Isolde had promised Zethar one last goodbye. The following evening they were to meet and attempt his experiment—the one he said had the potential to transport her away from cruel Aurelian and into his arms at last.
Before leaving the house that night, she had done her due diligence to confirm that Aurelian was actually away this time. According to his tracking, he was indeed on the Wayline to Teros, in the neighboring Idunn galaxy. Plenty of time for her to grant Zethar’s requests but she would need to be clever about it.
It was quite possible her fiancé was telling the truth about keeping watch over her, but just as likely he was lying. With the Lunaris family, possessiveness and pathological deceit went hand in hand. In any event, Isolde had weighed her fates and was prepared to take a risk, just this once, for the cosmic researcher who had quietly claimed her heart.
When she arrived at the beach, Isolde could see that the portal’s energy field was already burning bright down the shore in the darkness. Zethar had been working all night on two more stabilizers—one for each compass point within the crater basin—to support a consistent flow of current across the field and prevent the anomaly from burning out too quickly.
“It’s a simple test, really,” Zethar explained, locking eyes with Isolde across the distance between them. “You remember the cigarette smoke?”
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“Yes, of course.”
“It got me thinking. If our worlds overlap or even touch in any way—enough for a particulate matter like cigarette smoke to travel through the portal—maybe solid matter can too.”
“Travel through the portal?”
“Maybe. I’m not willing to risk that just yet. We have to test the theory a bit first.”
“And how do we do that? Do you mean try to pass something through? Like an object?”
“I thought about that,” Zethar said, becoming out of breath with excitement. “But then I thought of something better.”
“What do you propose?” Isolde asked.
“A physical test,” he answered. “To see if we can touch our hands together through the portal.”