KENNETH OPPEL

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are ­either
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Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-5461-5820-2

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 25 26 27 28 29

Printed in Italy 183

First edition, June 2025

Book design by Stephanie Yang

​FOR MY ­FAMILY
We made a grave marker, even though ­there was no body to bury.
We’d waited a long time before ­doing it. Despite what I’d seen, what I’d told
every­one, it was hard for some p
­ eople to stop hoping. They said, Maybe you w
­ ere
mistaken; maybe it was just an illusion. They said, Maybe he’s still alive, figuring out
how to get back to us.
But eventually, a­ fter a c­ ouple months, every­one agreed t­ here was no point put-
ting it off. When we fi­nally placed the marker, I ­wasn’t sure anyone had changed
their mind about anything, but you could tell ­people felt it was necessary. It was
an acknowl­edgment that t­ hings had changed.
Every­one said goodbye in their own way. ­There was crying, halting farewells,
prayers. Any words I had stayed in my head. ­They’d told me over and over that it
­wasn’t my fault, and I’d nodded and said, Yeah, I know, but I d
­ idn’t believe it. I’d
been t­ here when it happened. I kept imagining how I ­might’ve done ­things dif-
ferently that day. Bolder action, more persuasive words. Anything to stop him
from ­dying.
And as I stood ­there at the grave, I thought of other ­people who ­were lost to
me. My m
­ other. Sam. My mind tumbled backward down the endless road of if-­
onlys. You could waste a lot of time wishing ­things had been other­wise. Maybe
that had been part of the prob­lem from the outset. Striving for t­ hings that w
­ ere
impossible.
But down that terrible potholed road I hurtled. All the way back to t­ hose very
first days, when we arrived over three years ago.

1
 1
I snatched up my phone as soon as I woke, suddenly knowing how to get inside
the ­castle. We’d been wasting our time trying to cross the moat, hopping on alli-
gators’ backs or crawling underwater with breathing tubes. We’d been bitten,
pierced with arrows, and doused with boiling oil. Throcknor actually drowned
­because his plate armor (he was so proud of it) was incredibly heavy, and we had
to use up a resurrection spell to bring him back.
What we needed to do was slog back to the village, break the Grygax out of its
cage, feed it a goat so it liked us, and then I would straddle its mangy back and
get it to fly me over the ­castle wall. Once inside, I’d open the gate, drop the bridge
for the ­others, and we’d storm the keep. This would work.
I needed to run this by the other players. R
­ eally it was Serena’s opinion I wanted.
Our D&D camp was opposed to dungeoneer groups having “leaders” ­because that
was too hierarchical. But Serena was a natu­ral leader, and was very good at getting
the other players to make decisions that w
­ ere usually her decisions.
Right away Serena and I had seen eye to eye. Less debating, more playing. We
also agreed that the camp’s athletic activities ­were cruel and unusual punishment.
The counselors made us play capture the flag, do t­hings with Hula-­Hoops, and
sometimes even run laps. Serena and I would fall ­behind and talk. She liked
e-­gaming but, just like me, she loved the old-­school RPGs best: just you and the
graph paper and your ­imagined character, burning with purpose.

3
 I was glad she ­didn’t go to my school and know how deeply uncool I was. All
she knew about me when we first met was that I usually played a seventh-­level
thief with an invisibility cloak.
I was pretty sure Serena would be all over my Grygax idea, but when I tried to
open our dungeoneer group chat, my phone said ­there was no connection.
“Oh, come on . . .”
I wondered if Nia had switched off the router a­ fter we’d arrived last night. She
and Dad had left their laptops in the city, and s­ he’d been talking about how won-
derful it would be if we ­didn’t have any Wi-­Fi b
­ ecause it was so impor­tant to
“decompress.” We would do this, she said, by swimming and canoeing and reading
and talking together the w
­ hole weekend. Which was absurd, especially when I had
a ­castle to plunder. Why did Dad’s new wife even get a say about the internet?
I slipped out of bed to go check the router. I glanced at the top bunk where
Sam usually slept. He’d stayed b
­ ehind in the city for a soccer match. Cottage
weekends ­were never as much fun without him. I r­ eally ­hadn’t wanted to come. It
was the second heat dome of the summer, and yesterday it had been ninety
degrees. The cottage d
­ idn’t have AC. When we’d walked in last night, it was like
a sauna. We’d opened all the win­dows and set the fans ­going.
Nia was against us getting AC b
­ ecause we’d just be making the climate emer-
gency worse. We’d have to learn to live with the extreme weather that all us
greedy ­humans had created. ­She’d eaten a banana, taken a cool shower, and gone
to bed with a fan blasting right on her. I’d done the same (without eating a
banana) and it actually worked r­eally well. I had to hand it to Nia—­she ran
a ­great apocalypse.
When I went out into the hall, it was so much cooler than last night, but it
smelled weird. The cottage was often musty when you first opened it up, but this
morning it had a faint chemical smell, like new carpet. I ­hadn’t noticed any new
carpet.
Dad and Nia’s door was still closed. I was usually the first one up on weekends,

