“Wonderful! Meet me at the power plant on Route 9. I’ll be waiting outside.”
Faith paused for a moment. “The power plant? That’s an odd?—“
“Trust me, dear. It’s the perfect launching point.”
The line went dead, leaving Faith staring at her reflection in the bedroom mirror. A woman with brown hair pulled back in a practical ponytail, wearing jeans and a t-shirt that had seen better years. In hours, she’d be on another planet, serving desserts to aliens and playing pretend girlfriend to a prince.
The absurdity should have sent her running. Instead, it felt like the first honest gamble she’d made in years.
Faith zipped her suitcase closed, grabbed her keys, and headed back downstairs to the bakery. Whatever waited for her at that power plant, she was at least walking into it on her own terms.
She taped a hastily scrawled note to the bakery door: “Closed for one week. Sorry for any inconvenience.” The words felt inadequate, but explanations would only raise questions she couldn’t answer.
Her regulars would worry. Mrs. Martin would wonder where her morning coffee was. The neighborhood would buzz with speculation about Faith Woodard finally losing her mind. Let them talk. She had a prince to meet and a festival to conquer.
Faith stepped onto the cracked sidewalk outside her bakery, her suitcase handle cutting into her palm like a reminder of the insanity she’d just committed to. The familiar weight of her keys felt foreign in her pocket—when had she ever locked up for more than a long weekend?
She raised her arm, and a yellow cab materialized as if summoned by her desperation. The driver—a weathered man with kind eyes and coffee-stained fingers—helped load her suitcase without asking questions she couldn’t answer anyway.
“Route 9 power plant,” Faith said, sliding into vinyl seats that smelled of disinfectant and a thousand other people’s stories.
Twenty minutes of New Jersey traffic gave her plenty of time to second-guess every decision that had led to this moment. Her rational mind cataloged all the ways this could go wrong: kidnapping, human trafficking, elaborate con games designed to separate desperate people from what little money they had left. But the contract in her purse felt legitimate, and those references had been too specific to fake.
Besides,she reasoned, watching strip malls blur past the window,kidnappers probably don’t meet their victims at public utility companies or look like Gerri Wilder.
The power plant soon loomed against the evening sky like a monument to industrial practicality—all concrete and steel, humming with the kind of energy that made the air tastemetallic. Faith paid the driver and stepped out into the parking lot, her suitcase wheels catching on uneven asphalt.
Gerri waited exactly where she’d promised, looking like she’d stepped out of a boardroom rather than arranged clandestine meetings beside electrical transformers. Her pink pantsuit practically glowed in the harsh fluorescent lighting, and her smile could have powered half the grid.
“Right on time.” Gerri’s voice carried the satisfaction of someone whose plans always worked out. “I do appreciate punctuality.”
Faith’s hands trembled slightly as she pulled the signed contract from her purse. The papers felt heavier than they should, as if her signature had added actual weight to the deal.
“I’m still not entirely convinced I haven’t lost my mind.”
“Oh, honey.” Gerri tucked the contract into her designer bag with the care of someone handling precious artifacts. “Sanity is overrated. Adventure requires a certain willingness to embrace the impossible.”
The power plant’s interior defied every expectation Faith had built during the cab ride. Instead of industrial chaos, she found sterile corridors that smelled of ozone and steel—clean, purposeful, humming with energy that made her skin tingle. Their footsteps echoed against polished floors as Gerri led her deeper into the building with the confidence of someone who owned the place.
“I thought power plants were supposed to be, you know, loud and dirty.”
“This one’s special.” Gerri’s heels clicked a steady rhythm against the floor. “Multi-purpose facility.”
The elevator that opened at Gerri’s touch looked normal enough—brushed steel, standard buttons, the faint music that plagued every vertical transport system ever built. But when the doors closed and Gerri pressed a button marked with symbolsFaith didn’t recognize, the car plunged downward with stomach-dropping speed.
How deep does this thing go?
Faith’s ears popped twice before the elevator finally stopped. The doors opened onto a hallway that stretched into shadows, lit by fixtures that cast everything in stark white light. At the far end, a single door waited like a period at the end of a very long sentence.
The nameplate read “G. Wilder” in simple black letters.
“This is your office?” Faith’s voice sounded smaller than she intended in the underground quiet.
“One of them.” Gerri produced a key that looked more like jewelry than hardware. “I keep offices in several dimensions. Never know where business might take you.”
The room beyond the door could have belonged to any corporate building: desk, chair, filing cabinet, the kind of beige carpet that showed every footprint. Faith had expected something more dramatic from a woman who brokered interplanetary arrangements.
Gerri settled behind the desk and opened her purse—the same leather bag that had produced impossible contracts and references from people who moved mountains. This time, she withdrew something that made Faith’s breath catch.