My fingers slid over the bumpy-but-soft surface of the thick paper, counting. Where Twelve should be was nothing. The book just… ended.

  Where was Twelve?

  I pulled out the watch, just to make sure there even was a twelve on it. I clicked the button. The petals fell open, revealing the glistening face inside.

  I held the open watch up to my face; the petals were so close that I could see the tiniest etchings in the bright flowers of Ten.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. As I held the watch, I wondered if I was holding many worlds and all of their people in my palm. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

  But twelve wasn’t there. That was the petal that had gone missing.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it had looked like. When Jo had shown it to me when I was little… what had been there?

  The image was fuzzy, but I seemed to faintly recall a perfect place. With perfect clouds, tiny perfect people. They all surrounded what looked like a fairy-tale castle.

  I wonder why it isn’t in the book?

  I added a final Post-it to the bottom of Eleven’s page: Twelve: Fairy-tale castle?

  I guess I was going to have to leave that one until last. Maybe I could learn about it in the other worlds.

  I continued reading, studying.

  My favorite page was the one with a girl who sat on a swing that was carried into the air by bronze-colored bubbles. Amisi found himself at One, I read, whose Princess likes riddles and puzzles, but hates fun and losing. When she’s happy, she’s down, and when she’s sad, she’s up.

  I also liked the picture of giant stone faces with tiny legs poking out the bottom. Amisi found himself at Five, it said, whose people hide in stone heads and run around bashing into each other for fun.

  Finally, I flipped to the last page. There were two men silhouetted inside ornate, oval frames. The man on top was the thin man with the floppy mustache, Amisi. He smiled and looked bright and kind.

  Under his portrait was his name: Olaf Amisi – Author.

  Then just below was a second man. He was squarer than Amisi, his face all hard angles and clean lines, a flop of tawny hair swooping over his brow as if it were wrapped like a present. He didn’t look bright, and he certainly didn’t look kind.

  He did—I realized, my belly sinking—look quite a bit like Wes. As if confirming my suspicion, underneath the man’s face was a name: Harold Marks – Illustrator.

  I gasped. When I was little, I hadn’t been able to read cursive. I never realized what this page said. I didn’t understand that the person who made this book might be related to me.

  Maybe Jo had gotten the watch from him. Maybe he had been to Eleven and had drawn the ghostly pictures because he was an artist too.

  Like me.

  The thought made me smile.

  Maybe I could do this. I could collect all of the smoke, destroy the Wall, and save Jeremiah. The magical world was in my blood.

  I hid the book back in my closet and flopped onto my bed.

  I felt like I should start now. I checked my watch. It was 2:00. I didn’t need to go to Two. Plus, I wasn’t even sleepy.

  Maybe I can get sleepy by five o’clock if I go for a bike ride, and then drink a glass of warm milk, and then do my math homework, and then—

  My train of thought was interrupted when Mom popped her head in my room. She was smiling so widely that I got suspicious.

  “Your friend is here!”

  “My what?”

  Who could it be?

  Wait. Alejandro’s shaggy head popped up in my memory. Could he have found my house…?

  “Fallon.”

  “What?”

  I shot up, smoothing my hair back. Why would she come to see me?

  “Maybe I left something at her house?” I said aloud, hurrying to the front door.

  Sure enough, Fallon was standing on the other side. Her bright green bike was leaning against her leg. She didn’t look up at me.

  “Hey, Fallon, what’s up?” I asked, trying to pretend this whole thing wasn’t super weird.

  “Mom wanted you to have your goody bag,” she mumbled, shoving a clear plastic bag forward. Inside I could see a bottle of sparkly nail polish, a Hyung-Gyun bracelet, and candy.

  “Thanks,” I replied, feeling even more awkward. She really came all the way to give me this?

  There was a pause. My fingers tapped on the doorknob. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Do you need anything else?” I asked, unable to take the silence anymore.

  She finally looked up at me, her eyes watery.

