“Amelia!” Boss raised her voice. “You can come out.”

Down the curving staircase walked — very slowly, taking care not to trip — a girl who looked about five years old dressed up in a many-layered frilly lavender ball gown and long white gloves. On her brow sat a thin silver tiara adorned with rubies. Were those real? She looked as though she was costumed for Halloween — and she had billionaire parents.

“Hey!” Mari protested. “That dress is mine!”

Glancing between the woman who was built like an MMA champion and the five-year-old girl whose dress may have been a little oversized but not that oversized, Max could not figure out how the little girl’s dress could possibly belong to Mari.

“It’s hers now,” Boss said. “Amelia, this is Max. He’ll be staying with us for a while.”

When girl reached the bottom of the stairs, she scurried up to Max. “Hi I’m Amelia I’m a princess!” Her words ran together into a single sentence.

Max glanced around, trying to guess who had dressed up the girl. His money was on Boss. Possibly Scarlet, but Max couldn’t imagine the girl clad in blacks and browns picking out this particular dress.

“Hi Amelia, it’s an honor to meet you. I’m Max.” Careful to maintain a serious expression, he bowed in what he thought was a formal manner.

The girl lifted her dress and spun around, letting it float in the air. Once, twice — on the third spin she wobbled, demonstrating with pride how kids were basically small, drunk adults.

“She’s an orphan,” Scarlet said. “We adopted her a few days ago. In disguise, of course. Now that was fun. Boss’s mustache was my best yet.”

Did CPS exist in this world? As much as he appreciated the Red Handers for saving his life and all, they hardly came across as responsible parents.

"She’s a Thief.” Mari spat her words as if the girl had committed crimes against humanity.

“We’re all thieves,” Nerran pointed out.

“Amelia, what are you doing?” Boss asked. “You’re going to throw up.”

“Princesses spin!”

On the girl’s tenth or twelfth rotation, as she wobbled like a top reaching the end of one of its brief, unstable episodes of uprightness, out of the girl’s flowing sleeves slipped a small object, which was launched across the room like a discus. Several feet away, it struck the thick carpet with a thud and rolled, and the girl immediately stopped spinning to race after it, swerving as if she were a drunk driver. After snatching it up and squirreling it away in her sleeve, she looked around the room as though checking whether anyone had seen it happen. Guilt was plastered on her face.

Of course, everyone had been watching, and the Red Handers were stifling laughter. Save for Mari.

“Hey!” Mari began to walk toward the girl. “Was that my magic ball? Thief — double thief! Give it back!”

“Amelia, come here.” Boss’s voice was kind and held no chastisement.

“You better teach her a lesson!”

Head down in shame, the girl trudged over to Boss, her fluffy dress bouncing and shaking. It was hard not to laugh even harder. As a show of his commitment to the group, Max managed to keep his mirth inside.

Boss lifted the girl up onto her lap. At the touch, the girl burst into tears, and Boss wrapped her arms around the girl, patting her on the back and murmuring reassurances.

Jesus. The pair wouldn’t have been out of place in a skin care commercial, or a shampoo commercial, or a high-end clothing commercial. That is, if Amelia weren’t crying.

Once Amelia had stopped crying, Boss, with one delicate hand on Amelia’s chin, turned the girl’s head so that they were face-to-face. “We don’t steal from friends. You understand? If we want something, we ask.”

Sniffling, Amelia nodded.

“Good. Now hand it over.”

The small object was transferred from the princess’s sleeve to Boss’s waiting hand, from which Mari snatched it with a “Hmph.”

“I think that’s enough for today. Mari, why don’t you show our guest to his room?” Boss didn’t turn as she spoke, gently rocking Amelia back and forth.

“He can — ”

“He’s taking your room. End of discussion.”

“Fine!” Mari whirled on Max, who shrank back. “You!”

What did You! mean? He shot a questioning glance at Scarlet and Nerran, who stared at him with the pointed silence of people who were waiting for you to leave in order to talk about you, and they didn’t think enough of you to bother hiding it.

Getting the message, Max followed the stomping Mari up the curving staircase.

“By the way,” Max asked Mari as an afterthought while they climbed another flight of stairs, “what exactly did I sign up for?”

Mari glanced back just long enough to shoot him a death glare.

“Sorry.” It wasn’t his fault that Boss had ordered Mari to give up her room. He hoped her anger was temporary frustration rather than a permanent attitude change. She’d saved him, and seemed nice enough, and, unlike the Scarlet girl, Mari didn’t seem to have an ulterior motive. If anything she seemed a bit … simple. Unexpectedly being evicted from one's bedroom was annoying. Even a Buddhist monk would be annoyed if the government decided to dynamite a road through his secluded mountainside hut. “I can help you move.”

Mari turned back, looking at him suspiciously. “Really? Nobody ever helps me.”

