As a child, some of my own fondest memories were not the field trips nor the family gatherings, but the sleepy nighttime rides with someone else at the wheel ensuring we’d arrive safely, ready to be tucked into bed as soon as I was brought through the door. There were times when the vulnerability that comes with being so small could be such an unexpectedly nice thing, your trust in someone else’s careworn hands proving itself earned, and the mere suggestion that anything could ever go wrong nothing more than just that—a suggestion.

Oh, but where are my manners, rambling on again—I say all this simply to tell you, dear readers, that this is exactly what happened to Yona on the Phanna ride back to Zone 2. It was one of the scant few times she had relinquished piloting duties to Rory so she could relax. And as we all know, sleep travel is something that loves to occur on its own terms, with Yona being one of its favorite targets. That night, even soaring through the lifeless void of Lost Space, she had been so deeply engrossed in sleep travel that it felt as though she spent multiple days there. Where, you ask?

Rickety, rickety rollercoasters. Buttery hot, fresh popcorn. Frozen lemonades and gleaming neon balloons being carelessly released into the stratosphere. This was Radia—the city of endless amusements, or so it had been described while it existed. Being an artificial structure, it was what many termed a “pocket planet”—floating within close enough proximity to Eltrya that it was accessible via warp plates, beaming visitors directly from the ground into the glass dome that encapsulated the city. Some were rather incredulous of such a thing existing, while others welcomed its taste of the future with open arms.

Regardless of how one felt about this feat of twentieth-century engineering, it was a place Pamela and Lonissa had taken Yona and the other children of the orphanage just once before it ceased operations. That summer they had opened new areas of the city to visitors, and leagues of people traveled seeking business opportunities and whimsical distractions. Yona never forgot the queue, how it weaved itself through every nook and cranny of Majonia. The excited chatter that tickled her ears.

“Never thought I’d be back in Radia,” she said to no one in particular. Overlooking the city skyline, she soon realized she had been placed atop a roof where a flood of tourists were gathered, dropping coins into slots to operate binoculars. Pipe-like tubes were coiled between nearly every building, serving as fast travel between destinations. Structures were bulbous and toylike. To think it’d all be torn down just a few years later, she thought…

Wait, she also thought. What year is it? She pushed aside a particularly demanding tourist to gain access to one of the binoculars and scanned as much of the surrounding area as she possibly could. Artificial sky. Theater building. Park. Vendor. Fountain. She froze in place.

“There’s no way…”

“Hey, chick, are you gonna hog that thing all evening?” the voice of a greasy teenager squeaked behind her. She made a mad dash for the stairs, pushing through people like they were ocean waves, until she finally flew out the door. It’s impossible…

There was a family in front of that fountain—a rather unusual family with a lot of children, and two matriarchs, sitting down for lunch. They had with them a funny little girl who was too absorbed in tossing all the coins she’d been given to spend on her share of the day’s amusements into the fountain to eat her meal. Oh, and that smell—a Qulo egg sandwich—they were always made with such love. They still were.

If I say something to her, will I ruin this timeline? Yona thought anxiously, a few too many conflicting emotions bubbling up inside of her. Much remains unknown about sleep travel, you see: when one travels by sleep, they are also traveling by layer, and sometimes also by zone. Zone is easy enough to understand—it refers simply to being in a different zone from where one currently is, so, a matter of distance—but layer refers to time. There may be an infinite number of layers underscoring a specific moment in time. When Yona visits her friend Ceris, for instance, she is traveling several centuries back to the past; but not only that, she is creating a mirror image of that time. All those same moments she spent in Ceris’s presence have their own parallel layers where Ceris was by herself, or somewhere else altogether—a boundless wellspring of alternate outcomes, coexisting with one another across multiple timelines. Oh, but let’s not get carried away by the trivial details—Yona was face to face with herself!

“Whaddya want?” the little thing asked crassly. She had separated from the rest of the group and was deeply invested in licking an ice cream cone. Pamela—this layer’s Pamela—was still seated in the distance, in front of the fountain, distracted by the other children, or perhaps by Lonissa’s shameless indulgence in some particularly colorful cotton candy. “You’re dressed pretty funny.”

Yona took a deep, razor-sharp breath.

“Look, kid, don’t talk to strangers, alright? I don’t wanna be a bad influence or anything…Heaven knows you’ve got enough of those.” The younger Yona raised an eyebrow. “But just this once, make an exception. I need you to help me with something.”

“How do I know you’re not tricking me?” Little Yona asked, crunching on the cone.

