Siena

Siena jerked awake, her stomach clenched, nerve endings on fire. She sat up and blinked the sleep from her eyes.

The twilight that had permeated her entire restless night was gone, replaced by moss green light, like the cabin had been dropped into the middle of a pond.

Cam and Emmett were still asleep, Cam muttering something fierce and unintelligible in her dreams. Isaac remained on the couch in the main room; Siena had checked on him twice last night and was due for another.

Siena hurried out of bed and into a hallway drenched in the same scummy light. She entered the dark main room to an empty couch and yanked back the curtain, a startled feline cry escaping her throat.

A scream brewed at the bottom of her rib cage.

Trees. Not the drought-tolerant pines, nor the scraggly high Sierra shrubs that signified normalcy. Before her, an array of rainforest evergreens dripped with moss. Mist collected on the window and trailed down the glass.

Siena stumbled across the room and flung open the front door. The moisture in the air fed the panic in her chest, almost suffocating her. Heavy fog carried the green tinge, like the top of the mountain was caught in the opening breath of a thunderstorm. But the air was still, the forest silent. Thick fern growth covered the trail leading from the cabin. Either that, or the path had vanished.

Delirious laughter bubbled up in Siena's throat. Where were the Munchkins? The Yellow Brick Road? Glinda the Good Witch, so she could get the hell out of here? She wiped the tears from beneath her eyes and thought again of releasing the scream in her chest, like her voice alone could shatter this mirage.

But it wasn't fake. She wasn't in Deadswitch anymore, though that made no sense. Their cabin hadn't been swept up by a tornado in the middle of the night; she instinctively knew they were still on a mountain. They'd run into pockets of these evergreens and this moisture for the past few days. Whatever this was—it was growing. They'd been swallowed by it.

A visceral rumble in the mountain sounded beneath her. Just like at Wolf Ridge, and the parallel cabin, and again when they were trying to leave. Siena finally realized it wasn't a sound. She wasn't hearing the noise, but processed it through her gut the same as an emotion or intuition, a voiceless language that wanted her to listen closely.

Fear got the best of her, and she stumbled back inside and slammed the door behind her, swearing when it popped right back open thanks to the broken latch. She pressed her back against it and spread her arms wide across the frame, as if that would help.

Nothing protected her from that hunger—whatever it was. Not even a functioning door.

Maybe she was losing it. Maybe this was just her disorder slamming into her at full force. The thought eased her stomach. Never in her life had she hoped for sickness, but circumstances had changed.

Isaac stared at her from the end of the hallway, where he stood with a mess kit full of oatmeal, eating it spoonful by hefty spoonful. He wore Emmett's sweats, his hair somehow more of a tangle than yesterday. Wiping his chin with the back of his hand, he turned his attention toward the lab's open doorway and shoveled another spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth.

Unlike his outfit of animal skin, the sweats didn't hide the definition of his body. She swore Emmett had lugged an emaciated Isaac into the cabin, but maybe she'd been fooled by the hollows of his face. Muscle padded his frame, more muscle than when he'd entered Deadswitch as a scrawny kid. Regardless of where Emmett had found him, he couldn't have been without ample food for more than a couple of weeks. And not just nuts and berries, either.

Isaac muttered something beneath his breath. She caught the phrases "glacier melt" and "fork in the path"as he read from the list they'd written on the wall.

"I've tried to lay it all out too," he told her, his voice as gravelly as last night.

Lay it out—he meant their clues. "When?" she asked. "When did you try to lay it all out? Last night?"

He flashed her an expression that looked like a mix of curiosity and pity, like he found her endearing. She'd looked at him the same way countless times this trip when he'd said something na?ve.

"You were gone for two hours, Isaac," she said defensively. "Do you want to tell me what happened to you, or do you want me to keep making assumptions?"

Isaac walked into the main room, setting his bowl on the end table near the couch. "Weird being back."

The statement sounded more like the old Isaac—simple and obvious. But Siena knew the words held multitudes.

She tried taming her frustration. "Back from where?"

