"It's - it's more that they've been doing it a really, really long time. The people of this world brought us and people from other worlds, other Tomorrows, to this one. And people here - when they see me, when I tell them about home - most of them say that in the worlds they come from, people like us existed thousands and thousands of summers ago. It's like...our world is newer. Their worlds have had people in them for longer - and so has this world. And in this world, they've built on everything in all that time until they learned how to make things that seem like magic, when they're really just so far ahead of us that they make the impossible seem easy. So they built something that was able to pull us here - to pull people from all different worlds, all different Tomorrows - and - and I don't know if it can send us back. That's what people are hoping, that we'll be able to use the way they brought us here to go back home, but no one knows for sure because no one knows how they did it, other than that it was something they made instead of magic."

He sucked in a deep breath.

"And in the meantime...in the meantime, things are bad here. The people who brought us are -" his voice dropped to a whisper. "They're bad news."

That was what he called bad things, bad surprises, bad things that were new.