  “D-did you notice anything weird about Jer?”

  My heartbeat sped up, and I could feel sweat beading on my forehead. “What do you mean?”

  “He”—she hiccupped, trying to hold her emotions in—“he didn’t wake up this morning.”

  He’s in the Wall, I wanted to scream. It’s my fault. I’ll fix it. But instead, I stood numb, staring like a fish.

  “He what?”

  Tears were falling freely down her face now. “He j-just didn’t wake up. They d-don’t know why. We took him to the hospital, b-but they don’t know—”

  I hadn’t seen Fallon cry in so long. She used to cry a lot, and I’d always been there for her. Not Jeremiah or Samantha Plank. She always came to me. And every time I saw her crying, it hurt me too.

  Without thinking, I stepped outside and put an arm around her, patting her back while she quietly hiccuped the tears back in.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said.

  “B-but what if he doesn’t wake up again?”

  “He will.” I promise.

  “I—I didn’t know who to tell. Mom and Dad are s-so scared about everything, and I…” She trailed off, sniffing, then pushed herself away from me, wiping her eyes. “I was just wondering if you noticed anything different about him.”

  His wide-open mouth and shocked eyes, staring at me from the Wall.

  “I don’t think so,” I whispered.

  She nodded, wiping the rest of her tears away with a swipe of her sleeve.

  “I figured not. Oh well.”

  She turned to go, her bike wheels squeaking. Then she turned back, her eyes were on the ground again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  But she didn’t answer. She just hopped on the bike and pedaled away.

  I shut the door, reeling. I had been waiting for Fallon to say that for a long, long time, but the only thing I could focus on was the fact that Jeremiah really wasn’t going to wake up.

  That meant I definitely had to destroy that Wall.

  “What was that?” Mom asked, wandering over with a big smile and her hands on her hips. “Ooh! Cute goody bag!”

  “She came over to tell me…” I paused, thinking.

  “Tell you what?”

  “You know her brother, Jeremiah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He didn’t wake up this morning.”

  * * *

  Mom called the Bergs, thinking maybe with her nursing knowledge she could offer something or help somehow. It sounded like they all thought this was some weird fluke. The hospital was running tests.

  Aside from being comatose, nothing else seemed to be wrong with Jeremiah.

  I felt awful the rest of the day. If only I had saved him in those last few moments, he would be all right.

  I mean, he wouldn’t be all right, I guess. He’d still be a huge jerk… but at least he’d be an awake jerk. And Fallon and the Bergs wouldn’t cry.

  That night I lay in bed seriously debating if I should keep the watch on me.

  I was scared, to be honest, to go back into the clock world. Maybe it was better if I didn’t return if this was the kind of trouble I was going to cause.

  But then I couldn’t get Fallon’s red, teary eyes out of my head.

  I had to destroy the Wall to save Jeremiah, and I had only five days to do it, based on what Scape had said the day I’d met them. I had to find all the Smoke Keepers and steal their smoke.

  Impossible, a small voice in my head said.

  I clicked the watch open. It was 1:15 a.m. I’d been far too jittery to even attempt sleeping a few hours ago at 10:00, but now…

  I stared at the first petal, thought of the picture in the book of the girl on her swing. The Princess, I thought. If the Kings and Queens were the Smoke Keepers, then she’d be related to them, right? Was she even still alive? The book was written so long ago.

  That world, One, didn’t seem so scary. It looked light and bubbly and fun. Yes, that would be a good place to start.

  The hands of the watch spun as I thought about it, lulling me to sleep.

  I hoped the Princess was alive, I decided. I wanted to meet her.

  ONE

  I woke into nothingness—not knowing if I was right-side, wrong-side, up-side, or down-side. My head felt silly too. My body was light. I wasn’t tired at all.

  “Hiddly, piddly, widdly, woo, she was a poor one, Little Girl Blue.”

