Siena

SIENA

Grief was a fickle bitch.

It didn't grace her in linear stages like her high school psychology class had taught her, nor was it cyclical. Instead, she wallowed in the trenches of depression until rage rudely assaulted her out of nowhere.

She'd buried Isaac only a couple of hours ago, and since beginning her descent off the mountain had already punched a few trees. She was not the type of woman who went around punching trees out of anger. And so the bargaining began.

If I get out of here, I'll never punch a tree again.

Although dust-flecked beams of light broke through the canopy, she couldn't spot the sun behind the dense expanse of lichen-drenched evergreens. A bird tittered somewhere above, its song enigmatic and unfamiliar. The air smelled warm, like morning. She followed the trail through the forest, the straps of her ill-fitted backpack already chafing her shoulders.

The Briardark.

That was the name of this place, wasn't it? She'd heard it first in the research cabin when she tuned into the strange frequency.

Meet me in the Briardark, beneath the moon we will embark.. .

Eventually she'd have to come to terms with the theatricality of the name. A name conjured by the mind of someone haunted, lost, and unpragmatic.

She may be lost and scared, but this forest could pry her pragmatism out of her cold, dead hands. It was all she had left to keep herself sane, so she recited every recent event, teasing apart truth from speculation.

Isaac had died the day before yesterday. That was a fact. Cam had left Agnes Cabin shortly after without saying goodbye, also a fact.

Cam was dead set on tracking down Avery Mathis, the famous gaming influencer who'd gone missing seven years prior. Avery mattered more to Cam than her own survival—and 's.

Hypothesis . Not fact. thought she knew Cam's intentions with the whole of her heart, but hearts couldn't know anything.

Emmett borderline loathed Cam, and he'd taken off to bring her back. Fact. But then he never returned to the cabin, leaving alone with two sets of instructions:

One from Dr. Wilder Feyrer, her dead mentor, admitting in a letter that he'd been studying the Briardark all these years. He wanted to find The Mother, whatever that was.

And another from Isaac, her dead mentee, who'd disappeared and mysteriously returned three decades older. He wanted to hike out of the wilderness immediately, or else a god, The Shadow, would kill her.

Cancer had killed Feyrer. Isaac had died from a parasitic shadow bursting from his body, and subsequently a shot to the chest. Both facts.

Ultimately she'd listened to Isaac because she couldn't forgive Feyrer's secrets, and left Agnes Cabin to find an exit from this "Briardark."

She'd also gone without Emmett, who'd wanted her to stay and wait for help. But she'd never been the type of person to just sit around and wait, and she didn't trust Emmett's instincts .

Stopping, she took a deep breath. The path continued to steadily decline. Her knees ached, her pack now chafing the center of her back. Sweat and mist clung to her clothing. Staying dry on the journey was already proving a challenge.

Before her, the thin trail faded into a carpet of moss. The ferns and flora beyond formed a verdant wall she'd have to plunge through.

The first time she and her team tried escaping Mount Agnes, the path had ended in a wall of foliage, confusing all of them. But wouldn't be tricked again. She needed to hike south, regardless of what south looked like, and follow Isaac's dubious map. If everything went according to plan, she could clear fifteen miles a day, spending only three nights on the trail.

Only problem was, she was already off track. She should have reached the mountain's granite face by now.

Her eyes flicked between the thick growth ahead. Once she kicked through the dew-covered ferns, she took a water break on a rotting stump and studied her boots, the right sole peeling away from the toe. She could fill the gap with superglue and stitch it closed if needed, but hopefully the shoe in its current state would last another forty miles or so.

She took stock of her surroundings, including the grove of giant evergreens she wandered through, trees too large to survive this high elevation. Trees identical to the one Emmett had found near Agnes Cabin. A tunnel had led from a hollow in the tree to the cellar of another cabin.

Fact: had crawled through the tunnel and felt the tree's heartbeat. (No, theory . Trees shouldn't have heartbeats. More evidence needed.)

Fact: a mule-murdering man in a gas mask had awaited her at the tunnel's end, and told she needed to leave, his reasons unknown.

Fact: according to her tape recorder, she had not hallucinated any of this .

Hypothesis: maybe she didn't have delusional disorder after all.

tugged her pill bottle free from the small pocket in her bag's belt. She'd picked up a three-month refill a few weeks before the trip, which meant no matter how long it took to get out of this place, she'd have enough meds. Even if she could prove her hypothesis that she'd been misdiagnosed, she couldn't stop the meds cold turkey—not these antipsychotics. The last thing she wanted was to lose control of her motor skills in the middle of an unknown, possibly metaphysical wilderness.

She tucked the pills back in her pocket and zipped it up, stood from the stump with a groan, and kept moving.

Farther along the trail, she carefully climbed over a nurse log and around a tangle of roots. The ground hardened and leveled, which made no sense. She couldn't have hiked to the bottom of the mountain already; the air was too thin. So why did it look and feel and smell like she was at the center of a lush valley?

All the knowledge she'd accumulated over the years—everything she knew about geology and ecosystems—was useless here. Why did this place have different rules down to its very atoms?

Had the government known about this Briardark before Feyrer discovered it? Did they call it Briardark ? No, it probably had some name like Area T or Zone 75 or Third Sovereign Interrealm Discovery. But if the government knew of this place, maybe they'd help track down Emmett and Cam once she made it out.

Or maybe they'd permanently shut her up.

Even though she expected it, panic didn't smoke out the quiet resolve in her chest. Ah, yes. The acceptance stage of grief had returned once again to say hello . And that was just fine. She was tired of panicking, of replaying Isaac's death in her head, of fretting about Emmett and Cam. And The Shadow.

