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Ah, the ancestor who started everything.

I point to the next photo of her as an adult, labeled 1905 .

Jìngyi’s eyes are focused on her lover, a shorter white woman with her hair bundled up in a bun, tendrils escaping everywhere and partially obscuring her face, but it’s clear she’s laughing in delight.

Jìngyi is smiling, tender and soft. “Who’s that? ”

“That’s Jìngyi and her girlfriend, I think? No one ever knew her name. They lived in Los Angeles, and the history books only ever mentioned Jìngyi and her work, you know, saving the world.”

“I have an ancestor wall, too,” I say. “Not as cool as yours—we don’t have a lot of photos.

” There’s a tiny black-and-white photo of ? ng Ngo ? i’s mother, cut out from an old passport or identification card.

There isn’t one of his father, or of Bà Ngo ? i’s parents, just their names written in Vietnamese on the small memorial.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have more mementos of them, but I’m grateful for all of ? ng Ngo ? i’s ramblings about Nha Trang and Bà Ngo ? i’s stories about tending the lychee farm with her family, even if I don’t understand all of it with my limited Vietnamese.

The collection of photos gracing Kat’s wall go from black and white to color, and a heavy sadness settles around my heart as I realize just how empty the house is.

It’s just her and her dad, and these photos of people who are gone.

At the very end of the hallway is a photo of a lovely woman in her thirties, throwing her head back in laughter.

“That’s my mom,” Kat says quietly.

She and Kat have the same smile, except Kat’s smile is much more worn and bitter than the hopeful woman in the photo.

I study the photo for a quiet moment, remembering our first conversation.

I know what it’s like, to have something like this hanging over you, like when people ask where my dad is, and the instant quick decision I make about how much this person needs to know about my life, the unspoken question that sits at the bottom of my heart, how painfully I’m reminded that he left us, that we weren’t good enough. That I wasn’t good enough.

“She looks like she appreciates a good joke,” I say.

Kat’s mouth quirks slightly in amusement. “She was always laughing,” she says. “At me, at my dad, when she was working on developing a new spell or trying to solve a problem.”

She glances down the hall. “Come on, my dad will be home late, but if he sees my light on, he might come by to say hi. We should be asleep by then.”

My heart pounds nervously. Is she taking me to her room?

It’s only to hide , I tell myself, it’s not, like, romantic or anything, it’s because you’re from another universe and you’re not supposed to be here, and if anyone finds out it’s experiments or something terrible…

Kat bounds up the stairs, looks over her shoulder at me, and smiles. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

It’s a bright, colorful space, a huge bedroom twice the size of the one Stacey and I share.

There is clutter and clothes everywhere and the room feels just like Kat, a fascinating kaleidoscope of personality, everything out in the open, like Kat is unafraid to say, Here I am, figure me out if you want to, I’m not hiding anything.

Kat’s desk is covered in a smattering of books and journals, half-written scribbles with symbols that I now recognize as runes.

The open journal in the center has pages ripped out and crumpled, and the pages visible have sections marked up with notes like this one or try this again but without the modifier and NO! !!

The crystals and random objects on the desk don’t scream “magical” to me at first—a half-empty spool of thread, a hairbrush, an empty can of pineapple chunks—but the way they’re positioned on various diagrams give them a gravitas of importance.

The bookshelf in the corner is overflowing with books stacked in all manner of ways: on their side, at an angle, as if shoved there temporarily and then forgotten, next to items that seem both random and preciously placed—a mug filled with pens, a carved statue of a dragon, and a large stuffed owl, whose button eyes have been handsewn and wings clumsily patched.

Kat sets her runebook onto a glowing stone on the nightstand with a thunk and it starts to glow softly.

She flops onto her bed, stacked high with colorful pillows and quilts all in a jumble, the sheets and covers in an impossible tangle.

She falls back into a cloud of pillows and pats the spot next to her.

My heart thuds so loud I’m afraid she can hear it.

“I’m so tired,” Kat says, yawning. “Aren’t you?”

