“Please, sir, stop.”

“When will I be good?”

“It’ll take months.”

“Okay. I need–”

***

Days drag into weeks.

The daily visits help, of course. Cora can’t help but smile every time the door creaks open and it’s not a doctor or physical therapist, but Callista, fresh out of the shower, bouncing with a spring to her step as she closes the distance between them in a heartbeat.

They talk. They laugh. They unwind. Once, even, they cry, curled into each other, though Callista is mindful of Cora’s fragile body and her slung arm.

Liam appears several times. Sometimes with her, other times alone. But his visits are few and far between, and when he does appear, he’s withdrawn, murmuring basic questions and answers, avoiding her imploring gaze.

He helped save her, but now he wants nothing to do with her. Not that she blames him. If she was in his shoes, she’d hate herself, too.

Behind the veil of pleasantries and guided recovery, though, the urge to leave has built at the back of her mind. The first night, she stared out the window for hours at the twinkling city far below, knowing the governor was waiting for her, that finally, she’d get some answers and maybe, just maybe, find a way home.

Weeks later, she’s antsy, dreaming of home, a world so far and yet so close to her heart. She wants more. She wants to go home, she wants to visit the city, she wants to fix her mistakes.

Yet the days she paces the corridors, sticking to her recovery regimen, she overhears too many conversations. Soldiers, newly returned from war, recount harrowing tales of Transient incursions into contested territory on some far-off world called Uklut. The few times she is brave enough to ask, the answers she receives chill her.

If the Transients capture Uklut, the Empire will turn its incinerating gaze onto Muschia next.

The forest feels like a dream long since forgotten. Something she could talk about to the soldiers and they’d chalk it up to an overactive imagination, because why not? They’re the ones who have seen the worst in war, limbs shorn off, organs ruptured, while delivering exacting blows at the Transients. Cora is a nobody compared to them.

It’d be too easy to wake up each day and brush off those weeks spent scraping for survival as a horrific nightmare, but like the soldiers, her body bears the physical proof no magic can erase.

Puckered scar tissue runs down her chest. Faint scar lines mark her arms and hands. The bite wounds healed over nicely enough, leaving a faded patch of pale tissue where olive skin had been before. Apparently, a stray claw or branch had cut an arc into her cheekbone, so now she has a crescent scar framing the bottom-left corner of her left eye.

“It’s nice,” Callista said the third night, after Cora freaked out over how big the scar was.

“But it’s gonna be there forever!”

“So? It’s a part of who you are. Never forget that. It suits you, actually.”

And maybe it does. Maybe that’s why she catches Cenarians glancing at her whenever she walks outside her room, soldiers included. It’s proof that she, too, is a victim of the Empire, even if indirect.

She hobbles at first, requiring Eporsa’s supervision and a walker fashioned out of mushroom stalks tightly bound with expertly tied knots. It’s embarrassing, it’s slow, it’s awkward with one functioning hand and Eporsa’s steady hand–tendrils–and she shrinks beneath the many imploring gazes turned her way.

But she gets better. She upgrades to a cane, and true to her desires, she receives a cane with a black, shriveled mushroom pounded into the stick. She takes the desiccated white mushroom flesh packaged beside her cane, cuts the flesh into a circle, and pins it to the mushroom. She uses the Cenarian analogue of a fountain pen and traces an 8 into the middle.

Her handiwork is shaky–after all, her dominant hand is wrapped to her chest–but it gets the message across to the one person she hoped would understand. Everybody else looks at her quizzically, kind enough to leave her alone.

He doesn’t.

“An 8-ball?” Liam offers a rare smile and coughs out what sounds like a laugh, but his voice is so hoarse he clears his throat and stops. “What, are you going to grift the Cenarians? Planning to offer unearthly attractions for all to see? I think they’ll give you a run for your money.”

Cora beams at him. “You get the reference!”

He shrugs. “Just saying, when there’s no cops around, anything’s legal.” He leans in, scans to either side of him, and says, “You know, if the grid has over two thousand worlds, could that mean that maybe there are infinite worlds, and on those infinite worlds–”

“Nope. I don’t want to hear it.”

“But you–”

“Out. Out!” She half-heartedly swings her cane at him, and he easily dodges, always quick on his feet. Just like they dodge the uncomfortable truth that drove a wedge between them.

They’re putting on an act. Some things certainly haven’t changed. They swat at each other; they talk about the food, and they reminisce about missing elikanders, which apparently have to be shipped across two worlds before arriving a mushy mess at Cenari’s doorstep.

