Amelia floated off the wall she’d been pinned to by acceleration as Iris cut the engines. Moving without gravity was disconcerting and mildly nauseating, but Amelia hoped that would soon pass. Behind her head, her hair flailed around in weird ways, making her grateful she’d tied it back for the day. Likewise, the remaining half of the wheel of cheese floated free. She felt rather helpless for a time, because she ended up in the middle of the room, until she bumped into another wall.

  At that point, Amelia took charge of her own momentum, pushing off it. She bounced off the walls of the room for a time, until she got the hang of moving around, then aimed herself through the door to the next room. From there, she grabbed the ladder and used it to “climb” her way toward the witchpit. Along the way, she passed Marta, who was still unconscious and seemed totally unaffected by the continuous sensation of falling, because rest was more important.

  Amelia reached her destination, where Iris was busy trying not to vomit into a paper sack, obviously rather queasy.

  “I should take over from here.” Amelia suggested, “I need to assess our situation and adjust our velocity, so we won’t fall back into the atmosphere and burn up.”

  Still gagging, Iris unbuckled herself with one hand and drifted out of her seat. As she accidentally twirled in the air, her face turned a different shade of pink and she finally lost her breakfast.

  Amelia got into the seat and strapped herself in. She’d been worried Iris might have deviated from their planned course, but as Amelia examined the pressure gauge, then compared their angle of flight to the ground, she confirmed her sister had executed a slight pitch forward at the right time, to give them a more curved course. All that remained was to orient Starwitch to fly parallel to the ground, then run the engines from the apogee of their flight path, to give them sufficient velocity to circularize their course.

  Amelia sat quietly, doing nothing apparent, while she performed all of the required calculations in her head. She’d often found it strange that other people used their fingers to count, or an abacus for more complex arithmetic, because she’d been able to make the numbers dance and sing inside her head since the time Mother taught her to count, but in retrospect, all of that had gotten far easier the day she’d obtained The Book of Newts. As she finished a bit of calculus involving equations she’d learned from The Book, she slightly worried about what it was doing to her.

  It hadn’t done her any harm, but-

  “It’s beautiful!” Iris had somewhat acclimated to the lack of apparent gravity and was looking out one of the windows at the stars of space, which were more brilliant than any they’d ever seen from the ground.

  Amelia looked up and stared outside for a moment, since she had nothing to do for the next few minutes.

  Amelia smiled and agreed, tears pooling around her eyes, which ruined the view, “It’s far better than I imagined.”

  She wiped the tears away, which floated off as little ellipsoids that eventually settled down, becoming perfectly spherical. Amelia and Iris both smiled at the odd sight, because there was a powerful sense of wonder filling both of them.

  They both turned and briefly looked at Junas, the Home of the Gods, which was far more clear than they’d ever seen it, because there was no atmosphere in the way. Amelia picked out the details of the massive, swirling, red storm, just barely able to see movement in the surrounding clouds.

  Iris bowed her head, “Praise be to the Gods for our safe escape!”

  “Thanks be to them!” Amelia agreed and bowed her head, in turn.

  Amelia turned her attention back to the controls and laid a hand on the right-hand stick that controlled the gas thrusters, which used sprays of vaporized water to adjust their flight path.

  “Hold on to something.” Amelia warned

  Iris grabbed hold of the ladder and spoke, “Ready.”

  Amelia gave the stick a small nudge and watched the scrying crystals that showed the exterior of Starwitch. Two of the nearly-hidden thruster ports produced jets of gas, one near the tip of the vessel facing opposite the direction Amelia wanted to turn, while the other was near the tail, facing the other way. Starwitch began rotating, but having seen how slowly it happened, Amelia gave the stick a more vigorous nudge. The turn neared completion and Amelia very gently nulled out the rotation, just as they lined up perfectly parallel to the ground.

  The most bizarre sense of deja-vu struck Amelia, as if she’d performed such a maneuver thousands of times, though in the sudden flood of memories sloshing through her mind, she didn’t recognize her own hands, a very disturbing feeling. It soon passed. She wanted to get herself and the Book to the spell-core, because she had questions, but there wasn’t time, since she hadn’t yet stabilized their orbit.

  “You better strap in for the next part.” Amelia suggested.

  “Give me a moment!” Iris used the ladder to get herself to the seat beside Marta and strapped in, then called out, “Ready!”

