“That’s all,” Kenzie said, and she smiled at Damsel.

Damsel, for her part, smiled back, “And here I thought you’d be clever.”

She was, I thought to myself, but I didn’t want to poke the bear by mentioning it. Seeing Damsel mirroring Kenzie’s smile was unnerving enough.

Tattletale was standing on a ridge, staring off into the distance while avoiding looking at the crystals.

The others were catching up. There were too many spots that reflected into deeper parts of ourselves and our world, and a region where the people we’d loved dwelt was… it was captivating.

Devastating. Chicken Little kept looking back. Darlene flinched as she walked past a crystal and an unkempt man walked beside her, black-haired and lanky. And her mood had darkened afterward.

Is this place aware we’re in it? Does it care? Is it throwing these things at us to screw with us?

My instinct was no. That this was just happenstance, and that this was the kind of analysis and digging into our beings that the overarching system was doing as a matter of course.

“What are you looking at?” I asked Tattletale.

Kenzie broke away from me to go to the other kids.

“Looking back the way we came. We covered a lot of ground. More than you’d think.”

I looked, and I tried to interpret the landscape that shifted like an optical illusion, tracing the slopes we’d come down, finding the starting point.

“Yeah,” I said.

“There’s something over there,” Tattletale said.

Over the horizon. The sky wasn’t entirely black.

“I’ll go on ahead,” I told her.

“We’re not letting Damsel have the lead anymore, hm?” Tattletale asked.

“We don’t care who has the lead,” I said, rolling my eyes slightly. “And I do care about figuring out how to navigate and work with this place. If we’re going to beat Teacher at his own game, then we need to learn how to mess with this system, get our fingers into the works.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” she said.

“Watch Kenz?” I asked.

“I don’t need watching!” Kenzie raised her voice.

You already sound like a teenager, Kenz. Hurling yourself down that path?

I put my foot out, finding the slope before us. It wasn’t really angled though, just… awkward to walk on, nothing flat, everything at ankle-twisting angles.

I could shift my head to adapt to the perspective I wanted, but putting my foot out still found resistance.

It’s not about my head, it’s about me, I told myself.

Damsel had pushed us when she’d wanted us to go from one representation to another. I’d flown enough to be familiar with that stomach-jarring perspective shift, the dips and dives that one associated with roller coasters. I’d experienced just a bit of it when taking that one step to follow after Damsel, when she’d gone down the slope.