Siena

She woke to the howl of her own voice, which quickly diffused into quieter sobs.

Had she been dreaming? She couldn't remember, her fear untethered until the orange glow of the room reminded her where she was.

Her mattress sank with the weight of another person who grabbed her and pulled her close. Siena thrashed with a startled cry. Emmett hushed her.

"I'm here. I've got you."

His heavy warm arms wrapped around her waist. Siena relented, burying her face in his chest the way she used to on really bad nights when she felt as powerless as she did now.

"Cam," Siena whispered. There was one thing she understood more clearly than her own demise: Cam wasn't here.

Would she think they'd left her on purpose?

Emmett lifted his hand and brushed the hair from her face. He pressed his lips to her temple. "I know," he murmured against her skin. "I'm so sorry."

She'd listened to him say sorry so many times. Over text. Over the phone. When she returned to his apartment to pack her things. In the university office late at night, both of them overworking themselves to avoid the pain of their separation.

Those apologies she could never accept. This sorry wasn't an apology, but pure remorse for something neither of them controlled. He was sorry that she was so scared. That they both were.

Siena wasn't trapped in this place alone. There were two people with her, and she'd loved one of them unconditionally. She'd been engaged to him for four years.

She didn't know what was going to happen to them, but if this was the end, then her year of invariable anger toward him served no purpose. He was here with her. He loved her, and despite everything, the root of her anger had always been the fact she couldn't stop loving him back.

She lifted her face from his chest. Her chin grazed the stubble of his jaw, and she kissed the corner of his mouth.

He kissed her back. His lips were warm and chapped and reminded her of something distantly familiar. Safety, she realized. She couldn't remember the last time she felt truly safe, but she had always been safe with him before they'd fallen apart. At seminar panels when he would watch her from the front row with a smile. When he guided her waist protectively on dates or at university events, and when his touch slipped from protective to possessive. She'd felt safe then, too. And in bed with him, when she let him be rough with her. When he lost himself in her. When she liked it.

She'd been so cavalier about that safety, assuming its immutability. And she still craved it even though she knew better.

Emmett wasn't possessive or rough now. He moved with a kind of confused caution, unsure about pursuing her. He didn't need to pursue her. She was fine just like this, their bodies still, lips touching, everything else a blur of ambiguity existing somewhere beyond her bunk.

His hand moved beneath her shirt to the small of her back. Siena parted her lips when his hand crept higher, pressing the tip of her tongue to his lower lip.

Emmett's body went rigid, his hand darting further up her back. His fingers balled into a fist, and he dragged his arm out of her shirt and flung whatever he held onto the floor.

Siena pushed herself up on her elbows. Beneath a wildfire beam of light, a beetle twitched on the ground before righting itself, quivering about helplessly. Her stomach leadened in despair.

Emmett turned back toward Siena, an epiphany lingering in his dark eyes like she'd done something profound.

But she'd done nothing. She'd fought the bugs when they first manifested years ago, hadn't she? And then she became a victim of her own brain when no one believed her. Poor Siena, stressed herself out to the point of no return. In order to heal, she'd needed to accept that these infestations were in her head and move on. So she had.

And everything had gotten better, until her reality shifted. Cam pulling a bug from her hair, Emmett one from her shirt... like this was all some sick joke.

She'd fought for power her entire life. Power over her career, her mental health, her ex-fiancé who insisted he deserved forgiveness. Power over her grief. She fought when she didn't need to.

There were things she could control, and things she couldn't. It was possible she only had days left to learn that lesson.

The lesson wasn't easy.

Siena and Emmett tracked the hours of days and nights with rationed phone glances, the steadfast burning light incompatible with their solar chargers. The battery connected to the ham radio had inexplicably vanished. Emmett tore up the entire cabin looking for it. But whether they could track time didn't matter. Time granted her no power here.

As Emmett exhausted himself with rage over the missing battery, Siena reorganized their gear. She put away the dishes they couldn't use due to lack of water. Spreading bandages, ointment, and sutures over the table, she refit the first aid kits. As she did so, Emmett sulked over, crossing his arms as he leaned against the wall.

"You think this happened to the other team?"

Siena counted the ibuprofen and distributed it amongst the four kits. "I don't know."

"Feyrer told us the research was in the woods. Did he mean here? Where the hell do we find it?"

"I don't know, Emmett. We don't even know if what he said is true. He was drunk."