Liam leaves soon after, and despite it being the most interaction she’s gotten out of him in weeks, Cora is left chewing on her thoughts about why they haven’t talked about what she did.

Maybe she should forget it ever happened, start over anew.

Certainly, she feels like a completely different person when she glances at the mirror and startles at the sight. Hair drawn back into a ponytail, eye bags faded, lips soft, eyes bright and alert, back straight, it feels more like a stranger staring back. She’s put on some weight, too, smoothing over her knobby joints and protruding ribs, even rounding out her chest a bit.

Though she blushes after checking herself out and realizing that she was thinking of Callista the whole time.

Past the reflection, flipped and intruding into another reality, her metaphysical self is unresponsive. The one time Cora tried to explain her other wounds to Eporsa, he had his assistants consult books dredged from the densely packed basement library, but no written accounts hinted at anything like her condition.

Even Callista is left confused when Cora rambles about her other self.

“So you don’t have another you?” Cora asks.

“Am I supposed to?” Callista plants her feet on the window and throws her head back. Her upper half dangles off the edge of the bed, head flipped upside down to see Cora seated at her chair, tugging at her sling.

“Am I not supposed to?”

“No?”

Cora bites her lip. “Then what do you feel when your eyes get all glowy?”

“All glowy.” Cora waits for Callista to continue, but she looks at her expectantly. “Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t feel anything unless I push myself too far. In that aspect I’d consider it like running. You subconsciously know what your limits are.”

“You could’ve just told me that, you jerk.” Cora fakes a kick toward Callista’s arm, but her eyes flash, and she easily grabs Cora’s ankle.

“Do you see? That was instinctive for me.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t going to kick you!”

“Of course you weren’t.” Callista flips onto her stomach while keeping her grip on her ankle. Cora grumbles and does her best to keep her attention on her sling, on its coarseness rubbing her shoulder raw despite the cushioning, because Callista is still holding onto her foot and she’s posing like that.

She doesn’t even realize how she looks at that moment. Back home, she’d easily trend on Instagram, no filters needed, and not for being a sapient non-human person.

“Maybe your experiences are connected to that entity in your head.”

“It’s a parasite.” Cora sours at the reminder that an alien consciousness is enfolded within her brain tissues, and she can’t get rid of it.

Oh, she’s tried. Several times, she concentrated hard enough to leave her dizzy, clinging to her pillows while the world swayed around her. Eporsa had no explanations, either, and she left it as a simple hallucination, at least in their eyes.

She hadn’t heard anything from it, not a single thought or twitch of awareness. No shock of time pausing, or hollow cavity gnawing at her brain. Maybe it took her threat seriously. She hopes it did.

“Has it done anything else–” Callista releases her leg and claps a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Cora.” Too late to stop the torrent of memories from crashing into Cora.

And then Cora breaks down, and Callista carries her to her bed, before she breaks down, too, apologizing and saying she wants to put everything behind them, that the past doesn’t have to define their future.

But Cora can’t, because Mari is still out there.

Cora pushes herself to her limits–under Espora’s directions and Callista’s caution, of course–for her best friend, stranded on another world, captured by the worst kind of monsters infesting the grid. She refuses to believe Mari died. She’s too damn stubborn to give up.

Three weeks after the Cenarians took her in, Cora clears the last hospital floor and arrives, panting, at Eporsa’s door, knocking until her knuckles turn red.

“Eporsa!”

The door creaks open. Eporsa is seated at his desk, like usual, writing in four journals simultaneously. He lifts his tendrils from two of them and offers his characteristic greeting, a twirling of his tendrils and a bend of his arm, head craned to glimpse her from the side.

“Yes, Cora?”

His voice, as she learned from constant physical therapy sessions, reverberates from tiny, gill-like openings fluttering at the base of his head. Their biology never ceases to amaze her, these people that sprouted from a long, ancestral lineage of sentient mushrooms.

“I’m ready.” She presses her hand to her chest. Her heart beats hard enough to throb through her breastbone. “I can talk to the governor now.”

“You completed your instructed session?”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Yeah, I did, and I came here to prove it,” she pants, bending over. A tiny ache stabs beneath her ribs. “Oh, God, sorry, give me a moment.”

“Yes, you are ready. I will inform the governor, then. After, I will inform you on which date you may speak to him.”

