“Okay, Cora, this isn’t funny anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You spend so much time here. I’m worried about you. Your parents, too.”

“This–it’s important, okay? I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood to talk right now.”

***

It’s not fair.

Beneath her, Liam is a hurricane of blades and fists ripping through the mutants that slip through Callista’s barrages. Skulls, stomachs, and legs meet Liam’s knife, in and out before the body finishes dropping. Callista throws clumps of rocks at several times the speed of sound, the air booming, her muscles shuddering beneath the might of her power. The smaller mutants vanish, reduced to scraps of meat clinging to bone, while the bigger mutants are torn to shreds, stumbling several paces before collapsing, twitching as blue blood pools around them.

Cora’s throat is raw from screaming directions. Left, right, up, down–mutants converge from every angle, sometimes in groups, sometimes as individuals big and strong enough to count as two.

Every time, Liam strikes them down, or Callista punches through several feet of tissue. And the blood. So much blood. So much pulped meat and torn organs spills onto the forest floor. The stench of death leaves Cora’s head spinning. Howls, hoots, and screeches scrape her eardrums raw.

But despite their best efforts, her friends are not invincible. Liam tries to dodge a mutant’s claw, but it rakes his hip, ripping the fabric and leaving behind a jagged mess of red. Callista’s scars pop open, and blood trickles down her arms onto the rocks she hurls into the writhing mass of mutants.

It’s a battle they’re losing.

Cora stares at the carnage. Some distant corner of her mind calls out warnings, but she stares at the horizon, the place Mari had charged so freely, so strongly, until she was cut down.

Now, the slab-like mutants curl like tongues in her place, long and wet, dragging their colossal weights toward the forest. Hundreds of squid-mutants cling to their sides or tops, arms and tentacles limp.

Cora’s insides are as mushed up as the mutant Callista splatters on a tree. Her heart hurts more than Liam dicing up mutants.

She should be down there, bleeding and fighting, covering them. Instead, she sits high in a tree like a princess, spared the worst of the assault, stuck watching her friends get worn down, hurt, and hurt again, pain hidden by grunts and grimaces.

Useless. Useless! Mari’s wrath storms into Cora’s mind. She doubles over, spent, unable to watch her two friends die because she’s nothing. Get the fuck up! Do something, coward!

“I-I can’t,” Cora whispers, hoarse. She holds her trembling fingers up to see. “My wrist is broken. I can’t get down from here.” Cora curls into herself. “I’m a coward. A stupid, stupid coward who doesn’t deserve any of this.”

Liam shouts something undecipherable, smashing his fist into a mutant’s oval head. Several surge into close quarters, howling and hooting, throwing themselves into his outstretched blade. Except a single, ferret-shaped mass breaks from the trees and darts at him.

Cora opens her mouth to scream. “Liam, behind you!”

Five feet of lean mass pounces on his back. Its forelimbs claw through his shirt. Liam cries out, slamming his elbow into the ferret-thing, but it squirms past his arm and bites his shoulder.

“Liam!”

Callista knocks the mutant off him. He staggers, pressing his hand to his shoulder, eyes widened. His knife clatters to the ground. Trickles of bright red blood paint his fingers red.

He grimaces. “Fuck,” he spits out, clenching his fist. The ferret-thing slinks around Callista’s ankles, curls into a tight ball, and explodes into action. It is a frenzy of teeth and claws, swiping at Liam, who weaves and punches at a body that contorts at impossible angles, dodging his blows, while wrapping around his outstretched arm and biting his forearm.

Callista can’t help. She hurls fistfuls of rocks at the horde, trampling the forest, scampering up trees and launching themselves like guided missiles at her. “A little help!” Liam smashes his elbow over the ferret-creature’s back. It cracks, caving in at a right angle, a dying hiss escaping the paralyzed creature, before he kicks it away.

Panting, bloodied, he reaches for his knife. His lips peel back in a snarl. His eyes are pinpricks, teeth clenched, neck muscles taut. “We can’t,” he heaves, gripping the knife and holding it, outstretched. Briefly, his eyes meet Cora’s, safe on her tree branch. “There’s nowhere to go.”

Right before her eyes, he crumbles into his true image. A boy she doomed to die in another world, for her. Cora gags, the nature of her true self worming and squirming and tightening like a noose around her neck. She sobs, clapping her hand over her mouth, hating that she hasn’t changed at all.

