against me on our drive back from Imelda’s Eatery, a small but modern restaurant that stood alone along the north side of an untraveled freeway exit. After ordering our ninth slice of pie, Imelda herself came out to the main dining area to see who her hungry patrons were. She had squealed in delight at the sight of my uncle (he seemed to have that effect on women frequently).
Sebastian, you rascal! she had said, I should have known it was you! Then she gave him a very awkward wink and asked if he had any special deliveries for her. I almost vomited my pie up right then, right there. Our scholarly discussion on the traits of the spheresaii and the rock-paper-scissors battles to determine who would have to carry the cumbersome duffle bag came to an end after that exchange. We finished our pie in silence. Baert and I both avoided eye contact with Uncle Seb.
With a belly full of sugar, Baert had zonked out about four minutes after getting into the little MG. The small elf curled up against my left side in the front bucket seat. It was barely big enough for one human, let alone a human plus an elf. But I was grateful for the body heat. The tiny convertible produced an incredible amount of backdraft as we drove, and even on this mild, sunny day, I was frigid. Baert insisted he would “rightly spew the barry skan” if my uncle closed the convertible top. So the breeze was an ok alternative.
The spheresaii nestled on the rear passenger bench. They purred from within their duffled sanctuary. The bag had basically growled at me like a pup who didn’t want his slumber disturbed when I went to climb back there. I apologized – yes, apologized to a duffle bag of magic bouncy balls – and took a tight spot in the front.
The humming of the antique engine paced out and the car came to a stop at the entrance of a private airstrip. A lean man with perfectly styled hair wearing black sunglasses and a neat uniform of navy blue trousers and a white shirt spotted us from a small guard tower and jogged over to Uncle Seb.
“Yep! Very good to see you again, sir,” he said eagerly to my uncle. Then, spotting Baert, he became very erect and immediately drew his hand to a salute.
“Apologies, Leftenant, yep!” said the man. “Please do carry on, yep! Sir, gate’s open, yep!”
The man stayed like that, rigid and with pursed lips and clearly sucking in his stomach, until we drove fully past him. He sprinted back to his little tower and manually opened the gate, and then resumed his ridiculous strict posture.
“That guy knows Baert? What’s a left tenant?” I asked incredulously. I knew the elf in the context of pranks at my school and hives from uncontrollable peanut butter intake.
Uncle Seb didn’t respond. He was quiet and focused as he drove us around a large airplane hangar. He pulled up near the little Stinson plane I had been in before. It had been recently been cleaned; the royal blue stripes on the tips of its wings sparkled in the sunlight. Several more men dutifully sprinted up the car, and they all had the same taste in hair products and fashion as the well-mannered fellow from the gate.
“This isn’t your usual hangar.”
“Nope.”
There was something odd about these guys, I observed as I hopped out of the car. It wasn’t that they seemed to revere Baert or that their movements seemed so orchestrated and dance-like – I had never seen a more graceful exchange of keys and water bottles. It was that they looked … strange, but why? I surveyed each man’s neatly coiffed brown hair, parted on the same side that set off their identical, prominent pointed noses and broad chests. I gasped. They were all carbon copies of the same person. From the sunglasses to the sensible shoes. Five replicas tended to us, the car, and the plane with grace, respect, and resounding yeps!
As we climbed into the plane, each of the five men gave a little bow and, with fantastic synchronicity, pulled in their midsections and shot their hands up in a salute. Five chins jutted out over ten squared shoulders. Uncle Seb just gave them a nod and helped me up. Baert, however, stood dramatically in the doorway of the small plane; his frame finally large by contrast. He brought his hands to his hips and turned his head slowly to the side in a regal profile like he was posing for something. Then he shot his arms out and threw his head back, standing, as though victorious, in the open door of the plane. He stayed this way as the plane began to inch forward. It wasn’t until the tiny turboprop engine whirred loudly and Uncle Seb called for him to the close the plane door that Baert relinquished his hero stance. The elf gave a final salute to his fanboys below and pulled the door’s latch tight.
With the door shut and the plane’s nose facing up with increasing speed, I peered out the passenger window and saw all five men chasing after the plane, pumping their fists excitedly and waving vigorously.
"Those friends of yours?” I said, trying to be cool but obviously burning with so many questions.
“Oh yeah, that’s Kip,” Seb responded.
“Which?”
“All of them.”
I looked out again, their identical bodies now looking like tiny ants scurrying below us.
“Of course they are,” I said.
“We rescued them from the Seventh some time ago,” Uncle Seb explained. “Don’t know much about who their race was or when it was, but they were in a bad way in those tubes. Kip was the final five who survived the experiments going down on the others like them. Baert freed them.”
I was in disbelief. It was not that there were five of the same people running around below us; it wasn’t that my uncle had brought them back from a dimension that most of modern science doesn’t explain. It was that the little elf who threw a temper tantrum when I took his Nutter Butters away and flooded my kitchen doing flips in a bubble bath was their mighty savior. I looked back at Baert, who was in the small cargo hold just behind the cockpit. Something had gotten stuck to the back of his robe: his head arched back and his arms twisted as he tried to reach it. He looked like a dog chasing its own tail.
