The west garden served no practical purpose. It neither produced useful herbs for medicine nor fruits or vegetables for eating. Ornamental was the word Velanna liked to use for it. The west garden did, however, play host to a fleet of random shrubbery and flowering vines, a single ancient weeping willow, and a rather unspectacular cactus garden.

The west garden was Meg’s favorite place in all of Rainbow Valley.

She closed the door behind her and hurried into the quiet refuge of the tall stone walls that jutted out from Prism Castle. Different from the iridescent bricks of Prism Castle’s walls, the west garden walls were plain stone, irregularly cut and plastered together with mortar until they towered fifteen feet high.

The gravel path stopped first at the sprawling mess of cactus plants Meg had been nurturing for the last several years. Several Josharon villages in the area had cactus plants and succulents that grew naturally in the soil, and Meg had long since discovered they were the only plants she could keep alive.

“Hello, everyone.” Meg stopped at the edge of the raised bed she’d built to contain her cactus army. “Hope you’re enjoying the sunshine.”

The nearest cactus shivered in the wind.

Meg held up the journal and the encyclopedia. “I’ve got some reading to do, so I hope you guys don’t mind if I ignore you a little while longer.”

They didn’t mind. They never did. That’s probably how they stayed alive so long.

Meg gazed at the cover of her father’s journal as she approached the swaying willow tree at the north end of the garden. The first night at Prism Castle, ten years earlier, seeing the willow tree had brought her more comfort than she’d expected.

She remembered an old willow tree on the farm where she’d grown up in Terran, where the family used to live. She didn’t remember much else, but that tree lived in her memory. That tree meant home.

Somewhere along the way, this willow tree had grown to mean the same thing.

Meg parted its thick curtain of leaves and walked up the stair-stepped trunk of the gnarled old tree. Not even Velanna knew how old it was, only that it had been in the west garden since before anyone was paying attention. It might even pre-date Velanna and Tolan’s arrival at Prism Castle, and they’d lived in Rainbow Valley for three hundred years.

She settled down in the crook of the tree and held the encyclopedia in her lap.

I’m not hiding. She pressed her lips together. I just don’t want to explain what I’m doing. That’s all.

The cover of the worn encyclopedia had lost most of its shine in the years it had lived in Velanna’s library. Some of the pages were missing too. Velanna had always told her the book had been found out in a field, and one of the Josharons had brought it to her for safekeeping.

Josharons didn’t really do books. They told stories. It was more of a challenge to hold a pen or quill when you had claws instead of fingers.

Meg carefully opened the heavy book and skimmed its familiar pages.

The page at the very front of the book indicated that it had been assembled over a hundred years earlier. It was something Meg had fretted over as long as she’d been there. If the most up-to-date information they had about Terran was more than one hundred years old, how did they actually know anything about the world they’d come from?

Velanna knew a lot. But even she was limited by her own personal experience and what she could research with the materials available.

No Josharon had ever been to Terran, so they had no stories to tell. Velanna said she’d been to visit when she was young, sometime in the 1400s. Terran lifespans were so short in comparison to Celtican ones; the world could have reinvented itself dozens of times over since the last time Velanna had been there.

Meg stared at the book open in her lap.

Ireland. The mysterious island nation in Terran where her parents had been born. She thumbed through the pages until she found a worn map of the country where the city Dublin had been marked.

That’s where the letter said Donnie and his family had come from. Dublin. Meg chewed on a fingernail absently. But I’ve seen that city name before.

Meg flipped through a few pages in her father’s journal to the entry he’d written before Danny had been born. The entry was rushed and brief, more of an afterthought than anything else.

October 9, 1994

Maggie’s going to be a sister. Annie’s doctor says we’ll have a wee boy among us in the next few months. Had a visit from the Neighbors, and all seems well so far. Heard from Dublin today too. Bad news and good in equal measure, but rath Dé ort.

Meg’s fingers tightened on the page.

It’s that phrase again. What does it mean?

Dublin was the same too, but it didn’t seem as important as the unidentified words that ended the paragraph.

Throughout the journal there were other phrases that she didn’t always understand. She’d usually associated them with Terran words or phrases that she just didn’t remember.

This was different.

She set the journal aside and flipped through the encyclopedia, looking for anything inside it that might give her an idea of how to understand the phrase. At the very least, maybe she could find something to help her pronounce it.

You know this book inside and out. You know there’s nothing in it that will help.

She scoffed at herself and kept looking.

Meg scoured the encyclopedia until her back and neck were stiff, until the morning sun had risen high in the sky. No new information presented itself.

“It was worth a try.” She set the book down sadly and leaned back on the gnarled branch, staring up through the leafy branches into the blue heavens.

A shadow passed overhead.

Two Avi Josharons sailed through the clouds, feathered wings spread and robes flapping in the winds. Judging by the direction of their flight, they were down from the mountains, probably heading to one of the villages around Prism Castle.

The Avi preferred the areas of Rainbow Valley that were mountainous or heavily forested. Since they could fly, they liked being close to the clouds. The other two tribes, the Nibe and the Harna, were much happier to keep their paws on the ground.

“This is a waste of time,” Meg mumbled under her breath.

