“Hey, you wanna come along? We have room for one more.”

“Sure. How long will it take?”

“Most of the night, if you’re cool with that.”

“Yeah, I’m down. Let’s go.”

***

Cora doesn’t remember what happens.

One moment, she’s curled up on the ground, silently crying long after her vocal cords fail her. The next, she’s venturing deep into the woods, backpack with box slung over her shoulder, repeating to herself that this is the way to the mountains.

At least, it’s the direction she remembers seeing them before falling.

The cold worsens as she walks, seeping under her t-shirt and jeans and chilling her to the core. She nurses her injured wrist to her chest and stuffs her good hand into her pocket.

Using the little moonlight streaming through the canopy, she avoids the muted shapes that must be trees. On she goes, trudging through carpets of leaves, leaving a wake of crushed bits that fly into the distance whenever wind pelts Cora.

She can’t feel her ears, nose, fingers, and toes. The sharp sting of the freezing air travels down her body. She’s a living husk driven by the sheer desire to live, fueled with adrenaline, and maintained through the tiniest hopes that she can still fix everything.

Fat chance. The box grates into her lower back, an unwelcome reminder that it’s dead weight. Cora cinches her backpack straps, tightening them, but no matter what she does the box sags and stabs into her lower back.

Her throat is raw. Her body hurts in too many places. Pain spikes through her wrist if she jostles it. The blood on her shin dried quickly, sure, but the cut is long, jagged, and deep. That leg hurts every time she steps too quickly.

And somehow, she continues her merciless trek through the vast, gloomy wilderness.

Shadows reel wherever she passes. Trees creak, skeletal branches reaching out to grab at her. Leaves rustle everywhere, their corpses animated by the cold winds that never stop coming.

More than once, Cora stops to shake off the feeling something is watching her. Every time she checks behind trees or glances behind her, however, the land is desolate.

What would Mari do? She’d probably kill Cora herself. She presses her lips tight and adjusts the box so it’s flat against her back, then resumes.

Mari would fight until the end. Cora imagines her striding shoulder to shoulder, tossing her hair back, and straightening her posture. She’d project an aura of confidence, maybe smile and say something inspirational, and lead them forward.

And Cora would follow. Mari is–was–the popular girl at school, the class president, the perfect student every teacher fawned over. The girl who volunteered, who hosted food drives, who tutored classmates both familiar and total strangers.

The one person everyone agreed would change the world.

Yet, Mari picked Cora as her closest friend. They knew each other since they were practically babies, sure, but for their friendship to last that long, through so many problems over the years…

Cora kicks a pebble. It bounces off a trunk, spraying a plume of leaves where it lands. More pebbles litter the ground, on the bare patches of dirt. She kicks them all, and they shoot into the darkness, dull thuds registering moments after.

Their friendship was something more. Something Cora should’ve appreciated.

She trembles, and it’s not because of the cold. “Mari?” she whispers, hoarse. Of course, zero reply. God knows how much she begged for Mari to appear, or at least some sign telling her that she was okay.

Somehow, the loneliness hurts worse than the cold, her cuts, her bruises, her wrist. At least she can pretend to ignore those. But the loneliness settles inside her chest like a bad congestion, and though Cora keeps her focus on the forest ahead, checking she won’t run headfirst into a tree, she keeps thinking of her.

Mari was the more dominant one, the risk-taker, the one who faced everything head-on. The person who picked Cora up after a bad date, cheering her up by driving her to Mari’s house and binge-watching Netflix movies until they slept on the couch tangled together. The person who did dumb things and passed out on Cora’s bed whenever she needed a break from the world.

The person who reached out to her, every day after the incident, until her patience snapped.

That’s the side of her nobody else got to see but Cora. And she knows that if Mari didn’t want to beat her into a bloody pulp, she’d tell her to never give up.

Cora touches her cheeks. Not again. She sniffles and wipes away the tears before they freeze on her face.

