The whole weird castle exploded. The Final Fortress of the Dirrillillim, a hundred floors of weapons, alien tech, and rumpus rooms, blasted to pieces, and the pieces blasted to pieces, and those pieces blasted into even smaller pieces, microscopic pieces, smithereened to atoms, and the atoms cracked apart and spat neutrons and electrons and protons spinning across the mountains like Good & Plenty.
As the tower ripped apart, it took most of the ancient city with it. The capital of the old Dirrillillim Empire became, briefly, a bright dome of energy, and blew a hole in the atmosphere itself for a few seconds, and breathed out old, musty gas toward Zeblion III’s pale moon.
Katie Mulligan and Lily Gefelty did not know what had happened at first. All they knew was that they were plastered against the wall in the flying car.
What they didn’t know yet was that they were lucky to have been flying in the air when the explosion hit, because instead of destroying them, the blast instantly destroyed the machine that created the force field—and sent the two girls and their shuttle shooting at hundreds of miles an hour toward the purple horizon.
Their faces were twisted by the speed, the g-force. Katie’s hair was spread out all around her head. “Another few seconds . . .,” she gasped to Lily, “and we’ll be crushed flat as a French pancake.”I
They hurtled over jagged, glassy mountains. They tore past another flying car. It was the Dirrillill. He’d ducked his car down into a crevasse to avoid the blast. He shot through arches of green, then burst back into the searing purple sky.
Katie and Lily struggled with the floating controls. Lily was starting to get the hang of them.
The flying car was slowing down.
Lily’s eyes were fierce and concentrated.
“There’s the Dirrillill,” she said. There, miles back, was the Dirrillill’s jalopy, flirting with peaks.
Lily steered. She told Katie when to press buttons.
They were drifting through a mountain range where each peak had on it a weird antenna.
Lily said, “It’s around here . . . where we arrived in this world. It’s one of these towers.” She gasped. The Dirrillill’s car had just dipped down and disappeared from sight. “He must have landed,” she said.
She turned the flying car around.
“You’re really good at flying,” said Katie.
Lily didn’t answer.
They slowed down and scanned the hills for a parked car. They floated over gulfs and crystal ramparts.
There: an antenna tower. A car. Jasper and the Dirrillill has already landed and gone inside.
Lily and Katie exchanged a glance.
And there, running joyfully into the stone doorway of the antenna tower, was Mrs. Dash. She waved her arms.
She had seen her son go into the transmitter tower, and did not realize that he was hypnotized—that he was her enemy—and that their reunion was not going to be a happy one.
I Not as fluffy as American pancakes. But more eggy.