Adult Yona had been entranced by the strangeness of being face to face with a girl she’d come to only know in faded photographs; she narrowly resisted the urge to pat down the wildly untamed cowlicks sticking out of her past self’s hair. It was a blend of fondness and revulsion. Banishing the thought lest she really creeped out this poor child, she knelt to Little Yona’s height and said with great portent, “Ask me anything about Wizard Glick. Anything.”

Child Yona satisfiedly crunched on the very tip of her ice cream cone—fudge dipped—then, without a moment’s hesitation, asked something only she would know the answer to: “On what day did I see Wizard Glick perform where he levitated me to the stage?”

“June 10th, 1985. My—your—seventh birthday!” she proclaimed proudly.

The two girls locked eyes for an electric moment, then shook paws. “Layer traveling. So you can meet yourself,” the younger Yona declared with a hint of maturity beyond her years.

“I’ll bite. What’s it you need help with?”

“So, something’s gonna happen in the future, and really I think it’s best I don’t tell you what—well, don’t worry too much about it, that’s for grown-up Yona to deal with—but basically, Wizard Glick needs help with something, and you’re gonna be the one to get the job done. And most of that job constitutes finding his assistants. You know, those cute li’l guys who help him during performances.”

“Please don’t talk down to me. I just saw him again last week and taped today’s performance before we went out.”

Sheesh, I really was obsessed, wasn’t I? Current Yona thought with some embarrassment. It was incredible, in a way, just how willing Pamela and Lonissa were to indulge her in this hobby for such a long time. “Okay, okay, smart aleck. Anyway, you’ve got some extrasensory magical abilities at this age, right? One of the dolls is definitely lurking somewhere here in Radia, but I don’t know this place as well as you do.”

“How come?” Little Yona asked, quizzical. “When did you last visit?”

The elder Yona gulped. “Listen, my memory’s not what it used to be, okay? I need you to be my second pair of eyes. Help me look around the city.”

With both Yonas on their own secret mission, the pair discreetly disappeared around the corner, but not before the older Yona couldn’t help stealing a glance at her family. Pamela looked the same as ever, perhaps just a touch less aged—not that Manyas ever show prominent signs of aging. Lonissa looked more vivacious, certainly, a realization that tugged at her heart. The children of the orphanage had long since been adopted and grown up, and her memory of them had never been the best—but then she noticed a certain little boy in their group that she never expected to see again: Piko, whom died much before his time. It’s not that they had ever been especially close, but his passing was something she had struggled to parse when it took place. Now that she was older, much older, the weight of his loss was something she finally understood, though it took until this moment for it to make itself known.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t we going?” Little Yona tugged at her paw impatiently.

“Yeah. I’m sorry about that.”

The hustle and bustle of excitable tourists prevented Radia from ever knowing a moment of stillness. The sky above was an LCD screen, displaying daylight at all hours, further enticing visitors to stay as long as they liked—never noticing how tired they’d become til they returned home. Time was an enigma between these glass walls. Parades and celebratory marches sauntered around every corner, confetti filling the air like a snowglobe.

“How about I check the east side of town, and you go west?” the younger Yona volunteered.

“Good idea. And you know the signal to bring me over if you find something, right?”

“Yep. Three flickers of flame?”

“Perfect.” Releasing three bright flashes of fire from her claw was an old signal she once used to indicate to Rory that she had something important to show him (likely to be confiscated) while they were in school. The flares were bright enough to be seen from afar, even in daylight, yet inconspicuous enough as a gesture that most would pay it no mind.

And so the elder Yona faced west and slinked around a crowd, following her instincts while trying not to be distracted by the many things she wanted to explore at her own leisure. Who could say when, or if she would ever layer travel to Radia again? It may have been as densely populated as she remembered, but these were wraiths. The movie theaters, happy-go-lucky parks and three-storey shopping malls were mirages. A cold wind pierced straight through her as she approached an empty alleyway, and this, at least, seemed decidedly real.

But the doll and its hiding were Glick’s handiwork, not hers, and its whereabouts would likely be somewhere that bore some kind of significance to him. Had Glick performed at the Diamond Ballroom? She didn’t exactly have his touring schedule memorized, and if he had played there on this particular day, she surely would have dragged her family out to see him. Yona peered through the fogged window of its front door only to find that it was temporarily closed for repairs, and it looked like little more than a dimly lit warehouse through the glass.

