“No, but look!” Alex pointed at the fracture growing above them and tried to straighten his scrambled thoughts. “That . . . crack. It’s running from here to the castle. But you opened the gate in . . . the future. I mean, I think the crack is running from here in 1981, to the castle in our time. Maybe even back to the magician’s time, too, hundreds of years ago, when he first opened it. All at once. It’s all breaking open at once across . . . time and space . . . I mean, it’ll swallow everything. Everything’ll be wiped out. We have to close it.”

“Oooh.” Zia clapped her hands. “A fracture in existence! You could be right, brainy bunny. That’s exciting, eh? The crack of doom!” She paused and fell silent. Her brow furrowed as the rock swayed sickeningly to the side then slid back again. Zia looked seriously around them, taking in the increasingly apocalyptic scene. Turning to Alex, she considered him curiously.

“Here.” From her pocket, Zia pulled the flier Alex had previously used. She frowned at its mangled wings, then fished in her coat and produced a tiny silver hammer. Holding the little robot to the rock, she quickly battered the wings straight, then thrust it at Alex. “Looks like we’ll need to give you this.”

“What?”

“Well. There’s things to fight in there. Help or don’t help. You won’t be much use, anyway.” She moved toward the gate, staring at it impatiently, hands on hips.

Alex looked helplessly at the flier in his hand. “I don’t have any hair to give it,” he said.

“You’ve got a headful, idiot.”

“Oh.” Alex pinched a lock between his fingers, braced himself, and ripped it out. He fitted it inside the machine as carefully as he could with the world collapsing. “How do we go back through the gate?”

“I call, and I think we have to wait for someone to open it from the other side.”

“You think?”

“Stop whining. Something’ll turn up. I’ll call them.”

Alex looked around as she started chanting. The rock bucked beneath them. The crumbling sound was constant as the great crack in the sky yawned wider, brighter.

A sudden thought struck him. If he really was somehow standing in 1981, as he felt certain he was, then his father was still out there in the world somewhere, still just a boy, several years younger than Alex himself.

He staggered as another tremor pounded the mountain and Zia was thrown against him. They stood in a fearful embrace as half of their rock platform simply sheared off and fell away, leaving them perched atop a slender column that teetered alarmingly. Zia shook him off and began singing louder.