“So a thrift shop? You wanted to go here?”

“It’s an antiques store... No! It’s closed.”

“On the bright side, the theater’s open. Let me guess, you don’t want to go.”

“I bet twenty dollars that you won’t watch that new horror movie with me.”

***

A day turns into two, then three, and the sun still blazes like a supernova.

Its glacial pace across the sky screws Cora’s perception. She checks her phone too many times to count, watching the minutes tick by, then hours, yet the sun shifts a fraction of a degree.

They sleep in shifts. Cora is the first, followed by Callista, then finally Liam. Between sleeping periods, they navigate their way upstream, nearing the mountains. Foraging for elikanders. Boiling their water inside the plastic bottles.

Cora is proud of that idea. But the water is acrid, tainted yellow, and the plastic ends up charred and warped. Callista doesn’t complain, and Liam is stoic, never once flinching every time he downs a bottle.

After the fourth “day” spent trekking through stretches of weeds brushing their knees, they thin out, replaced with gravel bunched up against the shoreline. The skies thin, too, as the sun wearily sinks into the horizon, reluctant to relinquish its hold to the great, bloodied eyeball peeking over the opposite side. Great, bloody streaks are painted through clouds, drenched in darkness as the sun creeps lower and lower.

By silent agreement, they finish boiling their water and extinguish the flames. The embers are still glowing when Cora passes the blanket to Liam and Callista.

“I’ll take first watch,” Cora volunteers.

“Say no more,” Liam says, and he’s out moments after his head thumps on his makeshift pillow of needles and dirt.

With Liam’s blanket to buffer their bodies against the coming chill, all three are shoulder to shoulder, leg to leg. Liam’s sandwiched in the middle, but his bulk takes up most of the blanket, and Cora wants to let both of them sleep, so Callista takes up the rest.

Technically, Cora could scoot closer to Liam, but he’s all gross and sweaty and unlike last time, the cold isn’t yet creeping into her bones.

Also, because he’ll hate her after she tells the truth.

What would she have done without him? She plays with the strip of gauze dangling off her wrist. Over the last few days, the throbbing pain has reduced to a manageable ache, if she doesn’t think too hard about it.

What couldn’t she have done without him? His feet poke out the blanket, with socks, his shoes placed neatly aside. Tufts of hair and a glimpse of forehead emerge at the other end, but his face is hidden.

Good. Cora can’t bear seeing the face of the boy she can’t stop lying to. Maybe at the beginning she should’ve told them. Gotten that grotesque, convulsing weight out of her chest into the open, and finished off her guilt. But every day that passes bonds them closer and closer, and it’ll only hurt more when she tells him.

She stares at him a few more seconds, gnawing on her lip.

Maybe she is still a little like her old self.

Now you’re realizing that? Mari’s voice echoes and echoes until it loops into shrill dissonance. Cora winces, clapping her hands over her ears. The effect breaks, and she’s left alone with the crackling embers, faint wind, and dull roar of the river.

She flops onto her back. The stars are bizarre, some bunched into spiral galaxies, others spread out like lanterns on paper boats drifting through the cosmic ocean. Constellations foreign to her slowly emerge. Then again, she wasn’t the biggest stargazer back home, but they’re probably different.

However, even she can tell the red moon is the most bizarre of all.

Especially the winding, puckered scar near the southern pole. Even at such a great distance, the disrupted terrain and craters along the galactic wound send a sense of foreboding. Of what exactly, Cora can’t pinpoint, but it’s the same feeling she felt back at the old battlefield.

Against all precaution, she tucks her knees to her chest and settles her phone on her thighs. She checks the battery. 16%. Good enough.

The metal objects look worse than Cora remembers. Metal chunks and the carapace at the center create the buried semblance of a flying airplane. A UFO, saucer-shaped. She scoffs at that idea. Real aliens are so much more human. Callista is living proof of that.

The obelisk captures her attention. Even the best modern phone camera can’t fully capture every detail, especially at night. It’s like a pencil stick stabbed through a styrofoam plate. The nearest metal chunks lean away. Blown away through incredible force, maybe.