Meanwhile, Little Yona’s own extrasensory perception was a little sharper, a little fresher, not yet worn from years of use nor battered by overreliance on the regular five senses. On the east side of town were candy stores and gift shops, including one that specialized entirely in gifts for magic fans—all the trading cards, action figures and plastic wands she could ever dream of. Perhaps the doll was nestled somewhere along these store shelves, blending in with the assortment? She wandered inside, the door bell chiming sweetly upon her entry.

Typically one might expect a shopkeeper to greet whomever has walked through their doors with something like a standard “Welcome!”, but she was so small, and the adults surrounding her so imposing with their fists clenched around money and banknotes and doe-eyed children tugging at their legs, that no one cared to pay her any mind. She wandered from display to display, taking inventory of all that she saw, pondering if Glick’s assistant might be so devoted as to only hide amidst his own merchandise. Indeed, the charismatic Wizard had his own shelf with a striking cardboard standee before it. Oh, how she wanted these toys—these booster packs of magician cards, these replica silken top hats—but Focus! His future was at stake here, even if no one else in this shop knew it.

She trotted out the back door and inhaled, glad to get some air (however stagnant) back into her lungs after feeling nearly suffocated by so many legs and wallets stuffed into one building. Ahead of her was the Go-Coaster—the signature rollercoaster that was weaved throughout Radia, like a ribbon around a present. Stupid name, she thought rather critically, but wait: this’ll give me a better view!

So she stepped up to the next group of passengers and they soon departed. The speed of the ride was nothing so intimidating, being that most visitors to Radia rode it with the same intentions as Little Yona’s, and it had several stops at different landmarks. In the air, mechanical Qulos flew beside their car—yes, flew—as the city’s founders had long been intrigued by the species’ origin as animals capable of flight. Qulos may have evolved to be flightless for reasons unknown, but their wings were reanimated as cold steel in Radia.

After their first stop, the younger Yona scanned her eyes more intensely over the city now that they had moved further from the section of town she initially explored. The first thing to catch her attention was a funhouse. It was attached to a penny arcade right beside the big top tent, donned in frescoes of exotic animals and performers with painted faces. She hoped there would still be time in the day to see the circus with her family—hopefully the doll was in the nearby vicinity and that strange, tall Yona from the future would soon be on her merry way, saving Wizard Glick from whatever must befall him in the years to come. She tried not to think of whatever that meant.

At their next stop, she disembarked and followed a path of glitter-encrusted stone to the funhouse, which stood out to her more than the other attractions in the area for a few reasons: firstly, there was no crowd surrounding it, no waiting line whatsoever; secondly, it seemed to grow in size as she approached it, a telltale sign of an enchanted structure; and thirdly, but possibly not lastly, she could hear the sound of Nothing from inside it. Can you really hear Nothing? Most describe it as the absence of Something, but when you have truly heard Nothing, you have been deafened by how it saps the color from the air. Nothing was very loud inside of this building.

She stood by the entrance and signaled to the elder Yona with the three flickers of flame. After five lengthy minutes the two convened.

“I didn’t doubt you for a second, Little Me. This place’s as enchanted as they come. Do you think anyone else is even seeing it?” the elder Yona panted, seeming a bit fatigued from her run.

“Nope, no one. Those annoying tourists on the Go-Coaster point out every single thing they see, no one even noticed it. Ready to go in?”

The older Yona had a pang of familiarity upon seeing the frescoes, wishing to stop and gaze at them and the otherworldly figures they depicted just a little longer; but then, there is the question of just how joined her memory was with this layer’s Yona, and whether or not the things her child self saw now impacted her future memory. Truth be told, she had been experiencing deja vu from the moment she began this sleep travel, but chalked it up to exhaustion.

Without further delay, the pair entered the ephemeral building, a cold hush penetrating the air around them. The lights were dim, obscuring the path laid ahead and furthering a creeping sense of uneasiness that settled like a dark beast upon their shoulders. Setting foot inside an enchanted structure feels almost like walking on water, the ground never quite as solid as it would like you to believe. The checkered tile ebbed and flowed beneath their footsteps as they stalked slowly down the hall past a series of rippled mirrors. Before long, they noticed the path deceptively narrowing tighter and tighter as they had less leg room between each other, the elder Yona nearly accusing her young counterpart of trying to trip her. But the width of the path was not the only thing shrinking, as the ceiling had drooped so low they had no choice but to crawl on all fours. Luckily they had reached a door before the structure closed in on them entirely, albeit one with a doorknob so petite it had to be carefully twisted between Yona’s claws; but once they were inside, one following after the other, the room had opened into a vast structure that nearly felt like another segment of Radia in its sheer scope.

