Chapter 1 Faith #2
Minutes later, upstairs in her apartment, she stared at her suitcase with the bewilderment of someone packing for Mars.
Which, technically, she was. Her chef’s coat went in first—the white cotton armor that made her feel competent and professional.
Working clothes followed: jeans that had survived flour explosions and sneakers that knew every crack in the bakery floor.
Then came the hard part. Public events meant formal wear, and Faith’s idea of formal was a clean apron over dark jeans.
She pulled out the black dress she’d worn to the awards ceremony—simple, elegant, proof she could clean up when necessary.
Then a pair of heels that pinched but looked expensive enough to pass inspection.
She picked up her phone and dialed the number on Gerri’s business card as she packed toiletries with her free hand.
“Gerri Wilder speaking.”
“I signed your contract.” Faith’s voice came out steadier than she felt. “I’ll be ready in an hour.”
“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 taste metallic. 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 symbols Faith 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.
A metal egg, no larger than her palm, gleaming like liquid mercury under the fluorescent lights.
“What is that?”
“Transportation.” Gerri cradled the object like it might hatch. “The most efficient way to travel between worlds these days.”
Faith watched, transfixed, as Gerri whispered something too soft to hear. The egg lifted from Gerri’s palm as if gravity had suddenly become optional.
Faith’s rational mind scrambled for explanations—magnets, holograms, elaborate stage magic designed to impress gullible clients. But the air around the floating object shimmered with heat, and the scent of vanilla lightning grew stronger until it filled her lungs.
The egg expanded. Not growing larger but unfolding—reality peeling back like flower petals to reveal something that shouldn’t exist. Blue light spilled from the widening circle, casting everything in aquamarine shadows that moved independently of their sources.
A portal. An actual, impossible, completely real portal hanging in the air like a window into somewhere else.
“Ready for some fun?” Gerri’s eyes flashed pure gold, and her smile held secrets that could rewrite physics.
Faith stared at the swirling blue gateway, her heart hammering against her ribs like a caged bird.
Every survival instinct she’d honed through years of standing on her own screamed warnings.
This was insane. Reckless. The kind of leap that ended in disaster or fairy tales, with no middle ground between the two.
But her rent was due in thirty days, and extraordinary problems required extraordinary solutions.
“Sure.” The word came out steadier than her pulse. “Why not?”
Faith stepped forward, her practical sneakers carrying her toward impossible light.
The portal’s edge tingled against her skin like static electricity, and for one crystalline moment, she balanced between worlds—one foot in a sterile office beneath New Jersey, the other reaching toward something that defied every law she’d ever learned.
Then she stepped through, and existence rewrote itself around her.
Purple forests stretched beneath twin suns that painted the sky in shades of amber and rust. One sun blazed gold like Earth’s familiar star; the other burned blood-orange, casting everything in double shadows that danced across alien ground.
Pink oceans caught the light and threw it back in sheets of rose-colored fire, while yellow sand crunched beneath her feet like crushed gemstones.
The air hummed. Not with machinery or electricity, but with something alive and watchful—as if the planet itself breathed around her.
Faith stood frozen, her breath stolen by beauty that belonged in dreams rather than reality. The scent of foreign flowers mixed with salt spray from impossible seas, and somewhere in the distance, birdsong painted melodies across alien air.
One thought anchored her spinning mind.
I’m really on an alien planet.