CHAPTER 5

MEETING MAISON HAD CHANGED MY ENTIRE life and how I viewed the world. If you’d asked me a few months ago how many worlds existed, I would have said the Overworld, the Nether, and the End. It wasn’t until I jumped through a strange portal and fell into Maison’s bedroom that I realized the universe was much bigger than I ever thought.

Maison’s world was pretty weird. Here in the Overworld, things were blocky, but in Maison’s world, things came in all different shapes. They even thought the Overworld was just a place in a video game called Minecraft that they liked to play. They had computers and cell phones and all sorts of weird technology, yet if you asked them to build something themselves, most of the people would just stare at you and have no idea what to do. They couldn’t even build simple things, like beds or swords.

Maison was eleven, just like Alex and I were, but we all looked pretty different. Alex had very pale skin and red hair, and she was blocky like me. Maison and I both had brown skin and black hair, except she had all different proportions. Her face was shaped like an emerald and on her hands she had something called fingers that looked like little squid tentacles. She used her fingers to lift things up or type on her computer.

Besides being my best friend, Maison was also smart and brave, so I thought she was a good person to go to. Together, Maison and I had saved both the Overworld and her school from mob attacks. It wasn’t all scary stuff, though—Maison and I also had lots of fun, like when we built a tree house together not far from my home.

But when Alex and I went back downstairs to ask our parents if we could visit Maison, we were in for a surprise. Aunt Alexandra had already left, as if it hadn’t even occurred to her to say “Goodbye” to her daughter.

Dad, meanwhile, was getting his toolkit together. “I don’t want to see the music disc again, Stevie,” he said. “Alex is trying to pull a prank with it. Alexandra explained everything to me.”

I started to argue that I really did hear stuff on the music disc, only for Alex to shake her head. She knew it was a lost cause.

“We were going to go visit Maison,” I said. “Is that okay?”

“What?” Dad said. He was looking for something in one of his chests. “I’m busy, Stevie. I need to go to the village to help the blacksmith with all the mysterious things going on.”

“So it is okay?” I asked again.

“Sure, fine, be back by dark,” Dad said absentmindedly. I don’t think he was even listening.

On top of everything else that was going on, I was a little nervous about showing Alex the portal to Maison’s world. So far, only Dad, Maison and I knew where the portal was located, and we wanted to keep it a secret. I learned that the hard way when a bunch of mobs got through the portal and attacked Maison’s school in her world.

“You know you can’t tell anyone about this portal,” I said to Alex as we hurried toward it.

Alex made a zipping motion over her mouth. “I won’t tell anyone, but it’s hard to believe you really found a portal to a new world. In my village, there were whispers that you were with some strange-looking humans when you saved the Overworld.”

“Well, Maison and Destiny helped me save it,” I said.

“Destiny? Like the DestinyIsChoice123 person you mentioned earlier? Is that the same person?”

“Yeah,” I said. “DestinyIsChoice123 is her screen name and Destiny is her real name. She and Maison are friends now, but I haven’t seen Destiny since then.”

“And the other one who attacked the Overworld?” she said, wide-eyed. She adjusted her toolkit and the quiver she had over her shoulder. “TheVampireDragon555?”

I gritted my teeth at his name. TheVampireDragon555 was the screen name of Destiny’s cousin, a seventeen-year-old cyberbully who’d masterminded the whole Overworld takeover. After he’d been defeated and returned to his world, Maison said he’d owned up to his mom about all the bullying and griefing he’d done. Griefing was a new word I’d learned, and it meant destroying someone else’s stuff for the fun of it. He was seeing a therapist now, and Maison said he was like a new person. Still, I didn’t believe that someone as rotten as TheVampireDragon555 could ever really change.

But I didn’t get a chance to respond to Alex because something caught my gaze. “Oh, no,” I whispered. Just ahead of us was the tree house Maison and I had built … and all the leaves on the tree were gone.

I dashed up the ladder, into the tree house, with Alex right behind me. The tree house had been ransacked, the furniture all knocked over and the objects pawed through. Had something been stolen? I frantically began searching through the clutter.

“Oh my goodness,” Alex said when she saw the damage. “This is just like what happened at my village. All the leaves are vanishing, and someone’s ransacking people’s houses.”

I looked up sharply. “Your mom didn’t mention anything about that.”

“She probably told Uncle Steve when we went up to the guest room,” Alex said.

Something white was on the balcony. In the bright sunlight, it was almost blinding to read, and as soon as I did, I couldn’t turn my eyes away. Alex followed my gaze and inhaled sharply.

There was a white sign on the balcony. In big, scribbled letters it said: I’M GETTING CLOSER.