Cameron

Cam dragged herself to shore before collapsing in the mud, sucking in deep breaths. The air on her tongue tasted sweeter than candy.

Her cough was a mix of a sob and a laugh. And when she heard her own voice, she laughed for real. She laughed and laughed until her side hurt.

Was she dead? No... everything hurt way too much. She was alive. She'd survived some strange interdimensional vacuum of space. Her body had imploded, her molecules rearranged and pieced back together.

She'd been resurrected.

"Jesus Christ," Cam croaked, and then laughed again at her own stupid joke. She jammed her palms into the mud and pushed herself until she was sitting, reached out to clean her hands off in the water, and froze.

The sediment from her swim was settling, the water clear, unlike the tarn.

Across from her, water dribbled down a rock wall into a pool so deep, she could only see a ring of mossy rocks that ended at an abyss. It reminded her of the cenotes she'd studied in Mexico during her PhD.

It sure as fuck wasn't Alpenglow.

She craned her neck around toward a misty forest so dense she could hardly see the sun.

Her head throbbed. Cam reached up and gingerly felt around the base of her skull, pulling away bloodstained fingers.

She'd hit her head when she'd emerged—probably on one of those rocks. And before that, she'd had an out-of-body experience, trapped in a black nothingness for what felt like months. She remembered seeing two worlds, or at least interpreting two pinpricks of light as worlds.

And before that, she'd taken a swim in the tarn. How the hell had she come up with that brilliant idea?

And before that...

The radio. Isaac. The map on the wall—The Briardark.

"Oh," Cam whispered. "Oh, shit."

Cam stood with a groan. She shivered, her soaking t-shirt and hiking pants plastered to her body. She still had her shoes, though. At least there was that.

She limped around the perimeter of the pool, regaining her legs before assessing the rock wall. Hobbling over a few boulders, she finally found her way to the top.

On the high ground, she couldn't see much through the surrounding forest, only a mountain in the distance beyond the valley.

She'd seen some gorgeous peaks in her life. After she graduated, she'd spent a couple of weeks in Switzerland with an ex and witnessed the Matterhorn up close. Staring at this karling made her feel the same way as she did back then: euphoric.

This was the fourth peak—the mysterious mountain she'd seen right before she'd gotten lost and stumbled upon Avery's backpack. Here it stood freely, untethered to a range.

How long had bits of this world been entering hers? And the opposite...

Against her fingers, she could feel the phantom folds and creases from Avery's map. The Sharpie markings were real landmarks, this mountain before her the circled upside-down V.

Seven years ago, her SAR team had searched all of Deadswitch for the missing hikers without finding this separate plane of existence.

Janet's melancholy voice filled her.

Cam grew dizzy with the possibility and staggered. The possibility that the radio transmission wasn't a recording. That maybe the Deadswitch Five hadn't disappeared Without a Trace. They'd simply gone somewhere else.

And Avery... she'd left Cam a map.

She scrambled down the rock wall. As she reached the soft, moist soil of the forest, a scream echoed from the woods to the right.

Cam's heart seized. She knew that voice.