He saw no sign of rails or anything else to indicate train tracks. There wasn’t even a sunken floor running along the bottom. The inside of the structure looked much like the outside, a long tunnel of smooth glass almost completely unblemished by objects. It was much darker inside, the sunlight filtering into dark shades of blue and purple as it passed through. Here and there, small, odd-shaped formations of glass jutted into the tunnel. Tick had no idea what they were for.

Tick felt someone tugging on his shirt. He snapped back to his senses and jerked himself out of the tube. A second later, the humming sound returned as the glass magically formed upward, a gravity-defying sheet of molten crystal, and sealed off the doorway.

“Dang, Tick!” Paul said. “Weren’t you the one who said count to three?”

“Sorry—I just . . . I guess I lost track of time.”

“How do you lose track of three seconds?” Sofia said.

“Yeah, man—one more second and you’d have been running around here without a head.”

Tick ignored them, still fascinated by the inside of the tunnel. “So what did you guys see?”

“Glass,” Paul said. “A bunch of glass.”

“Me, too,” Sofia agreed.

Tick frowned, having hoped they would have seen something different. “No sign of a walkway or anything?”

Paul shook his head. “Just smooth glass with little things sticking out here and there—no idea what those were.”

Sofia nodded. “Below us the glass just curved toward the bottom in the middle then started back up again. It’s just a big glass tunnel. That’s it.”

Tick folded his arms and leaned back against the tube—a few feet away from the doorway, just in case. “What was that thing we saw zing past last time?” He wondered if maybe they’d gone to a Reality with extremely advanced technology, some form of travel they couldn’t even comprehend.

Sofia seemed to be on the same wavelength. “Maybe it’s some kind of futuristic invention—a train that slides through the tube at lightning speeds. Maybe this is a special kind of glass mixed with a metal we don’t know about and super-magnetized. Maybe.”

“Man, that sounded smart,” Paul said as he joined Tick, leaning against the tube.

Sofia put her hands on her hips and stared at them, as if picking out a criminal from a police lineup. “Okay, so what do we do?”

A long pause answered her. Tick finally broke the silence. “We go in.”

“Now, wait a minute—” Paul began.

“He’s right, Paul,” Sofia said. “What else can we do? We go in and let the door close behind us. Someone is testing our bravery. If we’re willing to just stand out here and roast to death, what good are we as Realitants?”

“What good are we if we get smashed by a big old train?” Paul retorted.