"You took their sun?" I ask, hoping I heard him wrong.

Green-Haired Suit nods. One of the PTB wearing a long white robe centuries out of style adds, "And the rest of the planets. And their moons and the asteroids and comets and such."

I clutch the back of a nearby chair to steady myself. From all my years of history cla.s.s, I know nothing like this ever happened before. To interfere in the universe on such a grand scale is just unheard of. Kal, too, is frozen from the shock of it.

"We didn't have much choice, Joss," my father says. "None of our options were good. If we had exploded the planet, gravity from the sun would have kept the pieces grouped together. A dead world, clinging to chunks of lifeless rock. No one wants to see that."

I shudder.

Dad puts his large, steady hand on my shoulder. "Or if we simply took away the sun, Earth would have gone shooting off into s.p.a.ce, and a rogue planet aimlessly hurtling about is simply too dangerous. We considered halting the planet's rotation, but then everything would fly into the atmosphere, and there's already enough junk in s.p.a.ce these days. This way it's nice and neat, and we don't have that nagging guilt at killing off a five-billion-year-old planet. Now Earth never actually existed, so no one had to die. It's a plan we've had in place for a while, in case the occasion ever arose."

Kal makes a sound that falls somewhere between a whimper and a growl. He faces my father and says, "According to your logic, my parents never existed, since they were ripped right out of time, too, right?"

"I suppose you could say that, unfortunately. Yes."

Kal puts his hands on his hips. "Then why am I still here?"

I turn to Dad to await his answer. We all know about cause and effect. It's one of the basic laws of the universe. The arrow of time goes in one direction only. First comes cause, then effect. Even I know you can't have a kid without having his parents first.

But Dad only stares at Kal. Or should I say, stares at the spot where Kal had been standing. For Kal, my best friend, my childhood companion in all things, is totally, utterly gone. Gone like back in the days when we were able to wink in and out of places, but those days are far in the past. Is he hiding behind a chair? I peer under the table, but all I see are a lot of hairy legs in sensible shoes.

He's just... gone.

"Hmm," Gluck says thoughtfully. "I was afraid that might happen."

Before I can question them on Kal's sudden and utter disappearance, he's made MORE gone by the fact that in his place now stands a tall, skinny girl wearing a big red parka, a white ski hat, and a sour expression.

"Fascinating!" exclaims my father.

"Now that," says Gluck, "I didn't see coming."

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

-Charles Darwin, naturalist Seriously?" the girl says, looking around the room in annoyance. "First I dream about some old lady baking a pie, and now this? I totally shouldn't have watched that Star Trek marathon last weekend. My father's never going to let me forget it if I sleep through the closest approach of Mars in like, sixty thousand years. He'll keep dragging me outside in the middle of the night pointing his new telescope at the sky until I go off to college." She starts pinching her arm. "Why am I not waking up?"

The PTB stare at one another in amazement, and it takes a lot to amaze these guys.

"Fascinating!" Dad repeats, beaming. He loves the mysterious and unexplainable. That's why he's so good at his job.

I just gape.

Dad walks over to the girl and touches her on the arm. They both jump back.

"So solid!" Dad exclaims. "Gluck, you have to feel this!"

Gluck makes a move toward the girl, but I step in front of him. "Wait! You can't just go around feeling people's arms."

"That's right," she says, with only a cursory glance my way. "Don't you people have any manners?" Then, surprisingly, she laughs and shakes her head. "Look at me, talking to people in my own dream. What are you supposed to do in nightmares again? Oh, right." She turns to my father and shouts, "Be gone, freaky dream guy. And your freaky dream friends, too!" Then in her regular voice she says, "But I like the green hair, dude. It's a good look for you." She turns to Gluck and shudders. "How did I dream you up? You look like your face got caught in a garbage disposal!"

If I weren't so traumatized by Kal's disappearance I would chuckle at that one.

A few of the PTB rush from their seats. "You cannot talk that way to the Supreme Overlord of the Universe and the Powers That Be!" they bellow. "You are in the presence of greatness!"

The girl quickly steps back until she is inches away from the invisible wall that overlooks the cosmos. My father holds up his hand. "It is all right, gentlemen. She means no harm."

She looks like she doesn't know what she means right now. Her brows are furrowed in confusion. Fear alternates with indignant determination. She yanks off her hat and stuffs it into a coat pocket. She then crosses her arms in front of her. Or tries to, but her parka is so puffy her arms get stuck trying to get around her elbows. With a grunt of frustration, she unzips the coat, throws it on the floor, and begins stomping on it.

While she's distracted with that, my father nudges me and whispers, "Go talk to her. You two look about the same age, so she won't perceive you as a threat."

"But what about Kal?" I whisper back. "We need to find out what happened to him and how to get him back. We have to hurry."

