“That’s a lot to unpack,” Brynholf said.
“Shut up,” I said.“It’s cold in my hands.It tastes like… cookies.Future.Hope.”
“Can you focus on that mental image?Is it fuzzy?Is it sharp?”
“I don’t know,” I said.“It’s kinda.It fades if I don’t keep it moving and spinning.”
“As tends to happen,” Dr.Kaz said.“Alright.You seem prepared, at least a bit.Listen.Ideas become weapons in Topside.Anything you can imagine you can pluck from the aether around you.You just have to keep it active.Believe in it.”
“I’m not even a fighter,” I said.
“Well, you better imagine one next to you, then,” Dr.Kaz said.
“This might be safer if we just brute-forced the entryway,” Brother Al said.
“Could be, if you want to try.Or it could destabilize your molecular bonds at an atomic level and cause you to splatter.”
“I have the highest of faith in you, Stacey,” Brother Al said, patting me on the back.
“Remember,” Dr.Kaz said.She waved a hand between me and Brother Al, and I felt something thick and sticky wind itself up around my head and into my ear.“Your mind is your greatest weapon.”
The portal sucked at me, air from behind me seemingly pulled inside.
“How am I even going to breathe in there?”I asked.
“Imagine you can,” Dr.Kaz said.
“Should I take it at a run, or what?”I asked.
I felt someone shove me in the small of my back, and then suddenly, I felt the world around me spinning.Colors faded—something was screaming—a magnificent strobe of light in orange and blue lit up, concurrently, like neon signs in a tunnel, as if I were falling down, down, down into some cartoon, and then I found myself smashing into the soft soil of an island, staring up at where I had come from.
A heart-shaped hole in the sky pulsing with orange and blue concentric rings.Like the oval that Porky Pig stared out of at the end of all those old Saturday morning cartoons.I stared around me.I was on a plateau of some sort, with blank space all around me in every direction.
“Stacey?”I heard, in my ear.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Oh, good,” Brother Al said.“Describe where you’re at.”
“The sky around me is cerulean blue.I landed on a floating island.I don’t see anything else around me other than a big full moon in the sky.”
“You may have landed in the Outers,” Brother Al said.“There are no other landmasses near you?”
“No,” I said.
“Stacey, this is going to sound ironic coming from me, but have you considered jumping off the rock you’re on?”
“No,” I said.“Should I?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Brother Al said.“Just avoid the moon.”
“Why?”I asked.
“Just do as I say,” he said, voice snapping.
“It looks really far away anyway,” I said.
“Don’t look at it, either!”Brother Al snapped.“Jump to the next island, Stacey.”
