When assessing the survivability of any given situation, it’s important to remember the rule of three: Generally, an otherwise healthy individual can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

Sixteen days into Nina’s unexpected sojourn into the wilderness, she was swiftly approaching the last limit.

What had started as an incessant and hollow ache in her stomach had long since faded into a general and persistent malaise. She felt tired from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to sleep and the intermittent migraine she’d developed on day three had worsened significantly in the last twelve hours.

To put it more simply, Nina was fucked.

Waiting in place for a rescue that would never come had cost her two weeks that would have been better spent foraging for food and scouting the area. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time. Not when every minute she went without eating was a minute her body spent cannibalizing itself to fuel her survival. If she wanted to live, Nina would have to save herself.

Unfortunately, that was easier said than done.

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Making her way to the nearest city or town would be ideal, but Greenridge—the podunk town she’d stopped in to get gas right before this disaster—had vanished along with the road when the storm hit. More disturbingly, so too had the Blue Ridge Mountains.

She’d climbed half a dozen trees on days one and two, each one taller than the last in an attempt to find some hint of civilization, but no matter how many times she’d looked, the scene that met her eyes refused to make sense.

Gone were the sprawling farms and vineyards that she’d driven through on the way here. Instead, unbroken forest surrounded her to the east, west, and south as far as the eye could see. And the rolling mountains which should have been visible to the west? They were now jagged snow-covered peaks that stood several miles north of her current position.

She was much farther afield than a thunderstorm could account for.

Aside from a bleak theory that she’d died and this was some sort of limbo, the only explanation Nina could come up with was that the white mushrooms encircling her car were precisely what superstition said they were—a doorway to some mythological otherworld.

A doorway that appeared to have locked behind her, if her failed attempts to get it to open again were anything to go by.

Nina kicked her tire. “This is all your fault.” All she’d wanted to do was pull off the road to wait out the storm. If her treads hadn’t been worn down to almost nothing a full 5,000 miles before she should have had to worry about replacing them, then that would have been the end of it. Instead, she’d lost traction about three feet from the road, slipping down a gentle slope and through a goddamned fairy ring.

Nina was tempted to stand around cursing her luck a little longer, but as she’d already established, her body was currently cannibalizing itself.

It was time to brave the forest.