Three things happened at that exact moment:
1. Louie and Alana swam frantically to the shore.
2. A ghost yelled, “Touchdown!”
3. And the golden thread jerked Ren off her feet.
That’s when I knew it had found what it was looking for.
The thread dragged Ren across the sand.
Zip groaned. “I got you, time girl.” He scooped her up and lifted her onto his shoulders, taking huge strides to keep up with the flying golden strand.
“Come on!” I shouted to Alana and Louie. “We can’t lose them.” I spun and did my best to lope after the giant without Fuego.
“Zane!” Alana quickly caught up to me. “Where are we?”
“Who are those kids?” Louie cried.
“Just hurry!” I called out. “I’ll explain later.”
We rushed into the trees, climbing over fallen limbs and ducking under bowed branches as we headed into deeper and darker shadows.
The sky had all but disappeared.
A few minutes later, we came to a black rock wall that stretched into the clouds.
Zip and Ren stood there, him panting, her still on his shoulders and clutching one end of the time thread as it rammed its other end against the wall.
“Zane!” Ren cried as we arrived. “It wants to go inside the rock.”
“Or to climb up it, and we can’t follow if it does,” Louie said.
“Give it more slack,” I said. “Let’s see what it does.”
“For the record,” Zip said, “I didn’t bring her here. The rope did. I just kept her head from getting split open.”
Zip lowered Ren as she released more of the strand inch by inch. Once she saw that it was trying to make a shape in the rock, she let go completely. The thread immediately spiraled into a tight coil and pressed itself into the wall, vanishing. With a pale green flash, the wall started rippling like water.
“The gold thread—it’s not coming back, is it?” Ren said.
Zip nodded. “There’s only so much time magic to go around. Guard the strands you have left,” he said, pointing at her watch.
Louie swayed. “I feel dizzy.”
I grabbed hold of him as Zip inched back from a circular shape in the wall, which was swelling and pulsing. “Looks like you need to step into that thing,” he said. “So this is where we say good-bye.”
Ren threw her arms around his knees and said, “Thank you for everything.”
“It’s a doorway,” Alana said. She reached her hand into the wall like it was nothing more than smoke. “We should go now. I don’t think this is going to last.”
She slipped inside, followed by Ren and a disoriented Louie. Just as I was about to step in, I turned to the giant. I had so much I wanted to say to him, but the only words I could come up with were “I’ll make things right.”
He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
I entered a chamber no wider than the Red Queen’s tomb, but with a high ceiling.
The floor was covered in fine white sand, and the walls looked like the inside of an abalone shell: iridescent swirls of intense pinks, greens, blues, and purples on a silvery backdrop. Each swirl cast enough light to illuminate the room, and my friends turned in circles as they took it all in.