Heaving deep breaths, Tick wiped away all of the enemies on his side then helped Jane destroy the last few on her side. They ran a few steps closer to the blue light.
A massive tree trunk, gray but looking solid enough to smash a truck, came hurtling out of the core, end over end. Tick dissolved it into wispy nothingness with a burst of Chi’karda. Next came a huge chunk of steel and concrete, the jagged and broken remains of an old skyscraper. Jane destroyed it. Cars came flying out. Busses. More trees. Homes, ripped from their foundations. Boats. Planes. Telephone poles.
Now yelling with each blast, Tick attacked the objects coming at him, annihilating them all. Nothing came within ten feet of him. Jane seemed just as strong, throwing her spurts of power out like grenades. Chaos reigned, noise battered the world around them.
Still the core continued to throw things at them, and on some level, Tick understood that the Fourth Dimension sucked things away from the Realities and transformed them into these projectile weapons. All of the matter they were fighting against had once been real and whole in a world somewhere.
He’d had enough. He couldn’t keep it up forever. Exhaustion was creeping in.
“Jane!” he yelled. “We need to rush the core! This has to stop!”
She answered by moving forward, still waving her arms as she directed her powers. Tick followed, taking step after slow step as he focused with all his might. One slip, and he’d have a crushed head.
Still enemies flew at them, relentless and unstopping. Huge rocks. Giant Dumpsters. More beasts and man-like creatures. Some monsters shot back with streams of lava flames.
Tick wiped them away with nothing but his thoughts, exploding Chi’karda out of himself. Jane did the same.
They made it to the blindingly bright core, its pulsing blueness as hot as the thrusters on an alien spaceship. Tick couldn’t look at it directly. He screamed as loud as he could and sent out one last detonation of pure Chi’karda, obliterating every single gray creature and monster within sight.
And then there was only the light and the roar of the core.
Jane quickly stepped next to him and grabbed the cube from his hands. For an instant, he wanted to rip it away from her, but he knew what she was doing. What she had to do.
“It’s the only way!” he yelled at her.
“The only way!” she shouted back. “Atticus Higginbottom! Don’t you dare forget your promise! Don’t you dare!”
She backed away from him until she was at the very edge of the core, the shaft rising above and below her to infinity, visible as if they stood on a plane of glass surrounding it. Then she turned and thrust the cube directly into the light.
A concussion of sound and power rocked the air, making Tick fall down. Jane’s robe burst into fire, and she screamed, an awful noise of things ripping and tearing. Tick had to shield his eyes. He could barely see what was happening, but he knew her entire body was being consumed. She kept screaming. Louder and louder. Then she suddenly turned back to him, her mask gone, her face a mess, her whole form burning. Where the cube had once been was now a spinning vortex of blue and gray and white lights.
“Now!” she shouted with a strangled, ruined voice.
Tick got to his feet and ran to her. He put his hands into the swirling lights. They immediately jumped out and began to spin all around him, growing brighter and thicker, encompassing every inch of his body. He barely had time to see Jane’s destroyed body fall backward into the core and disappear forever. Then he was consumed by light and energy and a million other things he didn’t quite understand.
Time stretched forward before him. He felt himself breaking apart, dissolving into molecules and atoms. There was a great rushing noise, and there was pain. He suddenly saw the entire universe before him, all at once. He saw the eyes of every person in every Reality, all at once. He saw fields and houses and forests and mountains and waterfalls. Oceans and deserts. But he had no eyes—his body had been ripped apart, thrown to the very edge of existence.
He and Reality—the fabric of Reality itself—were becoming one. The transformation lasted for infinity, yet was instantaneous. He was everything and nothing. Everywhere and nowhere. He was the space that filled the gaps, the barriers. He was matter and antimatter. He was Reality.
Tick had no idea how it worked. Not yet. But he knew that understanding would come soon.
A thought formed in his head. He pictured the core of the Void, the Fourth Dimension, the rips in Reality, and the link between them all. The chaos that reigned throughout all the worlds—even the countless ones that had yet to be discovered—filled him. His consciousness brought it all in, saw it all before him. The things that needed to be healed and the things that needed to be severed. Like the answer to a riddle popping into his mind, he knew how to heal and sever.
With powers no human had ever known before, Tick started fixing the wounded universe.
Chapter 70
An Absence of Sound