“Ain’t that just great!” the older Yona proclaimed, half sarcastic, half admiring the intricate beauty of the mess they’d found themselves in. The room unfolded into a candy-colored labyrinth—a sprawling maze of painted corridors, plastic slides and projections whizzing and whirling around every twist and turn; and the air was suddenly alive with raucous music—probably for the purpose of disrupting what little concentration they could manage to begin with.

As the pair strained to focus their eyes on any one part of the room (for it was all so animated), a toy biplane glided and sputtered above them before knocking pathetically against a wall, its gears dying down with a slow whir as it lay in its checkered deathbed in one corner of the room. The younger Yona picked it up and retrieved a message attached to its rudder:

Little Yona reflexively began crumpling the paper before she realized that was a bad thing to do and uncreased it. “How’s a path going to look like me?” she quizzed. “All I see from here are six ways to go, and one of them is obviously a trap.”

The elder Yona considered these words, wondering if there might be some carefully disguised in-joke of sorts from Glick to be decoded, before coming to: “Wait, whaddya mean one of them is obviously a trap?”

Geez, what happened to my eyesight? the smaller Manya thought uncharitably. “That yellow one there…fourth from the left. Don’t you see the hinges on the floor? It’s the most obvious trapdoor anyone’s ever seen. Look,” she said, demonstrating her theory by taking the toy biplane to nudge into the path. But when she turned to retrieve it, the path had already changed appearance, now a reverberating red corridor lined with living paintings.

“All I’m seeing is a green hallway with lots of potted plants and ivy. Kind of inviting in the presence of all this artificial stuff—well, they’re probably fake too, but still.”

At this, the younger Yona was indignant. “What are you talking about? What do you mean green hallway? I’m telling you, it’s…” she trailed off, before realizing it had been nothing but a clinical, stark-white pathway with not a thing in it, somehow a little blinding in its normalcy. She waved her paws frantically at its entrance, wondering if there was some unseen force tampering with her eyes; but no specters were there, no tricksters to play any puckish pranks. “Oh. We’re getting messed with, that’s what.”

“We aren’t seeing the same thing. And really, what did Pamela always say when we’d come back home a different color?” the elder Manya chuckled in spite of herself. It was all just a bit too on-the-nose for her liking, a little obvious. But the great Wizard never did like using all of his best tricks at the start of a show, no; not when there was so much time to build suspense.

Past the chameleonic hall was a room like an ice castle composed of nothing but mirrors: the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture were each reflective, creating a nauseating feedback loop of the same distorted bodies and faces scattered slipshod throughout the space. Values seemed all but imperceptible, as an entire living room’s worth of furniture was arranged quite neatly and practically around them, complete with a reflective rubber tree and a fireplace with glass fire, but it was so difficult to tell where one surface ended and another began that it might as well have been empty. After a clumsy moment of tripping over a particularly shiny chaise lounge, both Yonas took to carefully groping along anything they could feel to avoid scraping against any more sharp edges.

“This is weird. Why would anyone want to live in a home like this?”

“I think the idea,” the elder Yona started, “is that Glick is creating places we want to get out of, but can’t. I’ve had about enough of this one. The whole thing is making me dizzy and I can’t make heads or tails of where anything is.” She had been crawling on the floor, where it seemed safer, using both paws to scope the space around her in hopes of grabbing hold of something—anything—that could be a clue. Just as she was standing up she managed to knock her head into a kitchen table. “Dammit!”

The younger Yona was seated rather unhelpfully on a glass armchair, absentmindedly staring at the ceiling. Suddenly a small idea entered her mind, and, even if it had proven fruitless, it was probably more interesting than watching her future self bumble into invisible furniture any longer. So she cast a thin beam of light from her forefinger upwards to the chandelier that was centered in the room and watched it bounce off the tiny crystals down to the furniture below, where it scattered its glow from surface to surface, ricocheting to the tile, creating a little illuminated path that brought just enough clarity to their situation for her to make a little gasp of recognition.

“What did you do?” the senior Manya asked, still clutching her head in pain, when she noticed her younger self’s look of mischievous delight, and immediately knew all she needed to know.

“The room is totally symmetrical! The chandelier, fireplace, and dining table are all smack-dab down the middle.”

“Neat, but how’s it gonna help us leave?” Older Yona asked, more than a hint of impatience in her voice.