Weeks of walking, talking, bleeding, crying, weren’t enough to change her. This is all my fault. She silently screams, teeth grating against each other, hard enough that pain shoots up her jaw, eyes scrunched shut to block out the reality of what she’s done.

It’s all your fault, you stupid coward. Mari’s voice, cruel and hateful. Cora whimpers, shuddering at Liam’s grunts of pain and Callista’s thunderclaps of supersonic projectiles hurled at the mutants.

It’s all my fault.

You’re a monster. You steal, you lie, you hurt your friends–when will it end? Huh?

“I tried. I promise,” Cora whispers, snorting back the freely running mucus leaking out her nose.

You didn’t try at all. You kept lying to yourself that you were becoming a better person when they did all the work. They’re the ones fighting to keep you and them alive. They’re the ones who foraged for food, who tested the water first, who carried you if you were tired. And what did you do?

“Stop,” Cora whimpers, stabbing her nails into her palm. “Stop, just leave me alone!”

You doomed them! You doomed him! You doomed her! All because you’re too selfish. And you doomed me, too. You killed me.

Cora’s head pounds. Blood, blood everywhere, dribbles down tree trunks, crashes in waves against the torn bodies, seeps from Callista’s scars and leaks down Liam’s shoulder.

Screams, howls, half-maddened shouts, and wails deafen her. Her ears ring endlessly. Her vision distorts with tears. Blood, so much blood, cakes the world.

Bodies rupture under Newtonian forces. Bodies shut down when brains cease to function. Bodies cave beneath exerted pressure, delivered through punches and jabs that snap bones and rupture organs. Bodies tire under extended duress, the cells fatiguing and collapse becoming imminent.

It was a matter of time.

Callista convulses, her throwing arm twisting behind her back. She manages to cry out in agony before she collapses, frothing at the mouth. The horde snaps like a rubber band. Mutants are spit out, and they pile directly on Callista.

Liam carves his way through several mutants, working toward her, when a horse-mutant slams into his side. He goes flying, hitting the side of a tree with a dull thud, before more mutants pounce on him.

You killed me. You killed them. And now you’re next. Oh, this will be glorious. An eye for an eye, but the creatures don’t care. At least you’ll be good for something in the end.

Cora removes the porcelain shard, runs her thumb over its edge, looks down at the clearing below, at Liam, and jumps.

She wishes she could scream. Then maybe the pain might be more bearable. She slams feet-first on a mutant, breaking its back. Her footing slips and she crashes hard onto the ground, beside Liam. He clutches his knife and stares at her with horror.

“Why?” he mouths, eyes moist.

“We fight together.” She loosens her hold on the shard and grabs his hand, squeezing it. “Until the end.”

Immediately, mutants swarm her, saliva burning her neck, arms, and face. Claws rip through her clothes. Teeth scrape her skin. She stabs and stabs and stabs and stabs and stabs.

Heads slam into her flanks. Horns cut her stomach. Hooved feet crush her own. She’s a slave under adrenaline, reduced to a machine, stabbing and getting hurt and crying and dying.

A bright, blinding pain strikes her chest. She collapses, breath knocked out of her. She thought only cartoons showed stars floating above one’s head, but they float before her, more pinpricks of light than anything she can pin down.

Six feet of oily, intestine-like mutant stares back at her. It bares its teeth, sharp and lethal, and claws at her chest. Cora screams, but it comes out as a feeble hiss. The gashes leave blazing trails of fire, cuts blossoming open on her chest, skin torn beneath the mutant’s relentless clawing toward her thundering heart. She swings at the creature, porcelain shard dragging through its hide, but a single swipe of its claws cuts the back of her hand. She drops the shard, her hand on fire.

Cora tastes iron on her lips, blood gushing down her face. Her vision is spotty. Several mutants stand on her legs, gnawing at her hips, calves, feet. She can’t even scream. She can’t move at all, pinned under by too much weight, crushing and suffocating. Her chest is breaking open beneath the relentless assault of the intestine-like mutant.

Cora sobs. “Help!”

Help? After everything you’ve done? Suspended in time and space, caught between degrees of agony, sprouting from Cora’s cuts, scrapes, and open wounds, the Mari-apparition manifests.

Five-foot-six of uninterrupted visual hallucination blooms to life. She looks exactly like Cora remembers her from that final day, hunched over, hair thrown over her face, trembling with barely suppressed rage.