  Amelia eyed the clock at the center of the gauges and adjusted the throttle lever to full power, producing a distant rumble! She was pressed into her seat by the sudden acceleration as she watched the second hand of the clock tick away, until the appropriate time. With a backwards jerk of the throttle handle, she cut the engines and Starwitch was once again in free-fall.

  Yawning, Amelia got herself out of her seat, then used it as a hand hold, to help her reach the ladder, using it to “climb” her way to the next room.

  “I think I should do something about the lack of gravity now.” Amelia informed her sister, “This is kind of fun, but it will really get in the way of work.”

  Iris unbuckled herself and grabbed the ladder, as she agreed, “Yeah, good idea.”

  The two of them followed the ladder through crew quarters, until they reached the last room, where the cheese bounced off a wall.

  “The rats sure have been busy.” Iris grinned as she got a look at the cheese.

  Amelia shrugged, “I think we’ve got four or five of them with us, based on how fast they’re eating. Probably a little family.”

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  “Why did you want rats with us, anyway?”

  Amelia finished her “climb” and laid hold of the spell-core as she answered, “Rats can repair most anything, according to legend, so if we get into trouble, I hope they’ll help us out.”

  “That makes sense.” Iris chuckled and joked, “And here I was thinking you just wanted some furry, little friends!”

  “Well, a rat or two around the house does make me feel right at home.”

  Iris nodded, “I know the feeling. Mother always made a point of feeding them and our shoes were always in great shape.”

  “Ready?” Amelia asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Amelia closed her eyes and imagined a self-contained field of gravity filling the spaces of the ship. She made a point of picturing it happening slowly and the two of them drifted toward the floor at a sedate pace, until they’d made contact, then Amelia picked up the pace, producing a gravity field much the same as the moon they’d been born on. The cheese bounced a bit, then came to a halt on the floor. When Amelia was satisfied with how the spell functioned, she imagined the spell-core autonomously maintaining it and gingerly took her hand away.

  When the spell kept going, she smiled, “Magic is easy with this thing.”

  Iris frowned, “Magic should never be easy. There’s always a price to pay.”

  “Not with this.” Amelia objected, “The metal draws magic from the air, due to its nature as a naturally-enchanted element. According to The Book, it can only exist in the presence of magic, because the nucleus of the atom is so heavy, magic becomes a binding force, in addition to the strong and weak nuclear…forces…” The eyes of Iris glazed and Amelia stopped techno-babbling, because she knew she’d lost her sister along the way. She tried a simpler approach, “It’s a magic metal that draws in more magic than it needs, which would build up until unpredictable, natural spells occurred, if I hadn’t bound the energy with runes. In essence, the price has already been paid.”

  “Fine, but it still bothers me.” Iris rose to her feet and took an experimental step, “Though it is handy, I must admit. I don’t think I could do something like this for more than a few minutes, even if I knew how.”

  “It’s just gravity.” Amelia explained, “All matter is attracted to all other matter. I used the spell-core to twist the shape of it and locally amplified the effect, just the same as Denholm does for telekinesis.”

  “You’ll have to teach me sometime, just in case.”

  “Tomorrow.” Amelia yawned, “I haven’t slept much for three days and Marta is clearly too exhausted to function, so would you mind watching for trouble while I get some rest?”

  Iris nodded and headed back toward the witchpit.

  Amelia followed her as far as the crew quarters, which hadn’t yet been properly setup. There were bedsheets, blankets and mattresses strapped to cargo racks on the walls, all of which featured metal rings set into the corners, for the sake of tying them in place. The cargo racks had been designed for a lack of gravity and included many boxes with little doors, to keep things in place. Some of them were filled with clothing and others held food. Several bore runes for keeping food cold and one of the largest held nothing but frozen cheese, for the sake of feeding the Brownies. Including the cheese, they had at least three years of food on hand. That last night of work on Starwitch had concluded with loading everything three witches might need to survive in space for long periods. One of the containers held gold and silver in the form of bars and coins, which Amelia hoped would be of value to others they might meet along the way.

  She worked to free one mattress, then tied it to the floor via a set of rings hidden under the floor at regular intervals, each of which had a little door held closed by a spring. Next, she covered the mattress with a sheet and blanket, took off the military uniform she’d always hated, then climbed under the blanket, to sleep.

