“Mari,” he whispered in disbelief.

Marika Balam was the daughter of a Magister back in Calypsos, and the first friend he’d made here. She and her father were of Mayan descent, her people stranded in this savage land fifteen generations ago.

Marika flew up to him and hugged him tightly. “You returned!”

Jake blushed, which made his face only hotter. Pindor had retreated behind a boulder, flushing more brightly than Jake, but for an entirely different reason.

“Does anyone have a spare robe?” he asked. “Even a loincloth.”

Jake broke his embrace with Marika and shrugged off his backpack. He searched through his extra clothes and fished out a T-shirt. He didn’t have another pair of pants, but he had a change of underwear (of course). He passed the shirt and a pair of boxers over to Pindor.

Ducking away, his friend began to pull into them. “Thanks! I’ll give these back when I get real clothes.”

“What happened to your own clothes?” Marika asked.

Popping his head back up, he cast her an exasperated look. “I was taking a bath. Then—bam—I’m dropped into the middle of Vulcan’s fiery forge.”

He waved an arm at the desert.

“I don’t understand,” Jake said, glancing at both of them. “How did you end up here?”

Wherever here is.

Marika answered first. “I was at home, using a farspeaker to call my father to come eat, when something grabbed my wrist. It burned like fire. It pulled me into a moonless darkness. I then felt myself falling and crashed here.”

Pindor nodded. He stepped from behind the rocks, but he kept his bare feet fixed to a shady patch of sand. “That’s what happened to me, too. Felt like I was yanked out of my skin.”

He lifted his arm and bared his wrist.

Jake stared between them. He recalled the lasso of fire that had dragged him through the void. Same as his two friends. He glanced to his wrist. All three of them had one other thing in common. Jake twisted the circle of Atlantean metal on his arm.

“It must be something to do with these bands.”

Jake remembered something the Ur Elder had said about the metal when he had snapped the bands around their wrists, how the metal held a rare and potent alchemy … one of binding.

“‘To bring you all together as one,’” Jake mumbled.

Marika remembered, too. “Those were the words of Elder Mer’uuk.”

Jake nodded. “I think when I got transported here, the magic activated and drew us all together.”

“So this isn’t your world?” Pindor asked, searching around.

“No. I’m sure we’re still on Pangaea.” As proof, he touched his throat. “Why else can we still understand each other?”

Marika brought her fingers to her lips. “The alchemy of All-World is still with us!”

Jake felt it: the strange manipulation of his vocal cords that produced this common language. It took concentration for him to speak English now. The effect came about from a psychic energy field generated by Atlantean technology built into the heart of the great Temple of Kukulkan. The energy acted like a universal translator, letting the many tribes stranded here on Pangaea communicate.