I should tell him about the basketball game, Dylan thought. Tell him Dad was there. But how could he? Hunter thinks I’m a stranger right now.
He opened his mouth, trying to figure out what to say. But all that came out was “Yeah, I’ll buy it.” He put his cash on the counter.
“You want to look at it first?” Hunter said, holding out the bracelet.
Dylan took it and turned toward the door. He wasn’t going to his dad’s. He couldn’t. The most he could do was take the bracelet away and help Hunter forget about the Other Place. Help him be happy in the real world like Dylan had never managed to be.
“Hey, wait!” Hunter called.
Dylan held his breath as he walked out of the shop. The bell on the door tinkled.
It went on tinkling, like water over rocks.
And on and on—
Dylan looked up. A stream cut across his path, trickling over mossy rocks. A canopy of sun-lit leaves shuffled overhead. His breath whooshed out.
The lattice of branches all but hid a gold-roofed palace. Through a tunnel in the trees—some engineered walkway—Dylan glimpsed a distant city of glass like a gathering of soap bubbles. The cold air pricked his lungs, his eyes.
The Other Place.
“Hello?” came a voice.
Dylan spun. It was her. A bolt of electricity shot through him. She was taller and full of new angles, but with the same pale-water hair and glass-smooth skin. She’d come to meet him. She hadn’t forgotten.
“You came through yesterday, didn’t you?” she said. “And before that, of course—a long time ago. I remember you.”
The air seemed to bend around her as though she accepted obeisance even from molecules. Her eyes were blue as ice. Dylan wondered briefly if they changed color when she was warm, if there was as much magic to her as he remembered.
She crept closer, as though afraid to scare a skittish animal. “Do you know where you are?”
It was cold out in the wood. Frigid mud seeped into his sneakers. There wasn’t the rain-and-salt smell of Seattle. “The Other Place.” How can it be true? How did I get here? He had about a million more Impossible Questions, too many to ask.
Her vorpal was all shifting puzzle pieces. “The . . . ?”
“I’m too old,” Dylan blurted. “I shouldn’t have been able to come back. I’m too . . .”
He’d forgiven Hunter. In his own way—by taking the bracelet. That was why he’d been able to come. Some rotten core had lifted out of his heart.
“Will they let me stay?” His voice was plaintive, like a child’s. Can’t I come live with you? An Impossible Question, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“No one can make you leave,” she said, and gripped his hand as if to anchor him. Her vorpal was strong, and he felt a ripple of sadness pass from it into his skin when she spoke again: “Do you remember me?”
She thought he’d forgotten. “I’ve been looking for you, trying to get back here,” he said.
She threw her arms around his shoulders. “And I’ve looked for you. The same way we once looked for gold in river gravel, for something we never expected to find. But now you’ve finally come again.”
She’d learned so many new words since he’d last seen her, when he’d taught her his language in bits and pieces. How did she learn to say all of that?
She stepped back and her vorpal was a wave of brightening air. “Others from here have gone to your world, but they never saw you. I would have gone if I could have. They’ve been to your world many times.”
“When? I didn’t know it worked that way.”
“Before you ever came here,” she explained. “Years before. We discovered . . . a leak. Where our two worlds press together, energy flows from your world into ours. It led us to you.”
He shook his head, unable to take it all in. “But why would you want to leave a magical kingdom for sidewalks and trash cans?”
She laughed and pulled him by the hand through the trees. “Because we are curious about your world. Like you were about ours when you were a boy.”
She led him along the bank of the stream. A map unfurled in his mind: The stream led to a river, to a sunlit cave where he’d seen treasures stored. It fed other streams that ribboned through the forest, through secret glades where he’d once built forts out of fallen logs. Farther along were the marshes covered with boardwalk mazes intricate enough to leave any adventurer as dizzy as Dylan felt now.
“Do you remember everything?” she asked him. “The den we carved in the bank of the stream? Eating berries there until the rain brought our mud ceiling down around us?”
She laughed again, then stopped and turned to him. “You’re the first from your world to come here. You’re the first to learn how to use such an ability.”
“Ability?”
“That allows you to find another universe.”
“Universe?”
She frowned. “Is it the right word?”