  I sat up at the strange sound. The voice was quiet and loud at the same time. Far away but high and piercing. It’s a girl, I thought, but my mind was so full of fuzz that I couldn’t think much beyond that.

  “Hiddly, piddly, widdly, wink, the sad little girl fell in the sink.”

  As the singing continued, I stood. All around me was fog, wafting like steam from a warm mug of cocoa. The ground was so soft that I felt no resistance as I walked, like I was going to fall with every step—as if I were just walking on clouds. It took me a moment to get used to the sensation.

  I followed the voice.

  “Hiddly, piddly, widdly, woe, no one knew where it might go.”

  The fog opened onto a clearing of what seemed to be very thin trees. But when I tried to touch the bark of one with my hand, it evaporated; it was just an illusion. The way the sun sparkled through the fog, bleeding through it like a drop of paint in a glass of water, looked like an illusion too.

  “Hiddly, piddly, widdly, when, her mother never found her again.”

  Then I turned and there she was.

  The girl was younger than me, with a fluffy halo of tightly curled black hair. Her eyes were wide saucers of bronze, and she wore a heavy coat that looked like it was made of massive cotton balls. As I drew nearer, able now to hear the soft lull of her hum, I noticed she wasn’t standing but sitting, and yet we were eye to eye.

  I peered into the cover of gray and found that she was sitting on a plain plank of driftwood. Strings shot up from every end of it and connected to a cloud of sparkling bubbles above her.

  Nestled in her curls, I caught the glint of a crown.

  She’s the Princess, I realized with a start. The Princess from One.

  “Wowie wow, and who are you?”

  She was looking into me in a way that made me think she could see my bones.

  “I’m… Rosemary.”

  She laughed, though I don’t know why. “Strange name, strange girl.”

  She held a strange bottle. It was large and bulbous and round, like a fishbowl—only instead of fish, it was filled with a luminous, iridescent liquid that rolled over itself, slick like oil.

  The Princess dipped a large metal circle into the liquid, then held it above her head and blew. Bronze smoke filled the ring and made a flurry of bubbles that shot up, joining the cloud that held her aloft.

  It’s just like in the picture.

  That meant that I had made it to my intended destination, but I would have to work fast. I needed to find the Smoke Keeper of this world and steal its smoke.

  It can’t possibly be this odd little girl, I decided. She seemed too nice.

  “I actually came to, uh, well, ask you for help,” I shouted up at her.

  Her driftwood swing rocked from side to side. As she moved, she began to glow bronze.

  She rocked slowly at first, but then arced wider and wider until she was upside down. She stopped there, the bubbles at my feet and her toes above my head. Still, the bubbles didn’t pop or rise, the swing didn’t fall, and the Princess looked like this all was quite normal. She blew more bubbles that then shot to the ground below.

  Or was it above?

  The more I stared at the upside-down girl, the less certain I was of which one of us was right-side-up.

  “Play with me,” she cried, rocking her swing again until it was upright. “If you win my game, I will give you one present,” her voice tinkled.

  “Okay,” I said. I did need help, and I didn’t know how else I was going to find the Smoke Keeper. “What do you want me to play?”

  She laughed, clapping her small hands. “Tell me what I like, and don’t tell me what I don’t. If you figure out why I like what I like, then my feet will touch the ground and you will win. If I float out of sight, then you lose.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said. A riddle?

  “Then I won’t help you.” She blew a gust of bubbles, and her swing rose. “Goodbye.” As she drifted higher and higher, I lost sight of her in the fog.

  “Wait!” I shouted, hoping to bring her back. “I’ll play!”

  “Then what do I like?” her little voice chimed from the air.

  I tried to remember what I’d read about this strange girl in the book.

  The Princess likes riddles and puzzles, but hates fun and losing. When she’s happy, she’s down, and when she’s sad, she’s up.

  “Do you like a…,” I began, still uncertain of how this could possibly be correct, “puzzle?”

