Siena

SIENA

She wasn't healed. Not even close.

Not like she would have known that, lounging about Outpost 5, but now she was on the narrow trail, treading behind Ren in the gloom. She could see more of the Edge with Ren's lantern than she could with either her headlamp or flashlight, and she wished she couldn't. In hindsight, she missed her ignorance to the forest's innards. The lamp cast too many willowy shadows, illuminated too much rot and death. Off the trail, a ribcage clamped around a slimy trunk like teeth, as though the tree had grown from a nutrient-rich body.

"Human?" she asked Ren.

"Looks like."

How many bodies had she unknowingly passed since entering the Edge? Ren had told her she made it deeper than most, though "most" was an ambiguous number of people. She didn't ask for fear of the answer.

Once the two of them fell silent, the pain in her side and her feet swallowed her every thought, scabs itching, burning, and stinging, muscles trembling just to bear the ache. Blood soaked her socks, warmer and stickier than mud .

Twenty miles. Twenty miles had felt so easily accomplishable, and now she wasn't sure if she could make two.

What would Ren do if she sat right now and refused to move forward? He'd told her it was his job to get her home, some duty to his Mother faction, guilting her with the claim that staying would risk more than her own life. The Shadow wanted something from her, some nugget of knowledge buried within the folds of her brain, which made her so dangerous that Ren had followed her from the research cabin to ensure she'd make it out.

As she trailed him and his lantern, the mud sucking her boots every time she stepped, she understood why he hadn't wanted to interfere. Her time at the outpost had provided some answers, but many more questions. Hundreds of people lived in this Briardark, this dimension, something she couldn't grasp to save her life. She wanted to see it for herself so much that she'd conjured dozens of ways to escape Outpost 5 while Ren slept, all of them ending with her dying in the Edge. This goddamn biome. This hell .

Ren glanced back at her, the flickering light of his lantern reflecting in the plastic eyes of his mask. He'd outfitted her with an oversized waterproofed coat that fell past her hips, and a balaclava that covered most of her face. She flexed her sweaty fingers in a borrowed pair of ski gloves, only now realizing how hard she'd been clenching her hands.

He slowed, which she took as permission to stop, pressing a hand to her burnt side. Her heart pounded violently enough to make her nauseous. The journey so far hadn't even been strenuous with his guidance. She was just a wreck.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The scabs on my feet and side are ripping. It hurts to breathe." Her chest heaved as she tried to drag in enough oxygen. Somehow that only sharpened the pain.

His irritated grunt was hardly audible beneath the patter of rain.

"It isn't my fault." She hated not seeing his face or communicating via expression. Was he worried? Angry ?

Suddenly Ren's head shot toward the rumble of thunder.

No . . . not thunder.

Again came the rumble, ground trembling beneath her feet . A steady beat, each boom drawn out. She held her breath and listened. Boom . The rain picked up. Boom . It drew near enough for her to pick apart distinct noises within the boom. A crackle like snapping branches. A rush like fire. The scream of an animal.

"We need to move," he barked, and she jumped in alarm. "I'll carry you."

"No." She couldn't slow them down. Pain was temporary—she had to push through it. "Go."

Ren took off into the dark, and she remained at his heels, watching his feet as they moved over root and rock. She gritted her teeth hard enough to break a molar, lightning strikes of pain shooting from her feet to her knees.

The boom rumbled once more behind her, followed by a crack and a shriek like a mountain lion. Or woman.

Keep moving.

Boom, boom, boom.

The booms weren't thunder, the cadence too consistent. They were footsteps. Footsteps heavy enough to shake the earth, each one groaning like a creaking tree. Snarling like a wolf. Weeping like an injured old man. The sound kept morphing, shifting. Terror ricocheted throughout her rib cage, suddenly compelled to scream loudly enough to meet the volume of the steps.

Ren turned, grabbed her arm, and dragged her along with him.

He'd led them into a trap. Maybe this was the plan all along, for the shrieking behemoth gaining on them to tear her apart. Then Ren wouldn't have to worry about whatever valuable knowledge she held in her brain.

But if that were true, he would have let her die north of the outpost instead of coaxing her back to life.

Her legs shook horribly as he pushed her past her limits .

The sky flashed, and the entire forest lit up at once. A scream lodged in her throat; she could see everything. Every set of eyes in the boughs, on the ground. Lumpy concoctions of fungus and moss, growing in bulbous sacks from trees, dripping something like oxygenated blood.