“Of course.” What kind of friends didn’t help each other move? During college, Max hadn’t had a car, and he’d had to move apartments every year — sometimes twice a year. Though he lived pretty minimally, at least compared to some of his peers, he couldn’t imagine how onerous moving would’ve been without Kristoff and his trusty minivan. He would’ve had to carry things on the bus, or maybe he could’ve called a taxi.

Beaming, Mari stopped at what was presumably her room and threw the door open.

In high school, the parents of one of Max’s close friends, Aaron Williams, divorced. Though later he learned that Aaron’s jokes about his parents were part of a facade put on by a stressed high schooler nearly failing out, at the time, Aaron bragged regularly about the money and presents his parents gave him to try to win his favor. During one evening outing of window shopping at the mall, Max joked that he wished his parents divorced so they’d compete for his attention instead of ganging up on him at home. At that moment, a certain girl named Emma Barton was walking with him.

What was unusual about this particular pairing was that, by the friend group laws of high school, Emma Barton and Max Duong should not have been walking together that evening.

While Max and Aaron stuck to one small circle of friends of which Emma Barton was not a member, one of their friends in that circle who was more social than the rest had invited another of his friend groups to the mall that evening. That other group with him happened to include Emma Barton, who shared history class with Max, and he’d come to fancy her a bit.

Over the last few weeks, he’d been beginning to think that she returned the feelings. At least, that was what he hoped based on their flirting during class. His friends kept saying she was out of his league, and she was just being nice, and there was no way she was into him, but what did those doofuses know.

So that particular evening held elevated stakes for Max as if his buddies’ small weekly poker session had been invaded by a couple of high rollers who wanted to increase the bets by a hundred-fold.

For a few hours, he’d done his best to find excuses to cross the friend group lines and talk to Emma, primarily by vocally supporting the group decisions that would split up groups in his favor. He’d been doing pretty well, he’d thought. She was laughing a lot, which had to be a good sign.

And then suddenly Emma said she was tired and went home. Later, Annie Nickton, one of Emma’s close friends from the other friend group informed Max in not so kind words that Emma’s parents had divorced a few years ago, her mother had remarried scandalously quickly, and her father had subsequently jumped off a bridge. Max was apparently the only person in the entire school who hadn’t heard the story.

Years later, that evening still haunted him. Sometimes when he logged out of a game he would suddenly remember his joke and his cringe-worthy forced laughter and wince as though he’d been splashed with boiling water.

When Mari swung the door inward to reveal the room that was soon to be his, Max felt a strikingly similar feeling to the one he’d felt when Annie Nickton had excoriated him in irate whispers after school in the parking lot.

That is, he regretted that he’d let a certain set of words escape from his mouth.

“You have a lot of . . . stuff.”

As Mari waded in, Max hesitated in the doorway — of his room, now. It wasn’t a bad room. It was much larger than any apartment he’d lived in during college or since, the furniture was in good condition and expensive-looking, the doorframe was straight, and the far wall didn’t look drafty. He would enter, except he wasn’t sure where to place his feet.

Mari’s room looked as though a cornucopia of items, or perhaps a random loot box, had been opened, turned upside down, and vigorously shaken until the room had filled with a mass of items which had no relation to each other, as far as Max could tell, save for that they belonged to Mari. The floor, if it existed, was buried under several feet of the stuff. If a debris-filled tsunami surged washed through the room, it would clean it up considerably.

One day early in the second semester of his freshman year, he’d visited the dorm room of a friend he’d known in high school. Her parents’ house was within driving distance of the university, and every weekend since the start of the school year without fail she’d visited home. Each time she drove home, her car was empty, and on each return trip clothes filled the trunk and spilled over the passenger seats. By the end of the first semester, mountains of unfolded clothes had littered the floor of her room.

Mari’s room was like that, except Max could see children’s toys, cloth dolls, a banjo-like instrument, a wooden rocking chair on its side, a collection of marble statues, and was that the rusty tip of an unsheathed sword sticking out? He wanted a tetanus booster before he set foot in the room.

“Yeah, I have a few things. Thanks for helping me move!” Mari clasped her hands and fluttered her eyes in a disconcerting attempt at coquetry.

Max groaned. He was tired, and he hadn’t eaten for . . . twelve hours? Thirteen? His sense of time was shot, what with the whole world-changing thing. But Mari had saved his life and was now giving him her room, and he’d promised, however unwittingly, so it wasn’t as if he had a choice.

To his vast displeasure, before they started moving her collection, Mari popped her head inside each unoccupied room on this floor and declared it not to her liking, instead choosing a room on the second floor as her new abode.

