The tall, skinny teenager wandered around the hallways with his mouth hanging open, muttering to himself with every other step. Were all Terrans this weird? Or this tall? Or skinny?
Danny crouched behind one of the hallway pillars, watching.
What is he even doing?
Danny pushed the brim of his cap back so he could scratch his forehead. Why hadn’t he picked up the last tree frog he’d seen? This would have been a perfect opportunity to test the newcomer’s reflexes.
And it would have been funny.
Alas. Here he was tree-frog-less. He didn’t even have a decent handful of cherry pits since Yasira had started making him empty his pockets before he came into the castle.
The tall teenager—Jim was his name? Or something like that?—stopped to stare at one of the woven tapestries hanging from the walls. Every winter the adolescent female Josharons spent months making them, like a rite of passage or something.
Jenny had been buzzing about getting to work on one next winter. Danny didn’t really understand the excitement about it, but good for Jenny. She found another hobby to annoy him with.
Jim brushed his hand against the fine weave of the tapestry, leaning in close to it.
What was so interesting about it anyway? Jenny thought they were awesome, but she liked making them. Meg thought they were beautiful, but Meg liked cactus plants. Her opinion didn’t count. Tolan liked them too, but his admiration came from how long they took to make. Danny could respect that. That part made sense.
But a thing of beauty? Naw.
Now, a vat of korma curry with saffron rice? That was beautiful.
His stomach rumbled.
Had he eaten lunch? He probably had, but it didn’t seem to matter recently. He could eat every hour and still be hungry. Hopefully it would mean another growth spurt soon. He’d just gotten taller than Meg. Next up was Tzaitel.
Jim turned toward him with a start.
Oh. Guess the stomach was louder than I thought.
But Jim forgot to let go of the tapestry, and he jostled it hard enough to pull it off the wall. Jim yelped as the tapestry peeled away from the stone and enveloped him like the jaws of a river magara.
Arms flailing, feet spinning, Jim flailed at the center of the hallway with the tapestry covering his face.
Danny remained where he was.
Was Jim just pretending to be clumsy? Or was he really that uncoordinated?
Jim tripped on the hem of the tapestry and toppled over in a heap on the carpet.
“Wow.”
Slowly, Danny stood and approached the thrashing figure on the ground. Who needed tree frogs to pull a prank? This guy was a walking disaster. He could knock himself out with nothing but a wall hanging.
Finally, Jim found the edge of the tapestry and popped his head out with a cough, his hair a mass of blonde frizz. He blinked up at Danny disorientedly.
“Hi.” Danny smirked.
“Hi.” Jim said. “Danny, right?”
“Yeah. What are you doing?”
“I—well—I was—looking around—you see I was looking for Velanna, but then I saw this.” He gestured to the tapestry. “It wasn’t supposed to fall off.”
Danny couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “That was kind of funny.”
Jim sighed. “Yeah. I get that a lot.” He started to stand up and slipped. “Could you give me a hand?”
“I kind of want to keep watching.”
Jim rested his arm on his knee. “Yeah, I get that a lot too.”
Danny laughed and offered his hand, and Jim took it. He had a surprising amount of strength in his big hands. For someone so skinny, Danny hadn’t expect his grip to be so firm.
Danny levered him up and helped him get the tapestry unwound from his legs.
“I’m sorry about that,” Jim grimaced.
“Eh, don’t worry about it.” Danny pulled the heavy wall hanging over to the side of the hall and folded it haphazardly. “Tolan and I will hang it back up later.”
“It’s incredible craftsmanship.”
Oh, man. Him too? Danny shrugged. “If you say so.”
“No, the threads are really bright, and the patterns are super intricate.”
“Are you an expert on weaving?”
Jim shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. “Not really. I just find other cultures fascinating, and I’ve never run into a culture like this one.”
“Walking, talking fox people?”
Jim nodded. “Yeah.”
“Pretty crazy, right?”
“Completely.” Jim raised his hands in the air. “This place is just nuts. I want to know everything and meet everybody and learn all I can.”
“You do?” Danny scowled.
That wasn’t what he’d expected. From what Meg and Velanna had told him about Terran, it wasn’t a place that really valued history or knowledge. If that was the case, Jim apparently wasn’t a normal Terran.