She set the journal on top of the encyclopedia and gathered them close again.

Maybe Velanna had been right. The present had too much happening in it to realistically have the time to think about the past. And it’s not like anyone or anything from the past could even get to them.

Not here.

Meg levered herself out of the crook of the tree and climbed down, shouldering her way out of the curtain of leaves. She smiled at the sky, cloudless and deep blue.

She walked to the garden shed built into the wall and set the books on the wooden bench outside. With the sun shining, it seemed a waste of beautiful weather not to take some time to work on her cactus plants. She’d repotted several of them over the last few weeks, and the next step was to get them settled in the raised beds.

“I’ll work out here for a little while,” she said to herself as she pulled on a pair of work gloves and approached her little cactus army, “and then I’ll take the books back inside.”

It felt a little like giving up, if she were being honest, but what else could they do? Going to Terran was outside of her power; Velanna could do it, but she’d already said it was a bad idea. None of the books in Velanna’s library had different information about Ireland or the strange phrase both her father and uncle had used.

Velanna was right. Digging up the past only made life complicated.

Meg smiled at her cactus plants.

“Life is complicated enough as it is, right, everyone?” She grinned.

Meg made sure the gloves were tight on her hands and bent to take hold of one of the pots that held a vibrant green-and-purple succulent. The instant her hand touched the pot, electricity sparked between them.

“Ouch,” she muttered.

Strange.

It was too humid for a buildup of static electricity significant enough to feel. Meg craned her neck at the sky, narrowing her eyes. No clouds. No high winds. No indication of bad weather on the horizon.

Scowling, Meg turned in a slow circle, gaze sweeping the whole garden. The shrubs. The vines on their trellises. The willow tree waving in the gentle breeze.

Normal.

Quiet.

Empty.

Wrong. Something’s wrong. She clenched her fists.

The air felt thick somehow, hard to breathe, heavy as though a thunderstorm was forming nearby. But the sky was clear. The hairs on her arms stood up, the deafening silence in the garden roaring in her ears.

It couldn’t be an attack. The Centaur outcasts might live within sight of the castle, but they’d never ventured close enough to march on them. None of the Josharon tribes were warring, and even if they were, they’d never attack Prism Castle.

But her heart raced, her senses on high alert, every instinct screaming to take cover or find shelter or just get away.

The air sizzled. Electric sparks burst like popping corn all around her. The garden smelled like burning wires.

The willow tree wavered before Meg’s gaze, as though a mirage were forming, distorted by heat waves. The tree bent and wobbled unsteadily.

Not the tree. The air. Meg held her breath. What’s happening?

The very fabric of the world split open, tearing apart with a violent shriek and a shockwave so powerful it hurled Meg backward. She hit the gravel path on her backside and skidded.

Meg scrambled to her knees and stared in shock at the jagged, swirling interdimensional gateway that had ripped itself open before her.

Panic spiked at the back of her brain.

It’s just like before. It’s just like the one that brought you here!

She’d been six years old the last time she saw an interdimensional rip. Scared and starving and desperate, clinging to her brother and sister because that was the last thing she remembered her father telling her to do.

Light and shadow spinning in synchronized motion, the churning mouth of the rip swirled like the clouds in a thunderstorm, its surface speckled with arcing electricity.

What did she do? Get Velanna? Maybe, but what could Velanna do? Was it an attack? Was there an enemy descending on them that they’d never seen before? One that could cross the barrier from one world to the next?

She waited, trying to breathe through the panic.

Nothing happened.

The rip hung on nothing, resonating with power and danger and darkness. Air hissed and whooshed inside it, like the sound of water spiraling down a bathtub drain.

How could a rip have opened here? Slowly she climbed to her feet, still staring at the rip. It’s not closing either. Why isn’t it closing?

The lightning inside the rip flashed more brightly, almost blindingly. Meg covered her eyes as the electricity surged inside the rip, and the roaring noise around it grew louder. It spun faster, and the air grew heavier and heavier until breathing the air felt like breathing water.

The rip shuddered and turned itself inside out, like it was consuming itself. The rip hurled a dark figure out of its throat and faded away as though it had never been there.

But the figure it had dropped lay still on the dirt.

Meg stared, not moving, hardly daring to breathe. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Interdimensional rips could form naturally, but they were rarely large enough to transport a full-grown person between worlds.

Meg took a single step toward the crumpled figure. It didn’t move. It didn’t speak. Was it alive? Where had it come from? Why was it here? How did it make it through the barrier?

She paused next to the figure and nudged it with the toe of her boot.

No response.

Carefully, she tried again, using a little more pressure. Slowly, the figure rolled over and sprawled on its back. Fair skin. Blonde hair. And the text on the black shirt it wore read, No, I won’t fix your computer.

Could it be?

Meg eyed his clothing—it was a boy, she was certain. A shirt. A jacket. Trousers. Shoes that she remembered vaguely from Terran. Tennis shoes? Was that what they were called?

Meg knelt at the boy’s shoulder and gazed into his unconscious face.

“You’re from Terran,” she whispered.

Meg glanced at the castle and then back to the unconscious human at her feet.

“Okay.” She nodded slowly and gulped for air. “Well, happy birthday to me?”