off at the mouth before Mothball could say one word upon entering the kitchen. “I tell you, that boy is an insolent, inconsiderate, rude—”
“Calm yerself, little man,” Mothball muttered, grabbing the milk bottle from the fridge. “’Eard enough of yer gripin’ for one day, I ’ave. We all know he’s a bit rude, no need yappin’ off about it one second more.”
“A bit rude?” Rutger sat at the large table, munching on something that looked suspiciously like Mothball’s cheesecake leftovers from the night before. “A bit? That’s like saying you’re a bit tall.”
“Well, I am, now, ain’t I?” Mothball pulled out a chair and sat beside her oldest friend, pulling the plate away from him. “Pardon me, but I don’t quite remember givin’ ya the go ahead on eatin’ me hard-earned sweets.”
“Sorry,” Rutger said, head bowed in shame. “You know I get . . . kinda hungry sometimes.”
“Ya reckon so, do ya?” Mothball let out a laugh. “That there’s like saying Sato is a bit rude.”
“TouchŽ,” Rutger muttered.
A long pause followed. Mothball had enjoyed seeing her fellow Realitants come to the Center over the last few days—many of them she hadn’t seen in years—though the reunions were somewhat bittersweet. The reason for the gathering