It's the first day of summer break, and Matilda and Jenny are sitting together on the cozy couch in their living room, eating cupcakes.

All of a sudden, there is a NOISE.

Jenny squeaks and clutches a pillow. Matilda jumps up and stares out the window into a well of glittering darkness. Spectral black tendrils twist and writhe across the lawn, expanding and contracting in eye-blurring patterns. In their wake, the air stirs violently and the grass and dirt are twisted beyond recognition, as though run through some kind of cosmic mapping function with the spatial coordinates scrambled.

She doesn't know what that is, but it is definitely not allowed. She stares it down, ignoring the headache that springs up almost immediately. It doesn't respond quite right to telekinesis - it's not a thing, it's an effect. Like fire, a process rather than a substance. But she can fight it - sort of - almost - it's hard, and she's losing ground fast.

This is unacceptable.

Weird black reality-fire is not allowed to eat Lyndonville.

The weird black reality-fire seems to disagree.

The end of a tendril passes through the window, warping the glass into a complex fractal sculpture that the wind immediately tears apart. Matilda glares at the spray of tiny shards on its way into the room, and it inverts itself back into a smooth solid pane of glass. Another tendril tries to do the same thing to the wall. She denies it. The wind is shrieking past the windows at an earsplitting volume, now - Jenny's yelling, but Matilda can't hear her - she concentrates fully on battling the black tendrils. They are not allowed to eat her house and they are not allowed to eat the town. They will not they will not they will not they will not they will not—

Caught between her refusal to let it have the house and her refusal to let it spread, the black stuff slowly wraps around the house. She tries to fight it back, compress it right back to the spot on her lawn where it started, but she's fighting it on two fronts already and the third is beyond her. Jenny's house is engulfed in a bubble of black fire. It tries to suck all their air away, like vacuum, but she refuses to let it. Her ears ring so loudly she can't even tell if the wind is still howling.

When the last link to the outside world is severed, there is a jarring sense of impact, like being knocked out of a chair. The black stuff seems to stretch - she can't even tell anymore how she's seeing all this; the position of every separate particle in the house is burned into her brain, somehow, by the force of her attempts to preserve it - and rather than let the reality-fire spread out and consume her town, she takes hold of it with her mind and pulls hard. The bubble of darkness comes loose from Lyndonville like Silly Putty unpeeling from a book cover, taking her house along for the ride.

All together, Matilda and Jenny and the house and the fire-thing, they fall through an endless incomprehensible void. The fire seems to be shredded by some kind of interdimensional friction, which shortly begins wearing away at the edges of Matilda's house. She refuses to let it. She has to close her eyes because looking out the window makes her feel like she's being turned inside-out, and even with her eyes closed it still feels a lot like that, but the house stays together.

It's impossible to tell how long they spend tumbling through the cracks between worlds. Occasionally they bounce off the edge of one, and Matilda feels an extrasensory glimpse of vacuum or solid rock or thermonuclear fire brushing up against the edge of her perceptions, and she doesn't try to stop at any of those - but then at last she feels the touch of air, ordinary breathable air not all that different from the air she is still ferociously preserving against the erosion of unreality, and she grabs on tight and pulls the house into that one.

Silence descends. Matilda takes a deep breath and slowly, carefully relaxes her mental grip, relinquishing her intense awareness of the house's physical structure and allowing her air to mingle with the air of this strange new world. It's too bright. Even with her eyes closed, it's too bright.

"Jenny? Are you okay?"

"I'm - I - Yes. I'm fine," says Jenny. Matilda can hear the shaky smile in her voice. "How about you?"

"My head really hurts. Can you look out the window and tell me how far we are from the ground?"

"... Yes," says Jenny. She goes to the window and looks.