Zeran rolled his eyes as we set off to meet up with Eli and Frankie. “I am not diabolical nor am I a scientist bent on world domination.”

I winked at him. “Could have fooled me, Z.”

Zeran only groaned as his cheeks flushed the slightest pink.

When we walked to Eli’s house, his auntie was in the kitchen packing food. “What has this world come to? Ghosts? Evil overlords? Your grandmother is a celestial. You’re godlings. On my side of the family, we’re just plain folk. Do you hear that, Eli and Jayla? We’re plain folk. We aren’t messing around with no evil overlords.”

Auntie Bae was taking the whole celestials, godlings, and overlord thing better than I’d thought she would.

Jayla bounced down the stairs with an armful of toys. Eli screamed after her, “You’re supposed to pack useful things.”

One of Jayla’s dolls turned its head. “We’re useful and quite fashionable.”

This was new. Even Jayla had come into her godling powers.

“He’s wearing mismatched socks,” said another doll. “Somebody call the fashion police.”

“I heard that!” Eli shouted at the top of the stairs.

Jayla giggled as she put the dolls in her luggage.

With Eli in tow, we headed for Frankie’s. When we reached her house, her moms were arguing over whether they should take one or two microscopes to Azur in addition to the one that Frankie had already packed.

“We need three,” Dee said as she delicately placed glass beakers into a foam case. “It’s a new world, one built in the clouds. There are bound to be plenty of new bacteria to discover. Can you imagine?”

“That and the ability to study various forms of magic up close,” Pam said. “I wonder if it’s measurable like sound waves or the speed of light. That would be something.”

“Um, is Frankie here?” I asked, interrupting their conversation.

“You just missed her.” Dee shoved a telescope into a case. “She left for Azur about an hour ago. Apparently, there’s a library that contains the history of the universe, and she wanted to visit it.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. There was only one reason why Frankie could have gone to the library. She wanted to find out about the Azurians in the photo of her orisha mom at the farmers’ market. From the sound of it, she hadn’t told her moms her reason for wanting to go early.

When we left Frankie’s house headed for the community center, Eleni said, sadly, “I hope she finds something.”

“She will—believe that!” Eli said confidently. “This is Frankie we’re talking about, as in Frankie, the Frankiefier, the Frankster, the Frankiestein, the—”

“We get the point,” Zeran said, cutting him off.

I was on edge when we arrived at the community center. The last of the younger godlings and their noncelestial parents filed through the metal detector and disappeared.