I just shook my head, settled back into my seat and adjusted my seatbelt. I looked up– we were already high above the clouds. I had hardly felt the ascent! I couldn’t believe I was in Uncle Seb’s plane again. The last experience felt like it was both 20 minutes ago and 20 years ago.
“Have your water bottle ready?” Uncle Seb broke the silence. “You ready back there, Baert? Kip refilled the water supply, yes?”
Beart’s little hand thrust forward, holding his water bottle between us for us to both see. I obediently retrieved mine from beneath my seat. I was uncertain if knowing what to expect was helpful now; I think I preferred the element of surprise. The thrill of the unknown can definitely bolster courage. Sheer curiosity’s excited roar dulls common sense and propels us forward. I needed some poetic bravery now. For my mom, I thought, you can do this. I squeezed my eyes shut. That pain of discovering her gone flowed back and gave me another jolt of courage. I chugged the water bottle quickly and greedily.
I turned to my uncle and gave him a thumbs up. His goggles were down and his leather gloves were on. Baert’s little hand again jutted forward and gave us a thumbs up.
“Here we go,” I breathed in. The compression sensation started back up. Waves of lightning shot around us. A hum that grew louder and louder like a billion wasps enclosing everything filled existence.
“Oh, Egg! Eve! I almost forgot to tell you,” Uncle Seb was yelling, an uncharacteristic concern in his voice that almost sounded like panic, “Without Dragon we won’t be fully cloaked!”
“What?!” I yelled back at him, neither fully hearing nor fully understanding what he was getting at.
“Without Dragon!” he yelled, “We can travel, but we won’t be cloaked!”
Feeling my body contort and space closing in, I strained to look at my uncle.
“Egg, they’ll see us coming! THEY WILL SEE YOU! GET DOWN.”
His voice echoed through a deep tunnel to my brain, slowly, deeply, falling off-pitch. Deeper, deeper … and then … nothing. A blast of wind – energy? – forced my body down. I curled up in the cockpit, strained, and recognized the imminent sensation of compression.
I dared to open my eyes briefly as we shot through the portal. A huge shadow, a metallic bug-thing, toweredover us. It floated nebulously on the interdimensional haze. Tts vast two-part body bobbed rhythmically and made antennae-like structures tick up and down like conductor’s batons.
“Is that an antenna sticking out of that thing?” my breath finally squeaked out of my compressed lungs.
Uncle Seb coughed and put a finger up. He blinked a few times, opened and closed his mouth wide to stretch his jaw, and coughed again.
“Transmitters,” he said as he hit his fist against his chest. His breathing normalized. “They send static to scramble any nearby aircraft and keep these dimensional entrances covered.”
I followed my uncle’s ritual and also pumped my fist against my chest. I did so with a little too much gusto and choked on my own breath. As I cough and sputtered, embarrassed, Uncle Seb passed me the bottle of that magical goo.
“Entrances? Plural?” I gulped.
How do I reconcile this strange new world existed next to me all along. The idea that there were multiple access points into other dimensions interlaid within ours made my brain hurt and my stomach dance.
“They’re peppered about … so far as we know,” Uncle Seb responded.
His tone belied the gravity of what he was saying. He spoke with the casual air of someone ordering a diet coke.
“I guess I’ll just let that simmer while I drink this enchanted water,” I said dryly, trying to mimic his casual sophistication.
“Nah. That’s just your regular old H2O from Earth,” Uncle Seb responded, “but with a shot of Dragon sweat.”
I did a spit-take. Like an actual spit-take you see in movies: mid-swallow, water came shooting out of my mouth and nose.
“What?!”
Uncle Seb let out a deep belly laugh.
“But actually?”
“Keep your belt tight, we’re going to try something,” Uncle Seb said as he reached up to hit several buttons and knobs on the control panel.
“You can’t change the subject with your little beeps.”
“The belt. You’re gonna want that on.”
“Am I drinking dragon sweat though?” I said again as I frantically tightened the safety harness at my chest.
More laughter. He laughed as he deftly pulled the knob on the throttle almost all the way out and turned the control yoke hard to his left. The little Cessna 152 careened straight up and turned on its side, spiraling, spiraling, spiraling.
We sprang into the Seventh Dimension. I felt like I was toothpaste getting pressed, flattened, and then squeezed out of a small opening. My lungs burned; I wheezed and gasped for breath. Then came a familiar throbbing headache and blurred vision.
I looked frantically at my uncle. He was quiet, focused – he crouched forward over the controls he grasped with both fists at full tension – but he didn’t look worried. (If he knew how fervently the dragonscale water was trying to work its way out of me, he’d be worried.)