Little Yona gnawed at her claw in thought. “I think something has to be out of place, we just can’t tell what. Wizard Glick never liked symmetrical things. When he got invited to perform on shows he’d usually ask one of his assistants to put something a little askew—said the balance was all wrong when it was the same on both sides. I think it had something to do with the flow of magic.”

At this revelation, the mature Yona felt very stupid indeed. How could she have forgotten? He had an entire chapter devoted to the nature of symmetry in his autobiography (though it was a well-known fact that it had been ghostwritten). Magic comes from the planet’s magic barrier and some users need more control over the pathways that it takes to reach their minds, where it is harnessed and finally dispersed as tangible energy through their hands, or by the conversion routes of a wand. It made perfect sense in a way that, once again, seemed almost obvious.

“Hey, me! Shoot that beam at the chandelier again—I feel like I can see something,” she said suddenly.

The younger Yona cast another short burst of light energy toward the ceiling and this time it traveled down a slightly different path, shooting off the curve of a flowerpot, tumbling down the nooks and crannies of a modest bookshelf. With this image imprinted on her retinas, the elder Yona scrambled toward this bookshelf and began pulling its drawers open. “There should be another one on the other side of the room—look through there.” The younger Yona complied. Documents—these, too, made of glass—books, their titles unreadable—scentless candles, picture frames without pictures, fountain pens and feather quills—

“Look!” cried the smaller Yona. She reached into an inconspicuous drawer and held up something decidedly not see-through, what looked like a colorful marble or a snowglobe; and her counterpart hurried to join her on the other side of the room to examine it.

“Isn’t this just a miniature Radia?” the discoverer of the object pondered aloud, shifting the weight of the orb from side to side in her paw. It was shiny, as was everything else in the room, but certainly not symmetrical, and warm with life down to its core. Squinting, she could make out a tiny Go-Coaster trawling through the city, just like the real thing, as well as the unintelligible murmur of voices from within.

The older Yona took it into her paws. “Wait a minute.” She turned the thing around to view it at as many angles as possible, being careful not to shake it, lest some innocent bystanders fall off the Go-Coaster. “This isn’t Radia as it exists right now. The Diamond Ballroom’s missing, and the carousel, and some of the buildings are painted the wrong color. See?” She handed it back. Indeed, this was some primitive vision of the city, perhaps dating back to its grand opening. Why would this be in Glick’s enchanted funhouse?

The younger Yona bit her lip, deep in the debate of whether or not she should ask a question that had been bothering her all this time. Her future counterpart understood this look, too, and ventured a guess: “You want to ask me something, don’t you?”

“Well… if you’re from the future like you say you are, I’m sure you know things I won’t find out for a long time,” she started measuredly. “So, you can tell me, I’ll keep the secret. What happens to this place? Do you still have Radia when you’re from?”

Having acclimated herself to her maturity levels at this age, and gained an idea of what she can and cannot handle, the future Yona finally felt that it was right to tell her the truth. “No, we don’t. In fact, you’re only gonna have it for a few more years, so…make the most of this trip. Sorry you had to hear it from me. Er…yourself.” She hoped to find any trace of levity in the situation, but could tell the news was bitterly disappointing to her younger counterpart.

After being lost in the thought of what all this could mean, she questioned, “Why’d they get rid of it?”

“The fallout of the whole thing was pretty publicized. The King of Radia’s daughter had a bit of a spat with one of her friends—well, a lot more than a spat, it was like this unsolvable argument. Radia was always meant to be the King’s gift to his daughter, and after the argument had dragged on for long enough, she asked him to destroy it in revenge. Would’ve been nice if they’d just talked it out a little longer instead of making everyone pay for it.” At the time of its dissolution Yona thought the whole thing so silly, so frivolous—but time had taught her just how delicate relationships could be, how fragile the fabric of them was once words couldn’t be taken back, and suddenly it seemed so grim in its realism.

“Do you think we could’ve solved the problem for them?” the younger Yona said, a hint of optimism peaking in her voice. “We work well together, right? I don’t think it would stayed unsolved if we could be there.” Tenses were confusing—the distant, nostalgic past for one Yona was still an event to anticipate for the other.

The elder Manya thought this over, trying to shake away any default responses of how fruitless this would be; instead, she patted her head, ruffling that ratted mane of cowlicky hair. “With that attitude, it’s worth a try, right? Nothing’s really impossible. Maybe you can make your timeline better than mine turned out to be.”


With this, the dream travel concluded as abruptly as it had begun. Cold, blustery winds reanimated her into her own timeline, still on the back of Mivah, now with another one of the dolls snug under the crook of her arm for her efforts. It was a nice dream.