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Saturday morning dawns cool, the perfect not-quite-summer weather, with adorable puffs of clouds racing across bright blue skies.

I change my outfit three times out of nervousness before I remember Brenda’s world has different fashion trends. She had so many questions about how magic was involved in clothing creation, and a bunch of theories about why and when certain trends persisted and evolved.

I should have asked more about what people normally wear in her universe.

Brenda wore a shirt with some sort of painted logo on it and denim jeans both times I saw her.

I can’t replicate the shirt, but I do have a few pairs of jeans I use for horseback riding; they’re not usually my style, as I prefer tight trousers or dresses, but I can make it work.

I raid Mom’s closet again and find a shirt with a modernized version of a mandarin collar, with stylized handcrafted knotwork.

I brush out my hair carefully and put on dark smoky eyeliner and a touch of shimmer blush on my cheeks. My heart pounds nervously; I can’t remember ever feeling this apprehensive about any date.

But then again, hanging out with my hookups—those were never dates.

I’ve never met anyone’s friends, either.

I vaguely knew Gena’s friends—Candy or Sandy or Mandy—but we never all hung out.

I can’t believe I ever let myself catch feelings for Gena in the first place when she’d only ever wanted a trophy.

I take a deep breath.

“Brenda likes you,” I tell my reflection in the mirror. “She likes you.” I repeat it again, thinking about the confident way Brenda speaks and the way she moves about in the world, ready to take on anything.

The prophecy looming over my head for the past few years feels different now; it had seemed inevitable and impending that the Ritual that took Mom’s life would take mine, too, and soon. But finding her research, meeting Brenda, feeling this… support … Hope is starting to sprout.

Mom figured it out; I just have to do it, too.

The streetcar heading up to Mount Lowe is packed with the usual crowd headed to Echo Mountain House: tourists chattering with one another, excitedly taking pictures on their runebooks, well-dressed ladies in their voluminous skirts ready to brunch and have a day at the spa, hikers loaded with gear as they prepare to explore the mountain trails.

Ahead of us the gleaming white buildings of the hotel and its amenities seem to almost rise out of the clouds shrouding it at the top of the mountain. The tourists gawk, pointing and posing with one another excitedly.

I’m the last to disembark, studying the coordinates carefully on my runebook.

It’s in the tennis courts, another one of those short ones, three seconds this time.

I’m pretty sure the part of the Order that smuggles is only interested in the portals that are open long enough for an exchange, but I can’t be too careful.

The only people on the court are two men having an enthusiastic disagreement about whether a shot was out or not. No one notices as I linger by the gate.

Five seconds.

Three.

Two.

One.

I step forward through the gate.

The wind rustles through the trees, and the scent of sage wafts through the air. Delicate buckwheat flowers shimmer in the breeze.

Did it work? Did I misread the coordinates? Should it have been from the other direction?

Wait a second, the tennis argument—

There’s only the sound of birds and the gentle rustle of wind.

I turn around.

The tennis courts are gone. There’s only cracked remnants of a concrete foundation, surrounded by gentle oak trees reaching for the sky. A squirrel chirps, and somewhere in the distance I can hear a few voices, but it’s nothing like the busy scene I’m used to at Echo Mountain.

There’s no luxury hotel, no casino, no restaurant, only the gentle whisper of the mountains.

“Kat?”

Brenda appears around the curve of a hiking trail where there was once a paved path.

She’s wearing a ridiculously large hat, another printed shirt with a logo of a stylized cat, and bright blue skintight pants made out of a strange fabric.

Her face breaks into a bright, sunny smile when she sees me, and she dashes forward.

“Kat! You made it!”

Brenda pulls me into a close hug, and I breathe in the warm scent of the skin at her neck.

“Hi,” I say, once we pull back.

I suddenly feel shy, my face warm as I remember our last goodbye kiss. I’m not used to this at all. I’m supposed to be the confident one, the cool one.

I cough. “Hey, it’s good to see you.” I wonder if I should have kissed her hello, and I tear my eyes away from her mouth.

“I brought you more books, as a present, since you liked the other one so much.” I open my messenger bag and show them to her.

Brenda’s eyes light up. “Thank you! I’m so excited, I was hoping to ask if you wanted to test some magic or show me and my friends this afternoon; I really want to see what works and what doesn’t!”

