stars shining through the thin mists below us. A green firecracker explosion happened off to the left of us, buffeting us and knocking us to the right, but it was too far away to do any damage. Above us, the ship swiftly shrank to the size of a bottle cap and then vanished in the darkness above. And Jay and I hurtled into the darkness below.
You know how skydivers rhapsodize about free fall being like flying? I realized then that they had to be lying. It feels like falling. The wind screams past your ears, rushes into your mouth and up your nose, and you have no doubt whatsoever that you’re falling to your death. There’s a reason it’s called “terminal velocity.”
This wasn’t a parachute jump, and we weren’t near Earth or any other planet I could see, but we were definitely falling down, down, down. We must have fallen a good five minutes when Jay finally grabbed my shoulders and wrestled me around so that my ear was next to his mouth. He shouted something, but even with his lips only an inch or so from my ear I couldn’t understand him.
“What?” I screamed back.
He pulled me closer still and shouted, “There’s a portal below us! Walk!”
The first and last time I’d tried to walk on air I was five—I’d strolled blithely off the edge of a six-foot-high cinderblock wall and gotten a broken collarbone for my efforts. They say a cat that walks on a hot stove will never walk on a cold one, and I guess there’s some truth in that—certainly I never again tried to grow wings.
Until now. Now I didn’t really have a choice.
Jay obviously could tell what I was thinking. “Walk, brother, or we’ll fall through the Nowhere-at-All until the wind strips the flesh from our bones! Walk! Not with your legs—with your mind!”
I had no more idea of how to do what he was telling me than a bullfrog knows how to croak the Nutcracker Suite. But he was surely right about one thing—there didn’t seem to be any other way out of our predicament. So I took a deep breath and tried to focus my mind.
It didn’t help that I had no idea what I was trying to focus on. “Walk!” Jay had commanded me. But in order to walk I needed something solid to walk on. So that’s what I concentrated on—my feet treading solid ground.
At first nothing changed. Then I noticed that the screaming wind hitting us from below was lessening. At the same time the mist was thickening. I couldn’t see the stars beneath us anymore. And there was a strange luminescence that seemed to come from the mist that now surrounded us.
We were floating more than falling now. It was like falling in a dream, and it came as no surprise to either of us when we touched down on what seemed to be a cloud.
I suppose Jay had done stranger stuff than this before, and that was why he took it in stride, so to speak. As for me, I had just reached a saturation point, that was all. Considering what I’d been through today, I’d finally come to the conclusion that this was probably all going on between my ears, that I’d somehow fried my brain’s motherboard and that I was probably at that moment wearing a wraparound canvas jacket with padlocks for buttons. Most likely they had me up in the sanitarium at Rook’s Bay, sitting in a very soft room and eating very soft food. A pretty depressing prospect, but it did have an upside—nothing could surprise me anymore.
Which thought gave me a little comfort for about two more minutes—and then the mists thinned out completely, and I saw where we were.
I’d gotten a glimpse of this—place? condition? state of mind?—back when Jay had come through that slit in the air to meet me. This was the same, only this time he and I were in the middle of it.
“Well done, Joey,” said Jay. “You got us here. You did it.”
I stared, turning slowly. There was a lot to see.
We were no longer on a cloud. I stood on a purple pathway that snaked, apparently unsupported, off into . . . infinity. There was no horizon—wherever we were did not seem to have any boundaries—but there was no skyline either. The distance was simply lost in more distance. Jay stood next to me on a magenta strip that wound off in the same general direction; it sometimes passed under, sometimes over my path. The colors were vivid, and both paths had the sheen of dyed polyurethane.
But that wasn’t all. Not by several decimal places.
On eye level with me and about three feet away was a geometric shape, larger than my head, that pulsed and throbbed, presenting now five sides, now nine, now sixteen. I couldn’t have told you what it was made of any more than I could tell you why it was doing what it was doing. I suppose you could say it was made out of yellow, because that’s the color it was saturated with. I touched it, gingerly, with one finger. It had the texture of linoleum.
I looked in another direction—and just had time to duck as a spinning something whizzed by me, skittering erratically as it dodged and weaved through the chaos around it. A moment later it splashed into a pool of what looked like mercury—except that it was the color of cinnamon, and the pool hung at a forty-five-degree angle to the strip I stood on. The waves and droplets of the splash slowed as they spread, ultimately freezing at the height of the splatter.
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