“Don’t wanna listen? You used me! You lied to me! You made me think we could fix this!”

“You’re the one who took me to the fucking mine!”

“You asked me to go there. I took you to the party! Know what? I’m tired of your shit.”

“Then leave! Why the fuck are you here? Hey, back off–”

***

Once, in the murky early years of her childhood, Cora hit her head. Hard. Her memories are in tatters now, but from what she pieced together over the years, she had ridden her new bike. It was decorated white and pink, coming with a plush seat, tassels dangling from the handles, and a basket at the front. It was her dream come true. She absolutely loved it, squealing over her gift as her parents smiled.

Then Mari had shown up with a gap-toothed grin, riding circles around Cora in a sleek frame of matte black and steel gray, saying Cora’s bike wasn’t as cool. Then Cora grew mad and challenged her to a race. Her mom was supervising, and she approved, so long as they wore protection.

Clad in elbow and knee pads, wearing a vest, and mounting a helmet onto her tiny head, Cora took off. Mari made it look easy, even with the awkward protection, coasting past her, tinkling her bell along the way. Cora only got more mad, of course. She shouted and said she’d beat Mari to the end of the street.

Maybe that was the biggest mistake of all. Her clumsy feet pedaled furiously until her legs burned and she caught up. It all seemed so long, so fast, even though it must’ve been a block at most. Until she hit a rock on the road. Until the bike jerked sideways and she flew out, sailing a few lethal feet and bashing her head on the curb.

Later, Mari said Cora had stood, swayed on her feet, waved a hello to her, and collapsed. Cora doesn’t remember any of it. She does remember her throbbing skull, the sound of a gurney squeaking on porcelain floors, doctors rushing over her, taking measurements, checking her vitals, harried voices turning into inaudible slush in her injured head.

Then the days dragged by. Turned into weeks. The world was a kaleidoscope of blurry movements, ringing bells in her ears, and nausea. Mari visited, and so did Ben and a few other friends, but when they were away, Cora bawled into her pillows, hating the constant pain throbbing in her skull, her slurred speech, her dizziness, her concentration problems.

She had it easy back then.

Maybe if she hadn't hit her head so hard, things would've never spiraled out of control years later.

“How long?” a man pants, somewhere behind her. Beneath her? Cora’s arms and legs twitch. She tries to scream, but can’t remember why, only that she… she needed to do something.

Her head pounds. Her mouth is dry. Her cheeks hurt. Her tongue is bleeding, aching and sore when she brushes it against her teeth. Exhaustion drags her eyelids down, erasing her view of a world distorted out of shape.

“It passed.” Somebody clears their throat. “Cora?”

She blinks. And promptly lurches and vomits out globs of fleshy matter, dotted red, spit and bile stringing from her slack lips. An earlier meal, from… from... She groans, shuddering as her senses flip and her head throbs.

“It’s okay, Cora, you’ll be okay. You had a seizure, but it’s over now.”

Liam. The thought filters through abused brain tissue. She screws her eyes shut and shudders. “What… I was going to…” Cora gags again, stomach convulsing, purging what little remains of the elikanders.

A warm hand grips her arm. “Take your time.”

“I’m sorry you have to put up with us. You’ve done enough for a lifetime,” Callista says. It takes Cora a minute of gathering the broken pieces of herself and gluing them back together to realize they’re carrying her. Sideways. Callista holds her upper torso, Liam her lower. They’re covered in cuts, scratches, bruises, bouncing back from the verge of death–and they’re carrying her.

“Put me down,” Cora rasps.

“Cora, we can carry you for hours. Well, Callista can.”

“Put. Me. Down.” Her eyes snap open. She gags, head spinning as she views the world sideways. Trees look like logs stacked on each other. She bounces in their arms, nauseated and helpless, festering in her own filth and blood. “I can still fight. The Transients are somewhere out there, I know it. They have to be.”

“Cora. Wherever they are, they won’t follow. You scared them off, probably.”

“They got away!”

Callista stops. “Do you want to die?”

“I–”

“Because you are not invincible. We are not invincible. We are nothing like Marpei. Keep pushing, and you’ll end up gridshocked, and then what?” Callista practically spits out the last sentence. “You’ll die.”