"Shit," Ren hissed.

The light died, and she was blinded. Disoriented, she stumbled about until her toe snagged on a root and she fell. Ren tripped over her.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

blinked until shapes reformed in front of her eyes. She growled through her pain and stood, grabbing Ren's hand and helping him up.

"Watch my lamp," he said. "Don't look anywhere else."

She wanted to ask why, but they were off again, the ground slickening with moss and mud. A few times Ren stopped and redirected them toward the thinner edges of the briar, the garbled, screaming thunder crawling ever closer.

Another flash. It startled so much that Ren's warning slipped from her brain, and she glanced up at a synchronized pulsing in the knots of the lichen-drenched trees, like they had beating hearts.

"Focus on the light!" Ren yelled above the booming.

What the hell was happening?

"Focus on the?—"

Another flash, though this time it didn't die, and shielded her eyes as the forest fell silent.

"Ren!"

Tears streamed down her cheeks from the light's intensity, and she covered her face with her forearms. Green burst across the backs of her eyelids. The temperature shift alone knocked the wind from her, the air so intensely warm that her soaked clothing hissed as water evaporated.

Vertigo washed over as she fought to breathe. She lost balance, and braced herself for a fall that never came .

When she finally coaxed air into her lungs, it tasted like honeysuckle. She dropped her arms, blinking away tears until blurry, earth-colored shapes took form and slowly sharpened. The impenetrable canopy was gone, daylight streaking through the surrounding verdure. A bird tittered somewhere behind tufts of the greenest pine needles she'd ever seen. She followed the arrow-straight path beneath her feet, southward, the trees so perfectly geometric, evergreens spaced evenly between lush, red-crowned maples. Wallpaper perfect. She was the protagonist in a cheap cartoon retelling of a fairy tale, her surroundings benign.

Horrifyingly benign.

She must have fallen. Hit her head on a rock.

A shadow darted through her peripheral vision, and she whipped around. Nothing—nothing but a waver in the air, a distortion of heat. When she blinked, it was gone.

" Ren! " she screamed.

Fear clotted her throat as she scanned the trees. He'd told her to focus on his lantern, but she'd been too disoriented, and now...

She burst into a jog, but the agony was too intense, like the nerve endings in her feet were grating directly against the hard dirt. Slowing to a limp, she screamed Ren's name again. The dense, pristine foliage ate up her voice in this cheery panoramic toy, the woodland path repeating over and over again.

Her abdomen cramped in panic. Not even the sun or the heat could comfort her, though she did stare up, confounded by the sun's brightness and how the light shifted rapidly across the sky. Before long, stretching shadows covered her path, and the day deepened to a burnt orange.

All she had on her was a canteen, a meager stash of jerky, and a lighter. Ren carried his own supplies, but they were supposed to have reached The Way Back without camping.

kept her eyes peeled to catch any movement other than the squirrels chasing each other up tree trunks. She yelled Ren's name .

Behind her, the booming rumbled to life again, now even closer, and it dawned on her that this noise wasn't new, but one she'd only heard before at a distance, when she'd described it as a visceral hunger. But it was an amalgamation of noises. The chaos of the universe, the rush of undiluted atmosphere, the shriek of fear. Creation and destruction at once, as though the Edge was the gestation grounds for the entire forest.

Dusk fell with unnatural quickness, the cookie-cutter world suddenly drowning in blue twilight. Her heart leapt at a small trail slithering from the path, the differentiation hopefully signaling an end to this nightmare. dipped into the forest, the atmosphere sharper and earthier. Up ahead, a glow pierced the dusk. She ran her hands over imperfect bark patterns as she crept deeper, limping over rotten trees in her path. The moisture returned, the fetid air teeming with mist. A few meters away, the soil undulated like it was made of water, and slowed.

A cloud of illuminated haze lit up the clearing before her. The rumble dissipated as a chittering took over.

She waited beyond the clearing, cloaked in shadow as her eyes adjusted to the new light. The ground continued to roil and chitter, though it sparkled beautifully, like iridescent seafoam across the ocean's surface.

An insect flew past 's ear, its wings beating briefly in her hair before zipping forward and diving into the sparkling ground, which hissed and buzzed at the interruption. She slapped a hand over her mouth as a swarm of beetles shot from the ground and into the night.

Not water. Not foam. An infestation.

