I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. I was never going to find Nulan at this rate. Papa taught me two ways to travel long distances quickly. One was building a gateway between two points, aka a bridge. That was faster than any nonmagical form of transportation, but there was an even quicker way. Papa rarely made gateways; he opened portals by bending space itself. He’d warned me that it was more dangerous to bend the space between two points if you didn’t know what you were doing. I’d never tried. I didn’t think I was ready, but I didn’t see another way to get to Nulan faster.

I squeezed the staff, and the symbols started to glow brighter. Instinctively, I realized that to bend space, I must perceive it. I had to reach out and touch it. The symbols peeled off the staff and scattered around me. A lion leaped across my path. A tree bearing golden fruit sprouted from the ground. A sun with shimmering rays moved across the sky. The symbol for pi floated at eye level toward me, pulsing with golden light. Not a real pie, but the mathematical pi, 3.14 and the string of numbers that followed it. Thousands of symbols danced around me, but they didn’t keep their shapes for long. They blurred around the edges and then stretched out into long golden threads.

When I touched one of the threads, it vibrated against my fingertips. I thought I understood—the threads connected everything in the universe. I concentrated on finding Nulan again, and one of the threads pulsed brighter while the rest became dim. Her petty tricks didn’t fool the portal. A fuzzy image appeared in front of me. Nulan stood under a starry night, and Frankie lay in a ball at her feet.

“I should be on the front line,” Nulan murmured angrily to herself. “This is . . .”

I snatched the thread, and I was there with her.

“. . . beneath me.” Her words trailed off, and her lips curled into a vicious smile. “I should’ve realized that you’d be the one to catch up with me. My niece is too weak. She always has been, but no matter, you’ll do just fine.”

I bit my lip. I wouldn’t let Nulan bait me. Eleni was far from weak. She was smart, strong, and caring. She was everything I could ever wish for in a sister. “This ends here.”

Nulan grimaced as she looked up at the empty pocket of the sky where stars had been only a moment ago. Had I done that when I opened the portal? “You are a menace, just like your father.”