She stares at the image until her eyes dry up and it hurts to blink.

“What are you?” she whispers, staring at the pixelated definition.

“A Transient warship.”

Cora squeaks, whirling around. Her phone slides off her legs, landing with a muffled thump on the ground. Callista raises her hands. Her eyes don’t glow, at least.

“Callista!” Cora picks up her phone and blows off the dirt. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry,” Callista says, clasping her hands before her. She keeps a respectful distance, shoulders hunched, eyes downcast. “I can’t sleep. And I wanted to know what you were looking at.”

“That’s fine, but please don’t scare me like that next time.”

“Understood.”

Cora scrolls back to the image of the battlefield. “You said this was what? A Transient warship?”

She hears a deep intake of breath. Then a sigh, like Callista’s been burdened with something unimaginable.

“Yes. They destroy towns and cities that rebel. They burn crops and ruin lands so they can’t grow crops. What else do I mean?” Briefly–and just briefly, so fast Cora wonders if she imagines it–Callista’s pupils glow.

Cora flinches. Callista shakes her head, reaching out to her, then withdraws her arm to her side. “I can’t help it. I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Cora pries her fingers from her palm. She can still feel the indents in her palm where she’d dug her nails in. “Stop. It’s not your fault.” She shrugs, like the sight of those glowing eyes didn’t nearly send her into a heart attack. “I can’t relate to what you went through, but I understand. It’s okay.”

“And I’m thankful you can’t relate. The Transients are brutal to the worlds they conquer.”

“They fight back, though.” Cora stares at the grainy image of the downed warship. “You said they rebel. They win sometimes, right?”

“If you’re a good citizen, they won’t hurt you,” Callista mutters. She extends her index finger’s claw and inspects it. “That’s what my parents said. Figures, since they worked for those monsters.”

Whatever frail peace Cora gathered is being dashed into pieces. “Were they forced to?”

The response she gets is a bout of dry laughter. Callista grins, retracting her claw, planting her hands on her lap. “If they were, I wonder why they had a big house. Lots of food. Lots of garden space, security, walls, everything a person could dream of.” Her eyes glaze over. “I wasn’t blind. I saw what happened to my people. They suffered so much. One time, I saw a starving little boy get beaten because he stole some bread from the local baker. And you know what my mom said?”

Cora doesn’t speak. Callista continues, picking up after the pause, the deliberate invitation for Cora to ask what, what did her mom ask? But she knows the answer already.

“She said she respected the Transients for putting ‘the animals’ in their place.” Callista gags, clenching her hands. Her claws protract. “If you’re wondering about my dad, I think he hated them at first, but piece by piece he became a shell. He was nothing like the dad I grew up with.”

Callista retracts her claws and turns away. Cora stares at her in horror. “But anyway, they’re gone now. They were murdered in the Purge with everybody else I ever loved.”

Deafening silence. Cora shakes, sick to her stomach. She flexes her hand. She can’t think of anything to say. Maybe there’s nothing to say. Maybe all she needs to do is to be there, like how Mari was there for her, or like how Liam is there for her.

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Fuck that. Was that part of the Mari-hallucination, or Cora’s own crumbling mind?

Actions speak louder than words, but words can change worlds. That lesson is etched deep into Cora’s weary bones.

The hard part, though, is picking the right set of words. And she is currently a desert of words, grasping at blanks.

“Callista.”

Say something! Cora’s own thoughts. But it dredges up uncomfortable memories of how horrible Cora is at comforting people. Maybe it’ll always be a part of her. Mari is gone because of her actions, after all.

People don’t change in days. Who is she deluding? She’ll screw up what to say, Callista will clam up, and she’ll never trust Cora with anything personal again.

She deserves better than you, you know that? Mari’s remark scathes her. Cora is trapped between two worlds, listening to the old, or maneuvering into the new.

But people change. I’m trying. And, in a quieter thought that barely brushes conscious thought, she adds, And if you give me a chance, I’ll try for you, too.

