Before the Doors Open

The Quantum Quest Science Museum didn't open until nine, but Penelope Starwrite was already inside at seven.

She loved it that way — all hers.

The museum sat on top of Hallow Hill like a giant glowing atom, its silver rings catching the early morning light. Inside, the halls smelled like clean metal and something faintly electric. Holographic planets drifted near the ceiling of the solar system wing. In the next room over, a life-sized T. rex skeleton stood frozen mid-roar.

Penelope pulled her rainbow cloak tighter and dropped onto a bench near the dinosaur exhibit. She opened her sketchbook — thick, dog-eared, absolutely stuffed with drawings.

"Morning, Rex," she said cheerfully to the skeleton.

Rex did not reply.

She uncapped her pen and started drawing. She always drew whatever the museum showed her. The T. rex first. Then the planets. Then the little information plaques with their neat, tidy facts.

She didn't notice her pen beginning to glow.

The Ink That Wouldn't Wait

The pen had stopped glowing by the time Penelope noticed the T. rex skeleton moving.

Not shuffling. Not wobbling. Actually walking — its enormous bone feet clacking against the museum floor, while up in the solar system wing, something dropped with a magnificent crash.

Penelope spun around. The holographic planets — the ones that usually drifted peacefully near the ceiling — were gone. In their place hung her drawings. Enormous versions, paper-flat and clearly hand-sketched, floating exactly where Jupiter and Saturn used to be.

And in the solar system wing, the actual holograms of Jupiter and Saturn were now projecting themselves down onto the dinosaur exhibit floor, spinning across the tiles like spilled paint.

"No," Penelope breathed. "No, no, no—"

She grabbed her sketchbook and looked at the drawing she'd just finished. Her T. rex sketch had vanished off the page. So had her planet drawings.

In the dinosaur exhibit, the real T. rex skeleton — a permanent, museum-certified, twelve-thousand-pound fossil — had walked itself directly into the gift shop doorway and was now thoroughly stuck.