by Jacob Whaler
Leo says nothing, but shakes his head, a single stream of tears pouring down his cheeks below each eye.
“Back to MX Global?” Jake stands behind Kent, holding Yarah’s hand.
Kent does a quick scan of the field. “Who knows?”
Jake drops to his knees and begins to speak softly to Leo. “You’re a Stone Holder. You can do things that we can’t. You understand things that we don’t. You’ve seen things that we haven’t. Is there any way to find Matt or communicate with him? Anything you can do that only a Stone Holder can do?”
Leo looks up into Jake’s aviators. “Maybe.”
“Good.” Jake holds out his hand.
Leo takes it and pulls himself up to his feet. “I can try.” As he walks away, something on the ground catches his attention. His eyes drop to Matt’s small leather book. Reaching down, he picks it up and stuffs it into his pocket.
CHAPTER 105
Matt rolls backward, arms held out for balance. He surrenders himself to the pull of gravity.
Opening his eyes, he looks up to see Ryzaard standing on the edge of the marble floor, slipping away above him.
As he falls, the thin blue lines around him form into a smooth sphere that envelops his body. Lighted floors on neighboring towers shoot past. Thousands of people press their faces to glass windows, staring at him as he descends to the streets below.
Matt closes his eyes and tries to think of a way to slow his descent. He imagines thrusters coming out of the bottom of the sphere, landing him gently on the pavement below.
The sense of movement fades away.
When he opens his eyes, the sphere is gone. He is kneeling in the bottom of a large crater in the street. Fragments of concrete and twisted steel are heaped up around the edges. Large cracks in the pavement fan out from him like rays of the sun.
He stands up and climbs out of the crater. Using his Stone to form a blade, he cuts his way through the debris and emerges onto a well-lit street, waiting for Ryzaard to appear at any moment from out of the darkness.
But Ryzaard doesn’t come.
Casting his eyes around, Matt sees that each building stands on a single glass tube, each of a different color.
Off to the right, a man descends in one of the tubes below a rectangular structure. When the man reaches the bottom, an opening appears in the glass, and the man walks through. Other men and women walk out of tubes all around him, pouring into the street in front and behind, walking to him.
They are happy to see him, overjoyed in some cases.
And he knows them all.
There is Mr. Winters, the janitor of the old grade school he attended back in New York before his mom died, still with his potbelly and three days’ stubble on his chin. And his Brooklyn accent is impeccable.
“Hey Mattie, it’s been a long time. So good to see you.”
He turns and sees Mrs. Green, his first den mother in Cub Scouts. She wears the same blue dress they buried her in on that cold day in February after her heart attack.
“My goodness, Matt. You’ve grown so tall. How have you been? How’s your family?”
And Miss Lindsay, his favorite teacher from third grade, the one he had secretly wanted to marry when he grew up. He remembers how he cried for a whole day after hearing about her car accident in early November of that year.
Neighbors from up and down the street where he grew up. Soccer coaches. The doctor at the hospital that put a cast on his arm. A friend of his dad’s that went with them on a fishing trip.
He strains his eyes, looking through the crowd.
And then he finds her.
People part as she moves forward. Smiles beam on their faces when she stops in front of him and looks up into his eyes.
“Mom,” he says.
He’s seen this before. It can’t be real. It must be a clever illusion, created by Ryzaard to trap him. He has to resist, to be on guard. But she looks exactly as she did on the last day he saw her alive. It’s hard not to look.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she says.
He turns away, tears rolling down his cheeks.
Her small hands reach up to his shoulder. “What’s wrong, Matt-chan.”
A voice booms from across the street. “There’s one more person I’d like you to meet.”
The crowd parts again to show Ryzaard standing on its outside edges. He nods and steps forward, holding a Stone in each hand.
A beautiful young woman moves out from behind him. Matt immediately recognizes her brown hair and the way she walks.
Jessica.
“Matt, what are you doing?” she says. “Why won’t you listen to him.” She slips her arms around Ryzaard and lowers her eyes.
Taking a step back, Matt shakes his head. “No. This isn’t real.”
“They are all real. Flesh and blood. Real thinking minds. As real as anything in our world.” Ryzaard walks closer to Matt through the crowd, bringing the woman that looks like Jessica with him. “As real as you want it to be.”
Matt fingers his Stone.
“Don’t you see?” Ryzaard is still walking forward. “The Stones hold the power to create. The power that created our world and countless others. The power of the gods.”
Another woman steps out of the crowd and walks to Ryzaard.
Matt has never seen her before. He spreads his feet apart, flexing his knees, and holds his Stone in front with both hands, like a samurai warrior gripping the handle of his sword.
The people around him glance at each other with looks of concern and begin to move back.
Turning and seeing the approaching woman, Ryzaard drops to his knees so that Matt sees him in full profile. He reaches for her hand and kisses it. “Mother,” he says.
As Matt looks on, Ryzaard lets go of the woman’s hand, turns and thrusts his arms in Matt’s direction like two uncoiled springs. His Stones glow white in his hands.
Black spheres of energy the size of softballs burst from the Stones and shoot out at Matt.