Cora gulps and lets the hurt soften her tone. “Callista–”

“Is it bad that even though my parents were bad people, I still miss them?”

Cora reels. This is wrong. This is all wrong. Callista had broken down when she told her story, and Cora had felt her pain through her words. But the pain in her question is magnified tenfold, a hammer slamming into Cora’s chest.

Callista’s eyes are robbed of power, and her body is still, shoulders hunched. The look of someone defeated. Someone who had their future beaten and stolen.

Maybe there’s nothing to say because Cora misses her parents a lot. Her loving, misunderstanding parents. But she can safely say they’re safe back home, probably grieving her sudden disappearance, but alive.

Callista, though…

Cora surges forward and hugs Callista. Like a rag doll, her head drops onto her shoulder and the first sob breaks through, the blow of the impact leaving Cora staggering. She closes her eyes and hugs Callista tighter.

“They loved you, didn’t they?” Cora’s eyes moisten.

“They’re the reason why I’m here. They knew about the Purge and saved me.”

“Then it’s okay.” Cora rests her chin on Callista’s shoulder, squeezing her tight. “It’s okay. They’ll live on in your memories. And you can do the good they never could.”

In another world, another time, her friends would’ve called the line cheesy. Even Mari would’ve poked fun at her. But Callista, she shudders and sniffles in response, drowning another sob in Cora’s shirt.

“I won’t forget them.”

***

A day turns into two, then three, and the moon still gleams like a polished ruby.

Their pace slows to a creep. The temperature plummets. Icy winds envelop them the higher they climb the mountain. The river is massive, disgorging untold millions of gallons of water, an ever-present roar Cora can never seem to get used to.

On the second day, Callista spits out the last of her boiled water and drinks from the river itself. Liam stops and stares at her, then at the bottle in his hands, by now warped and stained a terrible yellow.

“Don’t even think about it,” Cora says, stepping past him. “Callista!” The river drowns her voice. She steps closer and calls out again. “Callista!”

She wipes off her lips and offers the filled water bottle to her. “It tastes great!”

“Yeah, and it might have a bunch of diseases!”

On the third day, or night, Cora guesses, Liam drinks from the river after Callista wakes up energetic and well-rested. They spend the final stretch of the long night foraging for elikanders while Cora boils yet more water.

Several bottles crumple beneath the heat, their plastic charred and twisted beyond recognition. Cora gags down the water, sure that the chemicals will someday kill her, but the alternative is succumbing to alien diseases, Callista’s reminder about parity still fresh in her mind.

They eat. They forage. They explore. They walk. Sometimes they talk. More often than not, they lapse into amiable silence, interrupted by Liam’s occasional sarcastic remark or Callista’s wistful recollections of her times spent camping with her dad.

Liam must’ve noticed a change between her and Cora, how they’re together more often than not, or how Cora prefers to ask Callista for help rather than him. His banter dies down and he becomes a skulking shadow, lingering at the edge of Cora’s consciousness.

But she can’t talk to him without being reminded of the lie their friendship is built upon.

The days pass by quicker than she expects. On the second day–night–her battery dies, and her solar charger charges her phone to just above 90% before it dies, emptied of life.

Cora obsessively checks the time. The hours don’t match the emptiness of the night, the world consumed by the moon’s bloodied sight, the gloom and lumpy clouds blocking the view of the starlit sky.

The date changes, too. Almost two weeks since she arrived here. Since she hurt Mari.

Sometimes, when Cora is sure Liam and Callista are sleeping, she slips the box out of her backpack and holds it. No amount of desperate pleading returns her back home. The box is empty, empty, empty, nothing like the object brimming with magical potential she experimented with.

On the fourth night, rather than hold the box again, she enters a staring contest with the moon, and loses.

Her eyes tear up. She scowls and rubs at her eyes. They don’t stop watering, even as she scrubs at them with the heel of her hand and trembles violently, wracked by the cold.

How long until she can go home?

Of course, the moon stares her down, mocking.

