The land around me is drained of life. The trees are hunched bones, and look as ancient as the world itself; the breeze touches them, bites at them and takes out motes of white dust that weep away into the air. Their bark is rotten beyond rotting.

The ground under my leather boots is cracked. Spidery fissures in the dry earth, that widen as I go on, that sometimes become dark pits and deep holes. That become rivens in the ground large enough to swallow me. I tread real careful and slow, as the fog is heavy and good at disguising anything under it. Whisps of mist have given way to a constant breath of green: a heavy shawl that covers the forest and hides the holes beneath me.

There is a stream to my side. Was a stream. Now, like the rest of the forest, it is dead. The water is a black sludge that barely moves, but bubbles like lava and stinks like raw-sewage. I had been looking for the stream for hours, a tiny pen mark on my map, as following it will lead me most of the way to the center of the plague -- and perhaps to its cause.

I follow its serpentine path that winds me deeper into the fog.

Deeper into the dead forest.

Sometimes I think I see eyes in the mist. Distant, half-hidden behind trees. Like red fireflies, or the distant embers of cigarettes.

The stars though, somewhere above me, I never see. Even in the day time, the sun rarely makes it through the black canopy, or else the fog itself.

The trees might be dead, but shrubs with razor-like needles and scale-like foliage are in abundance, and, along with the cracked open ground, slow my progress.

Sometimes I feel the warmth of blood trickle down my legs as they're pricked open, and sometimes -- for just a little -- that pain takes my mind off the suffocating hurt of my cracked ribs that presses my heart each time I breathe.

It's been a day, a night, and a day again, since I found the mask swaying from the tree, lolling in the wind, outside of my tent.

All that time following a compass, alone in a dead forest.

I am watched. I know that much -- can sense that much.

The forest is getting to me, 'cause it's not just those eyes I'm seeing.

The Colt, no matter how often I pack it into my bag and zip up the pocket, no matter if I fucking tie the pocket up with rope just to make sure, has this way of finding its way back into my sweating palm a few minutes later. And I'll just see it there and think: Oh, it's you. You're back. Well, you can stay a few minutes, I guess, 'cause I do like how you feel on my skin. And who knows what's out here, after all...

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But I don't know if I'm doing it for safety -- the bullets never much bothered that elk. So I think, maybe, I'm holding that gun for some other reason, a reason that I won't let my conscious mind settle on. And when those thoughts try to break through, I bury it back inside my bag.

I think back on that night in the woods with Susie. I find my mind wandering back to her a lot at the moment. It's like she's died and I'm having some kind of wake for her, and I know that's wrong but I can't help it.

How old would we been? Seventeen? I think that's when we started dating.

Blindfolded and dumped into the woods. Tent, compass, food... Not so unlike this.

It had been Susie who'd snuck the flask into her pack. It wasn't for me; I'd been provided needles to poke into my skin to 'keep me healthy'.

I'd almost snapped at her, as she'd walked south when we needed to go west.

"Sue, you even looking at the fucking map?"

"No." She's turned around, her back to me as she walks away, so I can't see the grin she's hiding.

"Then why are you pretending to look at it? Come on, it's this way."

"There's something over here I want to show you."

I just want to get back to base first. Show them that I'm not some poison injecting freak show who happens to be Storm Born, but someone who deserves their place on the team.

I cared, back then, what people thought. So I'm fairly fired up by the time I reach her.

Then her wrap around me and her lips close in and all I can think to say is, "Are you wearing perfume? For a mission? Why would you--"

"It's just a practice mission," she says, a bit salacious, as she leans in and kisses me, and I feel the warmth of the world on my tongue.

She tastes of vodka and sugar.

The electricity on my skin in that moment was a different feeling altogether to what this fog is sending through me.

Now, as the mist swims around me -- or as I swim through it -- my arms are shaking, like something getting too much current and about to overload. The skin on my arms and hands is turnin' yellow like jaundice, and I'm glad I can't see my face right now.

Another slow hour passes before I hear it.

Crying.

A baby crying.

I swear to God that's what the sound is like.

I ditch my bag and scramble through the undergrowth, forgetting my compass, forgetting my map, and just following the screaming.

The land is black beneath the baby. Black and cracked, the fissures running towards her like arrows. There are no trees, and it feels more like a clearing in a graveyard than in a forest.

She's wrapped in a white blanket.

Scrawled into the black earth, thick and unsure, are the words:

"If you let them take her, she'll die."

Punctuating 'die' like an exclamation point, a long stick has been thrust into the ground beneath the 'e'.

On it hangs something familiar, that makes my heart sick.

A long beak made out of twigs and leaves.

The baby just lying there by its side.

And I know that I've found the first Storm Born in twenty years.

No.

Not found.

Been led to.

'Cause someone's been here. Been looking after her.

A shiver, like melting ice, trickles down my spine.