“I didn’t do it.”

“That’s bullshit!”

“I swear, I dunno what you’re talking about. Jaze always gets me the best dope.”

“Wrong answer.”

***

Trapped in a cage of pain of her own making, all bodily control shunted off, festering in her own filth, Cora is so much less than the girl that defied the parasite’s demands.

The shouts abruptly stop. The air chills to a standstill. She can move, but barely just, whimpering as she cradles her broken wrist, shrinking beneath the eyes of an entity that hovers an arm’s length away.

Shadows blur the edges of its profile. For the moment, it’s a ghost, trailing on the edges of her worst fears, a gaunt specter of her guilt manifested into a physical entity.

It doesn’t help that its back is hunched over, head bowed, arms bent at just the wrong angles to suggest serious injuries. Its face is turned away, obscured behind a veil of black, reinforced with a hoodie drawn tight over its head. The only indicator it’s still human is the shriveled pinky finger poking out of the heavy folds of its black dress.

“I need you,” Cora whispers, struggling to keep herself from splintering into pieces. The parasite is still. “But I don’t want you.”

Slowly, too slowly, it turns. A stranger’s face stares back, impassive. A sharp nose, high cheekbones, and sunken eye bags frame a pair of the bluest, clearest eyes she’s ever seen. They twinkle like ice crystals suspended in syrupy darkness.

You will let me in, it–she–says, her voice cool and low. And then you will rest.

“I can still fight.” But beyond the sphere of influence the parasite exerts, the outside world is a bloody smear of details. Vague blobs define the newcomers, the soldiers Cora is certain have come to fight them. No matter how hard she squints, the resolution is the same, a static image on a screen she knows is how her biological eyes saw them the moment the parasite answered.

Please. Be realistic. Your allies are surrounded, you are at near death, and if they capture you before you slip from this cruel existence, oh… She smiles, a twist of her lips that reeks of smug superiority. You will regret not killing yourself first.

“What are you?”

I am me, and I am here.

Cora works her jaw, then spits out a glob of bloody mucus. “Did you live in the box the whole time?”

Does a bear shit in the woods and pick up eager colonists? The parasite steps forward and strokes Cora’s hair. She reaches to push her off, but finds her arms locked to her chest, tongue glued to the roof of her mouth, silently seething as the parasite fawns over her. You are quite bright, but quite short-sighted as well. Have you ever known what a comb is?

Her tongue releases, and she spits out, “Shut the fuck up. You try living like I did with nothing for weeks!”

You had something. Do Liam and Callista not count?

“Don’t say their names!”

I can say their names whenever and wherever I want. The parasite lowers her slender arm. Manicured hands cup Cora’s chin, tilting her head up to meet the parasite’s blazing blue eyes. I see.

Cora scowls, jerking her head away. Her heart pounds, throat tight, as she remembers Callista’s stern expression. “What are you doing?”

Letting you know that I, too, care about you in more ways than one. The parasite floats away, rotating sideways, clasping her hands behind her back. You will let me in, and you will rest.

“I told you, I don’t want–”

Cora’s ears pop. She gets one second of precious warning to brace herself before she slumps into an agonized stupor.

Several people shuffle by her fallen body. Liam and Callista? Shouts reach her, indecipherable, punctuated with angry outbursts from other sources, some higher-pitched, others low and gravelly, deep enough to cut through the feedback.

Cora tries to reach into the ether, only to be shot back into her skull, bouncing around the confines of distorted sanity, eyes rolling to the back of her head. She shudders. Her broken wrist flops uselessly, weeks of steady progress snapped in hours. Her other hand twitches, unresponsive, the tendons set aflame and her muscles too sore to defy gravity.

She can’t see. Can’t hear. Can’t do anything, trapped in crippling pain, left to die choking on her own blood.

The sounds stop. The parasite materializes over her raked chest, floating face-down, arms poised at her sides. Black sleeves rustle the edges of her wounds, prompting her to gasp, biting hard on her tongue. Those cold orbs of ice stare impassively at her.

It’s time.

“No!” Cora tears up. A heavy congestion settles inside her ruined insides. Somehow, in this slice of frozen time, she musters enough force to sit up and slam her good hand into the parasite’s face. “No! I don’t care! I did it once, I can do it again!”