Jim grinned. “Why wouldn’t I?” He knelt by the fallen wall hanging and held it up to examine it again. “I always theorized that there were alternate worlds, but I didn’t expect to ever get to visit one. And nowhere in any of my theories did I expect to find sentient beings, let alone an entirely developed culture.”
His whole face lit up like a sun.
He looked like Velanna did when she translated a new book out of her library. Or Meg when she figured out some Andaiku form. Or Jenny when she breathed.
“Oh, I get it.” Danny nodded. “You’re a nerd.”
Jim drew back. “What?”
“That’s the word, isn’t it? I remember that word from when I was little. You’re totally a nerd.”
“Well, yeah.” Jim chuckled. “I guess I am. I just didn’t expect to you to know it.”
Danny snapped his fingers. “We’re full of surprises here.”
Jim brushed his hair down with his fingertips. “I have no doubt.” He shook himself. “I really do need to talk to Velanna, but I have no idea how to find her.”
“If she’s back, she’ll be in her library.” Danny turned on his heel and waved at Jim to follow. “Come on. I’ll take you down.”
“Great.” Jim hurried after him.
Danny started down the hallway with Jim next to him.
If Meg knew that Danny was escorting one of the strangers through the castle down to Velanna’s library, she’d have a temper fit.
He smirked to himself. It would almost be worth telling her just to watch. Meg’s temper fits were funnier than throwing tree frogs at people.
Danny paused when they reached the connecting corridor. From this position on the third level, there was only one convenient way to make it down to the second floor. But they would have to go through the kahane-kadhan.
He bit his lower lip and glanced up at Jim.
“What’s wrong?” Jim smiled. “Are you lost?”
“Nope.” Danny drew himself up and headed for the stairwell. “We just have to walk through a strange room. This way.”
“A strange room?” Jim stayed at his heels.
Danny led him to the stairs and started down the steps, winding down to the second floor.
“The kahane-kadhan.”
Jim grunted behind him. “I don’t know that word.”
Danny glanced back at him. “It’s what the Josharons call it.”
“What do you call it?”
They reached the second floor exit of the stairwell, and Danny stopped before a huge arching stone doorway that led into cavernous darkness.
“I call it strange,” Danny murmured. Because I won’t call it scary in front of you.
He stepped into the dark, and Jim followed behind him.
Ahead of them, toward the center of the massive, empty room, dim light from the hallway leading to Velanna’s library spilled into the inky darkness. Some small amount of light from the hall behind them illuminated the first few feet inside the doorway. The rest was blacker than a moonless, overcast night.
Their footsteps echoed eerily, the sound reverberating off the the walls and spiraling around them. Danny ignored how his heart rate increased, and he fixed his gaze on the light of the far hallway.
He hated the dark room.
He didn’t really know why. There was no particular reason why it should bother him. It was just a huge, empty, black room inside Prism Castle. It had no light inside. It had weird carvings all over the walls. And it stretched the entire height of the castle itself with no other entrances.
Not even Velanna had seen what was carved on the walls at the very top of the dark room. The Josharons told stories about the Avi who had flown up in the dark with a torch to see what was written high above, and each one of them had either gone blind or lost their minds. A few had tried it over the centuries that the Josharons had occupied Prism Castle. Each one had been the same, or so the legends went.
It was all probably made up. The Josharons did get superstitious about some things. Although the fact that Velanna hadn’t pursued it was telling.
Danny sped up as the light from the hallway grew brighter.
The less time he had to spend in the dark room, the better.
Jim had stopped talking.
Maybe the room bothered him as much as it bothered Danny.
Finally, they reached the hallway and emerged from the darkness, the stifling black silence peeling away from them like something liquid and tangible.
Jim drew a deep breath and turned back to the dark room, his face pale. “What—what is that place?”
“That’s the kahane-kadhan.” Danny shrugged.
“It’s creepy.”
Danny frowned. “Creepy?”
“Yeah, it gives me the creeps.” Jim waggled his fingers. “It makes me feel weird. Does it make you feel weird?”
“Creepy.” Danny nodded. “I like that.” He scratched the back of his neck. “It makes everybody feel weird. Nobody likes the dark room.”
Curiously, Jim took a few steps toward it and poked his head inside, though he remained in the hallway.
“It’s bizarre,” he murmured. “Your eyes don’t adjust right.”
