Max stared at the women who stood in the middle of his hideaway. She had lifted her club to shoulder height and bent her knees to sink into a ready crouch.

“Who,” she said again, her gaze flickering between Max’s face and the fire he held out, “are you?”

Max finally realized that he had a handful of fire pointed at the first person he could ever remember meeting. He flapped his hand to release it and took a step back.

As the room plunged into semi-darkness, Max heard footsteps crunch toward him over broken stone and the woman’s shadowy shape dart close. Then he felt a rush of air pass inches in front of his face.

He stumbled backward as he realized that the woman had just swung her club directly at his head.

“Wait!”

The loose stone of the collapsed tunnel shifted under his feet and he fell onto his back. As he did, a remote part of his mind appreciated how much more painful the fall might have been if he hadn’t been wearing a new pair of pants. The rest of his mind was occupied by the fact that the woman standing over him, now just a shadowy figure, had swung her club over his head with all her might. If he hadn’t fallen she would have struck him in the ribs.

She was trying to kill him.

Acting as the hostile jungle had taught him to, Max raised his palm in the direction of the woman’s midsection, summoned fire into his palm, and shoved a fire bolt at her.

The mosaic chamber filled with light as the ball of flame burst, wreathing the women in a cloud of red and orange light. In that brief moment of illumination Max looked up into her face. In her frantic, wide-eyed glare he saw not menace, but a mixture of fear and grim determination. Then the light was gone and they were left facing each other in the dark again.

Max lay on his back on the ground as the shadowy figure above him turned and retreated to the archway leading to the collapsed chamber with the pool. Her shape filled the opening for a moment before she disappeared down the passage. Her brightling, a streak of golden fur, disappeared after her.

Max held his breath and listened. When he didn’t hear the splashing of water or the sound of the woman desperately trying to scale the walls, he climbed carefully to his feet. He paused again to listen. Very, very faintly, he could hear panicked breathing that matched his own. He took a deep, steadying breath and moved to stand just beyond the archway.

He stood there in the dark, opening and closing his mouth, unsure of what to say, what to ask. Had he hurt her? Had she really wanted to hurt him, or was she just trying to protect herself? But there was a more important question, he realized, and it slipped out before he could reconsider it.

“Are you one of the people who brought me here?”

That hadn’t been his first impression when he saw her. She’d looked just like him, wearing the same clothes and accompanied by a glowing golden creature. He assumed it had given her the same club Aurum had offered Max through the vision inside the yellow star. But now he wasn’t sure. She’d attacked him the first chance she’d had and the fear he had seen in her eyes might not have been fear like his own, the fear of someone abducted and trapped in a strange jungle, but the fear of the captor trapped in an underground chamber with a vindictive captive who could conjure fire at will.

The woman’s voice was both inquisitive and neutral when it finally drifted down the hall. “Brought you here?”

Max frowned and looked down at Aurum. The woman sounded calmer than he’d expected, and free from pain. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, had only wanted to stop her from attacking him, but he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or worried that his fire may have been entirely ineffective.

“I didn’t come here by choice.” Max paused. He continued when the woman didn’t answer. “I don’t re–I don’t know how I got here.”

The woman was silent for long moments. Her voice was slightly louder when it came again, as if she’d moved closer to the hallway, but she remained out of sight. “I don’t either,” she said.

Max took an excited step forward, then stopped.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” said the woman. Her voice was slightly puzzled. “I’m not.”

“Good,” Max said. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry I startled you. I’ve been…staying here…and I didn’t expect to find anyone else waiting for me.”

Max looked around at the dark mosaic room. Not the most inviting place for a frank and friendly exchange of information.

“If I go back outside, will you come out and talk with me? You’re the only person I’ve met here. Maybe we can help each other.”

“We can talk,” she said. “Outside.”

Max made his way back to the collapsed tunnel, crunching his way deliberately up the slope so the woman could hear him as he left. He moved a few dozen feet away from the entrance, sat on a jagged stone half-buried by fallen leaves, and tried his best to look non-threatening.

The stone, he realized absently, might have been part of a larger structure that once stood above his hideaway. Thrown down by a wandering tree, maybe. A palm tree or something else. He shifted slightly so he could scan the forest for walking trees while he waited.

The woman emerged a few minutes later. She’d crept silently up the collapsed hallways, then rushed out of the entrance all at once. Seeing that Max had seated himself nearby, she stood to the side of the hideaway entrance and watched him.