Gradually, shadows peel away. Moonlight breaks through several holes in the canopy. Pastel red washes over the forest, bathing her in soft light. The change is so jarring she rubs her eyes and blinks, afraid that the image will vanish and thrust her back into her darkest nightmares.

She steps under a shaft of moonlight, glancing past the hole at the red moon, a lot bigger and brighter than the moon back home. It looks almost like Mars does in the pictures, aglow with an atmosphere and deep channels carved into the surface.

And it looks like an eyeball, pinched at the sides and rounder at the poles. A massive crater consumes the center area, and channels lead away like blood vessels.

A bloodied eyeball, truly. One that mocks her.

Cora bites on her bottom lip. She tears her gaze away. Maybe that’s why she feels she’s being watched. It’s been above her this whole time, the haunting reminder she’s nowhere near home.

Something glimmers ahead. She squints, making out a glittering purple tree. Unlike the cone-shaped canopies of the other trees, the purple tree’s branches sweep out into the shape of a mushroom cap. Needle-thin leaves jut out of willowy branches.

It’s the first she’s seen of its kind. Is that a sign?

The mountains don’t just offer protection. Somewhere in a dusty corner of her brain, Cora remembers rivers can start at mountains. Forests need water. The forest seems endless, so there must be huge sources of water.

It has to be a sign. Cora pauses before the tree. She scrapes off dirt with a flick of her foot, then bends low and drags her fingers over the unearthed sections.

They come away wet. She can’t help the shudder of relief that runs through her. Water. Actual water, or it feels like it, wetting the soil.

She gazes back at the moonlit sections of forest. Leaving it is harder than she wants it to be. But Mari would push her to search for more. Some immaterial part of her tears and stays by the hole, soaking in the moonlight.

The other part of her, the part that wants to survive, to fix everything and find her best friend, carries on.

Layer by layer, the gloom and forest peels away. Carpets of leaves become carpets of needles. They crunch under her feet, and roll instead of fly whenever the wind pays a visit. Some time after spotting the first tree, the purple trees dominate the forest, leaving the others a rare sight. The moist dirt turns into a reddish brown, caking her boots a rusty color.

A sudden urge itches for her attention. She slides her phone out of her pocket and points it at the forest. Even in the dim lighting, her camera sensors work overtime to compensate, and the image comes out bright as day.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

She takes pictures of the moon, the starry skies, the trees and bushes and straggler weeds breaking through the dirt. Every image comes out bright and detailed.

Then she creates a new folder and saves the images inside. Her thumb hovers over the folder name, hesitant.

Another Dimension.

She erases the line. Cora’s heart twinges. What would Mari call it? “You do you,” she’d say, grinning. Cora shakes her head. Happiness is the furthest thing she feels. It’s trapped back home, an echo of herself when she didn’t know better.

That doesn’t stop her from basking in the beauty of this world and appreciating that she’s the first, and possibly the last, person to see it. A complete ecosystem, rich in history, complex beyond her wildest understanding.

And it’s so lonely.

Home away from home. Cora deletes the line, biting on her bottom lip. My mistakes. Cora slides her phone back into her pocket.

“You guys wouldn’t believe what I’m seeing,” she says. She claps a hand over her mouth, then pinches herself for being so stupid. Who’s going to hear?

Her mouth moves of its own will.

“What I’m living through.”

Pain jostles through her wrist as she paces down the forest. She stares at the moon. In it she sees red, deep red, gushing out of a broken nose, framed by brown eyes widened in shock and betrayal.

“I’m sorry, Mari. You deserved better than me,” she starts, her throat choking up. “I’d do anything just to see you again. But it’s all my fault, and I’m here because I fucked up. I did horrible things. I thought it’d be okay, because then I’d be gone and people would move on.”

Her voice is barely a whisper. Every nerve ending in her throat fires away. Swallowing saliva burns. “You’re either here, or you’re somewhere else. And I hate that I don’t know. You were always doing so much for me, and I just–” She balls her hand into a fist. “I treated you like shit.”