"We'll talk about the Kal situation later, I promise." He nudges me again. "Go. And ask her how she got here."

But I can't seem to move. Kal is not a "situation." He's my best friend. The only person outside my family I really trust. I'm not even sure I trust everyone inside my family, actually. Kal is the person who understands me the best. And he's gone. GONE. Things like this-shocking, unexpected things-don't happen here. The universe might be a seething, swirling, booming place. But after nearly fourteen billion years of the same sorts of things happening-a sun exploding here, a galaxy colliding there, a new species sprouting up on a new planet-life in The Realms has fallen into a sort of "been there, done that" kind of routine. I admit, I like it this way. Unlike my father, I am not at all fascinated by the unexpected. At least not when it involves losing my best friend and one of my favorite planets.

"Joss!" my dad booms. I startle and turn my attention back to the girl, who is still stomping on her coat.

After one last jump-stomp combination with her clunky black boots, she kicks the coat, and it lands a foot away from me. Aware that my father's eyes are on my back, I bend down to pick it up. Moving slowly so as not to frighten or anger her, I hold out her coat. "You really don't like this parka, do you?"

She looks at it but doesn't take it. "It's puffy and red and stupid and I hate it. Plus, it makes me look twelve years old."

"How old are you?"

She shrugs. "Twelve."

When I can't think of a suitable reply, she adds, "But I'll be thirteen really soon."

"I just turned thirteen," I say. It's more like a billion and thirteen, but she probably doesn't want to hear that. "So... how did you, uh, get here?"

Ignoring my question, she steps closer to me, examining my face carefully. "You have really perfect skin, anyone ever tell you that? Like, no pores. My friend Lydia is obsessed with her pores and spends hours in front of her magnifying mirror. She'd hate you."

"That's nice to know," I say, not really sure what pores are. To be polite, I say, "My name's Joss. What's your name?"

"Annika Klutzman," she replies, then glances down at her watch. I'm shocked to see the second hand ticking the time away. Eyebrows rise all around the room. Time is measured by how long it takes a planet to revolve around its sun, and we have no sun. Her watch should not work in The Realms.

"I really need to go," she says, blinking fast. "This is the LONGEST dream, and I've got to wake up. I don't want to sleep the night away and miss the whole meteor shower. Well, I do want to miss it, but it's important to my dad, so..." She starts pinching her arm again. Then she squeezes her eyes closed and open, closed and open. She takes a big gulp of air (we don't have oxygen here, which begs the question of how she can breathe), holds it, then lets it out. "Ugh," she says. "I'm still here."

My father taps his large foot impatiently.

I repeat my previous question. "So, um, how did you get here again?"

"Honestly," she says, "I don't really remember falling asleep. One minute I'm looking through Dad's scope at the sky where, as usual, nothing is happening, and then I must have fallen asleep because suddenly I see this old lady with flour on her face, pulling a pie out of an oven." She pauses. "I think it was apple."

"And then you were here, in my father's office?"

She nods. "Pretty much. That dream faded into dark and then this one started. You know how dreams are."

I don't, actually, since we don't dream here. We don't much sleep, either, maybe once every few months. But I nod politely.

She looks around again, clearly trying to make sense of her surroundings. I try to see PTB headquarters through her eyes, with her limited senses. Like the rest of the universe, The Realms are made of concentrated energy disguised as matter. But in the rest of the universe, all the matter-all the stuff -is made of tiny dancing particles inside only slightly larger atoms. And almost all those atoms, including the ones that make up her own body, were forged inside exploding stars. Here in The Realms, those tiny particles aren't so tiny. Humans are made of trillions of atoms, of all different elements. We are made of only a hundred atoms and only primordial elements, the ones that were here at the very beginning of s.p.a.ce and time, the ones that no other beings in the universe can see. We are more gas than solid, more energy than matter. Our surroundings shimmer and glow, vibrate and pulse. Sounds weird, but you get used to it.

As for the people, the inhabitants of The Realms mostly look like the kind of people she's used to. We have brains and hearts and skin like most of the species in the universe, but we are very different from them. Basically, we are only a bit denser than our surroundings. Like a liquid on Earth, we can mold ourselves to fit any container. Last century it was very trendy to take the shape of Blopies, the purple blobs from a planet with a really weak gravitational force in the Whirlpool Galaxy. The Blopie craze wore off when people missed having hands.

I'm suddenly not sure how much I'm supposed to say to this girl, this living, breathing human. Do I tell her she's in The Realms, and that this isn't a dream? Do I explain that the PTB made it so her entire solar system never actually existed? All because of her? I want to ask about Kal, but it's all too much to process. I glance at Dad for help.

"Permit me to explain," he says, stepping closer to us. The girl flinches but holds her ground.

"I am Joss's father, and you could say I run this place."

