The Blade of Shattered Hope by James Dashner

Author:James Dashner [Dashner, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2010-04-01T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter

29

~

The Only Hope

Tick spent a long minute simply staring at the shifting faces of the glowing Haunce. Their eyes stared back, full of scrutiny and concern, waiting to hear his reaction to the pronouncement that Tick was the only one who could save the Realities from ripping apart and ceasing to exist forever. No pressure, right?

He decided to show how much he’d grown up in the last year or so. “Okay. I’m not gonna sit here and waste time. It’s hard for me to believe I could do anything to stop or reverse what Jane’s done. But you obviously know what you’re talking about—I mean, you’re a billion ghosts crammed into the space of a water heater. That’s a lot of brains. So what am I supposed to do?”

The Haunce laughed just as its face morphed into that of a young woman with dark eyes. The sound was like electronic music. When the face changed to an old man with a mustache, the Haunce began speaking again. “No brains here, Atticus. At least not physically. But our combined knowledge is here all the same, stored on countless imprints of soulikens. But there will be time for school lessons later. You are correct that we should not waste any more time. We must get to the heart of the matter, and quickly.”

Tick nodded, half-fascinated and half-terrified of what he was about to hear.

The Haunce continued, the faces forever shifting. “Atticus, we have been observing the Realities for many years—living them, breathing them, being them. We exist in the boundaries and seams that keep the Realities together and apart, united but separate, all things balanced as they should be. At times, we have intervened, but only in extreme cases of need. Never before has the need been so great as it is now.

“The seams are splitting. Dark matter is consuming them, triggering chain reactions of heightened entropy and introducing fragmentation on a level never seen. We believe there is only one way to stop it.”

“How does it involve me?” Tick asked.

The Haunce’s current face—a boy, maybe only ten years old—frowned at the interruption, then the expression smoothed away like rippling water. “As we said, we have been observing the Realities for countless centuries. And in all that time, there have been only two people with a concentration of soulikens and Chi’karda levels similar to ours. You are one of those people, Atticus. And Mistress Jane is the other. We do not yet understand how the two of you came to possess this power or why you both came to exist in the same period of time. But it will take your combined powers to reverse what has happened today.”

Tick had to bite his lip. He wanted to shout a million questions, refute the Haunce’s words. If saving the Realities depended on him and Jane—depended on their cooperation—then the battle was over before it had begun.

The glowing orb of the Haunce flexed, as if taking a deep breath. “We must rebind the seams of the Realities and restore stability to the inner workings of quantum physics.

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