Ready or Not

🌀 from the unfinished graphic novel "Sifter"

“What are you doing here, Egypt? I thought I’d made it clear: you don’t belong here, and I don’t have time, energy or give a shits to save your ass more than once.”

The whip-thin man flung out an arm marked with a Venn diagram of colored circles and pointed to the wall, which quivered like hardening jello; when the shaking stopped, Egypt would be stuck in this slice of the metaverse until a new portal dissolved the barrier between here and Earth. Whenever that happened.

Egypt narrowed her nut-brown eyes at the Sifter, and stepped forward defiantly. “The metaverse doesn’t belong to you, you know, and I don’t need you to protect me.” She pushed back her hair when a hank of it dropped over one eye.

Rats.

She’d barely had time to pull on her boots as the wall in her bedroom oozed open, leaving her natural hair a poof of unruliness.

Sifter laughed, a dry, caustic sound. “Look at you, you’re barely dressed. That hair alone is a handicap. Can you even see?” He looked up, a flash of fear in his expression. “Last time, you landed in the middle of a firefight, but at least Space Command wasn’t trying to eat you.”

A sound Egypt couldn’t identify drowned out his words—a wet, gnashing sound, like a washing machine had lost a foot, walked outside on the other three, and then began eating a bag of wet clothes.

Reluctantly, she tilted her gaze up. That’s when she saw it, a head the size of a helicopter tilting to one side, the better to see her with.

“Is that a T-Rex?” she whispered.

“Something like it. I don’t think this is Earth. You ready to run back home now?”

Egypt glanced at the wall. As she did, it froze into stillness.

She shrugged and looked down at her forearm, where a prosaic blue band circled her wrist.

She pulled it off, swept her hair up in one smooth gesture with each hand, then twisted the band twice around her thick ponytail, letting it snap into place.

She grabbed Sifter’s marked wrist and yanked him toward the doorway, just as the dinosaur’s jaws darted into the room. She could feel its fetid breath billow after them as they ran.

Five minutes later, when they stopped, Sifter said, “Well, you’re stuck here now, ready or not.”

Egypt laughed. “It’s a good thing I always have a ponytail holder with me.”