No longer hindered by her huge coat, Annika crosses her arms successfully this time. "No disrespect, mister, but you don't run my dream."

A flash of anger crosses my father's face, but it is gone so quickly that her senses wouldn't have noticed even a flicker in his expression.

"You are right, of course," he says. "I will defer to your nocturnal flights of fancy."

"Good," she says. "Whatever that means. Well, since this dream won't seem to go away on its own, I'm gonna curl up and ignore it till it does. So... see ya." She takes her coat from my hands, drops it to the floor, then lies down on top of it and closes her eyes. Instantly, gentle snores fill the cavernous room.

Dad and I share a surprised glance. The PTB grumble angrily. Really, no inhabitant of The Realms would EVER treat my dad this way. But Dad motions all of us to the other side of the room.

"Let her be for now," he says. "Joss, you wait here until she's ready to talk again."

The PTB hurry out, probably glad to be released of any responsibility for the strange girl. Gluck the Yuck is the only one who stays with us.

"Dad, you promised to get Kal back."

He glances at Gluck before answering. "It's not that easy."

"You've been saying that a lot today. Everything's easy for you. You're the Supreme Overlord of the Universe!"

"True," he admits. "But I still have to abide by the same fundamental laws of nature as everyone else."

Gluck puts his hand on my arm. "Listen, Joss. What happened to Kal is very straightforward. As the arrow of time sped backward, his parents got younger and younger. As the billions of years wound down, and the last of their essence was lost, Kal was lost, too."

I turn to Dad for verification of this. He nods. "I'm sorry, son, but look on the bright side. Kal doesn't know he's gone, so he's not suffering." He gestures over to the sleeping girl. "And now you have a new companion. She seems... nice."

"And she has a lot of s.p.u.n.k," adds Gluck.

I know they're just trying to be helpful, but do they really think Kal, who was supposed to be my sidekick for the rest of eternity, can be replaced by a strange girl from a terrestrial planet who hates red parkas and will live no longer than two billion heartbeats? I shake my head. "Gluck has pimples that have longer life spans than her."

"Now that's just rude," Dad scolds.

"I'll let it go," Gluck says, "since you're obviously upset."

"How can she even BE here?" I ask. "We don't have an atmosphere like Earth's at all. No oxygen or sunlight or any of the things she needs to live."

Dad shrugs. "And yet she lives."

"For now, anyway," Gluck adds.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You saw how easily she fell asleep."

"So?"

"Never mind that now," my father says. "We have more important things to worry about than her sleeping habits. We have a living human in The Realms for the first time in the history of the universe. This is exactly why the consequences for viewing The Realms are so swift and dire. Anomalies like this." He grimaces, but I wonder if it's heartfelt. My father enjoys a good mystery too much not to be enjoying this at least to some degree.

My thoughts are swirling. Kal is gone. Annika is here. And then it hits me. "But Dad! If Annika is the one who saw Aunt Rae, and she's stuck here in The Realms, then she can't tell anyone about us. That means you can bring back her planet without having to worry about upsetting the natural order of things, or whatever you said before. And then Kal and his parents will come back!"

Dad grips my shoulder. "Joss, I cannot bring her planet back. It does not exist anymore. You must accept it. Kal will always be alive in your memories."

I cringe at his words. I can't accept it, no matter what he says. I have no experience with losing anyone. Immortality in The Realms can be incredibly, mind-numbingly, chew-your-own-foot-off boring, but on the plus side, no death. Except now, apparently, with a chain of events that started with some girl looking in the wrong spot at the wrong time and ended with my best friend going poof, never to be seen again.

I shake my head. "There must be something-"

"She's waking up," Dad says, cutting me off. "Go over there and convince her this is still a dream."

But I don't move. I don't want to talk to the girl ever again. All of this-ALL OF IT-is her fault. I've never ignored a direct order from my father before, but I just can't do it. I dig my heels into the floor. Literally, I push them in a few inches.

Dad scowls. "You don't have a choice, Joss. If she figures out where she is, who knows what the cosmic consequences would be. At the very least she can't know what happened to her planet, her family and friends. It's up to you to protect her. To protect The Realms."

Dad always did have a flair for the dramatic. How am I supposed to take care of this girl? Mom won't even let us have a pet even though we all promised to help take care of it. Forget a pet, she won't even let me have a plant! I'm about to dig my heels in even further, when a gasp from across the room diverts our attention.

Annika is standing in front of the huge window, staring wide eyed at the billions of galaxies swirling before her. Slowly, she lifts her arm and points straight out at them. "WHAT in the WORLD is THAT?"

Also by Wendy Ma.s.s:.

A Mango-Shaped s.p.a.ce.

Leap Day.

Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall.

Every Soul a Star.

The Candymakers.

Praise and accolades for Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life:.