The plane pitched side to side. Right to left, farther left, back to right, farther right, farther right. Down a purple treed alley we went, completely sideways. We swerved in and out, always sideways, always wrong. I couldn’t see where the trunks ended or began, just a woody expanse that shot through swirling pink clouds. Was I looking below us or above us? I hated this.
“I’m weaving in and out of the shadowy spots and using these trees for coverage,” Uncle Seb spoke up, maybe sensing my alarm. “Won’t be as smooth, but I’d like to go undetected for as long as possible.”
He pushed forward on the yoke just slightly. The little plane swung wide, leveled out, and shot upward. My insides punched my spine. Up, up, up … and … finally level. I looked out the window – we were in those pink swirling clouds above the mysterious purple trees. Treetops that were round, not pointed?
The plane hung in the thick air and its engines quieted. Baert ventured out of wherever he had been. He crawled between the two chairs in the cockpit, stopped, and looked up thoughtfully at me, then Uncle Seb, then back at me. He opened his bearded mouth as if to speak, but a blast of blandly brownish vomit came spewing out instead.
“Geez, Baert! Every goddamn time!” Uncle Seb cried.
“Can I get a – a – towel or something?” I squeaked, very aware of moisture on my sleeve.
Baert placed something warm and soft in my hand, Warm and soft and … moist. I looked down.
“Baert! You cannot give me your sock to use as a towel!”
He shrugged and pulled his one bare foot behind the dressed one.
“Aye, I am right sorry, lassie, but me heid’s a bit shaken and … aye, nay, here she comes agin!”
The little elf rocked forward a bit, his skin greyish. Another stream of peanut-butter-colored bile erupted onto the cockpit floor.
“Baert! Control yourself, man!” Uncle Seb cried.
“Yeah, Baert,” I started, but giggled too much to continue.
“Oh, you think that’s funny, the elf blowing chunks all over my plane, huh? Well, ha ha,” Uncle Seb shot back at me crossly, though I thought I detected hint of bemusement in his voice.
Whatever lightheartedness was there dissipated quickly. We looked up at the same time to see a whole army of tiny silver drones flying directly at us. I screamed, Uncle Seb grabbed his controls and cleared Baert away with a swipe of his leg.
“Hold on, guys,” he growled as he pulled straight back.
Off we went, swinging, tumbling, rolling, diving. We buzzed against the purple; shaved-off vines of foliage flapped away in our wake. Baert tumbled backwards in his own vomit that trickled after him like a viscous slinky.
“Baert? Be a friend and clean up your own filth, wouldya? Towels in the case behind Egg’s chair.”
The plane darted in and out of trees. Pink light, black shadow, reflections of drones. I don’t know how my Uncle Seb reacted so swiftly. On and on this went, but as I peered forward, I made out a gray rectangle, no, a wall, a black wall, no, an expanse, that reached on in either direction forever and ever and –
“Uncle Seb! Stop!”
“I see that. Oh, I see that,” he murmured. With a whistle the plane lunged, slowed, stopped. Everything up until that point had been brilliant swirling clouds and pastel vistas accented by purple trees and iridescent tubes. Nothing resembled the nature from the dimension I knew. So stones – big, grey boulders with jagged edges and unpredictable angles – were a strange but weirdly welcome sight. They piled up against the base of this ominous wall.
“Yah see that down there,” Baert stared out the window, mouth agape.
“Baert, you’re fogging up the window, friend. Please.”
Uncle Seb’s patience while so anxious was incredible. I watched his jaw clench and his shoulders tense, but slowly, gradually, he brought the plane to hover just in front of an open crevice in the stone wall.
“Where are we?”
“Thah radge bowels of hell.”
“I believe we’re at the southern-most wall of his lab. I’ve only heard of it. I didn’t … I didn’t even mean to get us here; I was just trying to shake the dronettes.”
“You’re … trying to shake donuts?”
“DRO-nettes. Those little silver flying machines that came out at us – they’re usually just surveillance cavalry. I’ve never had much of a problem with them, but I’m guessing they read heat signals. By the looks of those darts they were shooting at us, they’re not too pleased I’m packing extra bodies.”
“They were shooting darts at us?!”
“I’ll pummel the devil’s balloons!”
“How did you not notice?”
Uncle Seb leaned out of his seat and reached up. A tiny arrow had impaled the plane’s ceiling; with a gloved hand, he gave it a quick jerk and plucked it through. He held it out for me to see. It was silver and very, very thin. Its bulbous point had a green glint to it. In other contexts, I might think it was beautiful.
“I guess I was too busy holding in my vomit over Baert’s vomit to have caught that tiny little robot trinkets were shooting at us,” I shrugged.
My stomach calmed, which just meant I was more aware of my frustration. I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable, cagey, anxious. We had gotten here, but to what end? We were sitting ducks, hunkered down against a wall to nowhere. My uncle admitted he didn’t know exactly where we were. My family was still gone, and Dragon was who knows where, and … I had to stop myself from having a total and complete breakdown just then. Because, well …
There was a giant blob of elf vomit on my left leg.