Siena

Isaac sat on the front-room couch cross-legged, scraping the bottom of his second bowl of rehydrated rice and chicken. Siena knelt in the center of the floor and stared at him as Cam returned from the water barrels and Emmett scoured the cabin for extra clothes.

Rags, hides, and a mat of graying hair covered most of him. Blood blisters lived beneath his nails, the joints in his fingers swollen with arthritis. Scars covered so much of his hands, it was like he'd shoved them in a blender.

He held his fork strangely as he ate, like he'd forgotten how to use it. She fought the urge to reach out and help him, something she'd done often with her mother right before she died. And if she couldn't help her mother eat, she'd cast about the hospital room folding garments and stacking empty take-out tins and boxes for the janitor. And then she'd wait in a stupor for her brain to latch on to another task, if only to distract herself.

He met her eyes a few times as he ate, his own wary, but it was clear he recognized her. His teeth weren't in the worst condition—surprising, given how awful he smelled—and his mouth had been spared from the diagonal gash running from his brow to his jaw. His nose hadn't been so lucky.

"What happened to your face?" It was an easier question than what the hell happened to you, which he had yet to answer. He had said nothing yet.

Isaac set the empty bowl next to him. When he looked at her again, his eyes were glassy and injured, like a child who'd done something wrong.

He didn't answer her.

"We lost you two hours ago. You were twenty-three. How old are you now?"

Cam brought the Nalgene over and set it on the ground next to Isaac. "Maybe he doesn't remember."

"Do you remember Emmett finding you?"

Isaac lifted his chin and brought it back down again. A nod.

"And before that?"

He stared at her again, his attention flicking back and forth between her left and right eye, like he was searching for something.

"Do you remember what happened before that?" Siena asked again. She couldn't even bring him back to the place Emmett found him. The tunnel entrance in the cellar was gone, as if it had never been there. But she had no reason to disbelieve Emmett's story. Weirder shit had happened to her.

Isaac dropped his chin. Another nod.

"Will you tell me?"

"Not with the deck so stacked," he said. His weathered, unrecognizable voice threw Siena off guard.

"Stacked? Against what?"

Isaac closed his eyes and licked his chapped bottom lip. His shoulders heaved as he took a breath, like he was readying himself to relay something monumental. But then his body relaxed, his next words leaving him in a long groan. "I'm... tired."

His eyes stayed shut.

Emmett entered from the hallway. "Here's a t-shirt, and he can borrow my sweats." He glanced up and scowled. "Hey, wake him up."

Siena stood. "He's delirious, and useless to us until he gets some rest."

"We need to know what the fuck is going on," Emmett growled.

"If you'd aged half your life in a couple of hours, you'd also be too exhausted to talk." Cam picked up Isaac's abandoned bowl from the couch and walked it to the kitchen.

"It's not like we have to sit here and wait." Siena hurried across the room, down the hall, and into the lab. She flipped on the camp lantern on the desk and pulled the phone out of her pocket, booting it up. 1:03 p.m.—way too early to be so dark.

Emmett pulled out his own phone when he entered, tapping his thumb across the surface a few times. "Just because we can't get back to the sinkhole doesn't mean you need to rely on your imagination." He passed the phone to her. "I took these before we left. They don't do the place justice, but they're something."

Cam joined them as Siena swiped through photos of inverted saplings. Surreal. Unexplainable. Had Feyrer discovered something similar? Had he drafted hypotheses? Theories?

Her stomach rolled as she flicked through photos of the bone piles, her thumb freezing atop the statue of the antlered woman.

"A shrine," she mused.

Cam stole the phone from her.

"I've never come across any record of shrines or memorials," Siena said. "Not in this area."

Cam pinched the screen, zooming in and out on different parts of the photo. "Remember that cult?"

"The pioneer cult?" Siena asked.

"Before she disappeared, Avery was in the middle of this weird game. A bunch of her fans thought she'd chosen Deadswitch for the backpacking trip because that game clearly drew its inspiration from this area's history, specifically the cult shit. Damn." She handed the phone back to Emmett. "I wish I could remember more about that game, but a woman with antlers is ringing some bells."

Emmett pocketed his phone. "Who's Avery?"

"Deadswitch Five woman. Went missing," Siena said, and Cam flashed her a soft smile of appreciation for not divulging any further.

"So it might be related, might not." Emmett blew out a breath of frustration. "Where the hell does that get us?"

Siena pressed her fingers to her temples to think. Anomalies. There were too many anomalies and not enough connections. "We need to see everything at once." She swiped a once-abandoned Sharpie from the desk's surface, uncapping it and stepping toward an empty wall. With her free hand, she reached out and slid her fingers across the wood paneling.

Yesterday, she had crawled through a tunnel and entered a cabin, stepping into a room just like this one, the head of a mule nailed to the wall.

This wall.

The cabin she'd entered had been this cabin, not an identical one on the mountain. And Isaac... he hadn't aged twenty years in the past few hours. He'd lived those twenty years. She didn't know how or why it was true, just that it was. Call it intuition, something she'd been ignoring for years for the sake of science.

Dr. Feyrer hadn't. He'd always followed his intuition. And maybe there was a reason he had.