Except her clothes are torn, clawed away. Red seeps through the ragged remains. One wrist is horribly bent, the other criss-crossed with claw marks. Her flanks, stomach, hips, thighs, calves–every part of her body is bleeding.

She throws her head back, hair snapping backwards.

And it’s Cora. Throat bruised, cheeks cut, nose bleeding, eyes sunken. She looks back at herself, but her eyes narrow into a glare, arms crossing over her chest, broken wrist and all.

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This is you. Pathetic. A weak piece of shit who can’t treat her friends right. The shape changes, curves subtly filling in, hair shortening, face narrowing. This is Mari. The friend who put up with your shit even though she deserved much better.

Shoulders broaden, hair fizzles to a cropped length, legs and torso lengthen, nose broadens somewhat. This is Liam. The friend who loves you, and you’re too egotistical to pretend to realize that.

Shoulders narrow, a few inches are shaved off, hair darkens and lengthens, skull reshapes itself a little. This is Callista. A far better fighter than you, and somebody who isn’t scared to do what’s needed, even if she’ll get hurt or worse.

“That’s not true! You’re not real!”

Am I? Instantly, Cora’s face stares back at her, eyes bloodshot, brow furrowed. Get your shit together. You think I’m a hallucination?

“You-you are.” How can Cora speak, pinned under so many mutants, seconds from becoming shredded meat? “You’re not real. You’re just a response to my stress.”

Is that what your research told you? Still doing everything wrong? Okay.

A pressurized thunderclap of air pops her ears. The pain snaps over her all at once, thousands of needles jammed into her skin. She silently shrieks, pawing uselessly at the claws raking her chest bloody.

“Stop!” The Mari-apparition unfurls from shafts of stray sunlight. Its back is turned to Cora. Somehow, the world is put on pause, not a single mote of dust drifting into the sunlight. “You’re real, I believe you, okay?” She sobs, pinned beneath the mutants, staring at her bloodied body. “You’re real.”

We came to an agreement? Good. I didn’t want this, and you don’t want this, but we have to compensate. If you want to live, obey me. The hallucination–whatever it is–floats to the nearest mutant and taps it. The image shivers, coated in a golden layer slipped over it, rippling like a disturbed pond. Give me your body. Give me control, and you will live.

“Wh-what?”

Cora’s ears pop. The pain punches into her, like salt on exposed nerves. The mutant crushing her, clawing at her chest, folds into itself. Limbs retract into its elongated mass. Skin shrivels and crumples like a ball of paper. Muscles atrophy, bones snap, fat is devoured.

A second, maybe two, and the mutant is a crumpled ball of desiccated tissues, bouncing on her stomach before rolling aside.

Another pause. The apparition drifts over the next set of mutants, positioned near Cora’s legs, cut and bloodied. Give me your body, and you will live.

The words draw a chill down Cora’s spine. The apparition’s back is still turned to her, but something tells her she doesn’t want to see the front. That maybe there will be nothing but an abyss.

Her head throbs. Rectangles, trapezoids, cones, pyramids, and more shapes pulse on the edge of the awareness, born of her body, cast adrift in a sea of nothing. Is the apparition a ghost? Something that latched onto Cora the moment she traveled via the box?

She sniffles and reaches to brush at her eyes, free of the mutant. Does it matter? It all happened so quickly. So easily. A gift, like Mari had shown, but the force crushed the mutant inward rather than blow it apart. Her friends are dying. Cora is dying.

She has no choice.

“What do I do?”

Slowly, too slowly, the apparition’s face turns. The corners of a grin appear first. A shark’s grin, lips stretched back too high, nearly touching its ears, sharp teeth flashing bright beneath blue eyes.

Let me in.

And it makes perfect sense. The instructions come naturally to her. All it requires is a flicker of thought, a relaxation of the mind, and acceptance that her body will not be hers to command, but the apparition’s. The conditions don’t state when her body will be her own again, but it doesn’t matter because her friends are dying and she has no choice and if she doesn’t do this then she’ll die knowing she failed her friends and her family and herself because she was too much of a selfish brat not to do the right thing and surrender herself for the greater good–

“No.” Cora stares at the hallucination that is not a hallucination. Its grin drops. She shudders, nauseous at the blank slate replacing its face, writhing with oily masses oozing darkness like drops of blood.

