Page 29 of Barbie: Dreamscape

“Yes,” I say through my teeth, eyes narrowed.

“Then you know what it means! Impossible. Out of the question. Unfeasible. Not worth contemplating. Beyond the bounds of possibility. Irrational. Hopeless. Forlorn. Far-fetched. Unbelievable. Outlandish. Harebrained. Un—”

“I get it,” I say a little too loudly, setting my teacup down with perhaps too much force. Ken gives a slight startle. “But I can’t—I can’t work with impossible. I need to find my Fate. No matter what it takes.”

Silence follows, and I’m almost shocked by my outburst. By my conviction. But I didn’t disobey Robin and almost become sky-splatter just to give up at the first obstacle.

Besides… I have no choice. The boat is long gone, and Robin clearly can’t reach me for some reason, or she would have appeared by now, demanding I return to Heartland and Swancrest.

“How did you get here, anyway?” the Archivist asks.

“A flying boat.”

She lifts a brow. “That’s all?”

No, I suppose not. I reach up toward the necklaces. “These helped.”

At the brush of my fingers, they glow pink, and the Archivist’s mouth falls open. She leans in close, then lifts a monocle made from a shard of sea glass to her eye. With a scraping sound, the glass begins to extend, telescoping section by section until it nearly reaches my charms. She nods, satisfied with whatever it is she’s seen, and the elongated glass collapses in a flash with a high-pitched screeching sound. She pockets the monocle and says, “Of course! You had a key.”

I frown. “What? No, these are—”

“A key,” she responds. “That’s how you got through the barriers in one piece.” She must see the complete and utter confusion on my face, because she says, “Each land has unique keys that allow your passage. If you find one… it will take you to the next land. Safely.”

Why would Robin’s and my mom’s necklaces form a key? It doesn’t make any sense.

“Here, look,” she says. She reaches for one of the shells stuck against the sand wall—and pulls.

To my surprise, it’s the end of a long scroll that keeps emerging—impossibly long for how thin the walls are—until finally, she sets it on the table with a thud, jostling all our teacups. She yanks it open, and the parchment rolls and rolls, down the table, across the room, through the entryway, down the drawbridge, off into the sands. I crane my neck to see it finally roll to a stop, right against Sandy’s legs. The apple core drops from her mouth and gets coated in grains. She looks down at her sand-covered snack and then up at us, displeased.

My gaze drops to the part of the scroll still on the table. It looks so similar to the mural on the wall in the library… a map. But this one isn’t missing nearly all its paint. It’s complete.

The Archivist jumps up and walks several paces, pointing toward somewhere on the floor midway between the table and door.

“So we’re here,” she says, tapping at a land symbolized by a sun. Her finger slides across the parchment, which is thickened by brine, yellowed by years. “You need to get here.”

There it is. The symbol with the six stars. Hope bubbles up in my chest.

Two lands sit between us and Dreamland.

“Can’t I just… land hop? Go directly from here to Dreamland?” I ask hopefully.

The Archivist just stares at me. “Do you have other keys you haven’t shown me?”

“Um… no?”

“Then no.”

Okay, then. Three more keys to find, including one here in Summerland, before I can get to Dreamland. That doesn’t seem so bad.

Optimism floods through me, a similar feeling as when I’m about to start studying a subject I know well. This doesn’t feel hopeless any longer. I have a plan. A way forward.

I look at the symbols of the places between us and Dreamland, searching for clues of what type of lands they might be.

One is a question mark. What could that mean?

The next is a leaf. That’s hardly any information to go off of.

Then, of course, there are the Dreamland stars, the ones mirrored in my necklaces’ charms.