When Mari finally called it a night, Max retreated to his now traversable room and collapsed on his bed now clear of “things that might be useful in the future.” They’d transferred everything larger than a fist and swept everything smaller into the corners of the room. Even though Nerran had given him a spare pair of leather shoes, Max’s feet hurt terribly from accidentally stepping on hard objects; his feet felt as if he’d gone dancing in the ballroom of a Lego addict.

His first day in a fantasy world, and he was going to finish it complaining about sore feet? Kristoff would’ve kicked him from the group!

Having been told in no uncertain terms to go to sleep and be prepared for an early start tomorrow, as though he were a disobedient child, he was restrained from the first item on the agenda of any person in a fantasy world — explore! What sights might await him — magicians performing on street corners, fantasy creatures, immense landscapes colored with pastel greens and blues.

He hadn’t even been outside — aboveground, that is. And he wasn’t willing to risk his precarious agreement with the Red Handers over restless legs. Maybe the mansion hid secret rooms? Would they care if he wandered the mansion a bit? If they thought he was snooping, it could end badly.

The shutters across the room caught his eye. Thinking he might at least have an interesting view of the city, he pushed himself up and gingerly laid a foot on the ground, sharply retracting it when his sensitive sole contacted a hard corner. Fuck, Mari is such a hoarder! He felt around with his toes until he was certain the coast was clear and then tip-toed to the shutters and unlatched them.

The cobblestone street below, lit by moonlight, was deserted. Across the way were other multistory buildings painted in bright colors. Nothing magical. If he looked past the tacky paint and the lack of glass in the windows, he could convince himself that he was looking across a street on Earth, perhaps in a historical district of some city.

With a sigh, he reached to close the shutters. As he did, he glanced up. He was on the top floor, and the roof jutted out not far above. Peeking out between the mansion’s eaves and the roofs across the way, there was a sliver of sky — was that artificial lighting? The roofs of those houses were glowing —

The sky.

Ignoring jolts of pain as he stepped on vicious items hiding in the thick carpet, Max dashed out of the room and ran down the stairs two at a time.

As he sprinted across the living room, the Red Handers, discussing something at the dining table, turned to look at him. Nerran shot to his feet and shouted, but Max twisted out of Nerran’s reach and soon was opening the front door.

Cool air greeted his face as he leaped over the threshold, his neck craning backward and his eyes straining to take in the sight. Dizzy and off-balance, he fell on his rear. What did it matter? He didn’t need to stand to see. He lay back and stretched his arms out until he was spreadeagled, and he laughed, his mind struggling to believe his eyes.

Auroras, glowing lines of light, burned in the sky like the dying hearth of some sky god. There were his pastel greens and blues, right above him, everywhere, tracing jagged lines from horizon to horizon as though the black dome of the night sky were an eggshell, his eggshell, and he were a chick ready to be born pecking his way out, catching glimpses of the bright world outside for the first time in those jagged glowing cracks in the sky. His oranges and violets, reds and yellows, vibrant, moving, alive, dancing in front of a moon larger and more speckled than the one he knew.

He was not on Earth. He was in another place, in another world, a new world, a fantastical world that held magic and mysteries.

His limbs tingled as though his veins had been filled with something stronger than blood. He felt if he closed his eyes, he might float up into that gloriously alien sky and become a part of it.

“Where’d he — ” a voice shouted. “What in the void are you doing?” Nerran’s scruffy face invaded Max’s view of the sky. “Are you crying?”

“At least he didn’t run away.” Boss’s voice floated in the night air. Scarlet cackled nearby.

What Kristoff would give to see this. Or rather, was there anything he wouldn’t give? Max would’ve given up everything he had on Earth to experience this one moment.

“It’s beautiful,” he breathed out. “It’s incredible.”

“He’s insane.” Nerran’s face drew back. “I’m telling you, the girl’s a safer bet. She’s young, but he’s bawling like an infant over gods know what. The summoning magic must’ve messed him up.”

“What’s going on?” Mari yelled from the open doorway.

“You did a great job putting the baby to sleep,” Scarlet responded.

“Why’s Mook out here?” Mari asked nobody in particular.

“The musclebrain notices.”

“Hey! I told him to stay in his room.”

“Good job. Excellent work.”

As Mari began to loudly defend herself, Boss sighed and turned to head back inside. “I’m amazed I haven’t become a Carer.”

“Are we just going to leave him here?” Nerran asked.

As Boss walked away, her words were harder to hear but still audible. “I suppose it’s only a matter of time. One year? Two at the most.”

Blinking away the tears obscuring his view, Max felt another swell of laughter bubble up. There was no doubt in his mind that he’d been born for this moment, this place, this time. He’d never been so present. Hidden somewhere in this world was his purpose, be it a world-saving quest or a quiet life of bliss. His time on Earth had been a prelude to the symphony that was about to begin.

What splendid adventures waited under this fantastic night sky?