“I don’t know what the fuck you are.” She gulps, then bares her teeth at it, coupled with a glare. It takes every ounce of willpower to keep herself from collapsing into sobs. “But if I die, then I’ll die knowing I tried.”

Liam and Callista beg to disagree.

She lurches at the apparition. Her legs arrest her momentum, mutants pinning her legs down, frozen masses stronger than steel. “You don’t get to call them that!”

Oh, I do. What a waste.

The air claps under the stress of resumed time. The stench of blood and death stuffs her bloody nose, her legs are getting turned to raw meat, her chest is a massive, throbbing wave of pain, her wrist is a runaway nuclear reactor, and her cuts and bruises throb simultaneously, drawing a hiss through gritted teeth.

Air scrapes her lungs. She sucks in a mouthful of putrid stench before her head swims. Colors blur, glitching at the edges, bleeding into other objects. The howls, screeches, and hoots crash into themselves, shockwaves of deafening noise distorting the world like putty.

Her eyes sting. The apparition’s work? But the mutants claw at her legs. More mutants drop from trees and bound toward her. The pile of mutants writhes over Liam and Callista.

Then, she feels it.

A tingling that runs deeper than her bones, tapping into a curtain of non-reality Cora’s self extends to, an itch she can’t scratch. Non-reality bends her metaphysical self into something new. Pain stabs into her stomach, liver, kidneys, and hips.

She’s trapped between an airless scream and paralyzing agony as her vision becomes spotty and the real world loses coherency. Pain is nothing compared to the crippling congregation of unearthly disturbance her metaphysical self experiences. A million types of torture could never penetrate so deeply, so uniquely, exploiting every aspect of her existence and crippling them with agonizing fiery strikes.

Cora convulses, little more than a puppet dragged behind a train on gravel tracks. Shapes split and recombine. Shadows rotate into and beyond existence. Colors become sour tastes spat into whistles ringing forever and ever and ever. She screams, but can’t, vocal cords terribly injured, so it manifests as every inch of skin prickling and a dizzying smelly mix of old peppers and cheese.

The whistles plunge into throaty rumbles, the sliding of rock against rock, dull thuds and scrapes and the blinding hot grind of friction enveloping her.

She has the feeling a great, terrible mass turns its smoldering gaze on her. Observation reduces her to individual atoms. She’s flayed open, inspected, approved, somehow.

Heat worms around rocks, snakes past submerged half-molten continental sheets, narrows through packed metamorphic rock, and reaches her as a puff of warm air.

Hello there

Crystal clear, crackling like embers hours after the fire is put out, a new voice tickles her awareness. It’s alien, reconstructed by her subconscious out of perceived senses bizarre and wrong. Distortions in electromagnetic fields talk to her. Loops of electricity crackle miles below. Heat, compressed at incredible pressures, shifts like blobs over each other.

Then, Cora understands.

There are threads of energy, barely a whisper above the feedback of the entire planet. It’s alive, its presence too vast, too unwieldy to comprehend. A composite of fluctuating energy too tangled to parse out. Somehow, Cora gets the impression that the planet is angry.

Intrusion

Her fingers twitch of their own accord. Both metaphysical hands grasp the searing heat of those threads, broken wrist and all. She yanks on them. Gears shift behind reality, cogs rusted and abused, missing pieces, creaking in pain, falling out of place, but they work.

Cora slips back into reality. Her vision is streaked with blood, her limbs tremble, her jaw is locked into a clenched position, her muscles are tensed, her lungs squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of the air. She pictures every mutant, their locations, her friend’s locations. Her heart pounds. The last face she remembers is Mari’s before she opens her metaphysical hands.

The threads snap back into position.

The earth shudders. Trees crack at their bases. A deep rumble emerges from the ground, a subsonic vibration that rattles her bones and stuns the mutants. They pause, heads tilted, scrambling for purchase on ground that rapidly splinters like wood crushed under a hydraulic press.

Cora doesn’t know how. But she stays still as the planet shudders beneath this grave violation of reality. Its crust, or at least around her, fractures into a million pieces.

Mutants stumble. Feet, legs, and ankles break as the ground lurches. Trees snap at their bases and drop like dominoes, crashing into neighboring trees, the blows snapping their bases and momentum knocking those trees down.

But it’ll never be enough. The mutants are too many, their animalistic frenzy undeterred by pain. Suddenly, she remembers the clearing, the stone obelisk that pierced through what Callista called a Transient warship.

