“Even so,” Al said as he waved a dry stalk of ever-after grass through the purple line, then inspected it for damage, grunting as if something pleased him. “I don’t think knowing how to jump a line will help. No, this purple shit is different.” He straightened and dropped the stalk. “We should be able to do something about it. Buy us some time. Put us back where we were yesterday.”

The first faint stirrings of hope began in me. “What do you have in mind?”

He flashed me a quick grin, and I felt as if I’d done something right. “Stay here,” he said, waving his white-gloved hands dramatically. “I’ll be right back.”

“Al?” I called out, but he’d vanished. Nervous, I gazed across the bleak, sunbaked earth and the dry riverbed, feeling the bits of windblown earth hit me. I didn’t like being alone on the surface, and I twirled my parasol. My hair was going to be impossible to get through tonight.

Almost immediately he stumbled back in, his head down and back hunched. “Ah, here,” he said, his goat-slitted eyes meeting mine from over his dark-tinted glasses. “Put this on.”

It was a small black ring, and I looked at it in my palm, seeing there was a new lump of a circlet under his glove. Uneasy, I eyed him.

“I’m not giving it to you,” he huffed. “It’s a loan. For a few minutes. I want it back.”

“It’s a ring,” I said flatly, not able to tell if it was black gold or simply tarnished.

“Sharp as a tack, that one,” Al grumped. “You want to put it on, now? Pick a finger.”

I spread the fingers of my left hand, and I swear, he made a small noise of dismay. I looked up to see his jaw clenched. “What does it do?”

Al grimaced, shifting from foot to foot. “I, ah, it’s a life rope of sorts. That is, me in the ever-after to pull your ass out of the fire if I’m wrong, and you in reality, fixing it.”

Fixing the line was the entire point, and I didn’t mind having a safety rope. If it was a ring, then that was cool. Still I hesitated; the ring seemed to soak in the harsh light. It was heavy on my palm, and I had the insane desire to drop it into a fire and see if an inscription appeared. I set the open parasol down, and it rolled in the wind until catching against a large rock.

“The rings will allow us to function as a single energy entity across the realities,” Al said, standing almost sideways to me as he looked out over nothing. “I think.”

“You think?” I said, starting to understand. “Is that like a power pull?”

Al leered, the wind shifting the gritty lank curls of his hair. “If you want.”