Cora almost squeals–almost. She barely has enough dignity left as it is. Instead, she grins and does something she should’ve offered on the first day when Eporsa mentioned saving her: she offers a fist-bump.

“What are you doing, Cora?”

“It’s something my people do back on Magaram.” The half-lie slips out easily enough. It’s one born out of necessity this time. “We close our hands like this and go boop.” She mimes bumping her good fist to her left hand, but not actually touching, because her wrist bones still ache.

Eporsa stops scribbling in the other journals. He raises both arms, and his root-tendrils curl into rough approximations of her fists. Cora fist-bumps the first and leans so her slung hand can pretend to fist-bump the second.

“Just like that,” she says, grinning again. It’s been so long since she’s felt this ecstatic that she practically trembles with excitement. She can run a marathon, punch holes into the walls, jump over tables, do anything.

Eporsa mimics a thumbs-up, another gesture that she taught him a few days ago. “Thank you. Do you need anything?”

“Nope. What are you writing, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Medical records. Patient cases. It is very tedious. Would you like to see?”

Cora scrunches her nose. “No, thank you. I already had enough of that back home. Boring work, I mean. Good luck with that!”

“There is nothing good about this.”

She laughs, and then waves him goodbye, gently shutting the door. She bounces down the corridors and flies down the stairs. Sweat and blinding sunlight stings her eyes as she emerges onto the courtyard, the place the hospital, its two wings, and a towering chain-link fence enclose.

Beyond the gentle dip past the gate, she knows a road winds between mountains of rock, then branches off into a jumble of roads and rails, lights and buildings, squat and ugly. Past that plateau is another drop, where the city proper thrives.

From the courtyard’s view, however, all Cora sees are Cenari's five mushroom caps, three bright red and bearing white spots like freckles, one gleaming purple, and another dark gray streaked with blue. At night, that mushroom glows like a second sun, its blue streaks oozing light that bleeds out into a halo of light.

Oh, and the food. Her mouth waters. Half of the courtyard, the part snug against the main building and both wings, consists of concentric stone rings and a cobblestone walkway bisecting them. Exotic plants and mushrooms thrive in each layer, colorful explosions of growth that never fail to give her goosebumps.

The other half is an open cafeteria. Circular tables span its length in neat rows, and foldable chairs are set up like petals bursting from flowers, seven per table. Off to the side, three massive tables host dozens of food items, ranging from sauteed mushrooms to mushroom stew to mushroom sandwiches to glazed mushroom dessert.

Okay, everything is mushrooms, but the varieties of dishes the Cenarians cook make her forget they’re mushrooms at all.

“Cora!”

Callista waves from a table hugging the fence. Cora waves back, before turning and ordering anything and everything. The cook is kind enough to stack her food vertically like a game of Tetris, slotting dishes into each other while somehow maintaining it on a single plate. She thanks them and slowly, but surely, makes her way toward Callista.

“That is monstrous,” Callista says once Cora sets her plate down. “Where is your knife and fork?”

“Hey! We ate with our hands for weeks.”

“Yes, because we had no other choice.” Callista shakes her head, another Earthly gesture she seemed to have picked up, and waves her away. “You are not eating all of that with your hands.”

“Hand,” Cora corrects, and Callista swats at her, slow enough that Cora easily dodges it. She snatches a fork from the nearest table and waves it in front of Callista. “Is that better?”

“Is it supposed to be?”

“I swear, I’m gonna–”

Cora pauses, mushroom brushing her parted lips, as she spots Liam exiting the botanical gardens. Golden spores and pollen dusts his dark hair. There’s an aura of healthiness, of completeness, that he radiates. His skin is practically glowing. Sure, she’s seen and talked to him a few times since she showed off her cane, but he looks like months have passed, not weeks.

He stretches, flexing his massive arms and shoulders, then stretches his toned legs, reaching to touch his toes. Callista follows Cora’s stunned gaze and sighs.

“Show-off,” she mumbles. She lifts her chin. “Hey, what are you doing?” If he hears, he doesn’t acknowledge them. Callista’s pupils spark purple, and Cora gets a personal view of her friend’s throat muscles enlarging. “Liam!”

Several Cenarians glance their way, but thankfully return to their business, burying tendrils into soups and peeling back facial tissues to shovel mushrooms into narrow mouths.

He finally looks up. “What?”

Callista glowers at him. “What do you mean, what? I haven’t seen you in three days and we live together!”