"What if he knew about this and didn't tell us?"

Siena zipped up one of the packs. "What if? You going to dig him up from the grave and demand he tell you why he screwed us over?"

Emmett's jaw clenched. He leaned back until his neck and head were flush against the wall. "He was cremated."

Siena snorted a laugh, clapping a hand over her mouth.

The muscles in Emmett's shoulders relaxed, his grin slightly maniacal. "I think I'm losing my mind."

"Join the club."

Isaac entered the kitchen from the main room. Siena had seen little of him since they plummeted. He usually sat beneath the molten light leaking through the front-room window, somberly writing in a fresh composition journal that had been part of their original supply. One time she had tried asking him if he knew what was happening to them, but he only shook his head wordlessly in response.

Maybe it was better she didn't know.

Isaac held up two foil packs. "Chili mac. Found them in the lab."

Siena frowned. "I don't remember leaving food in the lab."

Isaac handed the dehydrated meals to her. Siena used her thumb to smooth out the peeling labels. "These are old. From the '90s, maybe. Must have been left by the last team. I could have sworn I went over every inch of the lab." She placed them on the table next to the kits. "Guess I missed them."

Emmett pushed himself from the wall. "Who's hungry?"

Every time they lay down to sleep, Emmett forced her to discuss things like their dwindling water supply. The barrels were less than half full. If they didn't bathe or wash their hands, and rationed their food and the amount they drank, then the three of them had enough for two weeks. Assuming they were stuck here for that long.

"Maybe we won't have to worry about it," Siena whispered as they faced each other on the lower bunk. "We could plummet to some other microverse in the chasm of space and time at any moment."

Emmett's brow furrowed as he thought about this. "You think?"

Siena had gone to Disneyland with her parents once as a tween, before her mother got sick. What was that ride called? Tower of Nightmares? No, that wasn't right. Some monstrosity of a contraption that emulated an elevator in a downtown highrise that had seen better days. The ride would shoot you up, drop you a level, and then another, and then finally release you to freefall to your doom. Or so she remembered. She'd done her best to shed that horrible experience from her brain, much preferring the memory of eating ice cream with her mom on a bench down Main Street, U.S.A.

This cabin was just like that elevator car. She just didn't know if the ride had gotten stuck forever, or if they were about to drop.

"Maybe," she said. "One minute we're making chili mac, the next..."

"Dark, Sen." Emmett shifted, his fingers drifting to her bare midriff. "I'm surprised how nonchalant you are about this."

"I'm not," she said. "But there's no point in worrying about things I can't control."

A calm washed over her as she spoke the adage, and Siena fell asleep next to Emmett.

When she woke, things were different, the crescendoing dread of the unknown enough to debilitate her. She spent an immeasurable amount of time lying on the floor, imagining it dropping out from beneath her until she became numb to the idea once more.

Something twitched behind her ear, and Siena pulled a beetle from her hair. Still lying on the floor, she pinched it between her finger and her thumb and held it above her face, watching its tiny feet wheel about.

Perhaps they were as imaginary as this world, an indicator she was in a coma or seriously losing her shit. But they felt real, more real than anything else.

She thought of the look on Cam's face when she realized Siena hadn't been hallucinating.

Cam.

Was she really going to lie about while Cam was all alone? Was she really going to give up?

The beetle's antennae twitched in a flurry. She sat up and stumbled to her feet, carrying the bug to the cabin's front door. On the porch, she lessened her grip, and the beetle took off, fluttering higher and higher until it disappeared within the boughs of one of the pines.

"Wait!" she cried, as if she could convince it to come back. She jogged into the clearing, her gaze whipping back and forth across the dark branches. But when she tried to circle the tree to see if she could spot the bug, she collided face-first with the resistance of nothing. Their boundary.

But the bug—the bug had escaped, hadn't it? Why couldn't she?

White-hot terror combusted in her chest. She released a scream and charged at the darkness, slamming into the barrier with her entire body so violently that she felt her organs smash into each other. She did it again and again, until Emmett found her and dragged her away, locking her arms behind her back with his own brute strength. Thrashing about, she fought against him just to feel her sedentary muscles ache and burn. He finally flipped her over and pinned her to the ground on her stomach.

"Siena, stop! You're going to get thirsty... We can't afford the water!"

She didn't care what they could or couldn't afford. It didn't matter if they ran out of water tomorrow or next week.

The ending would be the same.

