The air cooled, and the shadows of the swamp merged into an early twilight. Mara looked skyward and could see only a few gray slivers of sky through the awning of branches overhead. Wondering what time it was, she pulled out her phone to look. The screen was blank. She tapped on it twice. Dead. No signal and no battery power. “What time have you got?” she asked Ping.
He glanced at his wrist and said, “Five-thirty. We’ve got about forty minutes of sunlight left, assuming it gets dark about the same time as yesterday. Which is sort of odd, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“When we left our realm, it was December. Sunset occurs there well before five o’clock in the first half of the month,” he said. “Either we arrived here at a different time of year or the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun
