“Are you sure?” Joseph asked.

She looked around the table at us.

“Well?” a few of us asked with impatience.

“Well,” she said, “think about it. What does your first instinct tell you when you hear of a place where there is ‘no north’?”

I thought about it again, not for the first time. Then: “It makes me think it's way in the south, so far south that you can't even remember that there ever was a north.”

“Yeah,” Rusty said, “I was thinking that, too.”

“Well, good thing we're not relying on you two, then,” Mom said, surprising us all with her sarcasm. “The only place in the world where there is no north, is way up north!”

“Huh?” Rusty said.

“Right,” she continued. “If you go as far north as you can, then you can't go north anymore. So north ceases to exist.”

We all stared at her, and then right before she said it, it clicked in my own brain.

“The North Pole.”

After further discussion, we all agreed. It was just hard to accept at first because it seemed like it should be more difficult to figure out. But it made complete sense. If you stood on the North Pole, the only direction you can go is south. So no matter which way you pointed, there would be no north.

“Well,” Miyoko said, “that was the easy part compared to actually getting there. Even if we were trained and had all the needed equipment, how in the world would we get there in time?”

The hum of the hotel's heater was her only answer.

“Well,” I said, “we need to get a plane or something …”

“Jimmy, you don't just run to the airport and tell them you'd like a ride to the North Pole—we would need to hire experts who travel in that terrain for research or something.”

She was right. I had worried so much about figuring out where the Northless Point was located, I didn't even think about the impossibility of getting there. Such a remote place was not easy to get to. What could we possibly do? A dark cloud frustration and helplessness began to creep back over our little group.

The feeling did not last long.

Hood, who had not said a word since we'd made it back from our meeting in town, slowly stood, drawing our attention. He threw his Bender Ring onto the bed. It spoke for itself.

Of course. The Bender Ring. Hood had the ability to travel anywhere in the world with a drop of his magical red hula-hoop. It was instantaneous, albeit a very mind numbing experience—I would never forget my one trip using it.

And it looked like I'd be doing it again.

Rusty questioned why we hadn't used the Bender Ring for other things, like getting to the Tower of Air. It was a good question, with an easy answer. For one thing, we'd wanted to stay together as a group up until now, and the ring could only transport two people at the most. But more important, Hood could only use the Ring if he knew an exact destination. We never really knew exactly where the Tower was located, just a general idea, so it never would have worked for that.

But you can't get a more exact location than the North Pole. It's one spot, and one spot only.

But just to be safe, Hood wanted to test it out. We grabbed a map of the world that was hanging on the wall of the hotel room, and pinpointed on the map the location of the North Pole. Hood indicated that was enough to make the Bender Ring function. We followed him outside into the open air behind the hotel, making sure no strangers were around, and watched as he performed his trick.

I had never seen this before, as I was in the middle of the Ring the only time I'd been around when it had been used. Hood stood a few feet from us, and held the Ring high above his head, holding it with two hands spread evenly apart. Then he let it go, the ring slipping from his hands and falling to the ground at his feet.

As the Ring fell, Hood disappeared along its path. If you could have taken a picture when it was halfway down, you would have seen Hood's bottom half below the Ring, and nothing but air above it. When the Ring finally hit the ground, there was no noise, and the Ring itself disappeared. There was no smoke, no circular, flaming brand where his feet had been. There was nothing.

When he returned just minutes later, the Ring appeared first, floating six feet in the air, parallel with the ground. Hood materialized as it fell—the opposite of what we'd seen earlier. His robe was covered in frosty ice particles, and we could tell he was shivering underneath.

He knelt down and painted on the nearby sidewalk, even though I was pretty sure the owners of the hotel wouldn't appreciate it very much.

“I MADE IT. THERE WAS EVEN A BIG STICK IN THE GROUND PROCLAIMING IT AS THE NORTH POLE. WE WILL BE READY WHEN THE TIME COMES.”

We had only two days. There wasn't much I could do to prepare for my trip into the Blackness, because I had no idea what to expect. But Mom solving the riddle of the Northless Point had given us a much-needed boon, and everything seemed to switch in an instant from dark to light. There was a palpable feeling of big things to come, just on the horizon. We felt rejuvenated.

The beginning of the end was near.