Siena begged Emmett not to tell her the time when he turned on his phone to check. It was easier if she didn't know. She forwent a schedule, eating when she was starving, drinking if she was too thirsty to think, and sleeping when she couldn't keep her eyes open. All that signified time was the lack of water in the barrels.

But water wasn't all that disappeared.

First was the Chittick apparatus, a device too big to misplace. Siena noticed its absence when she wandered into the lab to see if its window offered any additional wisdom she'd missed the first hundred times she stared through it. Not that she needed it. She had done nothing related to her field since they hiked to Alpenglow, which felt like a lifetime ago.

But then the theodolite disappeared.

She notified Emmett, who shrugged as he sat at the kitchen table reorganizing their food for the millionth time.

Who cared about a theodolite at this point?

She understood why he didn't care. It didn't matter if things were disappearing, as long as it wasn't their food or water. Or one of them. But when her empty pack and hiking poles vanished from their place near the front door, Siena grew more curious about whether their stuff would reappear. She tried finding the items, scouring every corner and searching beneath every bed. She checked the cellar, with its smooth walls and no sign a tunnel had ever extended from it. She even checked the bowl of the outhouse, which the universe had decided to so graciously include as a part of their microverse (she decided this word was much better than prison, even though she was certain she would die here).

The shitter was a pitch-black pit of which she couldn't see the bottom, though the basin was only eight feet deep. She giggled hysterically when the thought crossed her mind that it may be the only way out of here.

When she checked her pockets to get a better look, all she had on her was her phone and her recorder. Her flashlight had also disappeared.

Siena returned to the cabin to see if she had misplaced it. When she entered, Isaac sat in the middle of the floor, facing away from the door and staring at the Briardark map. A new crimson trickle ran from a peak that looked like Agnes, around the mountain range, past huts and through rivers, circling a structure at the very bottom of the map. Smeared near both Agnes and the structure was a circle with two parallel strikes through it.

"Is that your blood?" she asked. "Are you cut?"

Isaac cast a glance at her. His hands were on his knees, neither bandaged nor wounded. She stepped closer to the map. The blood was dried and faded, like the trail had been there for years.

"The blood isn't mine," he said, his voice quieter than the scratch of nails against wood. "Whoever drew it knows another way out of the Briardark."

"A path," Siena said.

"A path between the two passages back to Deadswitch. This mountain is... or it used to be one of them. But I think I understand now... We're trapped here because this passage is collapsing."

Collapsing. "Like a wormhole or something?" God, she really knew dick about physics.

Isaac's eyes glazed over as he lost himself to a memory. Uncomfortable, Siena glanced away toward a canvas pack in the room's corner.

Her brain scrambled to make sense of what she was looking at. She stepped back, finding more strange bags leaning against walls and scattered across tables: totes and satchels and tactical backpacks. Some of them looked half a century old, while one bag was bright teal and made of nylon, a relic from the '90s. The food Emmett had stacked neatly on the counter now lay scattered across the floor, unfamiliar boxes of MREs amongst the dehydrated meals.

Excitement fluttered in her chest. Things were changing. It didn't matter that their gear was disappearing. All that mattered was the possibility of what it could mean... an upcoming change to their landscape. An approaching way out.

Siena jogged down the hallway. Emmett was napping in the bunk room, but before she could wake him, her attention caught on the open doorway of the lab.

The room was empty.

No, not entirely empty. The tables remained. A wooden bucket sat near the wall. The last time she'd seen it, it had collected blood from a mule's head.

Siena blanched at the thought of what was inside the bucket now.

But she'd worry about that later. While the tables were mostly bare, some things remained. The ham radio, for one, and the deck of cards. A microscope took up the left corner of the table's surface, though it wasn't the one they'd packed in. It looked either cheap or old, like it had been lifted from a high school lab.

The papers she had picked off the floor upon their arrival were still stacked in the corner opposite the microscope, though the bloody handprint from the doorframe had disappeared. Siena walked toward the desk to pick up the cards, and halted. The stacked papers were no longer blank, but filled with lines and lines of hastily written scrawl.

Siena knew Dr. Wilder Feyrer's handwriting well. She'd deciphered journals full of his personal notes when she worked as his assistant.

She picked through the pages, scanning the tops and bottoms of each page to order them. Feyrer's signature filled the corner of the last page. It was a letter. A long one.

When Siena found the first page, the tips of her fingers went numb.