I am everywhere .

If The Shadow were actually everywhere, then he would have already found her and sought her out. Made her do—what had Isaac said? Things more horrible than you could dream .

And then after, The Shadow would kill her.

The Shadow had shown her the beating heart of this Briardark, deep within the mountain. The Shadow once had her in his grasp, after he slaughtered Isaac.

And yet she was here. Alive. Hiking away and focusing on the path in front of her, because worry burned energy, and she had none to spare.

Eventually the foliage thinned, the gargantuan evergreens growing farther apart. shielded her eyes upon meeting the forest's edge, stepping beyond the last of the ferns onto granite.

Wind cooled the sweat prickling the back of her neck. She tugged on the collar of her shirt as she tried making sense of this unfamiliar landscape. An Ansel Adams photograph, but if a nightmare had gotten hold of it and made it big, bigger, too big.

She kicked a pebble, which bounced down the mountain slope toward the gaping maw of a valley wider and deeper than the Great Rift in Ethiopia. The jagged teeth of the range beyond gnashed at the horizon, peaks taller than the one she descended, and more dramatic than the Himalayas. Bigger, too.

Too big .

fought a wave of dizziness and looked west, following a ridge that enclosed the other side of the valley. Even when she squinted, she couldn't see the southern lakes. They were too far away.

She scuffed the ground with her boot, the geological composition different from the Sierras. Squatting, she traced her fingers over the coarse dirt, methodically ruling out felsic minerals and carbonates. Mineral composition wasn't the reason these mountains were so damn huge. Neither was gravity.

The colossal scale of this place could be from tectonic or volcanic activity. She could almost hear Cam bantering and bickering over the possibilities.

Cam.

She shut her eyes to think around the anger. What was the size difference between the Sierras and the Himalayas? The average peaks in the Sierras were around 3,300 meters, the Himalayas—she tried to remember—6,500 or so. Which meant this place was twice as big as Deadswitch Wilderness.

Hypothesis . Mountain height didn't correlate to wilderness size. But from the gigantic peak on which she stood, the Briardark felt twice as big as Deadswitch.

No, bigger.

freed herself from her bag to dig into it, and pulled out her phone and map of Deadswitch Wilderness. She unfolded the map and laid it flat on the ground.

Hidden behind wallpaper in the research cabin was a map of the Briardark Isaac had drawn in his decades away from them. She'd copied the important things from that map onto her own, and while she hadn't gotten everything, she'd noted the landscape and topography between the two maps were relatively the same.

had studied a U.S. Geological Survey map of Deadswitch before the research trip had even begun. She was supposed to know these mountains, this forest. After following the drawn line of the trail she'd traced from Isaac's map, she stood and studied the valley once more, lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

She could picture the path skirting the marsh below and continuing southeast through the valley. As far as she could tell, the trail from Isaac's map was sound.

A flash of red drew her attention to her raised hand and the blood beneath the crescent of her thumbnail.

Isaac . The blood pouring from his eyes, The Shadow crawling from his mouth. The shotgun. If something like that happened to her, there would be no one around to blow a hole through her. She'd have to endure the torture.

Maybe she should stop standing around on the open face of a mountain.

She soaked in the depths of the valley and the far mountain range—this terrifying geological wonder she'd never see again—one last time. Nothing like this existed on the Earth she knew .

The landscape spoke to her.

Discover me. Stay with me.

All the things she could learn in those tall peaks. All the theories she could conjure on their formation.

But no. Isaac had said she would die if she stayed, and the risk was too high if she ignored him. She didn't want to die. She didn't want some Shadow tearing her apart from the inside.

Isaac . . .

shook the thought away. There were three or so hours of daylight left. She needed to get moving.

She snapped a few photos of the divide, then wrestled her bag back onto her shoulders and resumed her descent. Not a single cairn dotted the mountain face, her only safe option to focus on her feet and follow the most gradual route. No one would help her if she slipped and fell.

When she stopped to rest, the sinking sun cast gaunt shadows over the rocky facade and lit the belly of the clouds. She followed the clouds eastward until they billowed into the stratosphere, almost black.

I am everywhere .

No, not The Shadow. A storm. A brutal one, one she hadn't seen back at the top of the mountain. It crawled closer before her eyes, and she was only a third of the way down the granite.

Tall fast clouds. Colliding particles. Lightning.

lunged forward and scrambled down the side of the peak, staying low. It had taken her an hour to get this far from the top, and now she had twenty, maybe thirty minutes to reach the bottom. Impossible at a cautious pace. Maybe impossible, period.

Her foot slipped, and she caught herself, loose pebbles bouncing down the smooth terrain. She would fall and break something if she kept moving this fast.

Better than getting fried to death.

She picked up her pace, but one wrong step was all it took. The world tilted, her knee buckling to a sharp bite of pain. She cried out as rock tore up her palms .

This was her own damn fault for being so careless, and now she had to cope with the pain. Stopping wasn't an option.

Gritting her teeth, she bore a jolt of agony and stood. The sun kissed the western horizon. She should have waited and begun the descent tomorrow.

But she hadn't seen the storm. She couldn't have known, and now she was wasting energy beating herself up for it.

Move .

The darkness above slid ever closer, thunder rolling over the jagged landscape and wind threatening to knock her over. The storm was too damn quick.

She continued her descent, crawling over rock, biting back pain until the crack of thunder rattled every bone in her body. She looked up into the pitch-black promise of a deluge.

I am everywhere.

The clouds ripped open and pummeled her with rain.