Her legs began to tingle. At first she thought it was just the sensation of her limbs falling asleep from being in her cramped position, but no matter how she moved, the tingling continued and intensified. It moved all the way up her body, to her arms and fingertips, even to her head. She felt like she was being pricked all over by a million needles. Was she dying? Disappearing? Had Yinreng killed her younger self? Was this the end of it all?
She started to have trouble breathing, and then she was hyperventilating. She felt like all the air was being sucked out of the room. She must be dying now. She rocked back and forth on the floor.
This was it. Matt had failed, and Yinreng had killed her younger self. Her existence was about to end. It’s all right, it’s okay, she told herself. Maybe this was the way it had to be in order to get Matt to do what needed to be done, to fix the lock, to save his family and the world. Like her father said, sacrifices needed to be made.
24Falling Apart
“Jia!” Matt screamed. “Stop! Let me go!” He wrestled against the guards holding him. One of them struck him across the face, but the pain barely registered. He kept fighting. All he cared about was Jia. He couldn’t lose her. She was all he had now, but she was being dragged away, and he couldn’t get to her.
“Matt!” she called. She was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear above all the noise of the guards and his own spitting rage. “You have to get to me . . . don’t fight it . . . fall apart!”
“Jia!” Matt screamed, but she was dragged out of sight, and he couldn’t hear her anymore. He jerked his body, tried to kick one of the guards. They both yanked his arms so hard he was certain they dislocated both of his shoulders.
Matt began to tremble, his limbs twitching and jerking. Spots formed in the corners of his eyes. He was having a seizure. His head was suddenly filled with a strange buzzing. He was about to black out, but then he remembered what Jia had said.
What if your seizures aren’t really seizures? What if you could learn to control it?
He remembered the epiphany he had, when he and Jia had been playing chess. This wasn’t a forward-thinking game. It was forward and backward and sideways. He needed to go in all directions. He couldn’t fight the seizure. He had to give into it. He had to let himself fall apart.
Matt released himself. His thoughts moved faster than light speed, a million miles a minute, and it wasn’t just his brain that was thinking. It was all of him. Every cell, every atom, was coming alive, realizing its own individual energy and power, yet still connected to the whole.
“What’s happening?” one of the guards said. “What is he doing?”
His hands felt tingly, like they were falling asleep. He held them up to his face. They were blurry. He focused on them and his fingers dissolved, disappeared, and then slowly came back together. Matt felt the connection in his brain. He could feel those individual cells separate, yet still communicate with each other. It didn’t hurt. It sort of tickled, and it took a great deal of concentration just to make his hands disappear, but once he did that the rest seemed to naturally come together, or apart, rather.
“Hold him!” Yinreng commanded.
“I can’t!” the guard said. “He’s . . . he’s melting!”
Matt dissolved right through the hands of the guards, slipping from their grip like fine sand.
“Where did he go?” said a voice. It sounded like it was coming through a tunnel. He could see the person, too, though it was like looking through a giant kaleidoscope, thousands of the same image in changing patterns, so it took him a moment to recognize who he was seeing. It was Yinreng. He was turning all around, looking like a boy lost in outer space.
“He just disappeared!” one of the guards said. “He turned to dust!”
Matt was dust. He was nothing, and yet he still existed. He was still alive and himself. He felt all his cells spread out around the room. It was a strange feeling, like swimming with a giant school of fish. Separate, but together. Wild and free, and yet instinctually ordered.
Time, too, was different. It felt different, and in this state he could see his own time tapestry spread out before him like an intricate web. There were holes in it, missing threads, but he found he could travel along as though being pulled in a current.
He saw flashes of things, bits of memories of his life, though much of it was blurred. He couldn’t see the people clearly. They were more shadow, intangible. There were two in particular that seemed to follow Matt wherever he went, and he knew these were the shadows of those whose time tapestries he had. They were with him throughout his childhood, when he first boarded the Vermillion, when he went to Paris and stole the Mona Lisa. They were with him in India at the Padmanabhaswamy Temple, and in England when he met Queen Elizabeth. There were moments where he breezed through and others where he lingered, like when he was stranded on a barren island in the middle of the ocean. Matt couldn’t remember why he had come to this island, but those two blurred shadows were with him, like phantoms, and they huddled on the beach together, shivering all night. He felt the panic rising in himself, the hopelessness, almost as if he were experiencing it again in this very moment. He was afraid. He didn’t know what to do, even though he could see very clearly what he needed to do. He had the Aeternum right with him, the stone tied into his bracelet. Didn’t he know how it worked? Maybe in his panic he’d forgotten. Maybe