“Different lives, different schedules.” He shrugs, and the movement is so casual Cora might’ve dispelled the queasiness squirming in her stomach and invite him over.

Might’ve.

Because this isn’t him. It can’t be him, the same boy who withdrew into himself, and except for that one time they talked, looked sullen and serious. Callista had told her, too, about Liam’s odd habits, his tendency to go unnoticed or arrive late to sleep, and in the moments they were in their apartment, not talk much.

“We have a seat for you,” Cora says, patting the chair beside her. “If you want.”

His expression flickers. He remains silent for a moment, eyes clouding in thought. “I’m not hungry, but I’ll sit down.”

Callista hones in on Liam. He sits down with a heavy groan, avoiding her burning stare. If he cares at all, he hides it well with a poker face.

“Well?”

Civilization is bringing out their true selves, Cora notices. Starvation and threat of constant death in the forest banded them together. They learned to cope in a hostile world, learned to depend on each other, learned about each other more in a shorter time than any normal person would dare.

Cushioned by constant supplies of food, embraced within spacious rooms and soft beds, protected by a world actively hostile to Transients, they’re free to sprout and grow.

Callista is confrontational. She doesn’t hesitate to act first, and doesn’t hesitate to call others out, including herself if she makes mistakes. She’s gone from cautious and resentful of herself to bold and confident. How she used to be, probably.

Liam is withdrawn. Sometimes he makes witty comments, other times he’s a shell of himself, responding with only the barest answers. Back in the forest he’d been like Callista is now, but after Cora told the truth about the box, he withdrew.

It’s all her fault, isn’t it?

She gnaws on her bottom lip. It’s a bad habit, one that’s led to scraping her lip raw, but she can’t help it. The pain grounds her, reminds her that she still has so much left to do.

Like talk to him about the damn box.

“Well what?”

Callista pinches the bridge of her nose. “Different lives. I understand. The problem is that you’ve been avoiding us.”

There. A crack in his polished exterior, his eyes blinking a little too quickly, his eyebrows sinking a little too low. “I’ve been busy. Really busy. I’m trying to learn about Cenari so if something bad happens, we can be one step ahead.”

“I understand. But you could’ve invited me.” She gestures at Cora. “You could’ve come with me to visit her and talk about anything. We wouldn’t have cared if you wanted to stay quiet. Your company would’ve been enough.”

Liam combs his hair back. The bits of pollen and spores float off, drifting toward other tables. “There’s a reason why I didn’t.”

The air chills. Cora remains still as Callista tears into him. “So none of that meant anything, then?”

“That’s not–”

“You can’t pretend it never happened.”

He stills. Slowly, too slowly, he glances at Cora, then back at Callista, lips twisting into a grimace. He slams his elbows on the table and grabs the sides of his head, screwing his eyes shut. A long, steady stream of air blows out of his nose.

“Talk about it later,” he mumbles.

Her plate is cold. Cora stabs at the mushrooms again, but her appetite is gone. “Pretend what never happened? Everything before we got here?”

Now it’s Callista’s turn to bury her face into her hands. She drags her fingers down her face. “No, not that. I don’t think any of us can pretend those things never happened.”

Liam nods. “It’s something else. Forget about it, Cora.”

“It’s his choice.” Callista scowls and stuffs mushrooms into her mouth.

Cora stares at her inert food that had been steaming minutes ago. She chews and swallows the first mushrooms, but they taste cold and dead, and add to the lump building in her throat.

“Do you want some of my food?” Small miracle her voice doesn’t shake. So close to him and his sulking expression, she gets the impression he hates her for what she’s done.

“You need to eat, though.”

“I don’t feel that hungry anymore. You can have some.” Cora pushes the plate toward him. He eyes the bigger, narrow mushrooms stacked on top, and plucks two by their stems before their caps crunch in his teeth like jalapeños.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. Why can’t she just talk to him about the box? Why can’t he? He knows, she knows, so it’s not a secret anymore. She hurt him, betrayed his trust, and reaped the consequences. It can’t be this way. They’ve been through too much already to just… fall apart.

Why does she always have to be selfish and hurt the people she loves?

“Thank you,” he says between mouthfuls, throat bobbing as he swallows.

Cora pokes at a mixture of diced mushrooms and red strips of plant matter smeared with a yellowish sauce on a strip of unraveled mushroom flesh. Callista reaches across and touches the back of Cora’s hand.