Max studied her intently. She still held her club, but she no longer looked like she wanted to charge Max and cave his chest in, but her powerful, compact frame gave him no doubt that she could. She had blonde hair that hung down past her shoulders and framed her sharp, angular face. Her eyes were a crystalline blue that made her intent expression all the more piercing when Max met her gaze. She had been studying him the way he had been scrutinizing her.

“Do you remember me?” he asked. He could hear the incautious, eager hopefulness in his own voice. He hadn’t meant to ask that question either, but hadn’t spent long rehearsing all the things he could say to the first person he met. He was barely holding back the flood of questions that had been building in him since he’d arrived.

The woman’s intent expression grew still, then distant.

“Should I?”

“I don’t know,” Max said. “I can’t remember. Can you? Remember me. Remember anything.”

“No.” The woman’s expression softened, then she sighed. She let the tip of her club drop to rest in the dirt. “I can’t remember anything.”

Max nodded then looked away, swallowing the disappointment.

“Well, I’m Max.” He reached down to run a knuckle gently between Aurum’s ears. “And this is Aurum.”

The woman looked startled, then looked down at the golden creature sitting by her ankle.

It had Aurum’s golden fur, the same large ears, and the same nimble-looking clawed hands, but some of their other features were markedly different. Its face resembled something between a dog and a bat, and where Aurum had a lean, narrow frame, this new brightling had a relatively thick, powerful looking body.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Is this another of your secrets?” the woman said, looking down at the golden creature with one eyebrow raised. “Do you have a name?”

Her eyes widened slightly and Max looked down at the brightling by her feet. He expected to see golden letters crawling through the space above the brightling’s ears, but when he saw nothing he looked back to Mineau. The woman was smiling.

“Well?”

“‘Orla,’” the woman said.

When she looked at Max again and grinned, Max felt his face break into an answering smile. It felt good. He felt himself grinning wider.

“I’m Mineau,” the woman said.

She turned to scan the ground around her, then took a few quick steps to her left and crouched to squat on a low, flat rock opposite Max. She kept her hand on the end of her club, but her grip was loose. Her smile widened again as she sat.

“So,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

—

Max was both reassured and disappointed to learn that he and Mineau had nearly identical experiences of waking up in the middle of an endless plain of red wild flowers.

“I was very calm, at first,” she said. “I just stood there looking for a while. It was beautiful. It was like…”

Max watched Mineau frown. She drew a breath to speak, but closed her mouth again with a frustrated sigh. Her right hand tightened around the end of her club while her left hand twitched. The fingers crept and crawled, as if they could find the words she was looking for.

“It’s so frustrating to be half a person like this,” she said. She looked into the middle distance between them, not seeing him. “I start sentences and thoughts, but I don’t always know how to finish them. Sometimes I do. But sometimes...”

Max knew what she meant. Sometimes he had intuitions about the way something might be phrased, as if he knew the shape of a sentence but the pieces needed to fill it in had gone missing. Things, places, people he must have known. Maybe ideas, feelings, beliefs. So many of his thoughts were bracketed by the suspicion that what remained to him was dwarfed by what he had lost.

“Did you see the city on your way here?”

Mineau looked at him, her eyes refocusing. “Hm?”

“In the middle of the sea of poppies,” Max said. “The city surrounding the tower. Did you see it, too?”

“‘Sea of Poppies.’ Is that what it’s called?”

Max shrugged. “That’s what I've been calling it. Or thinking about it.”

“I like that. And I did see it. The city. Briefly.”

“Do you think that’s the city stone monster was talking about? ‘Orliat, City of Shards?’”

Mineau returned his shrug. “Could be. It did look disjointed, like large sections were built at different times or in different styles. That might make sense, given the name.”

“I didn’t see much of it,” Max said, rotating his hands around each other. “I was tumbling when I went into the Tower.”

“Hm,” Mineau said, glancing at his hands. She flattened her free hand into a line and sliced it through the air. “I went in like an arrow.”

Mineau looked around at the jungle. “The stone mouth mentioned a Tower, but I’m not sure that’s where we are. I saw enough before I hit the ground to know that there’s no way this place could fit inside a structure like that.”

Max nodded and looked over her shoulder at the dense verdure of the jungle. The same thought had occurred to him, but the incompatibility had been too strange, too unsettling to puzzle at for long. Until that afternoon, he’d needed to stay focused on food and shelter and clothing. But as he thought about it again, he wasn't sure Mineau had to be right. They had no reason to trust anything the stone beast had told them, but they had no reason to trust anything their instincts told them, either. They could be anywhere or inside anything.

