“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.
As one, Tick and his friends stepped forward and followed her.
Chapter
19
~
The Black Tree