4
especially lately. Nia had been having trou­ble sleeping ­because her stomach was
so big with the baby. She usually slept in. Dad, too.
The router was way at the back of the weird l­ittle closet beside the bathroom.
Its lights w
­ ere flickering, which was good, but one was red, which was bad. I
unplugged it, counted to ten, then plugged it back in.
In the ­family room, I dropped into my favorite green chair and checked my
­music while waiting for the router to reboot. Smiling, I scrolled through the new
songs Sam had dumped onto my phone yesterday. He was my ­music guru. He
­didn’t know just the latest ­music but also cool bands I’d never heard of, ­going as
far back as the ’80s. He knew all the side proj­ects and solo efforts, the best pro-
ducers and session drummers. We’d listen to songs together and he’d peel back
the layers and identify e­ very single instrument in the mix. Yesterday, when assess-
ing my play­list, he’d shaken his head sadly and said, “­Little bro, you badly need
some new sounds.” I now had an ­album called Brotherhood and another called Is
This It and a bunch of assorted songs to help get me through the weekend.
A goat bleated, and it took me a few seconds to realize this was not a normal
cottage sound. For the first time that morning, I looked out the win­dow, and the
lake was . . . ​gone. Instead of a lawn sloping ­gently to the dock, ­there was a red
barn and a fenced pasture. Inside the pasture was a shelter with an open front,
and beside it stood a brown-­and-­white goat.
I stood. To the right of the pasture w
­ ere rows of green plants. Farther off was
a cornfield. My brain was already telling me a story, reasonably explaining how
this must have been done overnight: building the barn, planting the crops, drain-
ing an entire lake. Or maybe it had dried up overnight from the heat dome.
­Wasn’t stuff like that happening all over the world now? I s­ topped myself. No. It
­wasn’t just a change. It was completely dif­fer­ent.
I usually avoided ­going into Dad’s bedroom now that it was also Nia’s bed-
room, but this was impor­tant. The two of them w
­ ere still asleep. Dad had on one
of his weird nose strips that Nia made him wear ­because he snored.

5
 “Dad. Dad!”
He lifted his head from the pillow. “What’s wrong?”
“Outside is all dif­fer­ent. The cottage—­it’s moved.”
His head dropped back onto the pillow. “Xavier.”
“I’m not joking. ­We’re on a farm. ­There’s a goat.”
Helpfully, the sound of bleating came through their curtained win­dow.
“That’s definitely a goat,” Nia said, stirring.
“Just come look!”
Nia raised herself onto her elbows and affectionately rubbed her humped
belly. With a grunt, Dad levered himself into sitting and followed me down the
hall in his boxers and a McGill ­T-shirt.
“Must’ve gotten loose,” Dad said, yawning. “­Didn’t the ­people down the road
get a . . .”
At the win­dow he ­stopped talking. ­There ­were now two goats in the pasture.
From Dad’s lips slid a word that sounded like “faaaaawk.” He walked to the
kitchen, whose win­dows looked out front. Our car ­wasn’t in the driveway.
­There was no driveway at all, no road connecting us to the other h
­ ouses built
around the lake. Instead ­there ­were more fields of crops, a small orchard, and a
big blue sky over all of it.
Nia was laughing in the ­family room, and I felt hopeful. It was all a joke, and
now ­they’d explain it to me. When Dad and I joined her by the big win­dows, the
view was unchanged.
“Why’re you laughing?” Dad asked her.
“I just c­ an’t take it seriously.” She stood t­here in her mauve maternity yoga
gear, shaking her head as she took in the view. “Every­thing I can think of is
insane. U
­ nless I’m still asleep.”
“­We’re not asleep,” Dad assured her.
“Maybe it’s just video screens,” I said. “Pushed up against all the win­dows?”
Dad looked at me, bewildered. “Why would anyone do that?”