He feels them coming and brings his Stone close to his chest in defense. A disc of blue light, one meter across and as thin as foil, spreads out and absorbs the shots from Ryzaard. As each sphere of energy disappears into the disc, ripples move out from its center to its edges making it grow larger.
“No!” Ryzaard says.
Still in a kneeling position, he slashes wildly at Matt with the Stones. Bursts of lightning surge from each one, penetrating bodies to the right and left while Matt crouches safely behind the shield of his Stone.
A light rain begins to fall, and screams of agony echo from the crowd.
Ryzaard looks down and sees the woman he called mother on the pavement, burnt beyond recognition. Anger fills his eyes and the muscles in his jaw tighten. He jumps to his feet and holds his hands together. The two Stones glow white and join into one. Pulling his hands apart, he has a white sphere on each fist, like boxing gloves. He smiles at Matt as he turns to Jessica and hits her with a right hook. Her body glows with millions of volts as she drops to the street, a loose pile of smoking flesh.
He walks through the crowd, killing the people that Matt has known and loved without hesitation or mercy.
Matt stumbles backward, knocking down Mr. Winters, the old school janitor, and then turns and sprints down a side street, leaving the crowd behind him.
As he turns the corner, a voice calls out to him.
“You can’t leave, Matt. This is my world. You can run, you can try to hide, but you can never leave.”
CHAPTER 106
Leo kneels on the grass near a half-eroded Buddha statue, away from the broken bodies of monkeys, soldiers and tourists. The clouds have thinned and strips of blue sky break through in uneven patterns above his head.
Kent and Jake stand in front of him, looking down. Yarah sits at Leo’s side, her hand on his shoulder, a worried look on her face.
“It happened before.” Leo stares down at the grass and picks a thin green blade, moving it back and forth across h
is lips as he speaks. “Matt and I were healing a man. We put our hands on him and closed our eyes, going inside ourselves to another place. When I opened my eyes, I was floating in space next to him.”
Jake nods with his hands folded across his chest. “Little John used to talk about something similar, especially after he had a few beers. The Stones give their Holders access to another dimension, another level of reality. He always had a hard time explaining it, but he said it was real.”
“It is,” Leo says. “Maybe there’s a way to find Matt there. I just don’t know.”
Kent pats Leo on the head. “Give it your best shot, that’s all I ask. I have a feeling that wherever they’ve gone, Matt’s not making it easy for Ryzaard. I just hope we can get Matt back. Do what you have to do. Jake and I will keep an eye on things here in the real world.”
“What about Yarah?” Leo looks over his right shoulder into her eyes. “Someone needs to keep an eye on her. She’s curious about everything, has a huge imagination and no fear.”
“Or common sense,” Jake says.
“A typical six-year-old.” Kent reaches his long arms down, picks her up and balances her on his hip. “Don’t worry about little Yarah. We’ll keep her occupied.”
“Thanks.” Leo closes his eyes and starts breathing slowly and deeply, like Matt taught him.
Jake and Kent walk off with Yarah holding hands between them.
CHAPTER 107
Matt runs hard on a random zigzag pattern through the streets. Dark rain is falling. His lungs feel like they are going to burn through his chest. When he can’t run anymore, he slumps down and retches the contents of his stomach onto the pavement until his throat is raw with bile.
It’s time to think clearly and take stock of his situation.
The first thing he does is hold the Stone in his hand and think of the green field of old temple ruins back in Thailand. The image forms clearly in his mind. He even remembers the GPS coordinates and verbally repeats them to himself. Relaxing into the image, he sees himself there already, standing next to his dad.
But the falling rain tells him that he hasn’t moved.
He tries again, this time thinking of the kitchen at his house in Colorado. But the result is the same.
Ryzaard has fixed his world so that Matt can’t jump away. It’s the old man’s world. He’s making the rules.
I’m totally screwed.
He pushes the thought out of his mind.
He has a Stone and knows how to use it. Ryzaard tried to kill him with energy beams and projectiles, any one of which was magnitudes stronger than anything Matt can produce. But each time, Matt felt a sense in advance of what the old man was going to throw at him. And each time, the Stone reacted with his mind as one in repelling it.
It’s almost as if his Stone is trying to protect him.
He has to assume Ryzaard can track him. He might appear from out of nowhere at any time, and Matt has to be ready. His fingers grip the Stone until his hand aches.
Is it better to stay in one place or keep moving?
The answer is self-evident.
Keep moving.
What else can he do? He has nothing but the Stone and the clothes on his back. But what about Ryzaard? Does he have anything that Matt can use against him.
Yes. A bad temper.
Then let’s make him as mad as hell.
The Stones require clarity of mind and focused thought. If Matt can damage the old man’s clarity and focus, it will only help. Maybe then Matt can find a way out of this world.
Matt stands up from the puddle of vomit at his feet, looks down the street and tosses the Stone between his hands like a hot potato. He bounces back and forth on the balls of his feet like a boxer.
Time for some fun.
Walking to the middle of the street, he looks up into the dark sky. The rain quickly soaks his face.
“I’m here,” he yells, at the top of his lungs. “Come and get me, you old bastard.”