Liam clears his throat. “That’s a little harsh.”

“She almost died. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. Ugh.” Never once does she let go. Cora can feel the trembles wracking Callista’s battered frame, the sticky blood of her wrists, the exhaustion of her labored breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Cora says quietly. “I didn’t think right.”

“Are you kidding me? You saved us all. I’m venting. Ignore me.” Callista resumes her walk, and Liam follows. Cora bobs gently in their arms, her stomach not so uneasy like before. “Oh Arcego, I thought we were done.” Cora tilts her head back. Callista’s eyes are misty, flexing the slightest strobes of purple within her pupils. “You have a very special gift.”

“I didn’t do anything. Something else did. It’s like I knew what to do already,” Cora mumbles, letting her head droop back down. “But it didn’t work and then I had to push myself a little more to make the spikes. It felt horrible.”

She retches again. The trembles come again, but not as badly as before, the aftershocks of an earthquake possessing a magnitude great enough to burst earth and soul asunder. Between the pain, the deep, throbbing aches, the nausea, and her screwed-up eyes and ears, it’s a miracle she doesn’t black out. But something is pumping adrenaline into her system, jolting her awareness like a line of coke, making her twitchy and eager to get on her feet.

“I need… I need…” Cora grits her teeth, parsing through the last memory before she had a seizure.

“Shit, Callista, she’s about to have another one.”

“It’s different. Cora, what do you need?”

The answer comes to her like a flash of lightning, burning her retinas out. She half-shrieks, half-moans, choking past the dread slamming into her, squirming to free herself, get on her feet, and move, move, move.

“Where’s the backpack?”

A halting breath. Shared glances between Callista and Liam. Do you know? Callista’s raised eyebrows suggest. Liam shakes his head, eyes wide.

“I left it in a nearby tree,” Callista says slowly, taking great care to avoid Cora’s panicked gaze. “Cradled between three branches.”

Cora squeaks, shaking, finally paying her debt of accumulated stresses and countless restless nights. The one thing she needs more than anything else on the planet. The one thing that has any hope of returning them home.

“We have to go back.”

She’s the little girl on the hospital bed again, rendered powerless by her own body and mind, left to watch other children get to leave while she stays behind. Move! Do something! Stop being weak! But Cora’s demands can’t stop her nausea and pain any more than she can move the moon.

Sensations can’t be controlled, not fully.

But she still has control over herself. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll sneak a glance at Mari, or the Transients, or both.

Cora hates them. The planet, the vast buried entity, whatever that whirling mass of super-heated rock and magnetic anomalies was, agreed. It lent her the keys to moving that metaphorical system of rusted gears. She used them once, she can use them again. She shakes with grief and rage, but Callista must confuse it with desperation, because she cradles Cora’s head and sweeps her bangs back.

“Liam, do you think you can hold her while I fetch the backpack?”

He claps a hand over his chest. “Let me do it.”

“You’ll be in danger. I can defend myself.” Callista’s eyes flare the tiniest amount, amounting to static electricity crackling to life and vanishing.

“You’re a lot more hurt than me, and you said something about being gridshocked.” He squints at her. “You’ll push yourself too far.”

She barks out a laugh, hollow and dry. Her smile fails to meet her sunken eyes. “Fair. The tree might’ve been knocked down. It was the one closest to the pile of rocks you made. If it’s still standing, don’t climb it. Tell me and I’ll do it.”

“No.” Both heads turn toward Cora. She holds their gazes for a moment and frowns. “We go back together.”

Liam is the first to frown back. “Cora, we can’t. It’s not safe.”

“Nothing’s stopping them from chasing us down. If they could control that many mutants, they could bring more. It doesn’t matter if we start moving right now, or five hours later. They’ll reach us either way.”

“It’ll still give us time to rest and heal,” Callista says.

“We can get that anyway. If we go back, it’ll take what, five minutes? Ten? We’re a team now. We protect each other.” Cora raises a trembling arm, cut and crusted with blood, and brushes her knuckles against Liam’s arm, then Callista’s. “I’ll protect both of you if something happens.”

