Thick, grainy liquid covered every inch of my skin. I closed my mouth too late, and swallowed a big glob of the stuff, making my stomach wrench. I puked it out, only to have more come in, gagging me. The clawed hands of the Ka gripped me tighter, carrying me farther and farther into the earth. The only sounds I could hear were the swooshing and the sucking of the … quicksand.

It was quicksand.

Down, down we went, the stuff getting thicker and thicker. I held my breath and knew that my heart wouldn't last much longer. My whole chest hurt, begging for air. The chaos and panic made it so hard to think. But I had to—I had to.

I forced myself to calm down and quit struggling. Then I unleashed the full power of my Gift.

The Ka exploded away from me and a huge air pocket formed in the quicksand. I was completely surrounded on all sides by yellow goop. I fell to the bottom of the bubble and there was a big slurp as my feet sunk into the yucky stuff. I looked upward, only knowing the direction by what my senses told me. Ka were ripping through the bubble now, trying their best to get back at me.

But I was done with them.

I pointed my hands to the sky above, and the Power blasted me upward.

The force of the Gift ripped me through the yellow dirt and grime, parting it as I went up, until a few seconds later I burst out of the quicksand and flew up into the air. I was filthy, and as the Power lifted me far away from the sinking pool and set me down on a huge rock, I tried to wipe myself clean. The stuff reeked, making me gag.

I landed on a rock and bent over to spit as much of the quicksand out of my mouth as possible. I kept my eye on the spot I'd just exited, expecting the Ka to come after me at any second. But they never came. It hit me then that those things hadn't been Shadow Ka at all but just figments of the Stomper dreamscape. It made me sick inside, and I wondered what really happened to those guys from the cave.

I looked around, knowing that it was too quiet—that something awful had to happen soon.

And I was right.

From far to my left, an army of … things were marching toward me. They were huge, made of metal and stone and clay, thrown together at odd angles with patchwork construction. Some were two-armed, two-legged robot-looking monsters, like something out of an old science fiction magazine. Others were deformed heads rolling along on big wheels. Some looked like boxes with legs coming out. There were dozens of others, and I didn't want to find out anything more about them.

I turned to go the other direction—to my right.

But from there came an army of a different sort.

Marching straight toward the spot where I stood were a bunch of dinosaurs. T-rexes mainly, big and vicious with short arms and sharp teeth. That didn't seem like much fun at all. So I looked straight ahead, the only direction that didn't lead back into the quicksand.

The ground was … moving over there. It was like the dirt and rocks had turned into gray matter, swaying and shifting back and forth. Then I realized why.

They were snakes. And I didn't have to study one of them any closer to assume that they were very poisonous.

The Stompers were attacking me from all directions.

Then I noticed something way in the distance, behind the oncoming snakes.

Deep in the horizon there were two massive cloud formations, one to the far left, the other to the far right. There was a pinkish hue to the formations, and they billowed and churned like smoke from a fire. The two were converging together—it seemed like they were moving slowly from this distance, but it was probably a different story when you got closer. But they were on a definite path to meet at a point far ahead, through the snakes.

A memory slipped up from somewhere in the deep parts of my mind.

Something about the Stompers.

We had seen them coming through the great Ripping up in New York, but later Inori had described them to me in more detail. They were ghostlike, almost like mist when in their true form and up close, with a pinkish color to them. But from a distance …

From a distance they would look like clouds.

My stomach flipped inside, and my heart started dancing.

I knew what was happening. There could be only one reason for that many Stompers to abandon their nightmare form and head for a specific spot. Those two clouds were converging on one thing and one thing only. And if they met before I got there, it was over.

The Stompers had found the soul of the world.