“I just wanna–”

“If you do what I say, this will end soon.”

“Come on, it'll be quick!"

“Not now. I need you to answer a few questions.”

***

Pain.

Its existence has governed Cora’s every waking moment since the box spat her out like some regurgitated toxin. Day and night, night and day, there hasn’t been a moment where she isn’t plagued by aches, throbs, and stabs.

Pain.

It drives her forward, the pain of loss and want, once her leash leading her across the vast, merciless forest, hoping for a breakthrough, only to realize she understands nothing.

Pain.

It’s her collar, her chains, her cuffs. She can’t think without the pleading of her broken body, begging for care, for rest she can’t afford.

Pain.

It throbs and it dulls and it brightens and it dims and it becomes her.

Her body rejects her. Reality rejects her. The apparition rejects her.

Pain welcomes her.

Consciousness whirls and slams into her pounding skull at the speed of pain. Her ringing ears register faint screams, but it can’t be her, because her vocal cords are torn, and she can’t manage more than a wispy hiss. Cora coughs and spits out blood, along with globs of mucus and the few contents her ravaged stomach disgorged into her throat.

For a long moment, she hovers at the edge of lucidity, wracked with trembles. Did she die? Was everything just a sickening dream?

But then she realizes she’s standing on ground soft beneath her feet. The air is warm, reminding her of summers spent lounging by the ocean, basking in sunlight, absorbing the sea breezes caressing her face.

This world cradles her broken body. It soothes her with gentle shafts of sunlight streaming through… through… Cora rubs her eyes. Blinks away residues of blood tainting her sight.

For a moment, she’s lost in the beauty of this world.

Beneath the shadow of a mushroom big enough to blot out the sky, dangling from the concave space of its reddish, white-spotted cap, massive folds of vibrating tissues shed purple mist. Light twinkles within the mist, brightening as each puff of mist sinks toward the forest floor.

Oh, but it’s not a forest, is it?

Millions of mushrooms crowd every available inch of ground. Long mushrooms, fat mushrooms, tall mushrooms, and squat mushrooms grow into each other. Within the darker shadows near the base of the colossal mushroom, thousands of fist-sized mushrooms glow blues and purples. Tree-like mushrooms spread further out into the distance, near the rim of the colossal mushroom cap, branches curving upward into ends budding tiny, bright pink spores.

Gold, purple, and blue hazes drift everywhere. The smell of faint cinnamon brings her back to simpler times, safer times, when she curled up on the couch with Mari and watched silly cartoon shows.

They all had their own worlds. Their own landscapes. Picturesque dreams she dreamt of late at night, curled around Mari, imagining them becoming explorers, visiting all those strange, fantastic lands and bringing back stories of endless wonder.

What happened? Mari is supposed to be here. Cora touches her cheeks. An ugly sob forms deep in her throat. Her lip quivers.

Useless. Liar. Selfish.

She welcomes the pain and curls into herself. Doing the right thing… she hiccups. Mari always took charge. Whatever she did, Cora usually followed, because everything Mari did seemed perfect. She reflected that in her academics, her extracurriculars, her sports, while Cora was the loner trailing behind her shadow.

And it was okay, because Mari was the best friend anybody could ask for. Until Cora dared rebel against the status quo. Until she dared push herself to her limits to trace the box, research it, and experiment on it, by sacrificing everything and everyone around her.

Nothing but disaster. Betrayal and heartbreak. She can’t do anything right. Everything she touches unravels.

And now, Liam and Callista are missing.

Cora’s stomach is lead as she heaves herself onto legs made of jelly and limps in a wide circle. She tackled Liam, and he had slammed into Callista, so why aren’t they together?

Cora clenches her teeth. She refuses. She’ll break every bone and bleed every last drop if it means she’ll find them.

Faint screams start again. She pauses, glancing at the biggest mushrooms swaying in a gentle wind. Another brief scream draws out, but she’d recognize that voice anywhere.

Far, far above, enveloped within puffs of purple particles, a tiny figure clings to the side of the skyscraper-sized stalk. One arm waves at her.

Callista?

Cora waves back, wincing as her shoulder muscles protest. Callista starts a slow descent down the stalk, using her boots and claws to dig handholds and footholds. Within minutes, she’s halfway down the stalk, close enough to hear her panting.

“Liam is over there!”

Even with the amplified power of her magic, her voice comes out tinny against the perpetual ringing in Cora’s ears. She follows Callista’s outstretched arm toward several tall, fat mushrooms, bigger than houses.

Sure enough, a second figure sits at the edge of a giant mushroom, waving back. The drop is vast, with nothing to cushion his fall save for a carpet of tiny brown mushrooms.

Even Callista can’t hope to jump that height. Maybe she could climb the stalk, but then the cap would block her. And if it’s anything like the mushy mushrooms back home, the moment she tries to climb along its underside or punch her way to the top, the surface will crack and Liam will fall.

