The path kept descending, and the pace kept accelerating. My eyes began to burn from the strange light. We descended into a basin, walking alongside a marshy creek, or perhaps it was the backwater of a lake. It was shallow and wooded, surrounded by lush reeds and grasses, a bayou of sorts. Not far beyond it we came to a bog, a wetland of soft, spongy ground without a drain. All around us was decayed plant matter with a fetid, musty smell, the scent of peat and rotting logs. The bog was covered with plant debris and water-growing moss creeping out from the water’s edge, nearly blanketing the water’s surface.

The indistinct connection of land and water unnerved me—I wasn’t sure if the next step would put me on soft squishy land or if I would sink under my own weight in moss-covered water. Frodo lapped up the water loudly, but I pulled him away from it. He squirmed out of my arms, insisting on exploring the turf. Next thing I knew he was in tall grass sniffing out the local wildlife, whatever it might be. I just hoped it was badgers or raccoons rather than alligators.

I was relieved to come to an intersecting path that cut sharply away from the treacherous bog and rose over a slope, promising to lead to firmer ground. I immediately stepped onto the path.

“This is not your road!” Shad’s crusty head was just an inch behind my own. I threw up my right arm to keep him back.

I walked up the slope, glad when the road didn’t give under my feet. Before us lay rugged terrain with little underbrush, dry and solid. Beyond the trees, I could see something in the distance, a tower, tall and looming. I tried in vain to see it through the thick overgrowth.

When I reached the top of the slope, I emerged from the trees and stopped abruptly. There were a half-dozen tall, slender spires of rock, looking as if the mesa had once reached up to heaven in a singular, desperate grasp, now forever frozen. But if the change in terrain and humidity wasn’t shocking enough, before us stood a glass-and-granite high-rise, a modern building. Everything had seemed so real to this moment, but this seemed dreamlike, as if somehow I weren’t really there—yet it was so vivid, down to the detail, I had to be there.

As I walked toward the structure, heart pounding, I stopped abruptly, recognizing what it was. My office building! I’d never seen it like this, isolated from all the adjoining buildings and cityscape, as if it had been uprooted by some alien power and transported from Earth to Skia. I entered the familiar ground-level front door with Joshua a step behind. We took the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, and I instinctively walked through the maze of work stations toward the corner office, adrenaline flowing.