“YOU LUNATIC!” ARCHER CRIED OUT. FLAMING SWORD held high, he leaped at Rigby, plummeting like an azure fire comet.
KERRANG!
Archer’s sword met Rigby’s raven cane, now crackling with spiders of red lightning. “I can play this game as well as any Dreamtreader,” Rigby said, the sarcasm especially thick and dripping on the title.
Momentarily stunned, Archer fell backward, but he recovered, turning the fall into a somersault. He lunged forward with a thrust. Rigby parried, leaping sideways and swiping his cane high to low. Archer whirled and struck low, but again, Rigby’s weapon met his.
Archer rolled backward and came back to his feet. He yelled in anger. “You’d sell out your entire world? For what? Money? Fame? What, Rigby?”
“What’s wrong with love?” Rigby asked.
Archer’s mouth closed with a snap.
“You have no idea how important Uncle Scovy is to me,” Rigby said. “He was the first one to believe in me, to see my genius for what it was. He was a father to me, a mentor. All his hard work, all his research, he didn’t deserve to be locked up, trapped forever. No one does. Certainly not a little girl like Kaylie.”
Rigby’s daggers of conviction struck home. Archer knew what it was like to lose a parent. When his mother withered away from cancer, it had torn out a piece of his heart. Now, his father was gone, taken away in the middle of the night. And Kaylie. Doomed to spend the rest of her life in the Waking World, hooked up to a battery of machines. It wasn’t fair.
No, Archer thought, it’s not fair. He hovered on the edge of explosion. “You did it, Rigby!” he screamed. “All of it. You released the Scath, you commanded them to take my father, and you trapped Kaylie!”
“I can’t take credit for everything,” Rigby said with a twirl of his cane.
“I want them all back,” Archer said. “Give them back to me, Rigby!”
“I already have,” Rigby said, his eyes flaring red. “When the world’s merge, it’ll all be better.”
Archer gritted his teeth. He wanted to believe that. But he shook his head. “No,” he said, “even if we save the ones we love, we can’t just let the world burn.”
“That’s the trouble with you Dreamtreaders,” he said. “You always assume you know how things should be. You’d really let little Kaylie rot, would you? That’s so cruel, even for you, Keaton.”
“It’s not like that,” Archer shot back. “I love Kaylie, I—”
“Apparently, not enough to save her.”
“How can you justify one life while throwing away thousands, maybe millions of others?”
“And how can you possibly believe that? How do you know the two worlds weren’t meant to become one?”
“They don’t become one!” Archer shouted, exasperated. “They destroy each other! Do you have any idea what will happen? People won’t know dream from reality. People will die by the millions. There’ll be chaos—”
“Freedom, you mean,” Rigby said. “Who’s to say, Keaton? I mean really, who’s to say mankind wasn’t meant to live, free to dream?”
“Dreamtreaders say so,” Archer said, but his words lacked conviction. “Dreamtreaders are the caretakers of it all. We didn’t make the rules. We just follow them.”
“Follow them blindly,” Rigby muttered.
“I’m not the blind one here!” Archer shot back. “You call it freedom, but how can you not see that some freedoms can be abused? Some choices should never be made!”
“So says the Dreamtreader,” Rigby grunted, holding his raven cane and studying the weapon. “Easy to say such things when you have the power. But not anymore, not just you. There’s really only one question left to answer. Do you know it?”
“Rigby, you’ve got this all wrong,” Archer said. “It’s not about keeping the power or putting anyone down. This is about safety. It’s—”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Rigby said, tilting his cane. “I’ll tell you, anyway. The only pressing question is: what color should the flame on my cane be? I was thinking green.” Immediately, green fire leaped up Rigby’s blade. “Hmmm. Not sure that’s the right color for a villain. I am the villain, aren’t I, Keaton?”
“Of course, you’re the villain,” Archer growled, calling up buckets of his will. “You don’t care who gets hurt, who dies, as long as you get your way.”
