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it wasn’t the sky of the planet Rydale, which was a world that he’d never been to or even heard of before, but he knew that this was not that sky.
    A quick pat to his shirt pocket let Summerhill know that he had his watch safely tucked away. Good. Come what may, he was prepared.
    There was a sound, a cross between buzzing and whining. It was like the sound of an insect hovering too close to a bug zapper right before the fatal electric spark went off. Abruptly, the noise crescendoed, rising in pitch and volume until it ended with a fantastic crash.
    A hole tore open in the very sky itself. The rip expanded into a rift, through which Summerhill could see another sky, a separate sky, a night sky filled with stars and nebulae and galaxies that spun and swirled.
    Through that hole came a sphere enveloped in fire, rocketing across the beautiful blue sky. It screeched as it tore through the empty air, the sound like the piercing wail of a banshee. In its wake, it left behind a trail of leaves, which swirled madly in the superheated updraft, creating a spiral of splendid hues of autumnal foliage. A moment later, the rift in the sky sealed itself up silently.
    Far below, the ground, free of gray-green lifeless buildings, began to blossom forth with flowers of every conceivable color.
    Five
    Runaways
    Bleary-eyed Summerhill was greeted not by the wide cerulean expanse of an open sky, but by the pulsing green of a buzzing, crackling energy field. The euphoria of his magnificent dream faded, and in its place rose the dismal reminder that he was in the Nusquam ’s brig.
    His hand was resting on his chest, right over his shirt pocket. He groped around out of reflex, but the pocket was empty, and he couldn’t think of what he might have been looking for. Shrugging off the last vestiges of sleep, he stretched his arms out and sat up.
    For a ship as nice as the Nusquam , the brig didn’t disappoint. Summerhill was still in a prison cell, but he had enough space to pace around, and the wall-mounted bed at least had a pillow and a mattress. Of course, the actual guest cabins had to be far more spacious, with much more comfortable bedding, and without pike-wielding robot sentinels standing guard outside.
    The robots felt like overkill to Summerhill. Surely a force field was enough to keep a single dog from coming and going. It wasn’t as if he needed an additional deterrent to keep him from wandering off willy-nilly. Besides, since they didn’t have obvious faces, it was impossible to tell whether they were or weren’t looking at him, which made him feel awkward and uncomfortable, and the Chief had promised he’d be comfortable.
    Summerhill sighed as he flopped back down onto the prison bed. Dogs were creatures of instincts, and after the debacle with Katherine and the disappointing meeting with the Chief, Summerhill was starting to think that he might be better off not trusting his.
    Well, the Nusquam was going to reach its next destination eventually, wherever that was. Hopefully, the Chief would make good on the promise to figure out something to do with him. If nothing else, Summerhill had escaped from the World of the Pale Gray Sky, from an existence that didn’t make any sense.
    In the meantime, though, he didn’t have anything to do but wait. The security robots made for poor company, and he couldn’t simply will himself back to sleep in order to have more dreams (and he’d likely just disappoint himself further when he woke up again). Couldn’t the Chief have at least left him a deck of cards or a newspaper or something?
    Instead, Summerhill just lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, examining the little patterns in it and making sure he didn’t accidentally make actual flowers or vines sprout forth from the whirling loops and spirals he saw. Security probably wouldn’t take too kindly to that, even if there wasn’t really a feasible way for him to escape using flowers.
    With no clock or watch to check, he tried