6
 “I ­don’t know! Why would anyone move our lake?”
“You c­ an’t just move a lake,” said Nia.
“­Can’t just move a ­house ­either,” Dad said.
“You can,” I told him. “­There’s this video where p
­ eople moved a three-­story
­house on a flatbed trailer.”
“Not with p
­ eople sleeping inside. It’d be a huge job—­and noisy, especially in
the ­middle of the night. Ripping a cottage off its foundations?” Something
occurred to him and he returned to the kitchen and turned on the tap. ­Water
gushed out. “And we w
­ ouldn’t have plumbing. Or electricity.” He flipped a switch
and the lights came on. He looked out where the driveway used to be. “How
would you get a flatbed trailer in ­here without a road? I’m not even seeing tire
tracks.”
“Does it smell weird to you?” I asked.
“I’m getting my phone,” Nia said impatiently, marching to the bedroom.
“How do we even have electricity?” I asked Dad, pointing out the win­dow. It
­wasn’t just the road that was gone; ­there ­wasn’t a power pole in sight.
When Nia returned, she was holding her phone as well as Dad’s, and shaking
her head. “No s­ ervice.”
Outside in the pasture, both goats ­were still bleating.
“Where the hell are we?” said Nia angrily, like Dad or I was responsible.
I opened the map app on my phone. Instead of the familiar outlines of the
township, it was just a blank grid. That w
­ asn’t so unusual when you d
­ idn’t have
data. What was unusual was that t­ here was no blue GPS dot.
“­We’re not anywhere,” I said, showing the phone to Dad.
I’d grown up with blue dots: You are ­here. Behold, the blue dot travels with you
wherever you go. You w
­ ill never be lost or alone. My chest felt smaller suddenly. I
forced in a breath.
Nia checked on her own phone. “This is unbelievable.”
She reached for the latch on the sliding door, but my ­father caught her hand.

7
 “Wait.”
I felt it now, too: a first jab of fear. ­W hatever was out ­there—­a farm or a bunch
of video screens—­was unquestionably weird.
“Let’s just take a moment.” Dad sat down on the beige sofa that Nia had
bought last summer. S
­ he’d said the old red one was threadbare and smelled bad,
and she was right, but I’d still resented her changing the furniture.
My ­father stared out the win­dow. Last year my class had visited St. Claire
Farm and t­ here’d been old machinery rusting all over the place, busted fences and
snarled wire. This barn looked like it had just been painted a cheery red. One side
of it was covered with a flowering vine. It looked like a picture book illustration.
“I’m not sure charging out ­there is the best idea,” Dad said.
“It ­doesn’t look dangerous,” I ventured.
I was freaked out, too, but I wanted to find out what was g­ oing on, and where
we ­were.
“You just want to stay in ­here?” Nia asked him.
“Someone might come,” he said vaguely. “And explain.”
I said, “Like knock on our door and say it’s all been a big ­mistake and ­they’ll
give us back our lake next week?”
Dad chuckled. “Something like that.”
I pictured a rumpled man in a suit, holding a briefcase. Mr. Oak? I’m frightfully
sorry, he’d say in an ­English accent. (He would definitely have an E
­ nglish accent.)
This is all a terrible misunderstanding. Complete cock-up at HQ. It made me smile. I
needed a smile right now.
“Why wait?” Nia said. “­There might be someone outside who can help us.”
Dad stood. “Okay. Let me get my jeans on.” ­W hatever was ­going to happen
next, he figured it would be better with pants. I went to my room and pulled on
yesterday’s clothes. Then I texted Sam.
i think ­we’ve been kidnapped??
When I hit send, it said Not delivered.

8
 ­we’re on a farm somewhere
(Not delivered.)
our ­whole cottage has been moved to a farm
(Not delivered.)
Back in the f­ amily room, Dad was dressed and holding the just-­in-­case crow-
bar. I’d known he kept it ­under the bed, but I’d never seen him actually hold it.
My ­father was not a crowbar kind of guy, although Mom always said he was very
persuasive in a boardroom.
“We ready?” Dad said, reaching for the latch.
The serious way he said it made me won­der, Am I sure? I was a ­little scared,
but more than that, I was shot through with the feeling that once that door
opened and we passed through it, ­things would never be the same.
“Ready,” I said.

9
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