Julius blinked. “What, you mean like right now?”
“No time like the present,” his sister replied. “Time moves differently on every plane. If Estella’s going to make her move at the mating flight tomorrow, we need to get started as soon as possible in case our destination is running behind. It’d suck to spend a day getting everything together only to come home and discover we’re a year too late.”
Marci paled. “Will that happen?”
“Won’t know until we get there,” Amelia said, smiling at the Kosmolabe. “Besides, do you know how many centuries I’ve been waiting to try one of these things?”
“I just hope she gives it back,” Marci whispered to Julius as Amelia peered deep into Kosmolabe’s interlocking golden circles.
“I’d settle for getting out of this alive,” Julius whispered back. He didn’t care how easy his sister made it sound. Going into an unknown, ruined dimension to retrieve an ancient dragon weapon that they didn’t understand and might not even recognize was crazy, even for a seer plot. They were in way too deep to turn back now, though, and Bob was counting on them. Julius thought that was a pretty foolish decision on the seer’s part, but he was still going to do his best to hold up his end. At this point, it was all he could do.
“I’m going to wake Chelsie up,” he whispered when it was clear Amelia was going to be at this for a while. “If we’re all going, I don’t want her to wake up alone.”
“Too late for that.”
Julius and Marci both jumped, turning around to see Chelsie standing behind them, her face pale and set in a dour scowl.
“Should you be up?” Julius asked when he’d recovered.
“I’ll live,” Chelsie said, nodding at their sister, who was staring into the Kosmolabe like it contained the meaning of life. “Is she making the portal right now?”
“I can still hear you, you know,” Amelia said without looking up. “And yes. I’ve already found it, actually, but it’s pretty far.”
“Does that matter?” Marci asked.
“Only if you want me to do this more than once,” Amelia replied, glancing at them over her shoulder. “You might want to brace. I don’t have enough juice yet to do this properly, so I’m going to cheat and do a rip job, which means things might get a little uncomfortable.”
Julius swallowed. “Uncomfortable how?”
The words were barely out of his mouth when Amelia’s magic ripped through the room, and the answer became self-evident. Just standing near his sister was like being surrounded by fire-heated knives. Even Amelia wasn’t immune to it. Her whole body began to smoke as the power built, her dark hair smoldering as little fires began to appear in the crooks of her curls. Then, just when Julius was sure she was about to spontaneously combust, Amelia lashed out and split the world open.
Having seen Chelsie cut through space numerous times now, Julius had thought he knew what to expect. As usual, though, the truth was something else entirely. Chelsie’s cut had been exactly that: an incision through one place to another. Definitely not something you saw every day, but still easy to understand. This, though, this was watching someone punch a hole in reality itself. Just seeing the air tatter and fall away felt wrong on a fundamental level, and as for what lay beyond… Julius couldn’t even wrap his head around it.
On the other side of the giant rip Amelia had made in his living room was black desert lit by a blood-red moon. But while that was comprehensible, if creepy, thefeel of the place was utterly and inexplicablywrong. It was like the moment in a forced perspective photograph when you realized the seemingly normal-sized car in the background was actually a toy in the foreground, only instead of the three-dimensional perspective, this trick was happening on the fourth. Everything beyond that hole—the fine black sand, the starless sky, the red moon with its alien craters—looked like a diorama frozen forever in a single moment. Still, eventhatwouldn’t have been so bad were it not for the black mountain in the distance. The mountain that wasmoving,despite the impossible stillness.
“Whatisthat?” Marci whispered, her eyes wide. “And what iswrongwith it?”
“I’m…not sure, actually,” Amelia said, looking a bit pale herself. “I—”
Her voice cut off like a dropped knife. At first, Julius couldn’t understand why. The landscape on the other side of the portal hadn’t changed. He was wondering if something was wrong with the portal itself when his nose caught the now-familiar scent of sea ice.
After everything that had happened, Julius didn’t even bother trying to figure out more than that. He just grabbed Marci and jumped. And it was this paranoid anticipation that saved their lives as the front door exploded in a blast of dragon magic, sending shards of wood flying all the way to the opposite side of the house.
“Get back!”
The shout came from Chelsie, who suddenly had her sword in her hands, taking up a defensive position in front of Amelia as the last dragon Julius expected to see stepped through the shattered doorway.
“Conrad.”
Chelsie said her brother’s name like a curse, smoke curling from between her clenched teeth, but Conrad didn’t even seem to notice. He just noted her position and stepped to the side, making way for the dragoness who walked in next.
“Right on time,” Estella said, sweeping her ice blue gaze over the room full of dragons. Dragons who should have been attacking her as their enemy, but who weren’t reacting at all. They just stood there, frozen as Estella smiled at them like they were statues in her garden before turning to face Julius. “You again? Why am I not surprised?”
After what he’d seen on Chelsie’s video, Julius’s eyes went straight to her wrist, and the seer laughed with delight. “Finally figured it out, did you?” she asked, raising her bare arm for him to see. “Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t waste chains on failures.”
She glanced at the tattered portal, which was still hanging in the air in front of Amelia. “You know, part of me actually wants to let you try. I’d love to see Brohomir’s face when he realizes the underdog he’s invested so much hope and effort in is lost forever in the silent grave of our ancestors. Alas,” she sighed dramatically, “I’m not an idiot who allows loose ends.” She waved her hand. “Kill them.”
Since Conrad was the one who’d blown their door open, he was the one Julius flinched away from, but it was Chelsie, not her brother, who attacked, turning and slashing her Fang at Julius.
