Usually, morning looks like morning — all oranges and pinks smeared across the sky like someone had knocked over their paint pots. But when I crawled out of our little campsite at the edge of Rainbow Meadows, the sky was just… gray. Flat, dull, boring gray. Like someone had taken the whole sunrise and replaced it with a very large piece of cardboard.
I blinked. I looked left. I looked right. I looked up again, just in case I’d missed something.
Nope. Still cardboard.
“Biscuit,” I said. “The sky is broken.”
Biscuit was already sitting up in her bedroll, her copper bowl-cut hair perfectly neat on one side and completely sideways on the other, which was unusual for her. She was staring upward with an expression I recognized — the one where her nose twitched like a rabbit’s before a big sneeze.
“It’s not broken,” she said slowly. “It smells like old socks. And also…” She sniffed again, more deliberately. “Sadness. Coming from the north.”
I had learned, since our adventures in Rainbow Meadows and everything with Baron Blaze’s ridiculous cape, to take Biscuit’s nose very seriously indeed. If Biscuit said something smelled like old socks and sadness, something was definitely, horribly wrong.
We packed up camp quickly, which mostly meant Biscuit organized everything into seventeen precise pockets of her enormous backpack while I accidentally sat on the last piece of bread and turned it into crumbs. She didn’t say anything about the bread. She was too busy staring north with her lists face on — that particular expression where her eyebrows scrunched together and her lips moved slightly while she counted things nobody else could see.
“We’re still heading to Blockville,” she said firmly. “The stolen hats, the festival in three days — that doesn’t change. But whatever is making the sky gray is coming from the same direction.” She paused. “That feels like too much of a coincidence.”
“Nothing is ever a coincidence,” I said, and immediately tripped over a flower pot someone had left at the edge of the path.
“I meant to do that,” I added, from the ground.
We’d been walking for almost an hour when the first wilted flowers appeared. Just one or two at first, drooping sadly along the roadside like they’d forgotten what sunshine felt like. Then more. Then whole patches of them, gray-tipped and floppy, leaning away from the sky as if even they knew the sky couldn’t be trusted today.
That’s when Biscuit stopped so suddenly that I walked into the back of her.
“There,” she said.
In the middle of the road was a glass jar. A big one, sealed tight with a glowing purple cork. And inside it — I had to lean close to be sure I was seeing it right — was a sunrise. A real one. All pink and gold and orange, swirling around inside the glass like it was trying very hard to escape.
“Someone stole the sunrise,” I said. “Someone literally took the sunrise and put it in a jar.”
“Not someone,” said Biscuit grimly. “Something. Wither Wanda.”
I’d heard that name before, whispered between the villagers we’d met on the road. The Collector of Stolen Skies. The one who floated around in black-and-purple smoke vacuuming up beautiful things and sealing them away where nobody else could enjoy them.
Biscuit reached into her backpack to pull out her spare map, and that’s when it happened. She made a small, surprised sound — not her planning sound or her annoyed sound, but a genuinely puzzled one — and pulled out something small and round and copper-colored instead.
A button. Old and slightly tarnished, with a tiny engraving on it that looked like a four-leaf clover. She turned it over in her fingers, frowning.
“I’ve never seen this before,” she said.
I leaned in. The button had a warm, buzzy feeling about it, like standing next to a furnace on a cold night. Even I could feel it from two steps away.
“It was between my cheese sandwich and my backup map,” Biscuit said, sounding personally offended that something had appeared in her perfectly organized backpack without filing the proper paperwork. She sniffed it carefully. “Peppermint. And something electric.” Her eyes went wide. “Ollie. I think this repels things. Enemies. When you click it.”
We looked at each other.
“That’s incredibly useful,” I said.
“I’m not using it,” she said immediately.
“Biscuit —”
“Not until I’ve made the rules.” She was already pulling out her notebook. “Rule one: not for spiders, they’re just confused. Rule two: not when we could use a different plan. Rule three: not before I’ve tried at least four other options. Rule four —”
“How many rules are there going to be?”
“Seventeen,” she said, without looking up.
I looked back at the jar with the trapped sunrise. Somewhere to the north, Wither Wanda’s fortress was drifting through a sky she’d stolen from everyone else. And somewhere ahead of us, Blockville was missing all its hats and counting down three days to a festival that had never once been cancelled in a hundred years.
Here’s the thing I’d been slowly figuring out, ever since I tripped face-first into the Flame Tower device back at Rainbow Meadows and somehow knocked the whole thing sideways: sometimes falling forward is still forward. Baron Blaze had learned that. So had Snatcher the wool-stealing sheep, in his own fluffy way.
I picked up the sunrise jar very carefully, tucked it under my arm, and pointed down the road toward Blockville.
“Let’s go get some hats back,” I said. “And maybe a sky, while we’re at it.”
Biscuit finished writing rule number seventeen, closed her notebook with a decisive snap, and stood up.
“I have a plan,” she said. “Actually, I have seven. Pick one quickly, Ollie.”
The gray sky stretched out above us, flat and dull and entirely unimpressed. We walked straight into it anyway.
