“Ready yourselves!” Mothball roared.
Sally stood a few people down from Sofia. He lifted his left hand into the air and shouted something completely unintelligible. But he looked ready to fight.
A small tremor abruptly shook the ground, making Sofia stumble backward a step. The Realitants looked around in confusion, Mothball in particular. Sofia looked up at the black mountain. It shook as well; in the distance, she heard the sounds of breaking glass and twisting metal.
“Need be keepin’ our focus!” Mothball shouted. “Master Tick must be goin’ about ’is business. On the count of three—we charge! One!”
Sofia nudged Paul in the arm with her elbow. “For Tick and Sato,” she said, not caring if her voice betrayed how scared she felt.
“Two!”
Paul nodded without breaking his focused stare. “For Tick and Sato.”
“Three!”
Sofia sprinted forward before anyone else, her body acting before her mind could talk her out of it. Pumping her fist in the air, she screamed out one word, louder than she’d ever shouted anything in her life, almost ripping her throat raw.
“REEEEAAAAALITAAAAAANTS!”
The thunder of footsteps and echoing calls of her rallying cry sounded from behind her.
Sofia ran straight for the closing pack of metaspides.
The world shook.
Tick felt as if his mind was detached from his body. He rotated in a circle, staring at the huge open chamber he’d run into. He saw a vast open space with an artificial sky above him, complete with stars and a moon. Half-completed machines and menacing structures covered the hundreds of square yards of floor space. Workers hung on for dear life as scaffolding fell apart beneath them. Large holograms of floor plans and complicated designs hung throughout the chamber like see-through kites, countless lifts constantly moving between them, hovering and flying as if by magic.
Tick saw it all, but still felt his mind slipping away from him, out of control, on the edge of insanity. He staggered back and forth, the ground shaking and cracking.
To his right stood a huge tower made of gold that rose at least ten stories into the air. Near the top, partially obscured by a metal-grid catwalk, two words were stamped into the shiny metal.
Dark Infinity.
At the bottom of the tower, a panel of gold slid to the side, revealing a bright interior. A man appeared, then ran straight for Tick.
Don’t come near me, Tick thought. Stay away!
But then he saw it was Chu, and the anger and fear that had subsided flared anew.
“How!” Chu screamed, still running for Tick. “How could you possibly have done this?”
His words were distant, as if spoken through a wall. Splitting pain hammered in Tick’s skull. He squeezed his hands into fists to stop them from trembling. Pressure mounted in his chest and it became difficult to breathe. He could feel heat scorching him from the inside out.
He felt that strange separation from his body. He knew he was losing control, completely—but he couldn’t do anything to stop it. The chamber shook, the tremors increasing in magnitude. He stared at Chu and Dark Infinity and from the corner of his eye he saw things falling. Metallic crashes filled the air.
Chu stopped, his eyes darting around the complex. “How . . . what . . . stop this! Stop this right now!”
Tick could barely hear him. As if reaching through a bucket of mud, he grasped for and found a tiny glimmer of sanity in his mind. He’d been sent here for a purpose—to destroy Chu’s plague. He held on to that one thought, forced his hand to steady, and reached inside the leather satchel at his side for the silvery cylinder that held the antidote to Dark Infinity. All he found was something hard and jagged, dusty and rough. Confused, he pulled it out and held it up to his eyes, squinting to see it through the blur of the chaos swimming around him.
It was a big rock. Frantic, he dug in the satchel again. Nothing. The bag was empty.
The antidote was gone.
Sofia did as she’d been instructed and threw a Rager toward the army of metaspides, never stopping her sprint. The little ball hit the ground and spun forward, ripping along with increasing speed as the static electricity erupted from it, gathering massive amounts of grass and dirt and rock. The weapon quickly grew into an earth-made bomb, a gigantic bowling ball of nature ready to destroy something. Sofia watched with elation as it crashed into the front line of the spidery robots and smashed a dozen of them into metallic shards.
To her left and right, other Ragers hit the metaspides, wiping out the first wave of their enemy. As soon as the dust settled, Sofia started firing her Shurric, pushing the trigger repeatedly as she swept the nozzle back and forth, pointing it at anything shiny and silver. With each shot, a muted clap of thunder shook the air, rolling forward in an invisible tidal wave until it slammed into its target. Metaspides flew through the air as if ropes yanked them backward, dozens of them catapulting toward the black mountain as more and more shots thumped from the Realitants.
Sofia kept running, reaching into her bag and grabbing another Rager. She spotted a thick cluster of robots and threw it in that direction, then ran after it. As soon as the massive ball of dirt and rock smashed another line of metaspides, she went in, firing.
She was almost starting to have fun.
Despite the whole world shaking around them, Chu laughed—a bitter, empty chortle. The man reached into his pocket and pulled out the silvery cylinder containing the antidote. He held it up above his head.
“Looking for this?” he shouted. “How many times are you people going to mistake me for an idiot?”