  Amelia was in the witchpit, but she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, because Junas was far behind them and rapidly dwindling to a tiny spec, while the engines ran at full-throttle. Ahead of them was the sun, which loomed ever larger, over the course of many days.

  She argued with her sisters rather often, yet as soon as the arguments were over, Amelia couldn’t remember the words or the reasons for them.

  Each day, however, as they got closer to the sun, she felt elated. In the deepest recesses of her mind, she worried they were going to burn, but as they got dangerously close and the gravitational pull drew Starwitch toward a sure demise, Amelia felt absolutely comfortable and certain she was doing the right thing, which caused her worries to cease.

  Looking on the sun, as darkened through the glass of an enchanted window, Amelia saw the lines of a magic circle forming on the sun’s surface, drawn between six points along the edge. Initially, the lines formed a hexagon, then lines were drawn between every other point, forming a six-pointed star within it. The junctions between the crossing lines of the star became the points of a new hexagon, which began the process anew, with a smaller star within the hexagon forming another, getting ever smaller as the formation of the geometric fractal accelerated, endlessly zooming to a smaller point at the center, without ever touching it, though Amelia soon lost sight of the lines, because they got so fine and closely-spaced, she couldn’t make out the details.

  Amelia looked on the sun, realizing it was a doorway, that it had always been a doorway and the magic circle was the key to the lock.

  Amelia stared with anticipation at the very center of the circle, where a tiny point of blackness appeared, quickly growing larger over the course of seconds. At the same time, Starwitch accelerated, drawn forward by an attractive force beyond mere gravity, plunging toward the growing darkness!

  As they fell through the hole in reality, Amelia screamed, because it was more black and dark than anything she’d ever seen before, an emptiness so profound, she feared it might swallow the vessel and never spit her out! Dark and awful depression gripped her very soul and she knew she’d been swallowed by a great beast of tremendous size and scope! She knew in her heart, she’d led her sisters to their doom and she regretted everything. All was lost and hopeless! She curled into the fetal position as the darkness snuffed out the little, magical lights that lit the interior of Starwitch.

  Amelia sobbed, closed her eyes and accepted her impending death, until a glimmer of hope pierced the darkness, a single point of light so intense she saw it through her eyelids! She opened them and looked, but her vision was blurred from too many tears.

  Amelia woke from the dream, sensing subtle magic in the air, which she recognized from the day Mrs. Maccle showed her the warehouse. It had been exactly the same kind of magic, but more intense. She groaned and looked up at her sisters, who looked down with concern.

  “Bad dream?” Marta asked.

  “Yeah.” Amelia nodded, “That was a weird one.” She rubbed her eyes and explained, “It doesn’t happen very often, but The Book was trying to show me something.”

  Iris and Marta glanced at each other, sharing a look of deep concern. They’d occasionally expressed their worries about the magic book, but had also reasoned, like Amelia, that it had done nothing to harm them.

  Iris asked, “What did it show you?”

  The images were fading like a dream and Amelia shrugged as she shook her head.

  “I don’t quite remember.” She admitted.

  “You screamed, then cried like a baby.” Marta pointed out, “Are you sure it was a vision from the book? Maybe it was just a nightmare.”

  Amelia shrugged, because she was beginning to doubt she’d even sensed magic, since it had been so subtle, concluding it could have been part of the dream.

  “If it’s an important message, it will probably happen again.” Amelia climbed to her feet.

  She opened one of the many boxes lining the walls and hauled out a blue, one-piece suit, slipping it on. As she buttoned it up, she noted her sisters had also changed into their shipboard uniforms, which were practical, with many adjustable loops and pockets for tools, though Amelia was amused to see Marta had used her tool loops to hold some jerked meat wrapped in paper, so she’d always have a snack on hand.

  “What now?” Iris requested, “We’re not going to fly in circles the rest of our lives, are we?”

  Amelia shook her head and opened one of the lockers, to get herself a canteen, “No, but I think we should try a little sailing.”

  After dispensing some water from a spigot set into the wall, that was piped into the fuel tanks, she took a swig and strapped the canteen to her hip. It really was handy that their fuel was also their drinking water.

  “Sailing?” Marta asked as Amelia got some jerky for herself.

  Amelia nodded, “According to maps in The Book, there’s a place we can visit that’s fairly close, maybe a week’s journey, by sail.”

  “We have sails?”

  Amelia nodded, “We’ve been so busy, I didn’t have enough time to show you everything.”