“Is this all a dream?” he calls out. The absence of a response sends him venturing deeper into the fog. Strange shadows shift and writhe, their shapes contorting into impossible beings, melting into the fog as soon as he steps towards them.

“Why am I here?”

The fog thickens, the shadows elongated. A bright sphere of light penetrates through the grey gloom, bathing him in its light. Soft, comforting light that erases the shadows plaguing him, bringing light to corners he thought lost, clearing cobwebs and misconceptions and long-held hatred towards the people who wronged him.

He doesn’t squint against the sudden influx of light--he doesn’t have to. Inside that sphere, an entire lifetime worth of memories begin to play out, beginning with the day when he first became conscious.

And then he stirs awake.

The constant chattering of birds--or what must be their equivalent of birds here--crushes his hopes of returning back to a tattered bed, worn yet familiar, a thousand times better compared to the moist earth. Beside him, a girl lies curled up in a fetal position, using a backpack as a pillow, an ornate box resting a few inches away from her.

She looks stunning even when asleep. Even with the deep, inflamed scratches down her neck and lower face, of which he’ll treat as soon as she awakes. He guesses she’s either too tired to startle awake from a nightmare, or she’s lucky enough to not have one. Either way, he’d seen the acceptance of her fate. Her face contorted into a final sob.

He’d lost sight of the light once, and almost again when he appeared in the middle of the forest, caught unaware by the all-too happy rat-organisms. He doesn’t want her to hold her feelings close to her chest. Too many tragedies later has he learned bottled emotions lead to devastation in the end.

The pressure grows too high, the container too restricting, the air outside a constant while a war rages on the inside. And eventually, all falls silent, the pressure dissipating.

Sunlight sears him. He looks around him. The shadows are too short. The trees are tall, but the shadows cling close to them, as if afraid the prospect of light will cleave them apart. In his dream they’d stretched to unfathomable sizes, but here they’re almost nonexistent. The nearest tree has a thick shadow a few inches away from its base, with a lighter, overlapping shadow extending a few inches beyond that.

When he looks up, the sheer brilliance of both suns directly over him shocks the rest of himself awake.

Temples pounding, teeth gritted, he checks out their remaining supplies. He started off with twenty bottled waters and between the two of them finished off six, leaving fourteen left. Or perhaps he’s miscounted. He hopes he’s underestimating the amount left since he’s parched. He can’t open the backpack without rousing Cora, and he needs her to be fully rested for the next night, because this… he looks around them.

Recoils at how lit up the woods are. His eyes still haven’t adjusted completely. Were the trees safe, and this world revealed to Earth, and some form of travel made possible, he’s sure millions of tourists would flock here to enjoy the purple sights. Why visit Yellowstone or Yosemite when you have a completely new environment for your viewing pleasure?

Yet it’s still difficult to wrap his mind around the fact that he’s here. Away from Earth, on a completely new planet, perhaps even in a new fucking dimension. It’s only been a day and he’s seen things that only the most imaginative people could conjure up, much less to the degree of experience he’s seen these things.

Especially her.

“Why are you here?” he asks softly, half-expecting Cora to mumble an answer. But she doesn’t. Her chest rises and falls, breaths even, her eyes never fluttering open. “I thought I was never going to see you again. It hurt, you know. Having nobody to talk to, after knowing that I lost the best part of my life without a goodbye.”

Of course, her silence only drives him more desperate to know why she never said goodbye. Why she never gave him a warning about the move. There’s too many questions building pressure in his skull, not enough answers, so he turns his gaze skyward, towards the mountains they were supposed to reach today.

Their snow-capped peaks penetrate through the dense forest crowded around where he assumes the bottom is. He can’t find a single river, but then again the mountains weave through each other, creating cliffs and folds within the rock, products of the geologic activity of a living planet over millions of years.

The folded, protruding strata could easily hide a river, even a massive one. He wouldn’t be surprised if a rushing river was directly in front of them and they wouldn’t be able to tell.

He blinks. Stares at the mountains. Then rubs his temples, wanting to scream, wanting to shake Cora awake just to have some company other than his traitorous brain. He tried and he failed to use his wits to surpass everybody in school and escape his home life. Those are remnants of another boy, who doesn’t exist now, who likely won’t exist for a long time, if ever.

