“It’s possible the security cameras will be fixed before tonight,” Dad said.
“Then we fry them again,” Benden said with a shrug.
As I continued to describe our last heist attempt, Charles continued to write on the whiteboard, listing out every item with arrows that pointed to a solution. He put a big fat question mark next to security cameras.
I broke off talking. “Do you always whiteboard your heists?”
“It’s important to be organized,” Charles said.
“It feels like we’re making a supermarket list.”
“Weareout of cereal,” Liam said.
Dad shook his head. “How can you joke? Do you realize what is at stake here? If we fail, we will, at best, be exiled from this world, from our home, from everything we have ever known.” He met each of our eyes, as if he wanted to impress us with the seriousness of this.
“At least we’ll be together,” I said.
“Unless this Mr. Keene decides to kill us all instead,” Benden pointed out.
I shot him a look.
Shrugging, he ate another enormous bite of pizza.
Before anyone could say anything else, the front door slammed open. Charles quickly grabbed the eraser to destroy the record of our plan, but Dad put his hand on his wrist. “It’s your brother and Sky’s friend. Sky trusts her.”
Footsteps came, running toward the kitchen, and then Gabriela burst inside, followed by Tuck. “You’re alive!” She barreled across the room and hurled herself at me, hugging me so tightly that all the air whooshed out of me.
“Ryan’s father is a lying liar who lies,” I told her. “The jewel is a portal. It leads to the world that my kind originally came from. We call it Home. Our ancestors were exiled from there generations ago, but then the Door—the jewel—was lost, or supposedly lost. Turns out that Mr. Keene has had it in his vault and has been secretly exiling people there for years. Including my mother. And now, most recently, me.”
She drew back to gawk at me. “Whoa, seriously? You were sent through a portal dimension?”
Charles shook his head. “Sky, you can’t just spring that kind of thing on a human—”
“So cool!” Gabriela said.
Charles blinked. “Or maybe you can.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Liam gawking at Gabriela with nearly the same expression that she’d just worn. I smirked.Nicely done,I thought. Gabriela had impressed my brothers. Especially Liam.
“We’re going to try to steal the jewel again,” I told her. “It’s going to be dangerous. More dangerous than the first heist. And I can’t guarantee they’ll just bribe you if we fail. They might decide you know too much.”
Gabriela gripped my hands. “What’s it like? Double suns? Unicorns? Is the gravity the same? Do they speak the same language? Are there parallel versions of all of us? Killer robots?”
Liam’s expression turned even more admiring at the words “killer robots.”
Oh, I was going to be teasing him about this later.If there is a later,I amended.
“There are a lot of dragons,” I told her. “And unicorns. No double sun. There are a few robots. All the exiles spoke English, but I didn’t meet any of the wyverns who weren’t connected with the exiles—pretty sure they don’t speak English. But the ones I met taught me how to turn into a dragon.”
She blinked fast. “Oh, that is so awesome. I think I’m going to cry.”
Dad loomed over us. “It’s not a game. Sky, we trust you, but it’s irresponsible to include a human—”
“We need her,” I said. “Unless you have a counterspell to the wyvern detection spell? Maximus told me no such counterspell exists. We need a human. Specifically Gabriela. She’s done it before, and I trust her.”
Gabriela blushed.
Quickly, I summarized everything we needed to do, while Charles pointed to the relevant points on the whiteboard—I introduced Worm/Benden as the substitute for Maximus and explained that Liam was an expert on explosives.
