He stopped, and the entire room fell dead silent. Even Rutger had frozen with a piece of steak halfway to his mouth. Paul’s anger had vanished, replaced by pure shock. He’d never seen this before.
“I know I sound harsh,” George finally said in a much calmer voice, “but I feel as if our organization has slowly gone down the pits, so to say, since Jane embraced her evil ways and Lorena Higginbottom decided to leave our ranks. We used to be disciplined and strong and willing to sacrifice all for the greater good. But now I can’t even convince any of our members to leave their homes and come to help us. We’ve fallen apart, I swear it.”
The old man suddenly slumped down in his chair and buried his head in his hands. Paul half-expected him to sob, but he just sat there, perfectly quiet and still, for a long minute. Then he looked up, and his face was as determined as Paul had ever seen it.
“Never mind all that,” George said. “We have a job to do, and I expect us to do it. If I have to go it alone, I will. And if . . . when I defeat the Void of the Fourth Dimension, I’ll build the Realitants from the ground up. I stake my life on this promise to all of you.”
Paul blinked, not sure what to say.
“Ya won’t be alone s’long as my heart’s still tickin’, you won’t,” Mothball said. “I’ll be by your side to the bitter end, warts and all.”
“Me too,” Rutger added. Then he finally finished off his bite of juicy steak.
Sally wasn’t about to be upstaged. “Ya’ll ain’t havin’ all da fun, I can promise you that.”
“Paul and I—we’re in too.” Sofia said. She shot Paul a look that said he better shape up. But something in her eyes let him know that she understood his frustrations about George’s reaction to Tick leaving.
Paul groaned. “You guys know very well that I’m not quitting. But after all that Tick has done, I think it’s really lame to just snap your fingers and accuse him of being a traitor. It’s about the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It wasn’t a snap of my fingers,” George said sadly. “Master Atticus chose to go against my direct order. If my words were harsh, I apologize. But I don’t want someone by my side in the very last battle of these worlds who might turn his back on me.”
“Tick would never do that,” Paul said in a low growl. “You know it. He just went for a quick trip to check on his family.”
“Sorry to be the one to point this out,” Rutger said, “but he hasn’t come back yet, now has he?” His eyes darted around the room as though worried he’d said something wrong. “But no one likes the boy more than me. I hope you’ll be a little forgiving, Master George.”
The leader of the Realitants nodded slowly. “We will deal with him how we must, I assure you. However, I already have a very bad feeling that we may not see him for a while. A very bad feeling indeed.”
Tick’s heart lifted when he passed a clump of trees close to the road and saw the turn into his neighborhood come into view. He’d been lightly jogging and now picked up his pace to a full sprint, eager to run up the steps of his porch and rip the door open. He knew everyone would be there. Safe and sound and happy. He knew it. He was completely ignoring the small part of him that worried something horrible had happened. That they wouldn’t be there. Or worse.
This was why he had come. He needed to know for sure. Master George was probably ranting and raving by now, but he’d deal with that when he got back. Soon. He was just about to reach the street, less than thirty feet away, when he heard a loud noise from somewhere above him.
It was a bang, instant and piercing, like the clang of two giant iron pots. Times a thousand. Tick was so startled that he cried out and fell to the ground, rolling off the road and down the slight decline. He came to a stop in the dirt, on his back, looking up to search for what could have possibly been the source of such an awful sound. He saw a blur of flashing light and something silvery and long above him, accompanied by a great whooshing sound, like the thrust of rockets. Wind tore through the air and ripped at his clothes, sending dust and pebbles scattering down the slope.
Holding up his forearm to shield his eyes, his vision finally cleared enough to see the thing that had suddenly appeared in the sky over his head. It was a thick rectangle of silver metal, roughly the size and shape of a coffin. Its surface was smooth, without any seams, and the lights that flashed around it made no sense to Tick, as if they were being created by invisible protrusions from the flying object. Whatever it was, the push of air from the silver coffin was like a hurricane blast, growing stronger as it hovered in the air.
Then it slowly descended toward Tick.