After she wakes Callista up, she sleeps, one moment lapsing into a restless void, the next bathing in sunlight. Cora gasps and pulls the blanket over her head, but the sunlight still paints the back of her eyelids a hazy rose.

Something tickles the back of her ear. “Co-ra.”

“Holy fuck!” She madly scrambles to put as much distance between her and Liam as possible. Which isn’t much, because somewhere in the middle of her sleep her leg fell asleep, and her leg tingles with pins and needles.

“That was uncalled for,” Callista says, somewhere behind Cora. She rubs her eyes and breaks off bits of that annoying crusty material in her tear ducts.

“What? She did the same to me.” Liam clears his throat. “And we don’t have much time.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Cora growls, holding her hand up to shield from the sunrise.

“Not if the creatures get to us first.”

Cora swears her heart stops beating.

“Creatures?”

Howls pierce through the river’s roar. Sharp, cutting like knives, turning her arms and legs into jelly. She whimpers, then gnaws on her bottom lip, hoping neither of them heard her.

A lone howl carries across the river and slides between the crashing waves on rock and the roar of static in her ears.

Every inch of her skin tingles with instinctive terror. That howl sounds deeper. Louder. Smoother.

“I’ve heard that before,” Callista says, but her words are lost on Cora as she curls up, eyes widened.

“The creatures,” she squeaks out, shrinking beneath the blanket. She hates that she can’t get up. Not just because her leg is next to useless at the moment.

The mutants will finish what they started. It doesn’t matter that Callista acts as backup. More and more will come like before and they’ll attack and attack until they’re too tired to fight and then–

Metal slides on leather as Liam removes his knife. “You’ve heard that howl? It sounded different from the others. Do you know what they look like?”

“No. You told me they’re deformed. Dangerous creatures, correct?” Callista turns around, tilting her head. “I hear it again. It sounds closer.”

Cora doesn’t, but she believes her. She lets out a shaky breath. “We need to go.”

“I know. But we need information first,” Liam says. He paces back and forth, twirling the knife. He raises his head and squints against the sun. “I don’t see them. They might stick to the woods.”

“That’s bullshit.” Cora glances at each of them. Liam is doing a good job concealing his nervousness. Callista looks concerned, like Cora is the one they should worry about. “They’ll come after us, you know it.”

“Then they’ll deal with me.” His face hardens. So, too, does his voice, deep and unwavering. “And Callista?”

She dips her head. “We’re together now, no?”

Liam offers his hand to Cora. She stares, uncomprehending.

“Together.”

She clasps it. She squeezes, staring into the darkened depths of his eyes.

“I don’t know if I can help,” she whispers. Her hand is clammy. Liam doesn’t seem to mind, instead nodding seriously.

“If we need to run, promise me you will. I’ve seen people freeze up before.”

A distant part of herself tickles her brain. “Is that offer for a piggyback ride still open?”

He stares at her for a second, slack-jawed. Then the slightest hint of rose colors his cheeks, and he pulls away like she’s made of acid, grabbing his hand to his chest.

“Yes. Always.” He glances at Callista. She offers a wave. “I mean of course.”

The howls intensify. They interlap with screeches and hoots. New additions to the monsters hunting them. They sound wrong, nothing like the nature documentaries showed, more like audio played from a broken record player.

Cora touches her bandaged side. Her wound is healing nicely, filling in with scar tissue. Then her arms, and a spot on her cheek, places where the mutants attacked her, since then healed.

It’ll be different from before, she thinks, running her tongue over her teeth. We’re better prepared. It’s daytime.

They’re better prepared. You’re nothing but a leech, the Mari-hallucination seethes. Cora recoils. She’d almost forgotten her hallucination existed, how Mari used to sound like.

“They’re coming,” Callista says, quietly.

Liam hoists Cora onto her feet. She wobbles, knees shaking, legs like noodles, her leg still awash with the residual traces of prickling needles. “Pack everything up.” She starts toward her backpack. Bouncing around inside her pocket, the porcelain shard makes itself known. “If they try to ambush us, we’ll kill them.”

She will let nothing, nothing, stop her from finding Mari.

Even if it kills Cora.