Page 9 of Soaring into the Midlife

She closed her eyes and muttered an incantation under her breath. Her hands glowed with a faint blue light, but despite her efforts, no portal formed.

"Damn it, why isn't it working?" Kendra cried, frustrated.

"Maybe whatever brought us out here is blocking your magic." I tried to keep my panic in check.

Zara groaned. "Now what do we do?"

I racked my brain for any inkling of how to get back inside the building or down to safety. We weren’t near any windows. Zara and I could climb up or down, but what about Kendra? She didn’t have the physical abilities we did.

The wind continued to howl around us, and the ground below seemed impossibly far away. Though we were trained for many situations, none of our experiences had prepared us for this particular predicament.

"All right, ladies," I said through gritted teeth, "we're going to have to figure this out together. We've been through worse. We can handle this."

"Right." Determination replaced her earlier panic. "Maybe we can inch across this tiny ledge to a window."

"Let's just hope we don't end up as pavement pancakes," Kendra said.

Before I could even really process the impossibility of our situation and how we’d get back to it, the skyscraper itself seemed to come alive. In a matter of seconds, the entire building transformed into a massive, quivering mass of gelatin. As if on cue, we descended slowly through the wobbly substance.

"Is this happening? Are we actually sinking through a skyscraper made of gelatin?" Zara asked incredulously before our heads were covered up.

"Seems so." I struggled to maintain my balance as the gelatin shifted beneath me.

Soon the gelatin was over our heads, and it occurred to me that Kendra needed air. I turned my head and maneuvered a pocket of space around my mouth. "Kendra, can you breathe okay in there?"

"More or less," she gasped, her face contorted with the effort of taking shallow breaths. "Not exactly how I envisioned spending my evening."

"Join the club." I exchanged a bewildered glance with Zara. I couldn't believe that our simple mission to track down a skip had taken such an absurd turn.

"Have you ever encountered anything like this before?" Kendra sounded strained. She was starting to panic. It wasn’t easy talking in this mess.

I shook my head, racking my brain for any hidden knowledge that might help us navigate our way through a giant gelatin skyscraper, other than slowly descending. Unfortunately, I came up empty.

Zara grumbled, words unintelligible as she tried to say something.

The neon lights of the city below shimmered and twisted, warped by the layers of translucent gelatin between us and the streets of Philadelphia. It was a distorted, surreal sight left me even more disoriented than I already was.

Kendra’s eyes were wide as she tried to wiggle her head around to take another breath in the wobbly substance.

Our descent had become increasingly challenging, the wobbling gelatin hampering our movements and forcing us to carefully navigate our way down. The longer we were stuck in this strange reality, the more desperate I became to find a way out.

We had to speed this up. Kendra’s face was pale, and the panic was intensifying. I knew she couldn't hold her breath much longer, and we still had a ways to go before reaching solid ground.

We fought our way downward, our eyes fixed on the increasingly clearer view of the streets below. Our progress was slow, but each inch we descended only bolstered our resolve.

"Almost there," I tried to tell Kendra, noting the fear that still flickered in her eyes. I was fairly sure she’d heard me.

I rolled my eyes at the absurdity of our predicament as we continued to descend through the gelatin. Seriously, who ends up sinking through a skyscraper-turned-dessert? Quite the hilarious anecdote to share with the family, assuming we survived.

Zara was too far away. “Give me your hand," I shouted, extending my arm toward her. We needed to stick together, both figuratively and literally in this case.

She grunted, grabbing hold of my hand while balancing herself on the wobbly surface.

"Can't...breathe..." Kendra gasped out, her face turning a concerning shade of red.

I turned back to Zara, wiggling around until I had another pocket in the gelatin to speak into. “We need to push Kendra to the edge so she can get some air."

Zara nodded, her grip on my hand tightening as we forced our way toward the outer edges of the gelatin tower, using our combined strength and agility, hauling Kendra along the way.