The door opened suddenly and I found myself facing a girl. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, dark pants, and had her hair pulled back off her face. She had a smile that lit up her deep brown eyes and warmed every nerve in my body. I figured her to be about my age. Her face brightened when she saw me.
“You must be Skeeve,” she said. “Come on in. My dad said you’d be along eventually.”
I stood in the dust, staring at her. In all my life I had never been so surprised at anything anyone said.
She knew my name.
She had been expecting me.
God knew how many dimensions from home and in the middle of a raging dust storm, she had been expecting me!
My first thought was to back slowly away before turning and running into the storm. But my legs remained frozen in place, my mind too stunned to even try to reason out anything.
“Come on,” the girl said. “It’s windy out there!”
Nothing on me was moving.
Tanda finally pushed me forward and the girl stepped back, holding the door for all of us to go inside.
If I hadn’t known this was the same cabin as we had seen in the other dimensions, I would have never have recognized it. Now it had a wooden floor, the cracks in the walls were all filled, and it was warm and comfortable.
There was a table with a bowl of fruit on it, four chairs, and kitchen counter with cabinets on one side of the room. A fire was burning in a baking stove, keeping the cabin comfortable. A bed was against the far wall, with a beautiful blue and gold quilt neatly covering it and a pillow.