“Perhaps, purple,” Rigby muttered as if Archer weren’t even in the room. The green flame winked out, replaced a second later by raging purple fire. “I could just as easily call you the villain; you know that, Keaton? It’s all about creeds and rules with you. No room for love. No room for freedom. That sounds like a villain to me.” He paused, considering his fiery weapon. “Hmmm, no. Why fight it? I think I like being the villain. And . . . I know it’s cliché, but . . . let’s go with red!”
Again, the crimson electrical charges flickered on the cane, but with a roar, red fire engulfed Rigby’s weapon as he vaulted up to the height of the arched chamber and dropped toward Archer. The red and blue flame met and met again, causing a strange swirl of color to flash around the two combatants. They moved back and forth across the chamber floor, ducking and dodging, leaping the doorway to the Sanctum’s vault and careening around the room.
After an exhausting exchange of strikes and counters, Archer found himself panting and frustrated. Forty feet away, Rigby crouched.
“This is rather pointless,” Rigby said. “Don’t you think?”
“You’ve got to be stopped,” Archer muttered.
Rigby stood up. When he tossed his raven cane into the air, it vanished in a streak of red flame. “See, now, that’s what I’m trying to explain, Keaton. I cannot be stopped. What’s done is done. The Scath are free and working for me, the Shadow Key is destroyed, Dream Inc. thrives, and the breaches are multiplying far beyond your ability to weave them up.” Rigby shook his head. “You don’t even know the half of it. A Rift is inevitable, Keaton. Get over it.”
“I’m a Dreamtreader,” Archer said. “I can’t get over it.”
“Yeah, well, that may be,” Rigby said. “But don’t you think it’s time you put your family first? I mean, just this once? Where’s your father? Where’s Kaylie? And poor Buster back at home . . . all alone.”
The sound that burst from Archer’s lungs was primal and ferocious and, in some distant part of his consciousness, he was frightened to hear that sound and to know that it came from himself. Terror and rage propelled Archer forward. He crossed the forty yards in a blink, raised his sword . . . and crashed hard into a real brick wall.
Archer crumbled to the ground. He was already healing from the collision when Rigby made the brick wall vanish. “See there, Keaton,” he said. “It does you no good. You summon a sword; I summon my cane. You charge; I make a wall. You create a tank to blast through the wall, I’ll make a bomber to blow up your tank. Back and forth we’ll go until one of us finally—finally—gets too tired to fight. And by the look of things, that’s going to be you, Keaton. In the end, your family suffers. All these rules you follow, all these codes, and what really matters . . . your family, the people who love you . . . will suffer. You can’t win.”
“I beg to differ, ya bloomin’ ankle biter.”
The boomerang hit the back of Rigby’s head and sent him sprawling gracelessly, face-first, to the floor.
“Seems you’ve underestimated the Dreamtreaders, mate,” Nick Bushman said, striding out of the shadows. “We don’t work alone.”
Rigby lifted his head from the stone and shook away the cobwebs. He rolled over onto his back just in time to see a swarm of boomerangs streaking his way from all angles. Rigby called up a metallic dome and used it as a shield. The boomerangs clanged and clattered off, but the moment Rigby lifted his shell, a single boomerang took him in the jaw.
“I’ve got heaps of them,” Nick said. “Now, be good, and tell Archer here what he wants to know, or I’ll be forced to let the boys get busy again.”
Rigby wiped a trickle of blood from his chin and sneered. He made the shield shell vanish and clambered back to his feet. “You’re new at this, aren’t you?” Rigby asked. “A bit of beginner’s luck, that’s all.”
Archer leaped to his feet and came at Rigby. The Lucid Walker raised his hands only to find himself handcuffed with heavy, dark metal manacles.
“You don’t have beginner’s luck, Keaton” Rigby said, smiling. “Whatever kind you had has run out.”
A strange rope appeared, dangling down from somewhere unseen far overhead. Even with his cuffed wrists, Rigby reached above his head and gave the rope a sharp pull.
A distant bell tolled. Once. Twice. All the way to six.
Howls. Howls echoed across the landscape.
“Hounds!” Archer exclaimed.
“Sounds like heaps of ’em,” Nick said. “Not far away.”
“Call them off, Rigby—!” But the words died on Archer’s lips. The handcuffs Archer had summoned lay empty on the floor.
Rigby was gone.