Don’t deny reality, Cora.

“Why are you acting like that!” she screams, swinging her fist at the parasite’s nose. She disappears and reappears when Cora swings her arm back. “Why are you… oh.”

Maybe the parasite comprehended human psychology in the short time it inhabited her brain. Cora had endured weeks of relentless verbal abuse, chalking it to trauma, to hallucinations born out of the desperate need to convince herself Mari was okay. Cora was torn down, laid bare for the world to see, and scooped up when she needed help, only to reject the parasite in the end.

It failed.

“Fool me once, shame on you.” Cora giggles, a mad stream of clarity erasing her doubts, as the pieces crash together. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” She snorts and spits out more bloody mucus. “You can’t do anything at all, can you? You’re in my head, but I’m in control, not you.”

The parasite is still, eyes blank, lips settled into a straight line.

“You haven’t tortured me because you can’t, can you? The only thing you can do is emotional manipulation.” Cora grins, panting, as she races to catch her breath. “I don’t know how you stop time like this, or how you killed that mutant, but you can’t hurt me. I know you can’t.”

She gets no warning this time.

Shouts of alarm drown her thoughts out. Pain punches into her like a bullet, traveling from head to toe. It steals her breath away, her focus, drowns her smug happiness and encapsulates every cell, clawing at her nerve connections.

Then everything freezes. The world glazes over. She gasps, curling into a tight ball, tears watering her eyes. She gets just enough time to inhale a single breath before time resumes and pain slams into her again.

Pause. Pain. Pause. Pain. Pause. Pain.

In the slices of frozen time, she screams. In the slices of reality, stuttering forward like a badly burnt cinema film, she thrashes. She’s yanked in a tug-of-war between two pockets of existence, breaking apart, flaying open atom by atom, soaking in salty water and being thrown into a fire.

Over. And over. And over. And over.

Cora laughs. She cries. She groans. She sobs. The periods grow shorter, until the pain strikes her all at once like a whip, hundreds of times per second, but lagging just enough to hurt the same–

Every. Single. Time.

Her thoughts disassemble. She rides a tsunami of blinding agony down into the winding streets of her neighborhood. Her mom pours rubbing alcohol on her skinned knee. Mari rubs Cora’s knotted shoulders, jabbing her thumbs into the bunched-up muscles that ache at the slightest change of air. Cora runs the tap to wash away the bloody mess welling from her bitten tongue. Her dad smears ointment on the back of her hand where her spilled coffee burned her.

Pain, her oldest friend. It’s always been there, waiting for its turn to greet her, hasn’t it?

Her brain betrays her. It takes trillions of action potentials and registers it into that horrible, twisting, piercing sensation that invades her and makes her scream anew.

The intervals shorten, the lashes worsen. In real reality, Cora detects that somebody picks her broken, twitchy, self up. In fake reality, she hears the awful screech of gloating laughter, and glimpses icy eyes winking at her.

It is worse than hell. Worse than that distorted abyss, because at least there she could pretend to not exist, and dissolve into the background of the stifling darkness. Instead, she is stretched apart and thrust onto prickly spears of absolute reality and tangential reality, broken and re-broken, begging to pass out, but the constant switches resets her awareness, dragging the spears through bones and organs.

“Stop!” She squeezes the word out through many intervals. “Stop!”

Suddenly, the pain dulls. The shouts quiet. She lingers in a haze of half-lucidity, unable to do anything other than curl her fingers and remember she has a body.

Cora crawls, broken wrist and all, toward the figure dressed in black. A soft hand reaches and scratches her head. She collapses at their feet, sobbing, as she embraces the soft tenderness of normality, to exist without being in constant agony.

“Please,” she wheezes, shaking. “Please.”

You know what you must do.

“I–I…”

It lasts less than a moment. Time resumes, and then the subsequent shock of agony smashes into her, coupled with the rending pain of her ethereal counterpart that stabs deeper than any knife.

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Time pauses. Cora shakes her head and presses her forehead to the figure’s legs. “Stop! I’ll do it. Just make it stop.”

She was never strong.