“If you want to read the walls, you have to take a torch.”
Jim turned to him. “Read the walls?”
Danny adjusted his cap. “Yeah. The walls are all covered with writing. There are some images too, but it’s mostly just words.”
“What do they say?”
“We don’t know.”
Jim blinked in surprise. “You don’t?”
“Nope. The Josharons don’t know the language, and Velanna doesn’t know it either.” Danny started down the hallway again. “Which we all thought was kind of weird, since Velanna knows—like—everything.”
“Yeah, I picked up on that,” Jim said, falling into step beside him. “She seems to be the go-to person around here.”
“Well, she’s old.”
Jim laughed. “I’m sure she is.”
“No, she’s old.” Danny stopped and grinned up at him. “I bet you have no idea, do you?”
“No idea about what?” Jim leaned toward him. “How old is she?”
Danny scratched his chin. Oh, man, I could totally fry his fur right now. “You should ask her.”
“Won’t that insult her?”
Danny shrugged and started walking again. “Why would that insult her?”
“Sometimes older ladies don’t like telling people how old they are.”
“They don’t?” Danny wrinkled his nose. “Velanna’s really proud of it.”
“She is?”
“Yeah, I think it has something to do with her being the last of her kind or something.” Danny stopped at the library door and set his hand on the frame. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
“The last of her kind?”
Yeah, definitely shouldn’t have said that. “Well, I mean, there’s Tolan. And Tzaitel. So she isn’t the last-last.”
Jim’s expression had grown somber, his eyes sad. “What happened to their people?”
Danny pulled his hat off and pushed down his hair. “That’s definitely a question for her. I shouldn’t have said anything. Velanna gets kind of touchy about that.”
“But not her age?”
Danny snickered. “Yeah, maybe you just shouldn’t ask her anything.”
Jim rubbed his shoulder absently. “Well, I have to ask her something. She’s the only one who can help us get home.”
Danny pushed the library door open, and he fought back the urge to sneeze as the gigantic room full of dusty old books tickled his nose. Jim made a choking sound.
Danny looked back at him and grinned. The skinny Terran teenager looked like he was going to pass out.
“You okay?”
Jim didn’t answer. His mouth hung open. His eyes were nearly popping out of his skull. He strode cautiously into the library, turning in slow circles and making stammering, stuttering sounds.
“Jim?”
Was he allergic to dust maybe? Did Terrans behave like this before they died randomly? That would stink.
“Books.” Jim gasped.
“Yeah, books. It’s a library.”
“So many books.”
Danny rolled his eyes and shut the door. “Right. I forgot. Nerd.”
He left Jim standing awestruck in the entryway and walked to one of the sturdy wooden chairs at the huge trestle table. He flopped down in it and propped his legs up on the chair across from it.
He hadn’t really thought about how Jim would react to the library. It was pretty impressive, now that he thought twice about it. Velanna’s library took up several floors of the castle, and it had more books in it than she had been able to inventory in the three hundred years she’d lived in the castle.
She knew most of the books on the first two floors, but only half of those were in languages she spoke. The rest of them? Well, they were written in languages Velanna had never seen and couldn’t translate. There were even some written in the same language on the walls of the dark room.
“This is incredible,” Jim murmured, coming to stand at the table. “I’ve never seen so many books in all my life.”
Danny eyed the rigid set of Jim’s shoulders. “Have you seen a lot of books before?”
“Dude, I’ve been to the Library of Congress.” Jim ran his hands into his hair. “I’ve been to Harvard and the British Library and the National Library of Sweden.”
“I don’t know where any of those are.”
“They’re the biggest libraries in the world.” Jim stopped and shook himself. “I guess they’re the biggest libraries in my world.”
Danny folded his arms across his chest. “Velanna’s not here yet, but she’ll be here once she arrives. Whenever she’s got a puzzle to solve, this is where she camps out.”
“Amazing.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of books.”
Jim smiled. “You don’t seem impressed. You don’t like books?”
“Books are good.” Danny nodded. “I’m more of an outdoor kind of guy, though.”
Jim regarded him in silence for a moment. “This has got to be really strange for you.”
“What?”
“Us. Me and Barb, being here.” He sat down in the chair next to Danny.
“I think it’s stranger for you.”
