“Some help up here,” a voice calls down from above.

We both look up.

After all I’ve been through in the past little while, I would have said that nothing could surprise me anymore. But I would have been wrong.

“Lizzie?” I find myself saying. “What are you doing in this world?”

Her familiar face looks down at me from where she’s clinging to a branch as fat around as her own torso.

“So,” she says, “I’m guessing this isn’t Kansas, or even Sweetwater.”

I shake my head.

“Great. And here I am, stuck up in a tree.”

“Just let go,” the little man beside me tells her.

“Oh, right. Like I’m going to do that and break my neck. I’m neither cat nor doonie.”

“It will be fine,” he tells her. “I’ll take your weight.”

“Nope.”

“Trust me.”

She gives me a look but I have no words. I’m still trying to process the fact that she’s here with a little man who can turn into a pony.

“Oh, crap,” she says and lets go where I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have.

But instead of falling, she comes floating down. I shoot the little man a look and see that he’s got this serious look of concentration on his face. I guess by taking her weight he didn’t mean he was going to catch her, but that he was going to literally take her weight so that she doesn’t tip the scales more than a leaf.

When Lizzie’s feet touch the ground, she loses her balance and I catch her arm.

“You see?” the little man says.

She gives me a quick smile of thanks and puts a hand out to steady herself against the tree. Then she looks at the little man and shakes her head.

“I saw all too well,” she says. “What did you do? Talk to my fat cells and ask them to be air for a few moments?”

“Something like that, although you’re hardly fat.”

I have no idea what they’re talking about.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Same as you,” she says. “Bogans kidnapped me into the otherworld—or at least some part of the otherworld. The forest where we were was a lot darker and scarier than it is here. You did say this is the otherworld, didn’t you?”

I nod. “It’s sort of the otherworld, except bogans didn’t bring me. I just kind of appeared here.”

“And look at you—you’re like twenty years old and all, you know . . . healthy and everything.”

I give her another nod. “Apparently the way we appear here has everything to do with how we perceive ourselves to be.”

“Sweet.”

I look from her to the little man.

“Oh, this is Timony Twotot,” Lizzie says. “And this is Jilly,” she adds for his benefit.