  “I do like puzzles!” she shrieked from above me. I watched as she slowly fell.

  “Do you like a… riddle?”

  “Yes, yes I do!” She fell closer still.

  “But you don’t like boring things?”

  “Ugh.” And she floated higher, out of sight again.

  “Wait—I said you don’t like them, though!”

  “Tell me what I like, and don’t tell me what I don’t,” she repeated, sounding a bit angry now.

  “Do you like…” I had to think very hard. If I messed this up, then she’d be so far above me that I wouldn’t be able to hear her anymore. I couldn’t lose. “Bubbles?”

  After a frightening pause her feet dangled lower.

  “I like bubbles.”

  We played for ages, it seemed, her little swing floating up or drifting down, until my throat was anxious and tight.

  “Cake?” Everyone likes cake, right?

  “No, no, no!” She floated higher again.

  “Do you like a puppy?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “A kitten, then!”

  “Certainly!”

  Ah! She was getting close now, and if I could only get her down a few more feet, then her feet might touch the ground. “So then, you like dogs, too!”

  All I got that time was a laugh before she shot up.

  “How can you like puppies but not dogs? It doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Play my game.”

  “It’s not a game, it’s nonsense!”

  But what if it isn’t nonsense? Jo often played silly games with me, but there were always rules—even if they didn’t make sense at first.

  For the first time in what seemed like an endless string of random guessing, I thought I might be getting somewhere.

  Okay… so she liked puppies, but not dogs, sheep, but not cows. She liked the Queen, beef, grass, and jazz. She didn’t like floating, flowers, presents, or candies.

  And she liked a riddle, but not questions.

  But what’s the common denominator?

  “Do you like…” I thought about all the words. Ooh, maybe she only likes things that are a certain number of letters! I’d start small. “Do you like pie?”

  “No, why?” She giggled as she rose higher.

  What else, what else? I had nothing. Maybe she only likes when there’s one of something instead of multiple things?

  “Do you like a good book?”

  “I love a good book!” Yes! She’s coming back down.

  “What about a box, a toy, a bow?”

  “No, no, no!” She rose higher and faster than before. What had I done? I was never going to win now. Think, Rose, think… Jo had always told me that if I got stuck on a problem, I should draw it out.

  I kneeled on the ground, picked up a pointy stone, and wrote out all the words I could remember asking her in two columns in the cloudy dirt—the yes column and the no column.

  “Bubbles and riddles over here, but dogs and losing over—”

  Wait a minute! Now that I had written it out, I could see the answer to this riddle.

  “I know… do you like being silly?”

  She bounced in her seat. “I do!”

  “And kitties?”

  “I love kitties!”

  She was falling to the ground faster and faster.

  “And noodles?”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay… then what about me? A buddy?”

  “I like buddies,” she declared just as her bare toes hung inches from the ground.

  “I knew it!”

  “Then what is it I like?”

  “You like double letters, don’t you?”

  “Clever, clever, clever!” She hopped off the swing, dancing a circle around me in the mist. The path of her hands glowed a soft bronze in the fog, sparkling faintly.

  “Now it’s time for your prize! I’ll take you all the way up to my castle!” She pointed directly above us. I had to crane my neck to see. But if I looked hard and squinted, I could just make out the twinkling lights of a city above.

  “Actually,” I said, crossing my fingers in my pockets, “I was hoping that you might be able to do me a different favor.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want,” I said, debating what to ask, “I want you to bring me to the Smoke Keeper.”

  “It’s done.”

  “What? Where?”

  She smiled… revealing long, cracked, yellow teeth.

  A shriek caught in my throat.

  “What do you want from me, buddy?” she asked, her voice sounding much scarier now than it had before. “Let me see you.”

  Then she grabbed her large bronze eyes, pulling them right out of her head. I realized, looking through the fog, that what I’d thought were her eyes were only bubbles. She released them, revealing dark caverns where her eyes had been.