“Yes, like that, excellent.”

“I’m going to fall. I don’t like feeling this weak.”

“You’ve been bed bound for weeks. It’ll take you a few months to recover.”

“The stretching was bad enough.”

***

Eporsa gives her three days to prepare. Seventy-two hours of Earth time, eighty-four of Muschia time, if Cora tracked the time on her phone correctly.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. If there’s anything she should be a master at, it’s patience. Except she can’t sleep the next two nights.

Oh, she tries. She burrows into her blankets and faces the city in her bundled cocoon of blankets, closing her eyes and letting herself go limp. Except a tingling spreads at the base of her neck like somebody's watching her, and she flips the blanket off, opening her eyes, only to meet a room of gloomy darkness, absent of conspicuous, Transient-shaped shadows.

By day, she stumbles down the corridors, bleary-eyed. She talks to the patients, listens to a few soldiers recall heroic deeds, and stuffs herself full of mushrooms, but the old tiredness and paranoia is still there. She can’t even look at anybody without hesitating. Several ask her if she’s okay, and she says yes, because why wouldn’t she?

She’s well-fed. She’s clean. The city is footing the bill for her and her friends. She should be well-rested, trusting, and healthy.

Should be.

Damn Liam and his revelation. He could be lying through his teeth for all she knows, but she trusts him, and besides, that memory that slipped into her head… she can’t stop thinking about it. One of those monsters lurks among the people nourishing her.

Cora is no stranger to those feelings, of course. She hadn’t been able to sleep much the week after she broke into the thrift shop and stole the box. She’d stayed up for nights on end running countless experiments, collecting data, and trying to parse out a meaning to no effect, if only to at least forget that the police could be prowling the streets to arrest her. Plus, the scientific method was a suggestion, not a principle to follow, and thus with the cocktail of fear and ignorance she recklessly delved into her research, foregoing sleep and nourishment to find out what the next big thing was.

But all of that pales to the knowledge that any night, a monster could break into her room and kill her. It’d be easy, too, since her metaphysical self is unresponsive and Cora can’t grasp control over the tiniest dirt particle.

So on the third and final night before the meeting, Cora sinks into her mattress and drags her blankets over her head. If she can’t see the Transient, it can’t see her. The thought is hilarious, somehow, and she quietly giggles to herself.

Good thing Callista isn’t here.

Or maybe not. She had offered to stay over, and said she’d sleep just fine on the floor or the chair. It’d give her a faster reaction time. But Cora shot down the offer, saying they had to stick to their normal routines, or the Transient might react.

Yeah, that was a dumb assumption, and because of it she’s a paranoid mess jumping at her own shadows instead of cuddling with… she shakes her head. Better not to dwell on yet more of her smoldering mistakes.

Cora flips on her side and curls into a tight ball, scrolling through her phone. The photo gallery stays open a grand total of thirty seconds before her heart nearly bursts from the painful memories and she closes the app.

Shockingly, she never deleted the default apps that came with her phone. Several are offline puzzle games. Yes! Fuel for her boredom. She clicks on a random block game, swipes past the instructions, and completely fails. She rubs her eyes, adjusting to the glare of her screen and the tiny, multi-colored blocks pasted onto a grid. Another fail. She drags blocks into the grid, fails, fails again, and finally closes the app in frustration.

Boredom and darkness provide little stimuli for her racing brain to appreciate. She constantly taps her foot, gnaws on her cheek, and runs her fingers over her screen protector, trailing her nails down the edges.

Dreams. She needs dreams. Cora pockets her phone and lies still, closing her eyes, waiting for the gravitic lurch of sleep to drag her into an eclectic wonderland of dreams and nightmares.

At last, it does, and she plunges into a distorted echo of home.

***

The morning is simple enough.

She slips into her original clothes, the t-shirt and jeans that the Cenarians kindly stitched back together. At breakfast, she joins an alert Callista and grumpy Liam, who twice lapses into a nap. The second time, he nearly face-plants into the table, but Callista catches him, and he mumbles his gratitude before swirling his soup around.

“Are you okay?” Cora asks, shoveling cereal into her mouth. Cenari’s version of milk is sweeter and thicker, coating the dried mushrooms in just the right way that her taste buds sing in delight.

“I kept watch all night. For you,” he groans, rubbing at his eyes. “I had to make sure nothing would happen. I still have to.”

Callista pats his shoulder. “Maybe I was wrong.”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

Cora lets their mysterious issue go and continues eating until her stomach stops grumbling. She looks across the courtyard and waves at Eporsa, whose tendrils wave several hellos at each of them.

“Are you ready?” he intones, glancing at each of them.