Callista bows her head. “You can’t push yourself after having a seizure like that. You’ll die.”

“I don’t care! Please, let me do something for once. I can protect both of you, I know it. I don’t care if I get hurt. I don’t want to see you two get hurt like that ever again.” Cora scowls and drops her head, scrunching her eyes shut, pretending that they can’t see her crying. “Together. Please.”

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She doesn’t hear any objections or agreements. By silent confirmation, Liam and Callista hold Cora like a delicate statue, and together they move. She doesn’t need to open her eyes to know they’re returning for the backpack.

The box.

The thing Callista is confused by, the thing Liam has no idea cast him into this alien hellscape of mutated horrors and extreme weather. The thing that Cora locked herself in her room for. Studied for. Once, bled for. Fought for.

The apparition must’ve sprung like an unwelcome parasite and lodged into her brain folds the moment the lid split open. How long had it been there, biding its time, waiting for the perfect host to manipulate and trick into surrendering its body?

Countless tests run on the box and its magical properties never indicated that an intelligence was behind its workings. The occasional odd reading did appear, like a violation of Faraday’s law, or time dilation desynchronizing two clocks placed a foot and ten feet from its edge, respectively.

What could a real, unknowable, alien metaphysical entity want with control over a human body, much less one near the bottom of the physical health spectrum?

Whatever it meant by that, Cora is glad she rejected it.

Maybe exposure to the box will awaken it, somehow. Refill the gaping absence left behind in her mind, a nonmaterial wound she probes over, lamenting the loss of something she hadn’t noticed for weeks until it disappeared.

They pass the splintered remnants of trees, snapped like toothpicks, leaning into other sturdier trees that endured the miniature earthquake. The first of the dead mutants appears through gaps in the canopy. Bodies seized upwards, impaled by towering spikes of hardened soil and compacted rock.

Soon, the stench of death clogs her nostrils. Cora crinkles her nose at the iron aftertaste left in her mouth. Several mutants are splattered against the trees still standing–Callista’s handiwork–or crushed against them by several pillars.

More and more mutants appear, disemboweled, impaled, torn apart, or cut into ribbons, organs and tissues bursting out of their decimated bodies. Liam and Callista take great pains to avoid the worst of the puddles of blood and flesh. Their faces are tight with concentration as they navigate around spikes and pillars, step over puddles of filth, and steer clear of bodies heaped into mounds.

Cora did all that, and more, out beyond into the fields. They haven’t reached the epicenter, the place she broke reality, but she catches glimpses of the wall of suspended death between branches and through leaves. Continuous blobs of dark matter indicate the mutant slabs she raised high into the sky, a monument to her viciousness. Movements flit within the tangled mess of trees. She squints, only to realize the wind is stirring branches, carrying the stench of those colossal mutants toward them.

Come and get me! The gory display shows. I’ll do worse next time!

The box gave Cora that potential. And maybe it gave Mari the power she had used to cross the plains, too, and detonate the mutants by touch. The box also unleashed that parasite into Cora’s mind, and that parasite had crumpled a mutant into desiccated matter to show it had powers.

Gifts, like Callista calls them. The parasite killed a mutant without Cora’s permission. It froze time and talked to Cora. It didn’t need Cora for any of that.

Her head pounds. The logic is messy. Interaction with the physical world without a physical body. Mind over matter. Then why ask for her body?

Or, more importantly, did Mari get a parasite, too?

“It’s still there,” Callista says. “Liam, hold her while I get it.”

Cora switches hands, and now she’s held against Liam’s chest, broad and muscular, streaked with blood and cut in several places. His breaths are like a furnace, hot and simmering, heart an engine powering him.

Callista crouches, adjusts infinitesimally small muscles in her legs and back, and springs like a grasshopper. She barrels through branches and leaves, breaking them, a blur of motion unfolding at the top. Moments later, she clambers down the many branches. Near the lowest point, she tenses and jumps.

Her landing is less than spectacular. She loses her balance and stumbles forward, but she’s wearing the backpack, miraculously unscathed. “We leave now,” she says.

Leaves rustle overhead. But it can’t be the wind, because none of the other leaves react at all. Cora connects the dots and clenches her hand. “Trap!”