Maybe it’ll work.

Her subconscious implants its desires into her metaphysical self. She strums the threads like strings on a guitar, harmonic vibrations that transcend between realms of existence.

Suddenly, Cora’s blinded by terracotta on all sides. The mutants fall silent. Trees creak in the distance, toppling each other down. The sudden peace is so abrupt she half-expects the Mari-apparition to manifest itself. It never comes, its absence somehow more noticeable.

She sucks in a deep breath, then coughs out blood. Everything hurts. Everything burns. She’s a patchwork of blood and bruises, scrapes and cuts. Her chest is torn, bloodied and raw, a mess of tissue and muscle.

Some tiny voice at the back of her head screams about infection and antibiotics. Shock and trauma. Rattling out a list of injuries it memorized during long nights spent browsing medical sites.

But she’s alive.

“Wow,” Cora chokes out, clapping a hand over her mouth. Frightened by the wall of terracotta entrapping her. It’s smooth, featureless, save for a hole at the top exposing a sliver of sky.

Her stomach feels tight. She gags and lurches her head aside, spitting out stringy bile. There’s nothing left to give but tears. She heaves for breath, splayed on her back, watching the edge of a mahogany cloud drift by before disappearing beyond the edge of the hole.

Cracks appear along the terracotta walls. Moments later, chunks break off, crumbling to dust. Her temporary refuge dismantles itself until a circle remains at the foundations. The beyond makes itself clear.

The mutants are seized upward, almost like they’re going to pounce on her, but she catches the glistening tips of rock splitting their abdomens apart. Several are crushed against sturdier trees, or bisected, ribs caved or split beneath diagonal pillars of rock. Branches hang with intestines disgorged from ruined stomachs, torn by thorny rocks sprouted from the pillars.

Many trees are down, great mushroom canopies forming towering shields of leaves and tightly weaved branches. The ground looks like a cracked eggshell. The fractures extend toward the plains, blotted out.

Hundreds–maybe thousands–of dead mutants dangle from a spine of erupted spikes running along the forest edge. The biggest mutants, the slabs of wet muscle, cast vast shadows above the wall of death, speared high into the sky by several rock spikes.

Cora stares.

And stares.

And stares.

She stares at her shaking hands. Her cut forearms. Her cut stomach, her grazed hips, her clawed chest, her scraped knees, her bloody legs. Human. Or maybe once human, before the box performed magic and gave her this.

She did this. Already, the fine details are fast fading, leaving behind a hardened pit deep in her stomach, and the haunting reminder of that vast entity that supplied a fraction of its resources to help her fight back.

And she did.

She won.

They’re dead. But Liam and Callista… Cora struggles to her feet. It takes several attempts to find her balance, several more to stumble toward the last place she remembers seeing them.

She finds Liam first, back pressed to a tree, holding his knife inches from a spike that speared through two mutants, entrails wrapped around the stone core. His eyes rove to find her.

He drops his knife, open-mouthed. “Cora…”

She croaks, rubbing her throat. “Liam.” She sniffles, hiccups, then turns away, pressing her knuckles to her mouth. The apparition was wrong. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Your eyes are glowing. You did all this, didn’t you?” He turns his gaze downward, brow furrowing, a dimly horrified expression replacing his shocked reverence. “Oh my God.” He grimaces, struggling to stand. “You need medical treatment right now.”

“But Callista–”

As if on cue, a nearby rock spike cracks. The top half tumbles aside, crashing into several more. A slender arm retreats back to its owner, one very, very puffed-up Callista, clothes torn, hair tossed about her head in a messy mane.

Cora smiles–the apparition was wrong. Whatever that thing was, it’s long gone, vanquished back to whatever corner of her mind it came from. “Callista!”

She jerks her gaze upward. “Cora!” She approaches, then pauses beside Liam, staring at her. Like Cora sprouted wings. Or like she just performed a miracle. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, that is a stupid question, but your insides, your organs, your… other self. You killed everything. It must’ve hurt.”

Cora sways. She can feel blood oozing out of her ears. Her mouth tastes of iron. Deep inside, several organs produce stabbing sensations, and others radiate slow pulses of pain.

“Not the Transients,” she rasps. “They’re probably still out there. I need… I need…” A wave of vertigo flips the world upside down.

She doesn’t get the third word past her lips before reality folds into itself and she collapses.