“I’m staying,” Liam says.

“Yes, I forgot. My apologies. May I ask why?”

“I slept badly. I can barely walk as it is.”

“Ah. Well. If you want a quick burst of energy, look no further than our beverages.” Eporsa points at the third table, which hosts eight liquid dispensers and mounds of paper cups stacked beside each one. “Parity should give the same energetic properties to you.”

“I’ll check it out soon. Just need to finish eating.”

“You told me it was a private meeting between Cora and the governor, right?” Callista says. She cracks a breakfast bar in half and shoves it into her mouth.

“Ultimately, yes. You and I will have to wait outside the chamber room until they finish.”

She swallows. “Did the governor ask for anything?”

Eporsa pauses, tendrils stilling, the cue Cora knows that he’s remembering specific memories. Patients and soldiers do the same, too, whenever they tell her about their life stories.

“He requested a private conversation only about a box, whatever it may mean. Nothing more.”

Cora tilts the bowl and slurps the last of the sweet liquid. It’s incredible how many mushrooms she’s eaten, and how many dishes the Cenarians make with them. She never gets bored by the flavors ever. Every day tastes unique.

“Who else is coming again?” she asks.

“Four guards. Resma, Aspa, Tere, and Obuch. I believe you–”

“Yes!” Cora’s face burns when Callista stares at her incredulously and then grins. Liam is being Liam, wallowing in tiredness, eyes drooping shut again. “Sorry. Sorry…” Cora can’t contain her own smile, though. “I like Resma. He’s really nice. Aspa is nice, too, but I don’t know her that well.”

If there’s one good thing Cora’s physical therapy gave her–apart from stronger muscles and a steadfast recovery–it’s the odd assortment of friendships from seeing people regularly.

There are the soldiers and their war stories, of course. She knows at least fifteen, maybe a few extra if she concentrates hard enough to remember all the names. Normal patients cycle in and out, but she’s befriended several longer-term patients.

Then there are the guards. Those entrusted to patrol the corridors and catch any intruders, foreign or domestic. They’re part of the reason Cora leaves her room so often, because so many of them are friendly beneath the plates of armor, and because their presence means the hospital is safe, a feeling so jarring it took several days for Eporsa to convince her to leave the confines of her room.

“I met Tere and Obuch. I suspect you will take a liking to them, too.” Eporsa turns and starts toward the main section of the hospital, the part hidden behind the concentric rings of gardens. “We will wait in the lobby for you.”

“Okay, don’t worry,” Cora says, and he lumbers into the garden.

Callista smiles warmly again. “It’s good to see you like this.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Cora’s face burns again. Callista turns toward Liam and frowns. “Master spy, are you conscious?”

“Fuck off,” he groans, waving an arm at her.

“How are you supposed to keep watch like this?”

“I will. I just need a quick…” He lapses into silence, eyes fluttering closed. He nuzzles his head into his arms draped on the table and immediately starts snoring.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“It’s always the same with him,” Callista complains, standing and walking toward the third table, the one crowded with beverages.

Then Liam cracks open an eye and locks on Cora. “I’m not really sleepy.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” Cora snorts, shaking her head. A few of her bangs float over her eyes. She really needs a haircut, but the Cenarians don’t even have hair. Maybe with the scissors she brought from home…

“I haven’t been able to sleep that well. I guess I got used to it, or my gift changed my brain so I don’t need sleep.” He pokes at his bowl of soup, cold and still. “Which is useful for tracking the Transient.”

“How do you know where it is all the time?”

“Magic.” Cora scowls, and he smiles. “I have a very distant link to it. It’s like a phone notification. If it changes rooms, I’ll know.”

She glances around them. What would a hidden Transient look like, anyway? Liam can see it in its entirety, apparently, but for normal eyes like hers, what would she see? “And it hasn’t done the same back to you?”

“I don’t think so?” He stirs his soup and grudgingly lifts a spoonful to his slack lips. “I think I’d be able to tell. You don’t just forget something like that.”

She purses her lips and nods. The wrongness, the violation, the ickiness of another consciousness breaking into her mind. It’s something she’ll never forget. Especially since the parasite is lodged into her mind and she can’t get rid of the sensation of fullness its presence causes.

“You’ll be okay here?”

“Probably.”

Callista returns with three steaming cups of mocha liquid. She sets one down in front of Liam, who’s pretend-snoring, much to Cora’s amusement, and sets the other two down together.

“Okay, quit the act,” Callista huffs, flicking Liam on the ear. He rises and scowls, rubbing his ear.

“I’ve done nothing.”

