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hurry.”
    Gabe looked from one small golden glow to the other. “You can do this entanglement thing without making my head explode?”
    â€œCertainly,” the Envoy said. “I’ve never yet exploded the head of an ambassador.”
    â€œOkay,” said Gabe. “Okay,” he said again. “I’ll need you to rebuild the washer and dryer soon anyway. The twins go through lots of laundry. Our old washing machine broke right after they were born, and it took the landlord forever to replace it, so Lupe and I had to carry wagonloads of crap-stained onesies to the Laundromat almost every single day. So let’s do this quickly.”
    â€œAre you certain?” the Envoy asked.
    â€œNo,” said Gabe. “Hurry up.”
    The Envoy paused. “We should conduct your entanglement with a little more ceremony and reverence for a very long tradition.”
    Gabe laughed. “I accept the role of ambassador with all due formality, because my little sister and brother are going to need clothes that aren’t covered in poop.”
    The Envoy sighed. “Please stand over here.”
    Gabe stood over there.
    The Envoy scootched behind the former washing machine and made adjustments. The flickering light inside the dryer vanished. Gabe squinted at where it used to be. He couldn’t see inside the dryer. No light escaped the dryer to see by.
    â€œRepeat after me,” the Envoy said. “I will speak for this world.”
    â€œI will speak for this world,” said Gabriel Sandro Fuentes.
    â€œNow close your eyes,” the Envoy told him. “You’ll feel a tingling sensation in your eyelids, eardrums, and all along your spine.”
    Gabe closed his eyes.
    He still saw a blinding flash of light.

PART TWO
ENTANGLED

6
    Gabe never remembered his dreams. When other people talked about the bizarre, wonderful, or horrifying things they saw and did while sleeping, Gabe had always just listened and wondered what that would be like.
    His sister Lupe had a recurring dream about migrating birds who were also words. Sometimes they made messages on the undersides of storm clouds. Lupe never remembered the messages in the morning, but at least she remembered the rest of the dream.
    Frankie described his dreams at length and often, even the ones that made no sense. Especially the ones that made no sense. “And then I was an eggplant and somehow I’d climbed onto the roof even though I didn’t have arms, though I think maybe I still had legs at that point, and one of the trees in the backyard was also my mom and she forced me to play card games, but I’d forgotten howto play all of them, and I tried to explain to her how I’d forgotten, but she really wasn’t listening so . . .” Then Frankie and Gabe would play card games just to reassure Frankie that he really did remember how. Sometimes Gabe would win, and sometimes Gabe would let Frankie win if he figured that Frankie needed to win at something.
    Gabe was pretty sure that he had dreams just like everyone else, and sometimes he could just barely glimpse one as it vanished in the very first moments of the morning, but he couldn’t ever hold it. Before entanglement, Gabe’s dreams left no footprints or bread crumbs in his memory.
    After entanglement, Ambassador Gabriel Sandro Fuentes remembered all his dreams—almost. He remembered all of them but one.
    That first night he dreamed about motion and travel somewhere on the other side of the tiny black hole in his basement. He skipped and burrowed through the substance of nothing while stars stood fixed around him and watched him from very far away. Gabe tried to close his eyes in the dream, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t brought his eyelids with him.
    Suddenly and without warning he stood alone outside his house, in the center of the street. He was still in motion. He still saw stars in every direction. But he wasalso stuck in