Are you okay? Her eyes seem to suggest, her frown cut deep.

Maybe, she mentally responds, squeezing her hand before eating more.

They eat in silence. Cora eventually regains her appetite, and she devours the rest of the plate, though she leaves the narrow mushrooms for Liam to munch on. Callista clears her plate as well, licking her lips when she finishes, and gets a second plate.

While she’s gone, Liam leans forward and lowers his voice to almost a whisper. “There’s a Transient here.”

Cora almost spits out the last mushroom. She barely manages to choke it down before glaring at him, but like usual, he adopts another mask, becoming an unwavering statue.

“What the fuck?” she hisses. “Like, seriously, what the fuck!”

“I’d rather nobody overhear us.” He leans back in his chair and folds his arms over his chest. “This world is part of the Alliance that fights the Transients, but a few weeks ago I started tracking one here.”

She shakes. “Cenari?”

“Here. The hospital. I can’t explain it. I was searching the basement for historical archives about which worlds are good and which are bad. Then out of nowhere, a Transient walks past. But here’s the weird thing. It did something to my head and I forgot it existed. I couldn’t even see it. I didn’t realize until… maybe it’s easier if I show you.”

His gray eyes gleam. The light is just there, a smidge escaping his pupils and streaking across his irises, and then a new, alien thought worms its way to the surface. It’s not unlike the parasite’s corrosive influence, toxic and wrong, so she squirms in her chair and fights off the influence.

She banishes it by remembering how she countered the parasite through redirecting its own power, but not before she gets an impression of an armored figure waving a hand lazily at her and shutting off her senses to its existence, leaving bare concrete corridors, endless stuffed shelves, and the drowning silence surrounding her.

“What the fuck!”

He quickly glances at either side before clasping his hand over hers. “The Transient gave me or woke up my gift somehow. But it doesn’t know. I’ve tracked it throughout the hospital, but it always goes to a random room and shuts itself off for hours. Nobody else cares. I don’t think they know it’s there.” He withdraws his hand and curls it into a fist. “Except me.”

“How did you–”

Callista sits down. She takes one look at Liam and his glowing eyes before double-taking. “This is absurd.”

“I told neither of you because I thought I was compromised. I had no idea how to control my gift until yesterday.” In the literal blink of an eye, the light dims and dies, and he’s back to normal. “There’s a Transient in the hospital, and nobody notices it except me.”

“Of course. Just great.” Callista ducks her head and eats a forkful of mushrooms. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I was about to tell both of you, but then you had to interrupt me.”

“Then it’s part of the reason, then. Am I wrong?”

To Cora’s surprise, he doesn’t argue.

“Liam, please never do that again.” Cora combs her mind for any signs of corrosive influence until she’s satisfied she’s well and truly alone in her own skull. “Like, ever. Please.”

He nods. “I promise. I won’t do that to anybody unless they ask. I never expected to have actual magic, though.” That explains why he appeared so confident and relaxed earlier. At least he gets to control his gift, however he does it, whenever he wants, wherever he wants, forever.

Cora wants to be happy for him. If there’s anybody who deserves magic, it’s him. Yet she claws at her unresponsive metaphysical self, its absence a painful reminder of the power that had felt so right.

Liam frowns. “There’s a Transient in the hospital. With us. The only foreign refugees.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Callista says. “The Cenarians are Transient enemies. They’re at war in Uklut, but the Alliance still controls those nodes, and any Transient on Muschia would’ve been imprisoned or executed long ago.”

He coughs. “Should’ve.”

Or maybe there is a traitor among the Cenarians, after all. Cora’s met a lot of friendly people, but she hasn’t met everybody, and new patients cycle in and out daily.

Anything’s possible, though the possibility of it being somebody she greets and knows sours her stomach.

“I’m gonna need you two soon.” They turn toward her. Cora straightens her back. “I’m ready to talk to the governor, and I don’t want to go alone.”

“I’ll go with you,” Callista says, while Liam raps his fingers on the table.

“I have to stay. Otherwise I’ll lose track of the Transient.”

Callista opens her mouth, closes it, and shakes her head, hair swishing from side to side. “Talk about it later.”

He nods.

A Transient, tentative traitors, potential answers to the box, and a gift of mind influencing that belongs to the close friend-turned-awkward-friendship. If there’s something the forest had, it was brute simplicity. Eat, sleep, and fight.

Maybe civilization isn’t their salvation. Maybe all it does is trade one problem for another.