“Not this time,” Riq said, mostly to himself, already on the run to skirt around the soldiers and pursue Tilda. He was not going to let her get away. “Come on! Before she warps again.” He was surprised she hadn’t preprogrammed the thing already, just in case. It showed how overly confident she’d been that victory was in hand.
Dak and Sera stayed on his heels — he could hear them breathing but he didn’t dare take the time to look. Riq watched his step and watched Tilda, taking as direct a course as possible without risking a sword chopping off his head.
Tilda reached the trees and disappeared behind a huge oak, just as Riq cleared the last soldier and started sprinting across the expanse of grass. He sucked in each breath and spit it back out, his chest heaving with exertion. It had been a while since he’d run so hard. They were so close to victory. So close. And he just knew that if Tilda got away again, she could ruin everything.
“Hurry!” Dak yelled from behind him.
“What do you think I’m doing?!” Riq shouted right back, though he could barely get the words out.
He reached the trees and didn’t slow, bursting into the relative darkness of the shade. Whipping his head back and forth, he searched for where she’d gone, terrified that she’d already whisked away into a wormhole. Riq finally slowed, knowing he couldn’t risk passing her by, and Dak ran into him, knocking both of them to the ground. Riq grunted and struggled to get back to his feet, pushing Dak off of him.
“Over there!” Sera yelled, pointing.
Riq didn’t pause to ask questions, pushing off the ground and exploding in that direction like a runner off the blocks. He rounded a tree and saw her, kneeling on the ground, furiously working at the controls of her Eternity Ring. Riq ran, going faster than he’d ever thought possible. Tilda looked up at him, her face fraught with worry, tensed and tightly pulled over her skull. He saw her hand moving toward the final button, the one that would take her away.
“NO!” he screamed, diving into the air.
His shoulders slammed into Tilda’s body, knocking the Ring out of her hands. Out of the corner of his eye he saw it land and bounce, finally coming to a rest in a big pile of leaves. He and Tilda rolled, one on top of the other, about three times before they, too, came to a stop.
“Get off of me!” she yelled. “Get off !”
Surprisingly strong, she was able to push him away. Riq quickly got to his feet to run after the Eternity Ring, but Sera had already snatched it up in her hands. She held it close to her body, cradling it with both arms. Dak stood next to her, and both of them looked like they’d been underwater for five minutes by the way they were breathing so heavily.
Riq turned to Tilda again just in time for her to slap him across the face. It stung, made him stumble backward.
“How dare you!” she screamed at him, her eyes burning with hatred. “You brats have no idea what you’re doing! No idea! If you had half the vision that my people and I do, you’d grab a dagger right now and go stab Alexander in the heart!”
Riq didn’t respond. Neither did Dak or Sera. They stared at the woman, seeing the insanity that barely kept itself hidden beneath her exterior. She was cracking, cracking for good. Riq knew without the slightest doubt that Tilda could never be trusted with the Eternity Ring.
“Give it back to me,” she said in an almost scary, calm voice to Sera. “Hand it over, nice and easy, and I promise the SQ will leave your parents alone.”
Sera let out a little gasp, and Riq knew the woman’s words had hurt his friend. And just like that, he hated Tilda a little bit more. And made his decision.
Walking up to Sera, he held out his hand. “I know what to do.”
She hesitated a second, and Riq could see the doubt in her eyes. Tilda had almost gotten to her. But she came to her senses, giving him a grim nod and handing over the device. He felt its cool, smooth surface, could sense the outrageous amount of power contained within its infinity-shaped shell. Turning back to Tilda, he said, “You could’ve done so much good for the world.”
Then he gripped one end of the device, reached back, and slammed it into the trunk of the closest tree.
“STOP!” screamed Tilda. “STOP!”
But Riq didn’t stop. He hit the tree with it again. And again. And again. With all his strength, throwing his hatred for the woman into every single strike, he pummeled the trunk over and over, until he heard a crack, then a bigger crack, then a metallic splintering, followed by more cracks.
Finally, on one last heave, the Eternity Ring exploded into a mess of broken fragments, falling to the ground in a rain of sharp debris. All the while, Tilda wailed like a lost child.
DAK HAD mixed feelings as he watched Riq go crazy-town with the Eternity Ring, smashing the thing into tiny bits. On the one hand, he relished the painful cries coming from Tilda — the woman deserved what she was getting — but on the other hand, destroying such a valuable piece of technology might not be the smartest thing his friend had ever done. But in terms of showmanship, the guy got an A-plus.
When Riq was finally done, letting the last little piece of metal shard drop from his hand, he took a step backward and stared along with the rest of them at the ruins of the Ring. Tilda’s haunted screams had faded into more of a hitching series of sobs. Dak almost felt sorry for her, but then remembered what a master of manipulation she’d proven to be.
Riq looked a little embarrassed for what he’d done, but Dak wanted to high-five him, though that seemed slightly inappropriate for the moment. Instead, he walked over and lightly patted him on the back.
“You did the right thing,” he whispered. “She brought it on herself.”
Sera was right next to them, and agreed. “Let’s go back. She can’t hurt anybody anymore. The Eternity Ring’s destroyed and she probably spent every last penny hiring all those soldiers. Come on.”
Riq eyed Tilda, who seemed to be in total shock, still staring at the smashed parts of the Ring as she cried. “How can we just leave her? Who knows what kind of trouble she can stir up? She’s Tilda, man.”
“What’re we going to do?” Sera replied. “Kill her? Throw her in jail?”
“Maybe in the opposite order,” Dak said, hoping a laugh could relax everybody a bit. But instead he got two cold looks in response. “I don’t know. Aristotle can figure out what to do with her.”