Cora plunges into her metaphysical self.

The box’s limitless energy healed most of her wounds, but her bones are still fractured, muscles strained, ligaments sprained. She’s both in that intangible realm and in reality, aware that her body is convulsing. Her shackles of pain are gone, though. She’s free to move and touch what she needs to manipulate the earth.

But where the gears should be, there’s nothing usable. She roves her metaphysical eyes over the ground. The systems are there in their mechanical glory, but inert, refusing to respond even as she bangs her fists on their rusted structures.

“Move!” she cries out, digging her fingernails into the gears. “Move!”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The system rejects her, and she’s spat out of her body, out of the realm, back into the real world.

Cora twitches, every muscle set aflame, spit drooling out of her slack lips, fingers jammed into her palms. Never mind her broken wrist–its agony can’t compare to the dozens of simultaneous cramps that seize her.

She lays there, a twitching mass of raw flesh, for what feels like hours, dragging at her sanity. What is sanity nowadays? Sanity requires a baseline level of normalcy defined by human standards, and she’s anything but human, invoking magic at the cost of her body.

Her back arches. She drools into the carpet of mushrooms, insensible, eyes glazed over as the last of her cramps passes. Maybe she is still human. Humans feel guilt and regret, don’t they?

Footsteps thud behind her. With the flourish that Callista always carries herself with, she crouches beside Cora, silent save for her heavy panting. Cora cries, letting Callista cradle her like a baby. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she sobs, shivering violently. “Liam needs you more than me.”

“Don’t say that. You’ve done enough for us.”

“I’ve done nothing. I’m a failure. I’m a traitor. I could’ve saved her and I didn’t.”

To that, Callista doesn’t answer immediately, rubbing Cora’s back, tucking her close to herself. “You didn’t know you had the gift of earth until you almost died.”

“Exactly!” Cora sobs again, wailing like the big, useless baby she is to everybody. “I’m a traitor! She might’ve died and it didn’t make me learn how to do all that. Only when I almost died did I learn how to do that.” She snorts back her mucus. “I want to be a better person, but I can’t. I fuck everything up.”

Callista rubs Cora’s shoulders. “That is not true.”

“It is! I–”

“You are the sum of your actions. And as far as I know, you saved our lives. Does that not count?”

“I…”

“Cora. Look at me.” She does, compelled by Callista’s stern tone, only to recoil away from her blazing purple eyes. “Do you understand? We would not be here if you hadn’t sacrificed yourself to save us. We would be digesting in the bowels of those creatures. Because of you, we have another chance.”

Cora nods, teary-eyed.

“Say it. You are not a traitor.”

“But Mari–”

“Say it.” Callista’s grip tightens ever so slightly. She cups Cora’s chin and glances into her eyes. “Or I will make you.”

Cora’s heart jumps to her throat. “I am not a traitor.” She gulps and nods, palms clammy, mouth dry, as Callista bows her head in acknowledgement and gently separates from Cora.

“What was that?” She can’t bring herself to look at Callista again. She hunches her shoulders and picks at a broken mushroom, rolling its stalk between her thumb and index finger.

Callista licks her lips, crossing her arms. “Don’t think too hard about it.” Callista turns toward the series of staggered mushrooms, the tallest on which Liam is standing on, his giant frame reduced to an ant. “Liam, are you ready?”

He waves his arms. Cora swears he flashes a thumbs-up.

Before Callista generates enough muscular force to blow a crater into the mushroom field, Cora grabs her by the shoulder. “Wait.”

Wasted potential throbs down her legs and spasms her muscles. She grimaces, standing strong even as her body rejects her power. “What happened?”

“Can you reach?” Cora cranes her neck up to estimate the distance. Too high. If Callista fails, the drop alone might kill her, magically enhanced muscles or not.

“I’ll climb it.”

“That’s what I was worrying about.” Who knows how many mushrooms Cora toppled after weeks of heavy rain, flattening them beneath her feet, or throwing pine cones at each one that sprouted overnight. “Mushrooms are delicate.”

“Mushrooms? Delicate?” Callista squints, turning around. Then she focuses on their feet, and the many mushrooms quashed into mushy pulp.

“Do you not have mushrooms back in your world?”

“In Endralova?” For a moment, Callista wavers, her eyes briefly flickering, biceps shortening. “I don’t know what mushrooms are. These are mushrooms?”

“Everything here is mushrooms.” It might be her imagination, but Cora swears that beyond the finger-like fungi reaching out of the ground, tree-like organisms, and rolling hills dotted with tiny mushrooms, several faint dome-shaped outlines consume the horizon. More mushrooms? “They’re kind of like plants, but not plants. They’re not as strong.”

“If I climb it, it’ll break.” Callista chews on her bottom lip. Suddenly, she snaps her head toward Liam and releases a fresh wave of magical potential altering her muscles and thickening them. “Liam, jump! I’ll catch you.”

