Sofia stood on a slippery slope of rust-colored sand, squinting in the brilliant sunlight at the small, iron chair that stood rigid on top of the dune as if held in place by magic. She’d stood up and gotten away from it the second she’d winked there, not wanting someone else to come through and squish her.

Tick showed up a minute later, an instantaneous appearance that shocked her even though she’d been expecting it. There was no effect—no smoke, no sound. One moment the chair was empty. The next, it wasn’t. Tick’s face looked like he’d just bungee-jumped off the world’s tallest bridge.

“What took you so long? Hurry. Get up,” Sofia said, slipping in the sand as she stepped forward to help him, sliding down the steep dune. The hot sand seemed to find its way through every teeny hole of her clothes and scratch at her skin.

Tick didn’t answer, but stood up and was making his way down the loose sand to Sofia when Paul appeared, a small cut on his right cheek.

“Dang thing got me,” he said, wiping the blood away with his fingers. “Couple more seconds and I’d be . . .”

He trailed off, looking around him with huge eyes.

With her friends safe, Sofia finally had a chance to take a good look at their surroundings as well.

They stood in the middle of an enormous desert, an endless sea of dunes stretching for miles in every direction. The white-hot sun blazed down so the distant horizons shimmered in a wavering haze. The only thing breaking the monotony of sand was a large, shiny pipeline about a half-mile away. The tube of opaque glass sat above ground, at least twenty feet in diameter, and ran from one direction to the other for as far as Sofia could see.

“Where are we?” Paul asked. “And what is that?” He motioned to the giant pipe.

“Looks like a huge straw,” Tick said. “Maybe a giant sand monster dropped it.”

Sofia ignored them and started walking toward the glass structure. Her heart hammered in her chest, a rise of panic as she thought about their situation. They’d just barely escaped a horrible metallic spider and now they were stuck in the middle of a scorching desert. Anger at Master George rose in her as well. How can he waste our time with this? What if we’d been killed? But deep inside, she didn’t think it was him. Something had gone wrong.

“Wait!” Paul called from behind her. “Where’s Sally?”

Sofia stopped; she’d completely forgotten about the odd man. She turned and said, “Maybe he didn’t want to follow us.”

Paul was standing on the dune next to the chair, looking around. “No way—he winked away before we did.”

“Yeah,” Tick said, also searching. “He went right after you.”