Maybe this is the best decision in the end, if it means Liam and Callista will live to see another day.

“Please.” Cora screws her eyes shut and clenches her hands. “I let you in.”

No.

Cold water pours on her. She looks up at a face hidden behind writhing shadows. A smug smile twists the parasite’s lips upward, flashing pearlescent teeth.

I am not at your calling. I choose the terms, I choose the time, and this time, I say no.

“Please!” Cora drags herself up the parasite’s body. She clutches at its garments like a mountaineer hiking up an impossibly steep mountain. “I don’t want to–”

She falls.

Light and noise consumes her. She’s shredded apart, sandwiched between realities, as they flicker and blur. Lash after lash of agony splits her open. She can’t breathe. Her lungs are stiff with blood. She can’t think, drowning in pain, pain, consuming her identity, invading her, killing her.

Her vision throbs black. Sweet, sweet relief. Hands pass her to somebody else. Cora drools, head twisted back, arms and legs tangled together.

Time pauses. The parasite unfurls from her twisted legs and bows, sweeping its arms out wide.

“Please,” Cora whimpers, dragging herself toward the parasite again. Bone pokes out of her swollen wrist. She heaves, coughs, and reaches toward the parasite. “Stop. Stop.”

What if I want to keep doing this, forever until you die?

Forever, torn apart, reconfigured, torn apart. A cycle without end. Perpetually dragged between two realities, neuronal signals refreshed anew, cursed to live a life at a variable frame rate, doomed to succumb to the mad desires of an interdimensional parasite, forever and ever without end.

She sees blinding white. “No!” Howling, screaming, kicking, swinging, she throws herself at the parasite. She disintegrates just as Cora reaches it, but she imagines grabbing onto its frilly dress and slamming her down.

It works. The parasite is caught mid-disintegration, a loosely held cloud of particles, solid near the waistline, where Cora grabs on and tackles the parasite to the ground.

“No!” Cora roars, connecting her fist to the parasite’s cheek. Surprisingly, she flinches, blue eyes briefly scrunching shut. “I won’t let you!”

Time resumes. Pain explodes like the brutality of a grenade. She convulses, vomiting blood, the taste of iron heavy on her bitten tongue. The world yanks beneath her like a blanket and unfurls around her in a static embrace of incoherent madness.

The parasite stands triumphantly over her twitching body, hands on her hips, sleeves stained dark with Cora’s blood leaking out of every orifice, out of her wounds, out of her bruising skin.

You can’t control me.

“Maybe not. But you can’t do anything. Not really.” Cora pushes herself several inches off the ground before she collapses, rolls over onto her back, and pants, staring at the sky of another uncaring world. “Maybe you wanted to, before, but you got stuck in my head and now you can’t get out.” She coughs. “Because you realized that even if you possessed me–” She spits that last word out, letting her grimace speak for itself. “You’d push me too far, and then I’d die. We’d die. You’re torturing me because if I pass out, I might never wake up. And neither will you.”

Cora senses something new. A disturbance in frozen reality, like a ripple across a lake, rushing straight at her. To catapult her with a slam of kinetic energy out of this static pocket of existence into her real self.

The action is simple, really. She imagines the disturbance splitting, passing her, and continuing toward infinity.

The parasite lunges. Too late, too slow. Cora growls and redirects the disturbance to capture both of them, gathers that kinetic energy into a tight spear, and thrusts it into the pocket reality’s seams. Cracks spider web across the glazed surface. She heaves the spear into the weakest point and the surface collapses. Like a cracked hull in a stormy ocean, reality rushes to claim them.

You can’t!

“I will do anything it takes to fix everything. If I ever see you again, I will. Kill. You.”

The process completes.

One final lash of pain leaves her insensible. She touches Callista’s arm before she convulses and welcomes unconsciousness.

***

This world, to her surprise, is more than just a pretty painting splashed with eye-popping color.

Cora’s hearing is the first to come back through a series of clicks and pops as structures settle deep in her ears. A tinny ringing echoes at the edges of perception, but it pales next to the furious burbling of water somewhere.

