The Chasm and the Collision

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Middle-school students Alex, Meghan, and Simon discover a cluster of delightfully fragrant, irresistibly delicious berries in the fruit bowl in Alex’s house. Assuming the berries to have been bought by Alex’s mother, they eat them all. But this fruit is like nothing ever grown on Earth.

That night, the friends share a dream about an impossible city-mountain floating at the edge of a horizon-spanning cliff with no other side, just an endless rusty sky. Over the next few days, they begin to see and hear strange people and bizarre creatures that no one else seems to notice. Eventually, they are abducted to the world of their dream, where the sky is always sunset, where feathered reptiles work alongside humans, where mole-weasel creatures dig caverns by manipulating space itself, and where the miraculous plants can think and communicate telepathically with gifted individuals called Gardeners. There they learn of an impending catastrophe of horrifying proportions: The collision of that universe with ours, a cataclysm that would destroy everything in both!

They also learn that there are people—and an Other—that want the collision to happen, in order to fulfill a terrible prophecy. Now Alex, Meghan, and Simon must do what they can, with new abilities they have gained by eating the berries, to escape from those who serve that prophecy, and eventually to help save both universes…all while trying not to get in trouble for being late to school.