“This is it, folks! The last stretch of the Glorious Galactic Portal Grand Prix!” Amber shouted over the roar of cosmic wind and the snapping of portal energy. She flung her arms wide as she soared along a shimmering silver current.
“Rider One, Amber Reykill, blazing a trail through the unstable vortex network!” her sister, Jade, chimed in beside her, upside down and spinning with wild glee. “Current speed: unknown. Altitude: also unknown. Sanity level—questionable! All systems normal, Captain!”
“Emotionally stable and marginally competent!” Amber replied, laughing as she barely dodged a swirl of crackling plasma. “Hey, I think I just saw Zohar and Alice blink out!”
“Confirmed!” Jade replied, squinting at the shifting threads ahead. “Bálint and Adaline just got yeeted. Spring and Roam—ooooh—major wipeout! It looks like they went down fighting… with each other. My bets are on Spring. What are your thoughts, Amber?”
“Oh, definitely Spring, Jade. She’ll have that cat-shifter chasing his own tail and is sure to leave him buried up to his neck,” Amber replied.
They both burst into laughter as another blur shot past them.
“Was that Jabir?” Amber gasped.
“With a potato chip in his mouth,” Jade said, wide-eyed. “Where does he put all that food? If he doesn’t shoot up soon like his dad, he’s gonna pop.”
Amber snorted. “Hey, that reminds me, did you pack us some food? I’m getting hungry.”
“Of course! There’s a micro-replicator in this bad boy,” Jade said proudly, patting the duffel bag.
Amber looked down when she felt a tremor ripple under her feet—or under the thread, whatever it was they were skating across—and Jade’s smile dimmed a notch.
“Uh-oh. Thread instability increasing. I’m seeing compression fractures,” Jade warned.
Amber studied the thread and nodded. Silver-light veins were splintering through the translucent path beneath them.
“Yep. Classic thread slippage. It looks like Phoenix has lost the last bit of control of the portal. The plasma lines are destabilizing with the quantum tether. Do we have anything in the bag that might help restabilize it?” Amber asked.
“No. You told me that we couldn’t bring the plasma stabilizer, that it was too big and heavy,” Jade snapped back. “I should have just ignored you and brought it!”
“Too late now,” Amber retorted, spotting a glowing cross-thread ahead with a flickering opening just beyond it. “Come on. Less arguing, more jumping. We need to get off this thing before we become space dust.”
“Got it. Duffel bag toss in three!” Jade called.
Amber yanked their oversized duffel bag by the strap and lobbed it with practiced ease to her twin, who caught it in one hand. The two girls worked in perfect synchronicity.
“You go first!” Jade shouted, angling toward the cross-thread.
“Roger that!” Amber kicked off their fraying thread and hurtled toward the alternate path.
She landed on the shimmering thread, rolling and sliding towards the opposite edge before she came up on her knee. Jade shook her head and growled at her. Amber just grinned back at her sister.
“I swear, if you had gone over, I was gonna haunt you!” Jade hollered.
Amber flashed a grin over her shoulder. “Like I’d miss. I’m elegant under pressure. Toss the bag and get your butt over here.”
Amber held her arms out as Jade tossed the bag. She grunted as the weight hit her, knocking her backwards, closer to the edge. She glanced over her shoulder and grimaced. One delicate misstep and she would be a space kabob.
She turned back when she heard a whoop. Jade twisted in midair and landed on the new thread beside her. Amber breathed out a sigh of relief just as the old thread snapped behind her with a burst of ozone and disappeared.
“Thread’s gone!” Amber said, biting her lip as she realized how close they had come to being lost.
They both paused for a breath, hovering on the thinning thread that now resembled a silver ribbon dissolving into mist up ahead.
“We’re going down. Get on the bag,” Amber snapped, her eyes locked on the swirling hole ahead.
“If there’s no space for our wings when we drop, what do you want to do?” Jade asked.
Amber looked down into the swirling space that was growing closer by the second.