He peeks his head over the edge and shakes his head. “You’re insane.”

Cora dredges up years of physics lessons, distilled into the late night academic papers she pored over, mixing scraps of information into an approximate understanding of the natural laws.

So much for physics. Einstein would have rolled over in his grave if he found out that the box bent space-time in ways no star ever could.

But one idea leads to another, and she rapidly integrates those lessons into Callista’s plan, and suddenly she understands.

“The whiplash will kill him,” she says, screwing her eyes shut as pain stabs into her eye sockets. “You can probably catch him, but he’ll decelerate so fast he’ll die.”

“Decelerate?” Callista is hesitant, glancing at the towering mushroom again.

“He’ll get flattened into a pancake.” Callista still has a blank look, so Cora gestures at the ground and slams her palm on a mushroom. It splits beneath her hand and spreads out. “He’ll end up like that. You can catch me, though. I can help.”

“Cora, no.”

But Callista’s disapproval falls on bleeding ears. Cora slips through cracks in that metaphysical realm and claims control over her ethereal self. The wounds are worse, registering as faint twinges on some level of existence beyond mere physical flesh.

She reaches for the gears. They’re red-hot to the touch, searing her fingertips, metal molten. She hisses and retreats, clutching her burnt and peeling fingers to her chest.

She did it once, she can do it again.

Cora jams both hands into the gearwork. Heat cooks her hands. One by one, her fingers burn off, or nerves shut down, or bones wither away. She slaps uselessly at the gears with her cauterized stumps for wrists, only for the flames to melt deeper, exposing her radius and ulna arm bones.

“Come on!” she howls, jamming her feet into the gears. She manages to move them the tiniest fraction of a degree before flames race up her body. A warm, heavy feeling settles on her, and several sharp jabs of pain follow that quickly turn painless.

“Come on!”

The flames lap at her throat. She slams her head into the gears, only for the metal to stick to her skull and burn a path into her brain. The heat is starting to settle as a dull ache, throbbing everywhere. Warmth concentrates and envelops her, burning brighter and hotter, refusing to let her go even as she stumbles away from the gears, set ablaze.

She snaps back into reality screaming and thrashing.

“Cora!”

Callista’s voice booms like an artillery shot. Cora convulses against arms and legs made of steel. She can’t feel anything except pain, magnified a hundred-fold, claiming every nerve in her body.

Around them, sections of earth shudder and rise, short-lived pillars and spikes that quickly collapse into mounds of dirt. Mushrooms are uprooted, their mycelium networks tangled around cores of levitating dirt that spear upward into the colossal mushroom cap. Holes tear open far above, the great fleshy folds torn, bleeding gusts of purple mist.

Liam, however, leaps from core to core, like a video game character racing toward the final boss. Several times, he missteps and falls, only to be caught on several pillars that crumble seconds after.

Cora’s screams reduce to nothing but a hiss of air. She chokes on her own blood, spitting out the sinking taste of iron, only to cough and lurch again. Callista holds her, tilting her whenever she coughs up blood, shouting a string of undecipherable words.

She breaks beneath the pain. No human should ever endure such extreme agony. Several times, she blacks out, only to regain consciousness vomiting and choking on her own bodily fluids.

The cycle repeats. She wants to die. She wants to live. She wants to die, sink into that crushing oblivion, where she’ll be free. She wants to plunge back into that metaphysical realm to spare her from the agony, but her ruined mind grasps at a blank wall, like it never existed in the first place.

Sometime later, as the earth quiets and mushrooms rain around them, Cora stops convulsing. Words are exchanged between Liam and Callista. They carry her, or try to, only to lose their grip as burst blood vessels leave her slick and hard to carry.

Cora moans, silently crying, cowering under the pain stabbing into her skull all at once.

“She’s dying, do you–”

“We can’t just–”

“Then what do we do?”

Then they fall quiet. They loom over the pitiful, twitchy mess she’s made of herself. Her bowels and bladder failed. She stinks of piss, shit, and blood, smeared in her own fluids, broken on a fundamental level that throbs deep in her core, beyond her ruined body. Into that ethereal plane, the ether, the place she went too far, for too long.

Are they going to leave her?

Something changes. The sound of others, intruders, enemies, approaches from everywhere, their footfalls heavy. Aches stab her organs. Several shriek when she weakly pokes at the source of the aches.

The Transients came for them after all, and she’s dying.

The shouts of alarm and danger that follow blur into shrieking feedback. Within the confines of Cora’s hemorrhaged brain tissue, a certain presence stretches its awareness and grazes her cheek.

The parasite carries its own weight, its own field of gravity, and Cora can’t do anything but get drawn in and listen, focusing her dimming awareness on it.

In a rasping voice that slithers across neurons, it speaks.

Do you need me?