Too late. The air peels back. Clad in pearlescent armor, tall and broad, three figures drop from the canopy. They plummet like stones a few feet away, spraying dirt around them, armor plates clanging together.

Callista is quicker. The dirt hasn’t finished settling before she grapples the nearest Transient to the ground. The others react too slowly, materializing a greasy barrier shining like soap bubbles, casting flames at her.

A quick jerk of her hands snaps the armor like plastic. She breaks both arms, grabs its helmeted head, presses both hands together, and crumples the metal inward at the temples.

The Transient dies quickly and silently, thrashing against a girl with immeasurable strength.

She leaps back from the flames, actually growling, lips peeled back in a snarl, claws glinting. The barrier finishes forming and wraps around her like cling film. She lashes at the barrier, but somehow her movements are slowed, constricted, strength reduced to nothing.

“Cease resisting in the name of the Empire,” the flame-casting Transient bellows, turning toward Cora and Liam.

“Do you want to end up like your friend?” Liam sidesteps a jet of flame aimed at his core. “You’ll have to try harder.”

“It’s not him,” the barrier-casting Transient says. Its voice is metallic, bereft of any tones, flat and emotionless.

The back of Cora’s neck tingles. The heightened anticipation of a lightning strike, a shift in ambience, the slightest idea that this interaction is too reckless, too tame compared to the monsters that commanded the hordes of mutants.

Liam reels, hurling a fist at nothing, only for his stomach to sink several inches deep under a fist-sized indent. He crumples. Callista is stuck wrestling the barrier out of her skin.

Leaving Cora alone. Exposed. The tingling worsens, a rash that enters her nape and travels down her spinal cord, sending electrical signals to every neuron in her body. Her arms and legs move of their own accord. Against her agony, she lurches aside, hitting the ground on her chest and belly, igniting her wounds, just as a simmering figure rams its fist through the space her head had occupied seconds ago.

A flicker of recognition, consonance between herself and the planet, an adjustment of the threads composing all of reality, and she channels years of pain into a crystalline spike.

Somehow, the semi-translucent Transient pivots on its feet, dodging the blow. But that’s only the first step. As Cora convulses, a prisoner in her own body, tendrils snap from the glittering spike and ram through each Transient.

Four bodies, two translucent, two visible, cave beneath the rocky protrusions. She twists and branches off their spiky tips, shredding organs, snapping bones, burying them deep into where she thinks their hearts are.

One by one, they stagger and drop. Except the semi-translucent Transient. Its massive gauntlet grips the rocky tentacle and snaps it. The hole in its chest spits out fragments of rock, coated in red, before torn flesh at the edges puckers up, knitting itself together.

“I see,” it says. The voice is deep, not unlike the rumbling of the planet’s confusion.

Not quiet

Cora shudders. Her vision washes red. She hiccups, and spits out red.

Need more

But she can’t. Her metaphysical self grasps at threads with broken fingers. Cracked wrists. Pulverized bones, flayed nerves, torn muscles, and bleeding eyes that can’t see what she’s doing.

Slowly, the Transient lumbers toward her. Its massive outline fills her failing sight. Its other hand, thick and bare, cups her chin.

“Green and blue and brown and gold,” it murmurs. It withdraws its hand and glances behind it. “How long?”

Cora fumbles her tongue, slapping it against her teeth, swallowing blood and mucus. “What?”

Slowly, the Transient crouches so its armored head is level with her. An orb of air simmers and peels back to its shoulders like a hood. A masked face, framed gold, surface like marble, stares back at her. Protrusions of gold rise from the top of its helmet, forming a crown, if a crown bent inward into the tight arc of an obsidian crest like a Roman helmet, bisecting its helmet.

“How long?” it repeats, frozen still.

“Cora!” Callista whips at the edge of her sight. She cradles a very familiar object to her chest, keeping a wide distance from the armored Transient.

Cora opens her mouth to scream, but what comes out is a choked gurgle, a desperate shake of her head. “Stop! No!”

Callista stops. She locks her gaze on the hulking monstrosity looming over Cora.

“What is that?” It points its normal hand at the box.