Like life on the streets, there’s always something anchoring people down to their lives. Here, it’s trees. All they need to do is find where the most trees grow and then they should find water. There’s too many unknowns about this world, though. They can’t be sure if these plants even use water to live.

Either way, what choice do they have?

“But you didn’t have a choice, did you?” He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You were forced here like I was. By some god or whatever, we ended up here again. Damn it. Of all the people I could’ve ended up with, it was you.” He looks at her sleeping form again. She looks so relaxed. Probably is. He wishes he slept as well as she did.

The faint memory of the soft light makes him smile. He slept well enough.

Cora begins to stir. Liam takes a few steps back and turns the other way, folding his arms over his chest and analyzing the mountains again. After several moments of hearing her waking up, he turns around, putting on his best light-hearted face.

Everything’s a show. If they’re going to survive, they need to find the best in everything. Even if it’s an illusion they’re believing in.

His mind finally breaks through his hazy spell. The years of neglect and abusive experiences cling to his subconscious, shaping his thoughts, but he consciously grapples them and shoves them deep into the darkest corners of him. He smiles, crinkling his eyes so she thinks he’s genuine, but when she smiles back, her eyes full of warmth, his facade breaks away and he smiles without having to force it.

“Good morning, Cora,” he says.

“Good morning, Liam,” she says. She looks around, then grabs her backpack and stands it up, opening the zipper and pulling out a bottle of water. “You were waiting to drink, huh? But you didn’t want to wake me up. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”

So empathetic. So kind-hearted, the rarest kind of person in the world. Or the old world. The waves of resentment draw back into him, leaving a pleasant warmth no fire can replicate.

“You needed to sleep,” he says, and it must be the real way he’s smiling, because she hands him a bottle and before he registers it, hugs him with one arm.

“That’s for saving us yesterday. And saving me from that thing,” she says, averting her gaze. “I seriously can never repay you for that.”

“A hug and a thank you was enough.”

He unscrews the cap and drinks the bottle before she can notice his blush. She follows, drinking her own, leaving them with seven left. If they ration it like yesterday, then by tomorrow they’ll run out.

But that should be more than enough to reach the mountains. In one day, the mountains have become much larger, their peaks and folds in perfect clarity, and he’s unsure if it’s him analyzing the situation too deeply but he swears the air is more humid.

Or of course his body is adapting to this new environment.

“I’ll carry first,” Cora says, sliding the straps over her shoulders and tightening them so that the backpack is pulled taut against her back. “If we walk fast, then we should reach the mountains by-” She clasps her hands over her mouth, eyes flickering up. Then they widen, pupils contracting.

“We overslept,” Liam says, scratching the back of his head.

“I can’t believe we’re not going to make it today.” Her face contorts into fear. Her eyebrows furrow, gaze set at a spot somewhere in the woods. He doesn’t bother to check what she’s looking at, because he feels the same fear she is.

“The river doesn’t have to stop at the mountains, right?” he says. It doesn’t relieve the cold knot of dread in his stomach. “We can find it somewhere down here, too.”

“Yeah. You’re right, that makes sense. But the water’s going to be dirtier. If we get sick…”

He gulps. “Getting sick is better than having no water at all. We’ll keep walking and then we’ll find out whether we have to keep walking or camp and finally get some rest.”

“That sounds good.”

He’s not convinced that she’s fully onboard, but like everything else that has happened up to this point, they don’t have a choice. He squares his shoulders and squints, blocking out the surroundings to focus on the mountains.

One way or another, they’ll give Cora and him another day. Another chance. Though another illusion itself--the steady resolve hardening his heart--he takes the second step towards safety.

***

After the sixth hour, one hour before the twin suns dive beneath the horizon, Liam stops in his tracks. They haven’t found a river, but the mountains are much larger, and the earth is definitely damp, the air more humid. The purple has slowly receded from the trees, leaving a dark brown. Everything seemed like they expected. Until this.