Her vision comes next, piecing together walls of neutral colors, flat gray and smooth beige that remind her of a doctor’s office. Several paintings, glazed over in abstract patterns of rectangles and curved lines, are hung opposite a mounted board stuffed with hundreds of papers, pinned to the pinkish cork.

Swelling out of a corner like a pustule, bloated and glistening white, is a burbling pot of stew. Mushrooms simmer beneath a mat of red flakes. Coals glow beneath the pot, but the flames bleed blue and green, licking up the sides.

But that’s nothing compared to the person cooking the stew.

Purple swirls sweep across porcelain white skin. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Beady eyes set deep into a dome-shaped face stare back at her. Twisting, root-like tendrils whip out from beefy arms, curling around several handles and stirring the stew. A hardened cap of shriveled flesh protrudes from its broad skull.

A mushroom person, live before her, wearing overalls.

Anybody else would panic, maybe scream for a second or two, and throw blankets at the alien figure stirring mushroom stew like it was a normal day.

Not Cora. She laughs at the absurdity of her dream, before her abdomen feels like it’s splitting in two, and her ribs throb in protest.

“Ow!” She clutches at her stomach, only to realize her left arm is slung over her chest, and her right is so heavily bandaged she paws uselessly at her stomach.

“Relax,” the mushroom person intonates. It sounds nasally, though where a mouth should be, hardened sections of flesh decorates its face like scales. “You must be mindful of your wounds. Were it not for the quick thinking of your friends, you very well may have expired in the Reslan Moviche.”

“The what?”

But her head pounds. Cora sinks back into her pillows, trembling, shoving down the urge to vomit all over the floor. Is this not a dream? There were things that happened, important things, Cora thinks, but the harder she struggles to remember, the further the details slip, until she can’t remember anymore.

Several tendrils finish stirring the pot and remove three wooden spoons. Simultaneously, more pass a bowl onto a small table, and yet another produces a large spoon and dips it into the steaming stew.

“Eat,” the mushroom person says, dumping several spoonfuls into the bowl. A bit of liquid spills out, which a tendril easily wipes off the table. “Be mindful of the burning temperatures.”

They push the table until it’s beside her bed. A tiny spoon accompanies it. Cora reaches to grab it, but her fingers are wrapped in gauze, and her left arm is a non-starter.

“Oh,” she says, face burning, as the mushroom person picks up the spoon and dips it into the bowl. It wouldn’t hurt to encourage the dream. Whatever it is, this in-between reality her exhausted brain invented to cope with the pain. “What’s your name?”

“Eporsa. And yours?”

“Cora. Thank you. Did you do all this?” She does her best to sweep her arms over herself. Her legs peek out from the blankets, and they too are wrapped in bandages, down to her feet. The thickest bandages are wrapped over her chest, pressed tight like a vest.

“It was I and my several companions who raced to save you, yes.”

Save. It tickles at her memories. She scrunches up her nose, closing her eyes briefly, pushing past the headache and grasping at memories that break at the slightest touch.

Eporsa offers a steaming spoonful of stew. A single mushroom takes residence inside the hollow cavity, dripping purple liquid. Several red flakes are stuck to the shriveled cap. Cora eyes the mushroom especially, cherry red despite boiling inside that pot.

“Will it kill me?” Eporsa stares at her blankly. Or at least as blankly as a pair of beady eyes can. “It’s food, yes, I know, but parity changes things. It might kill me.”

She doesn’t feel tempted to test the dream-logic of eating imaginary poisonous food.

“Your friends have eaten our dishes many times, and they are healthy still.”

Liam. Callista. Their names are there one second, gone the next. Cora’s heart races. Her hands are clammy. This is starting to feel too real.

It can’t be real. They’d been in danger, but something happened to Cora, something bad, and she left her friends alone. She failed them, she thinks.

“I want you to tell me something. Am I dreaming?”

“Dreaming?” Eporsa rotates an arm, and several tendrils squirm around. “You have been unconscious for over three days. We did not know if you would survive for much longer.”

“We made it out?” Cora can’t help the wetness that moistens her eyes. The tightness of her throat. The stuffiness of her nose. “We’re okay?”

“Yes.”

Everything comes rushing back.

She spent three days veering on the edge of death, recovering from breaking her body to break the world. Those three days she spent hiding from the parasite and its corroding influence, and was spared the worst of the pain.

