“Yeah, I know. I’ve gotta have some way of making sure I stay your favorite.”
They reached a sudden rise in the slope that was steeper than before, which made Lisa feel even stronger that some kind of revelation waited on the other side.
She trotted ahead to pull even with her mom, who hadn’t slowed a bit. “We better be careful,” she whispered. “There might be something over this hill that we don’t want to see us.”
Her mom nodded. “You’ve got the caution of a Realitant. Maybe old George will make you one after we save Atticus and bring him home.”
“Maybe. Come on.”
Lisa dropped to her knees and started crawling up the steep rise. Her mom crawled right next to her, holding the Barrier Wand awkwardly on her shoulder.
“You want me to take a turn with that?” Lisa asked.
“No, thanks. I made this one, and I want to keep it nice and close right now.”
“When did you make it?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
They reached the top of the hill, where the land flattened for a couple of feet then dropped again, plummeting down another slope to the land beyond. When she saw what awaited them, Lisa forgot she was supposed to be careful, and she poked her head up, gawking so that anyone within miles could see her if they looked hard enough.
In the middle of a flat plain, there was a castle. Half of it had been destroyed, with stone and rock and wood collapsed in heaps around the edges of the destruction. Black figures crawled over the ruins like ants.
“What are those things?” Lisa whispered.
Her mom answered in a deadened voice. “Creatures of the Thirteenth Reality. Creatures of Mistress Jane. Just as Atticus described them.” She turned to Lisa, her face pale. “How did we end up here?”
Chapter 6
Poor Mr. Chu
Tick sat on a rock and stared at the ocean.
Though it wasn’t any normal ocean. The color of it changed about every three minutes, going from blackish-blue to red to orange, morphing in waves as though someone flew along the surface, spilling huge buckets of food coloring. Fish leaped out of the waters, but sometimes land animals did as well. Deer. Lions. Elephants.
The Nonex made no sense whatsoever. And things seemed to be growing even more unstable lately, sharp upticks in the madness. Like the thumping sound and earthquake attack of the day before. It was all a mixed soup for the senses, and it was beginning to make Tick want to hit somebody. Namely a grumpy, arrogant man named Reginald Chu.
Tick hated the man. Far more than he hated Mistress Jane, for whom he still felt an enormous amount of guilt—he’d scarred the woman for life, after all. And despite her evil ways, she’d shown moments where she doubted the path she’d chosen. If anything, Tick had driven her more toward the darkness.
But Chu was different. The man seemed crazy, and crazy wasn’t an excuse for being bad. Every single thing he said or did pointed to one thing for him—power. Dominating others. Ruling. Just the other night, the three of them had been sitting around a fire, talking about theories on how they could make it back to Reality Prime. The conversation hadn’t lasted ten minutes before Chu went off about how they needed to hurry, take some risks, because he might be losing his stranglehold on the Fourth Reality. With all the destruction and chaos happening, he feared someone else might be trying to take over what had once been his.
Tick had stared him in the eyes and told him to shut up. And Chu did. Which made Tick feel like king of the world, at least for a little while.
Jane and Chu were scared of him; Tick had no doubt about that. He’d shown them that he had more control of his powers over Reality and quantum physics—lifting firewood, igniting fires, making the sand leap into the air and swirl into shapes—than ever before. One time, as a joke, he levitated Chu, spinning him in a circle a few times. Even Jane had laughed, and when Chu came crashing back to the ground with a loud flump and a grunt, Tick had expected the man to be enraged. But instead, he simply stood up, brushed himself off, and told Tick he hoped the boy would come work for him some day, that a boy with such power was destined to do great things.
That was Chu, though. Always thinking about power. Always planning his next step to world domination. What a big, fat jerk. Tick didn’t like the feeling that such hatred gave him—like his insides were rotting—but he couldn’t help it.
There was the crack of a broken twig in the woods behind Tick. He turned to see Chu leaning out from behind a tree, staring at him.
“That’s kind of creepy,” Tick said. “Spying on a little boy like that.”
“Spying?” Chu replied. “What exactly am I spying on? You sitting like a frog on a log, staring at nothing? We’re wasting time. Jane agrees with me.”