Tick ignored him, focusing his eyes on the shiny object, his heart sinking. If only he—
The antidote suddenly shot out of Chu’s hand and flew through the air, turning end over end before it slammed into Tick’s palm and stuck there, even before he closed his fingers around it. His breath caught in his throat as he stared at his hand in disbelief.
Chu couldn’t hide the shock on his face, his eyes wide, his lower lip quivering. “How is this possible?” he whispered, too low to hear but his lips making the words obvious to Tick. The man’s eyes shifted from the antidote to Tick’s face.
“Listen to me!” Chu yelled, holding his hands palm out as if approaching someone about to jump from a bridge. “You don’t understand! Dark Infinity is a giant Barrier Wand. It’s powerful enough to control and shape the Realities. It’s the greatest achievement in history! All I need is your help—and we can use it for good. You have to trust me. Give me a chance. Stop this madness!”
Tick stumbled about as the earthquake got worse, things crashing everywhere, the massive golden cylinder of Dark Infinity pitching dangerously from side to side. The black specks returned, swimming in front of Tick’s eyes, but this time mixed with flashing colors, blinding lights. He felt as if his heart was a furnace, burning him from within.
“Atticus!” A female voice, barely audible, came from his right. “Atticus, you have to stop! You don’t understand what you’re doing!”
Jane. It was Mistress Jane. But he couldn’t see her. The chamber shook and spun.
Tick screamed and threw the silver antidote in the general direction of Dark Infinity, the cylinder blurry and bouncing in his vision. He heard an ear-splitting crack, then the bubbling sound of sizzling acid eating at metal. His vision darkened until he could barely see. He fell to his knees, screaming, and grabbed his head with both hands, squeezing his eyes shut.
Then, though he would have thought it impossible, everything got worse. The pain, the sounds, the shaking, the spinning, the flashing lights. Tick didn’t think he could survive another second.
A booming crack rocked the air, and his eyes snapped open. His vision cleared in time to see that Dark Infinity had exploded into countless tiny golden pieces, flying and swirling through the air like snowflakes in a blizzard. A sparkling tornado. It sounded like millions of killer bees swarming.
“Atticus!” Jane yelled again, somewhere closer to him. “You have to stop!”
Tick knew he wasn’t thinking straight. His mind was a chaotic soup of jumbled memories and thoughts. He glanced to his right and saw Jane running for him; Chu had disappeared. A small part of his brain knew she was coming to help him, but all his eyes saw at that moment was the woman who had tried to kill him, to choke him to death in the hallway. The horrendous fear and rage he’d felt when he’d been so close to death returned full force.
He didn’t know exactly what he did, but he knew he couldn’t stop it. The swarming specks of metal that had been Dark Infinity flew at Mistress Jane, like flies descending on a feast, surrounding her in a blur of sparkling gold. The metallic tornado consumed her body, obscuring her from sight.
Somewhere deep inside of him, Tick knew he’d just done something terrible.
I didn’t mean to, he thought. I didn’t mean to!
In answer, Jane’s screams erupted through the air.
Chapter
46
The Drag Race
Paul threw a Rager at the only remaining metaspide close to him, watching with glee as it steamrolled into a massive ball of earth and wiped the machine out, sparks flying as pieces of crumpled metal flew in all directions.
“Yeah, ba—”
A hard claw grabbed his ankle from behind and lifted, slamming his body to the ground. Paul tried to scream but there was no breath left in his body. He looked up to see a metaspide staring down at him with glowing robotic eyes. He wanted to say something—spit, yell for help—but he could only open and close his mouth, fighting to get air back in his lungs.
Scissoring metal blades came out of a hidden compartment, snipping on its hinges as it moved toward Paul’s face. But then the spider paused; its body rotated upward, as if it had spotted something behind them. Paul heard the glorious shouts of Mothball charging in to save him, when the metaspide took off on its spindly legs in the other direction, dragging Paul with it.
Paul’s body finally let him suck in a huge gulp of fresh air. It was enough for him to shriek with pain as rocks and dirt scraped his back, ripping his clothes. He kicked with his free foot, tried to slow the metaspide down by clawing at the ground, but to no avail. A burst of pain exploded inside him when his casted arm smacked a stray piece of one of the creature’s destroyed buddies.
“Mothball!” he shouted, trying without success to turn his head back to see if she was close. He kicked at the metaspide’s body and legs, but it kept running, dragging him like a sack of trash.
Enough of this ruddy nonsense, Mothball thought as she ran after Paul.
She lifted her Shurric, aiming more carefully than she’d ever done in her fighting life.
“Keep your legs down!” she shouted, still running, still aiming.
She pulled the trigger.
Paul came to a sudden stop, watching in disbelief as the body of the metaspide catapulted away from him and landed fifty feet away with a mechanical spurt of buzzes and sparks.
The thing’s claw was still attached to Paul’s ankle, the arm of it ending in a shredded clump of coppery wires. Paul reached down and easily separated the clawed metal fingers, then threw it far as he could.