He holds the Stone in both hands and thinks of a ten-foot beam of energy coming out its end.
A narrow line of blue light rises out of the Stone.
I can do better than this.
Imagining the Grim Reaper, the line morphs into the shape of a giant scythe, complete with a long, curved blade of plasma. Looking around, he walks to the nearest building, rising above a thin tube of green glass. Matt stands next to it, ready to swing and bring down the building.
Then he looks directly above him and thinks better of what he is about to do. Backing out into the street and away from the structures, he changes the energy beam to a long samurai blade. The shape pleases him and he brings it close to his eyes and stares into the depths of its neon brightness.
Allowing the blade to drop down and make contact with the black pavement, he observes how easily it cuts through the street, feeling no resistance, like a red-hot knife dropping through wax.
With concentration, he discovers that he can change not only the shape, but the color and intensity of the plasma blade. He slices cleanly through a steel pole and watches it topple over like a tree in the forest. If he tries, he can feel the beam making contact with other objects, cutting through them, separating the bonds that hold the molecules together.
His face drifts up to the sky. Black rain soaks his face. This section of the city looks dark and devoid of inhabitants, making it a prime target for destruction.
This will get the old man’s attention.
Balancing the Stone in his hand, Matt fills his lungs and thinks of the blade extending further out from the tip of the Stone. He watches as it grows ten, twenty, thirty meters. Then he swings it around and severs the glass column under the building on his right, feeling no resistance. Sparks and light explode.
As the column shatters, the underside of the building comes crashing down to the ground, teetering before falling away from him. The building groans with stretching and snapping steel as it collides with the next building over. It bends in the middle before snapping in half, the top section falling back over Matt fifty stories above his head.
Staring up as the structure comes crashing down, Matt kneels to the pavement, puts his Stone above his head and thinks of a smooth round bubble of energy that envelopes his body. Steel girders, blocks of concrete, massive sheets of glass thunder down on all sides.
Inside his bubble, he feels nothing, not even a whisper of air moving.
When the chaos around him settles down, he dissolves the sphere and stands up in the middle of a circle three meters across. It’s completely devoid of debris. He wipes the pavement under his feet with the tip of an index finger and brings it up to his eyes.
No dust. Nothing.
Mounds of twisted metal rise into the dark sky outside his circle as if one of the massive structures has been dropped into a blender and the contents poured out on the street.
Using the Stone like a pistol, he levels it at the pile that surrounds him. Oblong pulses of white energy blast through the wreckage and leave a clean pathway out. He walks through the opening and out the other side.
One down, ninety-nine to go.
For his next demolition, Matt walks three blocks and stops in the street, looking around for Ryzaard, but the old man doesn’t make an appearance.
Let’s do something big.
Matt holds the Stone in a vertical position, and a cylindrical bar of intense light bursts out and extends into the sky until it’s as tall as the two-hundred story buildings on either side. he carefully lowers the blade down until it floats parallel to the street.
The Stone balances on nothing more than an index finger. Matt marvels at the weightless blade.
Grasping it in both hands, he looks at the forest of light tubes in every direction, each one supporting a massive structure above.
Hey Ryzaard, check this out!
Keeping his eye on the far end of the bar of light, he straightens his arms and executes a three hundred sixty degree turn, cutting through dozens of col
umns of light, leveling the forest.
For an instant, the darkness of the night is beaten back. Brilliant explosions travel up each skyscraper, filling their interiors with fire, blowing out windows and bursting through their tops like living snakes of fire. The conflagration converges above the city and reaches skyward in a column of raging plasma. The rain stops. A massive hole opens up in the clouds. The weak light of a faint sun bleeds through.
Perhaps for the first time since its founding, the city knows day.
As the skyscrapers crumble to the ground, Matt kneels on the pavement in the eye of the maelstrom and raises his Stone above his head. Particles of light, like blue diamonds, fall down from the Stone in a cascade around him, attaching to his body and fusing together into a protective skin of pure energy.
He stands up, looks at his arms and legs, and walks through the sea of broken steel and glass, feeling no resistance, moving through it as easily as if he were on a Sunday stroll through the park on a spring morning.
When Matt emerges from the pile of debris, Ryzaard is waiting for him.
CHAPTER 108
Matt kicks the last piece of steel out of his way, stops and stares at the old man.
Ryzaard stands, arms folded, face devoid of emotion.
All fear of Ryzaard is gone, erased when the blue light clothed Matt’s body back in the middle of the pile. But just to be careful, he takes a defensive posture, holding the Stone in front, ready for anything Ryzaard might throw at him.
“Your move,” Matt says.
Ryzaard lets his legs separate and arms fall down to his side, staring straight ahead. Lifting his empty hands slightly, three transparent spheres of violet the size of golf balls extrude from each of the Stones on his chest, like toothpaste coming out of a tube.
“You force my hand.” Ryzaard casts his eyes around, as if taking one final look at the world of his creation. “I had thought to avoid this, but you leave me no choice.” He presses his palms together and closes his eyes.
The three spheres expand in size and start to move into each other, slowly becoming one ball, larger than Matt. It hangs suspended between them, hardly visible against the background of the dark night.