“Take a breath,” I say with a little smile. She’s so cute, how excited she is about everything. “We have all day.”

Brenda exhales. “We do, don’t we?”

I take her hand and squeeze it. She squeezes back, her fingers a warm and solid presence in my hand.

“Come on, the trail is this way.” Brenda leads me forward, and I follow, my heart pounding nervously in my chest.

This feels good, spending time together like this, without being worried about how to get home. Terrifying, in a whole new way. The last times we’ve spent together were an accident. This time—this time we planned for it.

Suddenly I think this could have been a terrible idea, but there’s no going back now. I’m committed to being in Brenda’s world for the full day. The next portal isn’t going to open until 7:08 tonight.

It dawns on me that this may be the longest time we’ve ever actively spent together as well.

What if she doesn’t like me? What if Brenda realizes that I’m just smoke and mirrors, that once she gets past that, I’m just hot and not really someone worth hanging out with?

“Oh! Before I forget—Fancy drank this potion when we were at UCLA, and I wanted to ask you if you think she’s okay; she seems okay, but I wanted to make sure.”

She pulls out her phone and shows me a picture of a smashed potion bottle. The label is torn and soaked in the glimmering liquid, but I recognize it immediately.

“Oh, that’s just a prep potion. People usually drink it before another larger working to help the effects last longer.

There’s a preset here that I can’t read, but it doesn’t matter.

” I give Brenda a comforting smile. “It doesn’t actually do anything if another spell isn’t involved. The cat will be fine.”

Brenda giggles. “Okay. Good to know.” She flicks a strand of stray hair away. “This is nice, you know? A real date. I’ve been looking forward to it, but I’m nervous, I’m so nervous—”

“Me too,” I say. “I really like you.” The words tumble out of me unbidden, a strange new kind of warm affection that surprises me. I can’t take it back, and I find myself not wanting to, the feelings sitting in the air just there, waiting for Brenda to acknowledge them.

“I do, too,” Brenda says, and this time she moves first, pressing a soft kiss to my lips, delicate and shy.

I kiss her back, holding her close, and then something flops into my hair, heavy and tickling.

I yelp, looking up. It’s a stray branch that’s fallen from a nearby tree.

Brenda laughs. “Sorry, it’s just, your face—you’re so offended.”

She untangles it from my hair, fingers gently plucking out the leaves, and I can’t help but laugh, too. And just like that my nervousness melts away, and we talk and laugh as we pick our way back toward the trail.

I wipe my brow, already sweating. “Is it just me or is your Los Angeles hotter than mine? I mean, it’s so dry here.”

Brenda nods. “That’s one of the first things I noticed—there isn’t a drought in yours, huh?”

This would be the kind of question Mom would have loved: the implication of mana flow in weather patterns, how these portals affected it—there’s a sharp bite to my thought processes now, about the Order and what they knew and if they did something to the Ritual that affected Mom.

Brenda starts talking faster, her voice escalating in excitement and pitch as we get closer to our destination. “My friends can’t wait to meet you! I’m so sorry if they are overbearing… Ryan and Adib have been talking nonstop about magic, so they’ll probably ask a ton of questions.”

Ahead of us is where the main hotel courtyard should be, but there’s nothing but a crumbling stone facade. Over by where the train station would be are only a few giant gears and steel rods with people sitting on them, eating lunch and talking among themselves.

I try not to stare; everyone is wearing strange clothing, some prismatic and shining as if underwater, or fabric that looks painstakingly painted on in elaborate, colorful detail that would have taken a designmage forever to spell.

There are people wearing shirts and strange forms of outerwear with their jeans, but my attempt to replicate Brenda’s shirt-and-jeans look clearly didn’t work well given the way people are looking at me.

I’d worn this outfit because I thought I’d looked good in it; I know Brenda said “ruins” but I’m so used to Echo Mountain House and its pretentiousness, the way the waiters at the restaurant wouldn’t seat you if you weren’t wearing formal attire.

The way Brenda reacted to our streetcar ride I’d just expected slightly different versions of the same buildings, shops, vendors.

But here the luxury resort is gone. The famed overlook where tourists would gather and take photos of the Los Angeles skyline is just a concrete outcrop now.

The skyline itself is different, dramatically taller, with thick gray haze drifting around shining and angular buildings sparkling in the distance.

“Is what I’m wearing okay?” I whisper to Brenda. “I wasn’t sure…”