Max sat up a little straighter and took a deep, steadying breath. There were still other, more important things to focus on. He had clothes now, and access to food and water. He had a place to sleep, but none of those things were guaranteed as the jungle continued to surprise him in profoundly unsettling ways.

He let his breath out and looked at Mineau’s club. “Why did you choose that from the yellow star?”

Mineau looked at him quizzically, then followed his gaze to the club.

“It was the only viable choice,” she said. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because when I–” Max rolled his hand absently as he searched for the right word– “selected it, it showed me dying when I tried to fight with it. Painfully. Over and over again.”

“Did it?” Mineau said wonderingly. “Did you have any other options?”

“A slingshot,” Max said. “And lots of other elemental bolts.”

“I had the same. In the illusion I survived with the slingshot, but this seemed more effective,” Mineau said, shaking the club.

“How many times do you need to hit something before it dies?”

“Usually only twice,” Mineau said. “You?”

“With that? It always showed me dying before I could finish off the tentacle monster.”

“Tentacle monster…right. What about when you use your fire?” Mineau gestured at herself. “It didn’t do anything to me.”

“I noticed. That worried me when I thought you were trying to kill me.”

He smiled, but Mineau’s answering smile was brief as she looked at him expectantly.

“Most other things go down after two hits,” Max said. “It varies, though. How do you reach the seed throwers when they’re up in the trees?”

“‘Seed throwers?’”

“The black furry creatures that climb around and jump between branches.”

“Oh,” Mineau said, “you mean the lemurs?” Mineau shrugged. “I don’t. I run.”

Lemurs, Max thought. He didn’t know that word. Hadn’t seen it anywhere before. How did she know it?

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of running.”

Mineau smiled weakly again, nodding.

Max watched Mineau as her slight smile faded and her eyes grew distant again. He had just opened his mouth to ask another question when Mineau’s eyes snapped to him again. “Have you killed a lemur?”

“Yes,” he said. “A few.”

Mineau leaned forward. “What do they taste like?”

Max straightened slightly, unnerved by the intensity of her gaze.

“I have no idea,” he said. He looked down at Aurum. “The little one grabs the dust–the sparkling green stuff,” he clarified when he saw her brows come together, “while I try to make sure I won’t be surrounded by whatever shows up after they die. I’ve only tried eating the green tentacle monsters.”

“They’re called ‘Ambling aloes’,” Mineau said absently. “That’s too bad. I was hoping you’d found something better.”

“I like them,” Max said, frowning at the authoritative way Mineau had said ‘ambling aloes.’ “They’ve got a bright, fruity taste.”

Ambling aloe was as good a name as any, he supposed, but she’d corrected him like she knew definitely what the monster’s true name was, what the people from the jungle might have called them. And she called the black furry monsters ‘lemurs.” How could she know the names of things if she’d never been to the jungle before?

“They’re bitter,” Mineau said. “I can barely choke them down.”

“They’re not so bitter if you avoid the burnt bits…” Max began, but then he stopped. “But you’re eating them raw, aren't you.”

Mineau stared back at him, then she turned to her brightling. She muttered something and a faint haze of golden light appeared in the space above Orla’s ears. Mineau reached both hands into the light and her hands disappeared up to the wrists. When she pulled them back again, the golden light disappeared and she held a stiff green monster tentacle in each hand.

“This is what I’ve been eating,” she said, gesturing at Max with both tentacles. “Are you telling me yours are cooked?”

“Yes,” Max said. He raised his hand and conjured flame, careful not to point it in her direction. “Mine are roasted. Probably because I’ve been killing them with fire.”

While Mineau digested that, Max looked down at Aurum. He passed an open hand over the brightling’s ears, but when no golden light appeared he looked back at Mineau.

“How did you do that? Does Orla make food for you?”

“No,” Mineau said. She gestured with the tentacles. “She just holds onto these so they don’t spoil.”

Max looked down at Aurum where he had curled up between Max’s feet. He leaned forward until his face was a few inches away from the creature’s ears.

“Aurum,” he said.

The brightling opened its eyes and looked up at him expectantly.

“Aurum,” Max said again, “please show me how I can give you food to carry so I can stop running through the jungle with my arms full.”