“True story.” Jim chuckled. “But—wow, it’s just so crazy. All of this. To uncover this world. To find you and your sisters when nobody else could.”
Danny tipped his head. “Find us?”
Jim stiffened slightly.
“What do you mean find us?” Danny set his feet down. “You mean—people are looking for us?”
Jim sat back in the chair. “Well, yeah. You three are one of the most famous disappearance cases in history. Even Phoenix Munroe couldn’t solve it.”
“Who’s Phoenix Munroe?”
Jim raised his eyebrows. “Right. You wouldn’t know. She’s—well, she was the most successful detective in the history of the Peregrine Agency.”
“She was.” Danny turned his hat in his hands. “She died?”
“No.” Jim gave him a short smile. “But Barb knew exactly who you guys were the instant your sister shared your last name. Every Peregrine Agent knows your story. It’s the one case every cadet dreams of solving in the academy.”
“And that’s what you two are?” Danny waved his hand. “Peregrine Agents?”
“Yeah. That’s us.” Jim gazed up at the multiple levels full of book shelves.
“But you’re not looking for us anymore.” Danny arched one eyebrow. “Right?”
“Well, not exactly.” Jim winced. “I think that’s why your sister doesn’t like us.”
“Jenny likes you just fine.”
“I mean your other sister.”
“Meg doesn’t like anybody new.” Danny stilled, resting his hands on his knees. “But—well, hang on. If you know who we are, and you’re part of the group that’s looking for us—”
Jim pressed his hands together and waited in silence.
“Oh.” Danny sat back. “So if Meg lets you go back, you’ll tell people where we are.”
Jim smiled sadly. “I think that’s what Barb led her to believe.”
“Wow, no wonder they aren’t getting along.”
“The whole thing is theoretical, though.” Jim slumped his face into his hands. “We may not be able to get back. At least, that’s what Tzaitel seemed to indicate. That’s why I need to talk to Velanna. I want to see if there’s any way I can help them.”
Danny rubbed his fingertips along the stitching his his ball cap. This one was only a few years old. He’d worn out his last one, as well as the one before it. They’d all been based on the ball cap he’d been wearing when he fell into Tolan’s wheat field as a five-year-old kid.
He had precious few memories of Terran, though what he remembered wasn’t bad. He mostly remembered his parents. His mother’s beautiful face. His father’s laughter. Their happy home had been taken away from them so suddenly, replaced by the murky terror of the children’s home.
Meg got them out. And then they’d ended up in Andaria. None of them had ever wanted to leave. Andaria was home. But what had they missed in Terran? What if his memories of the other world weren’t as dark and unhappy as Meg made them seem?
“Would you tell?” Danny asked softly.
Jim looked at him. “What?”
“Would you tell on us?” Danny met his eyes. “If we got you back to Terran?”
Jim hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“What would happen if you did?”
Jim lifted his hands. “I don’t know that either.”
“Could we—come back with you?”
Jim tilted his head. “Do you want to? Leave, I mean?”
“No.” Danny shook his head. “I don’t want to leave. But I—would like to see what Terran is like. I don’t really remember it, and Meg doesn’t like to talk about it. She says our life is here.”
Jim rested his elbows on the table. “Hey, let’s make a deal.”
“A deal?”
“Yeah. You help me make an impression on your sister, and then you can come visit me whenever you want. I’ll take you out for Thai food, hot dogs, movie theater popcorn—the works.”
“I don’t know what any of that is, but it sounds awesome.”
“It’s food.”
“Even better.”
“Which sister do you want to make an impression on?” Danny extended his hand.
Jim made a face at him. “Well, your little sister already likes me.”
“Meg, huh?”
“Yeah, Meg.”
Danny shook his hand. “Go put the wall hanging back on and do that funny dance from before. She won’t be able to get you out of her head.”
Jim rolled his eyes. “Maybe I should have emphasized that I want to make a good impression?”
Danny snickered and leaned back in the chair, propping his legs up again.
I think I’m going to like Jim.
Meg could be as negative as she wanted, and maybe her instincts were on point as far as Jim’s sister went. But Jim himself was a good guy. Weird. Awkward. And very strange.
But good.
“I think we just became friends,” Danny said, leaning his head back on the chair.
“I’m glad.” Jim smiled at him.
Danny smiled back. “Yeah. Me too.”

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