They walked in to the wonderful smells of dinner, all of them pausing to take a deep breath. Tick was starving. He couldn’t tell what his mom had cooked, but he had a feeling she’d felt the need to prove to Sofia that she could cook, too.

“So are we gonna tell your parents what just happened?” Paul whispered.

Tick thought a minute. “Maybe later. My poor mom’s worried enough as it is. No harm, no foul, right?”

“Yeah,” Sofia agreed. “Let’s just stay in the house and stare at each other until it’s time to go meet Master George.”

“Sounds good,” Tick said. “Hopefully we can stay out of trouble for one more day.”

They walked into the kitchen.

~

Mistress Jane felt discouraged.

She sat next to the large stone window of her apartment in the Lemon Fortress, closing her eyes every time the soft, warm breeze filled with the sweet smell of wildflowers blew up from the meadows below. The day was beautiful, the slightest hint in the air that autumn lay just around the corner. Everything was perfect.

And yet, a stinging sadness tempered all of it.

It had been four months since her Barrier Wand had been stolen, trapping her inside the Thirteenth Reality. At the time, she’d been so intrigued by the Realitants’ ability to wink away with a broken Wand, and its potential implications for her, that she’d gotten straight to work—studying, experimenting, building. There was a lot about the mysterious power of Chi’karda she’d not yet discovered, and the little group’s seemingly miraculous disappearance had led her to change her thinking. She had already made some exciting discoveries.

However, at the moment, she was very frustrated.

For one thing, her efforts to build a new Barrier Wand had hit a major snag. Frazier Gunn, the leader on the project, couldn’t find one of the key elements for the wire that would transmit the Chi’karda from its Drive packet to the body of the Wand. The needed material was a complicated alloy of several rare metals, and one of them was proving impossible to find within the Thirteenth. Frazier had grown noticeably irritable, obviously realizing the potential consequences if he failed in this project. His room for error with Jane had grown very thin.

But all of this was secondary to what troubled her most.

She was starting to feel guilty.