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cow!”
    “It looks like the Emerald City of Oz!” Jesse said.
    “Made of rubies instead of emeralds!” Daisy said. “A Ruby City!”
    Before them stood a dazzling scarlet cluster of arches, atriums, and domes, as delicate as blown glass, dominated by a single elegant spire that rose up into a pomegranate red sky and pierced a layer of clouds resembling pink cotton. Red crystal vehicles that looked like giant sleighs, pulled by teams of fire-breathing animals, shuttled up and down wide boulevards lined with trees. The trees had ebony braided trunks, leaves of topaz and emerald, and fruits of garnet and sapphire.
    “What
is
this place?” Jesse said as he took a step forward.
    Daisy hauled him back by the belt. When helooked down, his stomach lurched. It was at least a hundred-foot drop to another lake, larger than the one they had just fallen through and holding in its limpid surface the reflection of the magnificent city on its far shore. Daisy squeezed in beside him just as the crack in the rock closed behind them, leaving them stranded on a ledge not much wider than a balance beam.

C HAPTER F OUR
THE GRAND BEACONS
    “What now?” Jesse asked, his voice shrinking. Flying around on Emmy’s back had gone a long way toward curing his fear of heights, but he wasn’t on Emmy’s back now, and he was scared.
    Daisy groped around for his hand and said,“What else can we do? We go jump in the lake.”
    “No way,” said Jesse, shutting his eyes and grinding his back into the stone wall, hoping it would open up and let him back inside.
    “Look down, Jess,” Daisy said.
    “I don’t want to look down,” Jesse said, squeezing his eyes shut all the more tightly.
    “Just
do
it,” she prompted him gently. “Trust me.”
    He opened one eye and looked down.
    “What do you see?” Daisy asked softly.
    “I see a gym sock floating on the lake,” Jesse said, opening the other eye and starting to breathe normally again.
    “And that’s exactly why,” Daisy said, seizing his hand and pulling him with her as she leaped into the air, “we j-u-u-u-u-u-m-p!”
    Feet kicking and arms flailing, Jesse screamed all the way down. His scream was cut short as they sank into the soft surface of the lake. They floated up and then came down and bounced on top several times before they finally sank into the warm and oozy mire.
    If the crater lake had been warm maple syrup, this stuff was like hot toffee—or, Jesse thought,
molten lava
. But how could it be? The temperature of hot lava was something like two thousanddegrees Fahrenheit. If this were lava, wouldn’t they be burned to a crisp? Then he thought he had an answer.
    “The dragon dust and the stuff in Miss Alodie’s canteen are protecting us,” Jesse said, but Daisy was out of earshot. She was swimming, or rather wallowing, across the lake, toward the shore.
    “Wait up!” he called out to her.
    By the time he joined her, she was running up and down the beach scooping up handfuls of pebbles. Jesse noticed that neither of them was wet, and that their clothing was steaming like a bunch of laundry pulled out of a hot dryer. And yet, in spite of the heat of the place, he didn’t feel overheated in his winter clothing. It was very strange.
    “Gemstones, Jess!” Daisy held out her hands and showed him rubies, sapphires, topazes, emeralds, as worn and translucent as beach glass, ranging in size from peppercorn to lima bean. She filled her coat pockets with them.
    “Isn’t that stealing?” Jesse asked uneasily.
    “How could it be stealing? The beach is full of them. There are tons and tons of them. Look around you, Jesse! This whole place is made of precious and semiprecious gemstones and crystals. It’s
gorgeous
!”
    Daisy was right. Now that he got a closer look at the Ruby City, he saw that while rubies were the principal building material, in and among the ruby spires and arches and domes were flashes of sapphire and topaz and amber and maybe even diamond. It was like