The automobile chugged along the road, a trailer on the back carrying Maddie’s home. Not her actual home, but everything that goes inside of one. With her parents in the front two seats, the three youngest in the family sitting in the back seats, the only place for Maddie and her younger sister, Lilly, to sit was on the trailer with their furniture. It was a very bumpy ride.

  At the moment, the scenery was dry and yellow. Few things grew and even fewer things were actually alive. Basically, nothing was interesting at all. Sometimes, they passed other automobiles on the long stretch of road but that was even more rare than finding something wet in the ‘desert’.

  Maddie looked down at her notebook and sighed. It was filled with scribbles, circles, maybe a few eyes here and there and some random shading. She wanted to draw but had nothing to draw. Or at least she wanted to write something but what was she going to write? The automobile chugged along the long winding road in the middle of the desert. That wasn’t nearly interesting enough to create a story for.

  Finally giving up, Maddie dropped the notebook on the ground of the trailer, opened the drawer of a side table and shoved her pen into it. She focused her fleeting attention on the book in her hands. Only after she flipped a few pages did she realize that none of it actually made sense to her. She was just bored. Plus, something was distracting her. It probably wasn’t the best idea that Maddie used the envelope as a bookmark. For more than one reason, too. First of all, it was bulging with parchment on the inside so it wasn’t nearly slim enough to properly work as a bookmark. And second of all, she was dying to tear it open and read the contents.

  This was the third day in a row that Maddie had the envelope her friends had given her. The only, seriously only, reason she hadn’t opened it yet was because her friend, Eddison, begged her not to open it until Maddie reached her new house. So basically, Eddie found pleasure in torturing people. Like, not only did she give Maddie a bulging letter that she wasn’t allowed to open for ages, but she also set up a going away party for her. It was very nice in theory but still torture because she was really going to miss her friends.

  “We’ll be there in another hour,” Lilly said, glancing at her expensive watch. For her birthday, Lilly had asked only for the watch and, knowing how expensive it was, didn't ask for anything else. Maddie was still surprised, though, when she’d gotten it.

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  “There’s no way,” Maddie said, doubtfully. From her studying, the village they were going to was meant to be constantly wet and rainy with lots of trees and rivers and lakes and even some mountains. There’s no way they were only an hour away but in a completely different biome.

  Lilly silently agreed and tapped her watch a few times. “Mom and dad, you said we were arriving at eighteen hours, right?” Lilly yelled. Her dads thumb poked out of the window, pointing up.

  Lilly and Maddie looked over their shoulders at the road in front of them. If Maddie squinted and if she was not getting heat stroke or delusions, she could maybe make out a line of green far in the distance. Maybe that meant they really were only an hour away from their new home.

  Suddenly there was sand blowing into Maddie’s and Lilly’s faces and the automobile jerked to a stop in the middle of the road. The girls covered their eyes and mouths until the wind died down and the sand stopped attacking them. They rubbed their eyes and saw that it wasn’t just some random, hard wind. It was a messenger.

  A man with a pale tunic and a dark, leather vest on top stood next to the car. He had on long pants and a hat covered his hair. But what was really (literally and metaphorically) blinding about the handsome man were his wings. Long, brass wings spread from his back made to look like bird wings. Obviously, they weren’t actually, like, his wings, sprouting from his back. There were straps that connected them to his chest and arms.

  Across his chest was a bag packed full of scrolls and letters. “Jean Mariwethen?” The messenger asked.

  Maddie’s mom poked her head out of the automobile and said, “That’s me.”

  The messenger smiled and walked over to Jean, pulling a box out of his pocket. Maddie’s mom went through the process of pricking her finger on a pin connected to the little box on which a drop of her blood fell. The messenger took the box back, looked at it and back at the letter he held in his hand and nodded.

  “Here you go, ma’am,” the messenger said, passing the letter to her.

  Jean thanked him and with a flap of his wings, sand whipped around the automobile once again and the messenger was off, flying in the sky. The automobile continued down the road again as Jean read the letter. Maddie tried to peek through the windows to see what the letter was but couldn’t see anything. Then her mom’s hand dropped the letter on the ground outside of their moving car. And then it caught fire, no evidence left behind.

  “What do you think the letter was?” Maddie whispered to Lilly

  “I’m not sure,” Lilly whispered back. “But I’ve seen her getting those letters a lot recently. ANd they always burst into flames when she’s done reading them.”

  Maddie frowned. Then she picked her notebook off the ground and grabbed her pen again. Finally, something interesting. She wrote, Mom gets mysterious, self-destructing letters. What is she hiding?

  Okay, maybe a little dramatic but part of Maddie couldn’t shake the letter from her mind. Something was odd.