Cora’s ruined metaphysical sight can make out something new. The box is alive again. Churning with potential. Fields of coruscating colors weave around its central axis.

The apparition must’ve filled it somehow, acted as a catalyst for the reaction that sent Cora, Mari, and Liam here. The abyss in Cora’s mind calls to it, begs her to open and release its awesome potential.

And if the apparition is responsible–

“Let her go, and you can find out,” Callista says slowly, inching towards them. One hand next to the lid, ready to flip it open and throw it. “Liam, are you doing alright?”

A groan in response. “You try getting hit like that.”

“Stay behind me.”

“What is that?” Voice hard as iron. The Transient turns away from Cora and tenses. “Tell me. Now.”

“Let her go.”

The Transient bolts. Nothing in this world can possibly stop something so lethally fast. It’s a streak against the bloody ground, a bullet racing to connect with a thunderclap of armored strength. But Callista tucks the box under one arm and leaves a crater where she stands, legs straining against her pants, scooping up Liam with her free hand, and reaching Cora at the same time the Transient whirls and raises one gauntleted fist.

“I’ll open it!” Cora’s voice rings loud and clear. The Transient pauses. “If I open it, we’ll all die.” She swallows the lump in her throat and gingerly accepts the box from Callista, dangling her fingernails into the crack between the lid and the rest of the box.

It’s so warm, pulsating slow waves of energy that trickle into the void left in her mind. Her metaphysical self drools over the energy teeming within such a small thing. She almost flips the lid open and lets the light consume them all–but Callista’s terrified face and Liam’s apprehension roots her to sanity.

Her friends. Her rescuers.

They deserve so much better.

“You do not lie.” The Transient lowers its fist and retreats several steps. “What is that?”

“Something bad. Really, really bad.” Cora trembles. “I’m sorry I never told you, Liam.”

“Cora?”

Betrayal. Heart-break. She bites her lip and risks eye contact with Liam. “I wanted to tell you, I promise. I tried. But then I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.” Damn the crack at the end of her sentence. She sniffles and readjusts the box so it’s draped over her lap. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

She stares at her feet. “I’m the reason you’re here.”

“No.” Liam stares at her like she just admitted to murdering a baby. “You didn’t.”

“I did! I did it because I’m stupid and selfish and keep hurting others to help myself!” Cora digs her fingernails into the crack. A fraction open, and its sweet energy drifts beyond, tantalizingly filling the void in her mind, mending her metaphysical wounds, giving her structure. Purpose. Desire. “I fought with my friend, the girl you saw, Mari, yeah. We fought because of this stupid thing. Because I kept treating her like trash even though she tried to help me. But everything went wrong and then it opened. And then I came here. And then I found you.”

“A node inside that?” A portal, but apparently it’s shocking to Callista. She, too, takes several steps back, though she keeps a hand on Liam’s back. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

Liam is silent. Dead silent, face set like stone, lips pressed thin. Cora ignores him and focuses on the Transient looming nearby. It could try to rush at them. But there’s a fifty-fifty chance she’ll open the box, and then release that sweet, delectable source of thrumming power.

“I don’t know,” she admits, slumping her shoulders.

“A node, inside of the box.” The Transient raises its gauntlet again. “Marpei may find this curious.”

“Don’t think about it,” Callista hisses, but she may as well be speaking to a wall.

Several translucent figures break their invisibility. Hands reach for her. Armor plate contours ripple as they slide over each other. The armored Transient bolts toward them, gauntlet closed into a fist, aimed straight at her.

Cora throws herself into Liam’s chest at the same moment she musters the last of her strength and jerks the lid open.

Blinding, white-hot light washes over them all. Laughter echoes until it becomes shrill feedback. Ghostly hands reach at her, but she streaks across a plane of fractured colors and blurry shapes, tangential to the void enclosed within, somehow.

Her mind strains. The void fills and gets filled again and ruptures and weaves itself into her blood vessels. She is incorporeal, set alight, screaming, torn apart and reconfigured and disassembled into her constituent atoms.

Something else screams alongside her, too. A different voice, a familiar one, a certain parasite Cora thought had vanished.

It didn't activate the box.

But it’s too late.