Isaac stepped up onto the couch so he stood on the cushions. He ran his hands along the rustic wallpaper and began scraping at the center with his thumbnail.

Siena pushed herself from the door. "What are you doing?"

He ignored her and dug the rest of his fingers into the hole he'd worn through, ripping off a strip and tossing it to the ground. He did it again, clawing away paper to reveal a mountain.

No, not just one. A whole range, cradling a long valley. Isaac tore off another strip. Landmarks dotted a thick forest: cabins, lakes, a swirling pit of some sort to the south. A town or a village north of a bog. Vast expanses of woodland inked with the occasional skull. All of it was painted in the same olive tone that flecked and smeared the signs throughout Deadswitch.

But the map itself wasn't of Deadswitch.

Isaac didn't stop until all the brown paper littered the floor and the entire map was visible. It had been hiding in the cabin this whole time.

How old was it? Had Feyrer and his team known it was here?

"I've seen this before," Siena said. "When I went through the tunnel beneath the tree. The other cabin had a map just like this one. The Briardark."

Isaac stepped off the couch. "I made a few of these while I was gone."

"You? You drew this? No, that can't... that's..." Impossible, she wanted to say, until she remembered one column on the wall in the lab: Time Discrepancies. The rules of physics didn't apply here for whatever reason. As far as she knew, nothing was impossible.

She glanced at the cedar branch pressed up to the window, and the pattern of green mildew on the glass. "Are we in the Briardark now?"

His response was instant. "No. You'd know if we were."

She didn't know what the hell that meant, but she wasn't sure that mattered at this point. "But you've been there. How long?"

He opened his arms, as if inviting Siena to look at him. "I lost track."

"Well, you look like you're fifty."

He thought for a moment. "I'm probably less old than I look."

Siena scoffed. "So what, two decades?"

"That sounds about right."

She pushed back her hair, dizzy at the thought. "Unbelievable. And how'd you get back?"

"I returned to Agnes. I chose to come back."

"What? Why didn't you—"

He cut her off. "Remember that story I told you about why I became a scientist?" He pointed at the kitchen table and then let his hand fall, his shoulders slumping. "We were sitting over there, and you were trying to call out on the radio."

Siena nodded. It had only been a couple of weeks ago, the conversation mostly small talk. Yet Isaac's expression twisted in pain as he recalled it.

"The choice I made to study how the world was really formed changed my entire perspective of reality and God. It seems... trivial, I guess, but it scared me."

"Yeah, I get it," she said. "It takes a lot of courage to change your worldviews."

"Worldviews..." He turned his attention to the window and the teeming life beyond the walls of the cabin. "It was like that. Every day since I... since I left. But the fear was constant. Every time I remembered what had happened to me. Every time I remembered where I was. It doesn't matter if it was two decades or three. Everything I knew about space and time and life... love... it was wrong. And I never learned to cope with that. I still..."

He drifted off, and Siena stood frozen, unable to form any response amid her shock. She understood nothing of what Isaac was saying, yet the gravity of his words terrified her.

He blinked, a tear falling into his facial hair, and turned back to her. "I want to tell you everything, but it would take too much time. I shouldn't have slept last night. I should have fought my exhaustion to prepare you to leave."

"Leave?" Siena shook her head, trying to reorient herself. "You don't need to prepare me to leave—I'm ready. We tried getting out of here yesterday, and I plan on trying again."

Isaac took another step toward her and grabbed her arms. Siena tensed up, but she was too surprised to yank away from him.

"Emmett is going to try and keep you here," he whispered. "Cam... Cam will run the other direction, and you'll waste too much time trying to find her."

"No," she hissed. "That's not true. Cam wants to go home. And Emmett..."

His grip on her tightened, his tear-filled eyes now wild. "What you think they'll do doesn't matter. All that matters is that you get out of here, Siena. Just you."

She didn't understand. "Why just me? Why don't you care about the others?"

"Something is after you. Not Emmett. Not Cam. You. And when it—when he finds you, he will hurt you and force you to do things more horrible than you could dream.

"And then after all that, Siena... after everything, he will kill you."