Something From Above

Some doors should never be opened. Some doors open you.In Prairie Creek, the cornfields go on forever and nothing happens. Then Riley McClain points her stitched-together telescope at the sky and finds a patch where the universe has gone quiet — a place where light behaves like it has second thoughts.Riley and her four best friends — a fearful athlete who refuses to let fear win, a scientist who treats equations like a contact sport, a tinkerer with grease-stained hands and something to prove, and a quiet artist whose sketchbook keeps drawing things she hasn't seen yet — decide to build a machine that might win a $10,000 science fair prize. Lilly's mother is sick. Ten thousand dollars might be enough.It isn't a machine. It's a door.Each portal opens onto a world that tests them. A floating city patrolled by faceless guardians of light. A living plain stalked by five-story sentinels. A corridor that punishes anyone who looks at it too closely. And waiting at the center of it all is the Overlord — a figure who is less a person than a function, offering each of them exactly what they want most.All they have to do is say yes.But the price of yes is something none of them understand yet — and one of them may have already paid it. Read more