“What the hell…”

Dozens of trees lie torn to shreds or scorched to ashes, untold thousands of leaves peeled off the branches and scattered on the floor, making a thin carpet that crunches under their feet. At the center of the destruction, a circle of scorched earth is devoid of any leaves, the circle’s edges burnt to a crisp.

“Over there,” Cora says, pointing at a similar scene of destruction past a cluster of untouched trees. This time, there’s no circle that accompanies it, but the leaves are different. Gold filaments are threaded through the leaves, starkly contrasting against their dark green color.

Another thing is missing: the sulphuric stench that hangs everywhere no matter how much they breathe it in. Instead, the scent of smoked meat lingers in its place, which doesn’t make sense because neither of them have seen a trace of any animal; they’ve only heard the chirps and chatters of birds.

Yet the chirps seem louder here. “Is it me or are the birds louder now?” he asks her. But her attention turns towards a copse of trees. She walks over to it, tilting her head, while Liam crosses his arms and waits for her to finish investigating whatever it is she’s found.

“They’re here,” she calls out.

“What’s here?”

But she creeps closer, this time her movements slow and stiff, head turned so that one ear faces the trees. Suddenly, everything about this feels wrong to him. His stomach curdles, heart racing faster, instincts screaming for him to run, to be anywhere but here.

He doesn’t get the chance to shout for her to get away from the trees when a black ball shoots towards her.

Cora ducks at the last second, the black bird soaring where her head was a split second ago, claws raking the earth. The bird opens its beak and the same chitters from the morning erupt from its mouth. It flies higher with a few beats of its wings, the bird as big as him.

A red line of feathers runs from the bottom of its beak down its neck and ends where both of its wings meet. They bristle as the bird shoots downward again, faster than the boar-creature could ever hope to run. She can’t run.

But he can.

She’s going to get skewered in front of his eyes and he’ll have witnessed yet another death he’ll have failed to prevent.

He can’t lose her again. Never again. He wishes she never appeared in his life again, but she has to have been brought here for a reason, and him as well. They have to watch out for each other now.

Cora’s shocked expression is the image he holds when he launches himself forward.

He holds the knife by its blade and roughly calculates where the bird’s path will take it. His muscles adjust, every one of his senses focused on the bird, and then he hurls the knife.

She jumps out of the way as a mass of feathers and flesh crashes onto the earth. Blood splatters everywhere, bits of bone and flesh raining down, the creature little more than grounded pulp save for the perfectly intact knife embedded where its ribs used to be.

Quietly, he walks over to the corpse and pulls out the knife. It’s covered with the bird’s remains, but he doesn’t care. He’s careful to hold the knife in one hand and keep his other clean when he approaches Cora.

“You did it again,” she whispers, staring at him, then at his hand, then at the body behind him. “You saved me again.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he keeps his mouth shut. That’s the second time she’s seen him fight. He doesn’t want her to think he’s some demented killer. He knows skills that are necessary to keep himself alive, not to purposely hurt others.

Yet he killed the boar-creature and the bird with little more than some concentration. He hopes she doesn’t think of him as dangerous.

“What would I do without you?” she says. Her voice quivers. “You saved me three times already. That’s incredible. Without you…”

“I’m here,” he says, and hesitates, deciding to pat her shoulder with his clean hand. She doesn’t seem to mind. “I’ll protect you no matter what.”

“I want to protect you too. It doesn’t feel fair that you’re always looking out for me and I’m just here.”

“Hey, it was your idea to find water in the mountains. And look.” He gestures at the brown-purple trees. Digs his toe into the dirt, which doesn’t crumble as easily anymore. “Everything’s more wet now. Did you notice that?” She nods. “We’re going to find a river. I feel it. I know it. And thanks to you, you saved our lives. Isn’t that protection, too?”

“Thank you.”

He looks around at the scorched clearings. The toppled trees and the leaves with the strange markings, all stripped from their source. He can’t tell if this is some natural event that happened or… something more.

The explosion of light is far behind them now, but perhaps it’s tied to this somehow.

There’s too many uncertainties, but there’s one certainty he’s sure he’ll never lose in the face of adversity.

“Whatever happens, we’re in this together.”