I wasn’t tired anymore, but I was confused. The answers I’d gotten had only created more questions. Who was that girl? Why had I seen her? Why would anyone be after me? Who were these people in charge who had apparently sent me here? And what the hell was a Jeevne?

I put my head in my hands, rubbing my temples. It wasn’t fair. If someone was going to send me to some freaky alternate dimension, they should at least let me know what was going on beforehand! I felt so horribly overwhelmed. I didn’t cry – I wouldn’t cry – that would make me feel worse, like some little crybaby who couldn’t handle himself. But this was the closest I had gotten to crying in a long, long, time. Not that I would have admitted it to anyone else, of course.

Okay. Calm down. You can deal with this. A Jeevne. Whatever the hell that was. A person? An animal? An object? I didn’t know how I’d know when I’d seen it, but-

Just then my thoughts were interrupted by a noise behind me, and I whirled around, startled, to see what it was.