Siena pressed the Sharpie to the wall and wrote Time Discrepancy.

"So we're just writing on walls, now, Doc?" Cam drawled.

"I'm out of whiteboards and patience." Beneath Time Discrepancy, Siena wrote: Isaac, Cam losing half a day, strange twilight, cabin through the tunnel. She made another column header: Landscape. Beneath, she wrote: weird cypress, sinkhole, glacier melt. She thought back to when they'd entered Deadswitch and added: fork in the path.

Cam took the Sharpie when Siena was done, adding a new column. Communication: no cell reception, no receivers, idiotic ranger?

"Why the question mark?" Siena asked.

"Because he was certain Deadswitch Wilderness didn't exist. I thought he was just a moron, but now..." Cam shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair. "Fuck, I don't know. We're just listing weird shit, right? Well, that was weird."

Siena pushed her hand against her stomach, attempting to knock loose the growing sense of dread. She turned back to Emmett, surprised to find him captivated by their brainstorming session. His arms were crossed, but his shoulders were hunched like he was trying to make himself smaller. Like this was scaring him.

"Anything to add?" she asked.

To her surprise, he stepped forward. Cam gave him the pen, and he started a new column.

Cult Shit.

He wrote antlered woman statue beneath. Computer game.

Siena took the pen from him, adding: beheaded mule, The Mother Reigns. She stepped back, rubbing her thumb along her chin as she thought. "Do you think The Mother is the antlered woman? Does that ring any bells, Cam?"

Cam clenched the hair at the nape of her neck in her fist. "Maybe... I don't remember. I watched too many of her videos to keep them all straight." She dropped her hand and took the pen from Siena once more, moving back to the Time Discrepancies column.

Avery's bag. Naomi.

Cam returned the pen to Siena with a sigh. "I should go check on the kid... errr, Isaac."

"Naomi?" Emmett asked when Cam was gone.

"The dead woman on Wolf Ridge," Siena explained. "Cam thought it looked like Naomi Vo, another one of the missing hikers. Which would have been impossible, of course. But now..."

"Now anything is possible," Emmett finished, glaring at the wall. "If Dr. Feyrer somehow knew any of this would happen to us, he's a bastard for not saying anything." He scoffed. "The research stays in the woods, my ass."

"The last thing he told me was not to go. And I shrugged it off to him losing his mind."

"It shouldn't have taken him losing his mind to tell you the truth, Sen."

"Do you really think he'd put us in danger on purpose?" Her body leadened at the thought.

"Hey." Emmett lifted his fingers to the base of her chin, tilting her head back until their eyes met. The back of her knees used to weaken when he did this, in the days when the power moves turned her on. And as much as she knew she should push him away, she took comfort in the familiarity of his hands and his eyes. His body had been a harbor for her anxiety, a vessel that calmed her pulse in the middle of the night when her adrenaline yanked her awake. She needed him now more than ever.

But the safety she felt was a lie. One selfish mistake and he had ruined everything.

"Can you try the satellite phone again?" she asked.

Disappointment crossed his face before he dropped his hand. "Yeah... sure."

"Don't get lost." The last part was supposed to be a joke, a cheeky comment meant to break the tension and elicit an eye roll. They exchanged an unsettled glance, and he left saying nothing.

She was about to leave herself—let the wall behind her marinate for a bit as she checked on Isaac and Cam—when she spotted the deck of cards on the desk next to the radio.

The cards had appeared in the cabin through the tunnel, next to the map of The Briardark. She had thought it a residual memory from her subconscious.

Not with the deck so stacked—Isaac's response when she had asked if he could tell her what had happened to him. It could have been figurative, but even figuratively, it made no sense.

Siena sat and picked up the deck, running her thumb over the buck's skull on the pack. She lifted the box flap to a message written on the inside:

Play two.

Rules to some game? Seemed uncomplicated. She wiggled the cards out, the deck the size of a standard fifty-two. The stock was thick but unlaminated. The back of each card had the same skull and bird print as the box, but when she turned the deck over, a solid olive tone greeted her. Blank. She shuffled through them, but they were all the same. Blank, blank, blank. Not even playable as regular cards.

Siena grabbed the box to shove them back in, lifting the flap again.

Play two, it taunted.

"Screw it," she whispered, dropping the box and shuffling the deck twice. She peeled off the top card and flipped it over, yanking her hand back in surprise.

On the face of the card, a painted woman dressed in an open hunter's coat knelt in the forest. She was filthy and emaciated, her face twisted in anguish as she attempted to rip an arrow from the flesh between her collarbone and shoulder. On the ground next to her, almost buried in the grass, rested a bloodied knife. The Butcher's Daughter was scrawled above the illustration.

Siena touched the space beneath her own collarbone, increasing the pressure until she dug her fingers into her taut muscle just to feel an ounce of the pain this poor woman felt. She winced and pulled the second card.

An upside-down evergreen, like the photos Emmett had shown her, hovered in midair, its tangled root system filling an empty and enigmatic sky. The Verdantry, the card read. It was beautiful and odd, and left her head empty, like she was trying to recall something that had slipped her mind.

Siena pulled another card that showed nothing, and flipped over the deck, fanning the rest across the surface.

They were all as they'd been before: blank. Like a magic trick.