“This is really fucking weird,” agreed Ava. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from that writhing border. It took a moment to hear Jules calling her name.

“What?” she asked.

They held up a pair of purple fleece gloves. “The old woman was wearing purple gloves, right?”

“Shit,” Ava sighed. She pulled out the phone on her hip.

“This is amazing,” Jules said. “It’s a creepy Scandinavian Narnia. I can’t believe we found something like this.”

“Tricia,” Ava said into the phone, and Jules whipped their head around. “We’ve got a situation up in the showrooms.”

“I’ll be right there,” Tricia replied, and hung up.

“Seriously?” Jules said. They sighed with melodramatic disappointment. “We find a wrinkle in time and you tell the manager?”

“What did you expect me to do?” Ava said. “Will you get out of the … whatever that is? You don’t know what’s in there.” That seam between the rooms twitched unpleasantly, and Ava took a step back.

“It can’t be much worse than what’s back there,” Jules said, waving vaguely at Ava, LitenVärld, who knew what.

Jules always wanted to run away. For a long time they’d talked about the two of them leaving together, moving or traveling. The destination changed, but the wanderlust remained the same. The last few weeks, they had more often talked about disappearing on their own. No destination in particular, just … away.

“Jules,” Ava said urgently, but couldn’t think of anything to follow it with. What could she possibly say to bring them back?

Jules sighed, looked down at the gloves in their hand, and then trudged over the threshold. “Ursula had the right idea,” they muttered as they passed Ava.

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Tricia called an emergency meeting, and everyone who wasn’t working a register crammed into the break room.

It always surprised Ava how many people worked at LitenVärld. She only saw most of them crammed in here during the pre–Black Friday war meeting, or for their exquisitely painful “sensitivity training.” She’d only gotten through the latter by focusing on her and Jules’s plans to get obliteratingly drunk afterward.