The beetles' nacre shells shimmered in waves as they crawled and tumbled over each other synchronously, their iridescence both hypnotic and vile. kicked out, shaking off the beetles skittering beneath the hem of her pants and up her legs. Her eyes traveled from the ground to the glow beyond the mist, and the soft gossamer tendrils of the beetles' web.

She lifted her boot and stepped forward, scratching the deep itch to feel them crush beneath her foot. But as she did so, ringing pierced her ears, and she stumbled as her vision blurred. The beetle lair spun around her until pressure forced her eyelids down.

She was going to pass out.

Her head snapped back, and she peeled her eyelids open. She lost purchase with gravity, and floated.

Before her, in a stunning display of impossible geometry, Webs crisscrossed in shapes she'd never seen, at angles she couldn't comprehend. The bugs fluttered upward and beat her body with their wings. They weren't suspended, not like her, and scattered out of alarm, out of fear, out of survival instinct. But she couldn't. The lack of gravity trapped her, even when she flailed her arms and legs.

Why?

Why was she entangled when they could go free? Why was her matter somehow different from theirs?

They aren't beetles .

thump THUMP. thump THUMP. thump THUMP.

The dark space beyond the web stretched infinitely, but the heart thumped somewhere beneath her.

thump. THUMP.

thump. THUMP.

thump. THUMP.

The web's light pulsed to the beat.

thump.

THUMP.

thump.

THUMP.

The light gathered into beads and shot outward, zipping through synapses and down nerve cells, filling the void with the silhouette of a root system.

A nervous system.

She'd been here before, after The Shadow bled from Isaac. Back when she'd been na?ve about the strength she would need to get out of this place .

I am everywhere.

Except it didn't speak to her now, nothing in the beyond but the thud of a molten heart, miles and miles beneath her. Her head was quieter than it had been in a long time.

Her insides teetered on the edge of a drop. Gravity flirted with her, sentient, as it toyed with the idea of pulling her organs from her body.

" Check the bed! "

Her own voice echoed from above. lifted her head to a cathedral-like dome of celestial sky, Emmett an angry man in the moon.

" I'm losing my patience. "

She was projecting a memory from the night of their engagement party, when she'd woken up screaming. The first time she'd experienced her delusions .

" You're right. " Her voice echoed. " I'm losing it. "

No. That was wrong. She hadn't said that.

She'd argued with him. Told him to stop patronizing her. That night was burned into her brain along with every time she'd had delusions, because she'd thought back to those moments so often, trying to tease apart hallucination from reality. Insects desperate to lay their eggs inside her body, tangling in her hair, prying open her nostrils, skittering across her abdomen, burrowing into her belly button.

She'd been combative that night because she'd been so certain.

Emmett's face softened. " You're not losing it. Stressful days lead to stressful dreams for you. You okay? Need some water? "

This wasn't a memory. It was a lie.

Thump. THUMP .

Back on Mount Agnes, when she passed through the tree tunnel from one world to another, the beetles had been there. Again, when the passage to the Briardark collapsed, and she, Emmett, and Isaac were stuck in a microverse, she'd pinched one between her fingers, then released it, trying to follow where it flew .

The bugs weren't an omen—a harbinger of panic. They shifted reality.

Emmett's face vanished.

She raced through a tunnel of wet forest sounds until darkness swallowed her. Her feet gained purchase with a slosh of mud. Rain splashed against her clothes in its slow and suffocating drip. The cloying stench of plant and animal rot overwhelmed her senses.

was back in the Edge. She exhaled in relief, happy to return to this festering, unending hell. In the abyss, her stomach unclenched, her heart returning to its resting rhythm.

Footsteps sloshed around in front of her. The muscles in her legs tensed. "Ren?" she called out. A splash, another squelch. Closer this time. jammed her hand into her coat pocket and found her lighter.

"Ren," she repeated. Silence answered her. Something was wrong.

She extended her lighter. A tall figure loomed ten or so paces in front of her, motionless.

Not Ren. Ren would have said something.

They stepped closer and kept their hands at their sides, but the flame wasn't bright enough to see much else. Her fingers trembled so badly, she almost dropped the lighter. She took a hesitant step back, though retreating wouldn't solve anything, because she was directionless. Trapped.

"Sen . . ."

A nickname she knew too well. A voice, gruffer than it should be. Her blood ran ice cold as he closed in on her, one slick footstep after another.

Weak light flickered over the black stone filling his right eye socket, then the scars spidering from his forehead to his cheekbones. Everything else about him was just as she remembered. Just as she knew him.

Emmett.