We looked to a small clearing, where lights seemed to have been pressed into the service of some strange designer. It was a line of bright white that was shaped into a perfect cube—the size of a doorway.

“What’s that?” I asked.

But before an answer found its way to my lips, a spoonful of life insurance did. And when I mean a spoonful, I mean a hefty helping of ground up financial papers—all tangled in a honey-soaked pulp.

“Dra-eywhhh!” I spit. And I wasn’t the only one. It was a chorus of just that sort of sound from each of us. Attached to the end of each spoon was a long airfoil kind of a stick—as if they’d been shot from a bow and arrow. Rather than an arrowhead at the end, though, there was just this…strange fiscal substance.

“Spit it! Spit it out!” The Ambassador warned. “All of it! Or you’ll be charged!”

“Charged with what?” Macie demanded. She knew all about judicial charges of one kind or another.

“Charged for insuring your life,” the Ambassador explained. “We must get out of here. Quick—” He snatched all of the spoon-spears up and made a run for that strange white square of light. Without further explanation, the ambassador hurled them into the center of it. They sailed into the white of that small, door-sized space for what seemed like a hundred and fifty—nay, five hundred and fifty meters. Sailed until we couldn’t see them any more, as if he had dropped them from an airplane into the mouth of a white-hot volcano. And we were just watching them dissolve into the distance. The Ambassador read the wide-eyed expression on our—well, our eyes. He shrugged: “Just mirrors, mates.” And he dove in.