“Exactly. And soon you’ll be doing something, so you may as well do it with as much energy as possible.” Within a few days, their dynamic went from estranged to friendly. Cora can’t make sense out of it, but apparently they can, because he accepts the drink and sips out of it.

His eyes shoot wide open. “That tastes great, actually.”

“I know, right?” Cora sips out of her cup. The taste is perfect. She continues sipping even as the liquid sloshes around the cup and burns her tongue. “Everything they make tastes amazing.”

“They called it a warm mushroom’s brew,” Callista says. She tastes the drink and hums, pleased.

“Will you be okay there?”

That’s the last thing Cora expects to hear from him. “Yeah? Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Somebody’s colluding with the Transient. I wanted you to remember that.”

She nearly spits out the drink. She forces herself to swallow and set the cup down. The taste is delicious, and she has no reason to doubt the chefs–after all, they’ve kept her fed for weeks–but she can’t bring herself to drink again.

The Cenarians are friendly. They could’ve captured them, interrogated them, or killed them the first few days. They could’ve turned them away, or refused to heal them, or ignored them.

“I’ll be fine.”

Except Cora doesn’t believe herself anymore.

***

Resma is the first to wave his tendrils around after Cora crosses the entrance, curling them into a fist for her to bump.

“Good morning, Cora,” he intones. He adjusts the plate of red armor covering his chest. “Do you appreciate my fashion?”

She smiles. “It really brings out the swirls on your shoulders. How was your morning?”

“Rotations, keeping watch, the usual activities. Ah, allow me to introduce you to my friends. You know Aspa, I believe?”

Aspa wears a plate of blue armor. She curls her tendrils into a fist, which Cora fist-bumps as well. “Hi, Aspa,” she says.

“Hello.”

“This is Tere.” Tere, unlike the other three, is clad head to toe in armored plates. They clang against each other as they lift their arm and several tendrils offer a hesitant shake. “Tere cannot vocalize. She asks if you are meeting the governor with that stain on your shirt.”

By instinct, Cora glances down, finding nothing, only to hear a metallic chortle from deep within the metal carapace. Their tendrils twist and bend at odd angles, and Resma rapidly interprets, beady eyes soaking in the frantic movements.

“Tere says she is sorry. And that she…” Tere’s tendrils form loops and wave rapidly. “Is lying and is actually not sorry. Ha!”

The last one remaining is Obuch. They wear normal armor like Resma and Aspa, except plated gray, and a chain necklace hangs from their neck. Their mushroom cap, unlike the rest, is narrower, like a pointy hat emerging from their spotted scalp.

“This is Obuch. He is the undisputed master of sarcasm, though Aspa may challenge his status soon.”

“I would do no such thing,” Aspa protests, waving her tendrils around.

“No, you would beat me,” Obuch says quietly. “You have much talent and I lack all. I am jealous of you.”

Cora grins. “I disagree.”

The other two remaining people are Eporsa and Callista, and both of them look terribly out of place, awkwardly shoved into one corner of the entrance room while Cora and the guards take up the center.

“Hello?” Callista looks like she’s testing the water in a pool full of sharks. Eporsa offers his characteristic waving of his tendrils, oddly subdued compared to the confident doctor that sweeps into any room with an aura that demands respect.

Resma bows his head, the characteristic Cenarian signal of I screwed up please don’t be mad. “My apologies, doctor. We may set out.” His eyes twinkle, and he straightens his back. “Ah, Callista, do you want a rematch?”

“Rematch?” Cora says, at the same time Callista grins and offers her hand.

“Not today, you lousy cheater. Maybe after we escort Cora, if you’d be willing by then.”

“I would not mind soaking in the glory of a second win.”

“Save your banter for after,” Eporsa intones, and the guards fall quiet. Callista grunts and scowls at Resma, who offers a brief wave of his tendrils. The guards assume positions around him and Cora, except Callista, who lingers at the edge of the group. “We will begin, then.”

The walk starts at the entrance, descends several slopes, crosses the jumble of railroad tracks, misshapen buildings, and roads, descends once more into a valley cut into rock, and finally opens up to the edge of Cenari itself.

From afar, the city of Duproseis resembled a child’s mad dreams, shacks and huts stacked beside stone and steel buildings beneath the five mushrooms. The skyscrapers completed the look, too sleek and modern to belong in a fantasy world, impaling the city’s underbelly and soaring toward open skies.

From within, Cora is immediately thrust into a labyrinth of streets, dirt and paved, clean and littered with trash. Passersby hurry down the winding streets. Signs spin on their poles, names melting mid-sentence to match whatever direction they point at. Children scamper down sidewalks, kicking what looks like the fantasy version of a soccer ball down the slopes, shrieking and pushing each other. A few cheat by manipulating wind currents or downright levitating the ball toward their feet, and other children bend stone to bounce the ball at angles or summon wisps of flames that push the ball forward.