I feel like I should be; my school day was just as long as usual, but somehow it seems like it happened in a dream, or a month ago. The excitement of trying the real spell, the terror of being alone in the tunnel, the pixies, all of it feels far away—I feel too awake, alert with curiosity.

I set down Fancy, who sniffs curiously at the room, her tail swishing back and forth as she regards her new surroundings. She leaps gracefully onto Kat’s bed without a second thought.

Kat laughs and pets her until Fancy starts purring contentedly, stretching out on the pillow. “Your cat is so cute.”

“She’s my friend Erica’s cat,” I say. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything she could eat? Or a bowl of water for her?”

Kat nods. “Yeah, of course, I can just grab something from the pantry.” She draws a symbol in the air and makes a circle with her hands, and within it the air seems to shimmer, wavering expectantly, like the heat just above a candle.

Kat reaches into the circle, humming thoughtfully to herself as she reaches around and starts handing me things: two bowls, a can opener, and a can of tuna.

“So neat,” I say in awe. “That must be so handy.” I open the tuna, pour it into the bowl, and place it on the floor. Fancy sniffs it imperiously before settling down to eat.

“Otherspace? Yeah, absolutely,” Kat says, walking over to her bathroom to fill the other bowl with water. “Everyone pretty much has one or more in their home, and a personal one for storing stuff you don’t want to carry with you all the time, or like, even entire offices and closets and stuff.”

She sets it down next to Fancy, who looks up from her tuna and meows in acceptance.

I scratch her behind her ears. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you home.”

She meows again, licking her paws.

“So you said you used the boxed teleport spell from Target?”

I pull out the stuff from my backpack and show Kat the map to Erica’s house, and explain about how we were just trying to test it to go downtown. “And then the map from our D&D game fell onto the diagram… they were to these catacombs that were made up.”

Kat sits up, humming thoughtfully. “What were you thinking about?”

I blush, remembering the moments right before Fancy leapt onto the diagram. “You. I was thinking about you,” I say softly.

Kat giggles a little. “You’re so cute.”

She shuffles off the bed and grabs a book off her nightstand, a thick textbook that has seen better days.

Its spine is worn and frayed, and the pages she flips through are old and yellowing.

Kat turns to a section and peruses, her fingertips delicately handling the pages.

“That’s amazing that it worked, given your universe supposedly doesn’t have any magic.

But it worked just like how this premade spell would have done given the last-minute substi tutions.

I mean, people complain all the time about how they don’t end up where they’re meant to be, but it comes down to the map being inaccurate or their intention was muddled. ”

“The instructions didn’t say anything about intention.”

Kat waves her hand. “It shouldn’t really affect the spell if your map is correct, but given your map went to these catacombs that didn’t exist, the spell did the next best thing with the distance and the general layout of what you directed it to—dumped you in the steam tunnels at UCLA in my universe. ”

“Do you think it worked because this spell was, like, prepaid?”

She taps the page on the book. “Those spells are all ready to go, but they draw a little mana from the world around you in order to function. So… the fact that it did work…” She grins at me excitedly.

“The implications! The possibilities! If I were a spell developer, this would be a huge breakthrough. It means that there is some level of magic in your universe. Come look at this!”

I climb onto the bed, my nervous heart both thankful and annoyed that Fancy is between us. I peer over Kat’s shoulder at the book, titled A Compendium of Basic Mana Flow: A History . The text is small and cramped, and footnote references date to 1906.

Prior to the Mayfield Breakthrough, spells were cast by mages who either painstakingly wrote spells for each unique purpose or used spells handed down over the generations.

Channeling the raw mana inherent in our world was time-consuming and dangerous, often leaving mages physically and emotionally exhausted.

In ancient times, people used focus objects and pure intention to channel mana into simple actions, such as increasing water flow to crops in an irrigation channel, warding off insects from grain stores, and more.

However, without direction, the results were varied and unpredictable.

As civilization grew and uses for magic increased, mages across the world specialized their craft by writing spells using diagrams, focus objects, and symbols that would later become standardized as runes.