She remembers distant voices calling her name, the cool glass of cups pressed to her lips, the precious liquid called water she drank before lapsing back into unconsciousness.

It’s real. They’re alive.

Her body feels like one giant bruise, as if a hammer whacked her front and back. She can’t move, or else pain stabs into her muscles. She can’t even blink without the surfaces of her eyeballs aching.

“I should’ve died. I went too far,” she mumbles. Eporsa offers the spoon again, and she relents, opening her mouth.

It’s quick and simple. She closes her mouth and chews on the mushroom. The texture is rubbery, hard to break apart, but the taste is strong and meaty, the flakes taste like regular spices, and the viscous liquid tastes of broth.

Her stomach grumbles. Her parched throat demands water. Cora nods toward the soup, and Eporsa feeds her another spoonful, this time with two mushrooms, which she eagerly accepts.

“Yes,” Eporsa says. “You suffered ruptured organs, sprained muscles, torn ligaments, ocular damage, auditory damage, a severe concussion, a broken wrist, numerous bite wounds, many minor injuries, and that grievous chest wound.” Cora receives a third spoonful of the savory mushroom stew. “We healed the worst of your wounds and internal injuries. Your friend Liam provided his best knowledge of Magaraman anatomy to assist us, but unfortunately we could not fully heal your ears, nor remove the scarring process.”

That explains the faint, hollow ringing noise. “Oh.” After the fourth spoonful, Cora smacks her lips and looks down at her bandaged self. No part of her made it out unscathed, it seems. Between weeks of accumulated scrapes and cuts, the mutants, and breaking herself along the planes of reality, it’s a miracle she can move at all.

She braces for the parasite’s interjection of an insult, or time pausing again just for the parasite to torture her again. But she knows how to counter its influence. And maybe someday, how to kill it for good.

When the inevitable doesn’t come–not even a faint stirring in her thoughts, or an insult pointed her way–Cora relaxes.

“Did anyone get hurt?”

Eporsa pauses, tendrils waving around. “Several soldiers were struck by falling debris. Your handiwork?”

“I didn’t mean to. I wanted to help Liam off a giant mushroom.” Cora swallows the fifth spoonful and hums to herself to drown out that ringing noise. “I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologize. You were under duress. Do you want water?”

“Yes.” While Eporsa produces a pitcher and opens a tap, Cora turns toward the source of the room’s light. Not the pot of stew, whose flames are dwindling, but to the floor-to-ceiling window behind her.

She gasps and stares at this new world.

Far below a steep hill, past a network of roads and solitary buildings, past fields of scrubby gray moss stretched and segmented into rectangles, a city of mushrooms and steel crawls on a cliff. Buildings cluster around five colossal mushrooms, casting vast shadows over large swathes of the city. Glass and steel spirals upward in the spaces between mushrooms, scraping the bottom of cotton-candy clouds.

Beyond the cliff, a lapis bay gleams reddish from the red orb suspended high in the sky. Hundreds of boats glint off the coast. They range from paper-mache look-alikes to container ships, drifting lazily while bearing hundreds of colorful crates stacked on top. Several ships sit further away, arranged into a tight formation, gleaming polished metal.

Warships?

“This is the city of Cenari,” Eporsa says. “Here is your water.” Tendrils raise the cup to Cora’s lips, and she drinks greedily, refusing to breathe until the cup is empty.

“It’s beautiful.” Cora glances back at the sprawling city. “Are Transients here?”

“They have not breached our nodes for over five hundred years. You are safe.”

The last doubt vanishes. That was all she needed to hear. She slumps into her pillows, accepting spoonful after spoonful of stew. Where some dribbles on her lips, Eporsa wipes the messes off gently with a cloth.

“There is something I must tell you, though.”

Cora’s stomach hardens to lead. She gnaws on her lip and trembles. “What is it?”

“After you recover enough to live without assistance, the governor of Cenari wishes to hold a private audience with you.”

“Wait, what?” Cora glances back at the city. “Why?”

For the first time, Eporsa hesitates, root-like tendrils briefly stilling, head tilting to one side. “He says it concerns matters about a box.”