So many alien faces glance over her. Some are flat-faced, others rounded; Some have beaks, some have three or more eyes. One citizen has none. Tails, claws, feathers, scales, and more mix into a blur she quickly loses track of. Her attention bounces from person to person and soon, her eyes glaze over.

It’s like the city back home. Completely mundane, if one ignored the variety of people and their gifts freely expressed in public.

Cora passes cafes, restaurants, supermarkets, and convenience stores. Vendors shout at her to check their produce, guaranteeing their freshness from Magaram or Lorden or whatever world they’re selling from. Stalls set along busy roads promise cures to aging, disease, and mental illness, waving vials of neon liquids that radiate like tiny stars.

“We are nearly there,” Eporsa intones, sidestepping several children barreling forward, one of them wreathed in water that somehow doesn’t soak into their clothes.

“Do you want anything?” Resma points his tendrils at several stalls. “There is plenty of food, plenty of games, or other things that may interest you.”

Cora loves the wildness of the city, yet her stomach squirms at the prospect of meeting the governor. They’re going to talk about the box. The object that changed her and Liam’s lives forever, for better or for worse. The object that some Cenarian soldiers recognized and passed the message along to their superiors.

“Nope. Maybe after we’re done?”

“Sure.”

Tere waves her tendrils in frantic patterns. Several shapes come out of her wild twitches, and Cora’s head hurts, the memory of the abyss doing its best to crush her into nothingness.

“Tere says she would like to teach you several board games, if you want.” Several twists later, Resma speaks again. “She says do not worry. The governor is a fair leader. You will be okay.”

Well. That certainly does little to help Cora’s anxiety. She nods and gulps. They turn a final corner and reach a broad street gently sloping upward. Nestled between two of the giant mushrooms, far, far, below, is an emerald palace.

Jade pillars support a vast, mushroom-like dome that caps dozens of stories of a narrower base. Crowds are even thicker there, congregating like ants, blotting out the lower stories of the palace. Behind it, a few towers curl toward the sky like clawed fingers, but neither the palace nor towers reach the mind-boggling proportions of the other skyscrapers that scrape between the giant mushrooms.

Tree-like mushrooms line either side of the road. Countless stalls are packed into the spaces between mushrooms, and thousands of people are crammed into every square inch, jostling each other for passage toward the palace, or buying off the vendors.

There are no gifts active, however. Everybody just acts normal. The guards, though, wince as they cross some invisible threshold. Eporsa recoils. Callista grimaces, sinking her fingers into her stomach.

“There is nothing quite like entering the governor’s grounds,” Obuch says, and the others are too queasy to respond.

Apart from a faint tickling stirring at the base of her stomach, Cora feels nothing. “Huh? Why are you guys acting like that?”

Aspa’s tendrils wave aimlessly. “Permissions are turned off. Gifts cannot be used here.”

“Several commanders have gifts of nullification. Their influence extends to cover the governor’s grounds,” Eporsa intones, sounding miserable. “With the incurable effect of temporary nausea.”

“We will get through it,” Resma groans.

“Wait.” Callista turns toward Cora and extends a hand. “You didn’t feel anything?”

“I’m kind of fucked up, remember?” She still can’t reach toward her metaphysical self. It remains wounded and sealed behind an impenetrable barrier her nails glance over.

“I’ve never heard of somebody like you. Huh.”

The sea of people part around a vehicle that looks straight out of a sci-fi movie. Rounded edges, bands of steel, and flat panes of glass wrap around a bulk of glossy black metal, stretched into a teardrop shape, tail end pointed away. The pod is suspended several feet over the ground, and no matter how hard Cora squints, she can’t make out any wheels.

“Thank Arcego,” Aspa says. “Travel in style.”

The pod glides past the crowd and continues down the winding length of the street before drifting to a stop several feet away. Panels fold and slide into the steel bands. Glass retracts into the black metal bulk. Two people sit inside, one a Cenarian wearing glittering gold armor, the other an octopus creature tapping complex patterns into the metal.

“Is this real?” Cora asks. Cenari and its people contrast so much against the forest and its horrors that she wonders if she bled out after pushing her gift too far, suffering vivid hallucinations.

Maybe it’s the parasite influencing her broken mind, and really she is dying a slow death. Everything is too good to be true here. The last few weeks–a month, almost–have passed by so smoothly she finds it hard to believe she’s here.

“Welcome aboard,” the Cenarian pilot intonates, and despite Cora’s mix of dread and incredulity, she laughs and steps aboard first.