Operation Tenley by Jennifer Gooch Hummer Page A

maybe it was a small meteor. Something very heavy was preventing her from standing. She pushed against the ground with all her might and got to her knees.
    Gravity, she remembered. That’s what it was.
    Using the 3 rd i, it was impossible to believe that gravity could be so heavy. It was invisible, after all! “ Breathe,” Laraby had told her.
    Pennie tried to sip in the thick air, but her heart was racing. Everything was too bright. And pointy. And heavy . She sipped in more air until slowly, slowly, using the closest tree for support, she pulled herself up to standing.
    Through the maze of branches, she saw it: a house. The Tylwyth house.
    She was here, at 19 Nathan Lane. On Earth !
    She gritted her teeth and took a baby step toward the yard. How could her tiny feet be this heavy? By the time she reached the end of the tree line, beads of sweat were slipping down her temples.
    But the sky!
    “So bright,” she said, reaching up for it. No one had ever come close to describing the sheer beauty of it from this point of view.
    She looked across the luscious green grass. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she whispered to the trees. Acclimating to Earth took a few days—she knew that part. But no one had told her about the birds chirping or the leaves blowing. Everywhere she looked, there was color and movement and energy. And all of it was spectacular.
    A searing pain ripped through the back of her knee. She yelped and yanked up her robes to slap at the burn. A bee fell to the grass. She jumped away. “Why did you do that?”
    But the bee didn’t respond. And without her tools, a bee couldn’t hear her.
    Plus, she’d killed it. “Oh no. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry,” she whispered. It was said that Mother Nature kept tabs on each and every one of Earth’s creatures. She didn’t have control over the animal kingdom, but she held a grudge against anyone who’d harmed any animal in it.
    Another buzz blew by. Pennie looked across the lawn.
    Mrs. Tylwyth’s car was gone. Along the side of the house, Tenley’s old princess playhouse looked exactly like it had through the 3 rd i: dirty and abandoned.
    Pennie placed her hands under the back of her knee, lifted her boulder/leg, and slung it forward. She did the same with the other leg until she’d walked out of the woods. A squirrel crossed the yard and stopped to stare at her.
    “Hey, you furry thing.”
    The squirrel cocked its head.
    “I’ve just arrived here. My first time.”
    The squirrel scurried away.
    “Rude,” Pennie mumbled, struggling on. Tenley, as usual, had left the front door open. Which, today, was good news. Pennie stepped in and shut the door.
    Everything was familiar. The 3 rd i, equipped with technology so advanced it had its own vocabulary, could see inside and under just about every spot on Earth. But standing in this place was so much different. The colors in the hallway looked rich enough to dip a finger into. And the smells. There was little to smell in Fair City besides rock and dust and Administrator contempt. In Tenley’s house, the smells were full of things that made you feel alive .
    Pennie peeked into the kitchen. Her eyes fell to the clock on the wall: 1:25 p.m. She was five hours and twenty-five minutes into her mission. There was plenty of time to convince Tenley to stop using her element. Now she just needed to find her.
    She turned for the door and stopped. Her robes.
    By the time Pennie made her way up the stairs (sitting on each step for a good thirty seconds before starting up again) and into Tenley’s room, it was 1:40 p.m. The room was so pink she had to close her eyes and hold onto the wall to get her balance. The curtains, the walls, the bedspread, and even the chair were bright enough to feel the heat coming off them.
    Pennie tripped over a (pink) high-top to get to the mirror. A kind of squeak fell out of her when she saw her reflection. She was a mess, worse than she’d imagined. Her long red hair had fallen