The Void of Mist and Thunder (The 13th Reality #4)
James Dashner
Acknowledgments
I can’t believe the series has come to an end. It’s been a long and sometimes tough journey, but I’m so proud of the story and thankful to the people who helped push it through to the finish. Particularly Chris Schoebinger and Lisa Mangum. Without them it absolutely never would have happened. Much appreciation to all my other friends at Shadow Mountain too.
As always, I’d like to thank my agent, Michael Bourret, for his tireless work.
Thanks to Liesa Abrams and all the good folks at Simon & Schuster for believing in the series enough to take it to a larger stage. Here’s to many more people discovering the adventures of Tick and the other Realitants.
Prologue
A Very Special Boy
It was all about the soulikens.
Master George sat in his study, the lights dimmed, Muffintops purring in a corner, the first light of dawn’s birth still an hour off. He stared at the wall as if the most fascinating thing in the Realities had been stapled there for him to see whenever he wished, but it was only a knot in the wood of his paneling. A knot that had two eyes and a mouth if you looked at it just right, and for some reason it reminded him of a boy named Atticus Higginbottom.
Atticus. Tick. The young man who changed everything.
The boy who’d disappeared from existence.
It was a shame. More than a shame. It was a downright tragedy. Master George had never ached in his heart so much for someone lost. Right when they’d finally begun to understand why the boy had such extraordinary powers, why he was able to harness and use Chi’karda as if he were himself a Barrier Wand—and a powerful Wand at that, even more so than Mistress Jane, who had a unique and tragic story of her own—he was gone.
But none of that really mattered anymore. It wasn’t the reason George missed Master Atticus so much. He missed him—ached for him—because the boy had become like a son to him. So innocent, yet brave. So genuine. Such a kid, but so grown up. Oh, how he missed that dear, dear boy.
He was a wonder.
Sato had completed the mission George had asked of him. He had visited each Reality and searched until he had found the same thing in each one: a grave for the Alterants of Atticus Higginbottom—the boy’s “twins” in the other twelve Realities. Never before had such an odd coincidence occurred, where only one version of a person remained throughout all the Realities. They’d never know if there was some deep cosmic reason behind it, or how it had happened.
But one thing was for certain: every one of those Alterants’ soulikens had traveled to and collected within the body of the one remaining Atticus who had lived in Reality Prime. It had changed his structure, his makeup, his quantum mechanics. He was full of Chi’karda, filled beyond measure with the powers that bound and controlled the universe. Filled beyond anything mankind could ever hope to recreate or dream about.
He was lost now, gone from existence.
There’d probably never be another quite like him, in far more ways than one.
George called for Muffintops. He needed to hug a friend.
Part 1
The Nonex
Chapter 1
A Gash in the Forest
The forest smelled of things dead, things rotting.
Jacob Gillian paid the stench no mind, walking his merry way along the narrow path that threaded through the tall oaks and pines like a dried-out stream. Of course, the reason he paid it no mind was because he’d lost his sense of smell thirty years ago in an unfortunate spice sniffing contest. His grandson, Chip, had to tell him that the place stunk like a three-week-old dead rat stuck under the pipes.
The two of them had been hiking side by side for well over an hour, knowing full well that something horrible had happened deep within the dark woods. Exactly what had happened was still a mystery, and the reason they were out there. Jacob had heard the awful sound of ripping and shredding and booming. Chip had smelled the nose-wrinkling stench. Those two things together spelled trouble, and by golly, the source behind it needed finding out.
Jacob and his grandson had moved into the boonies after Chip’s parents had been killed in a train collision near Louisville. Ever since then, they’d learned to live with little and less, loving the wild freedom and exhilaration of being smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. Their closest neighbor lived a good thirty miles down the poorly maintained state road, and the nearest town was forty miles in the other direction. But that’s just how Jacob liked it, and the life had seemed to grow on Chip as well.