Cora touches her cheeks. The sharp sting of the cold air slashes at her cheeks. Her bottom lip trembles. Not again. She got rid of all her tears, sobbed until her ribs hurt and throat was raw and bloody from screaming. There should be nothing left inside her.

“It’s okay, Cora,” Mari says. For a second, she’s there, tall and proud, like she came back from the beach. “What happened happened. At least you’re trying to fix things, right?” She gives a small smile, wiping at the bruise blossoming over her cheek.

Cora stares at the apparition. “Mari?”

One blink, and the image vanishes. “Wait, come back,” she whispers, reaching, grabbing nothing but air.

I’m going crazy.

She takes a step back, then another, until her back meets against a purple tree. She stares at the space where Mari has just been. The proportions were three-dimensional, her voice was soft and caring.

I’m going crazy.

Pain jams like a dagger into the back of her elbow. Cora yelps and tears away from the tree. Scathing pain scrapes her nerves raw. She turns her arm sideways, glimpsing a glossy pink welt rising from her skin.

“Fuck!” she screams. Knives rake her throat, and she lets out a strangled cry, grinding her foot into the dirt to distract herself. No sooner do her fingertips touch the welt than she feels a sharp jab tear into her flesh. Recoiling, she withdraws her hand.

Her fingertips begin to burn. Not as badly as her elbow, but it feels like the time when she’d gotten bits of habanero stuck under her nails. She moans, hopping from leg to leg, doing anything to distract from the crippling pain.

Why her? She planned out everything so she’d be in paradise.

What did I do wrong?

Lying to everybody, for starters. Cora’s chest aches. Like a storm, the aching swells in size until the pressure threatens to blow her apart. Lying to her friends, who trusted her, whose trust she took and stabbed them in the back with.

Breaking and entering, robbery, extortion–she did things she thought were necessary. She didn’t hurt anybody, not physically. She was supposed to disappear, and the world would move on.

And for what, this? Cora’s hand tightens into a fist. Screw the feeling that her fingertips are melting off. Everything was going to plan. She was so sure. Until her delicate lies to herself crumbled when her best friend came to stop her.

Mari approached her with the right perspective, lacking the right context.

And. Cora. Punched. Her.

It doesn’t matter that Mari landed the first hit. She’d been driven by emotion, hurting, that Cora used her. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Cora cared about her. She even tried to fix up the things she damaged, the emotional wounds she inflicted, but it was too late.

For the first time, she physically hurt someone to get what she wanted. Her best friend, who was only trying to help. And Cora ended up trapped in this world for her cursed ambition.

She slams her fist down onto one of the brown trees. The bark biting the underside of her palm feels good. She does it again, relishing the specific pain that contrasts against the broad burning variety of pain.

Her fractured, possibly even broken, wrist. The gash in her leg. The welt on the back of her bad arm and her burning fingertips.

Soon, the pain lessens to a dull throb. Her whole world is pain. It gnaws away at her, chipping off pieces of her sanity. It sinks its fangs into her wrist, lashes her feet, constricts her legs, and bites above her elbow.

Her mind goes blank. More than once, she’s jarred out of her pained reverie by her foot catching under a root or a branch snagging on her clothes. She lingers in the pain, then retreats into her memories, doing everything she can to distract herself.

Memories of before the incident play in a rickety pattern. Here she is, five years old, crying because Mari pushed her and Cora skinned her knee. Here she is on her eighth birthday, squealing with laughter as Mari chases her around the house. Here she is, fourteen and a half, hugging Mari after a bad break-up.

Cora doesn’t want to think about her. Anybody but her. But she’s replaying in her memories over and over. Every iteration grows more extreme. Here is a memory of Mari pushing her into the pool. In another, Cora play-wrestles her. In yet another, Mari donates her homecoming dress and lets her keep it, then shows off her matching dress.

“Stop,” Cora moans, rubbing her temple. “Please.”

The leaves and dirt abruptly vanish in a straight line ahead. She snaps back to reality and jerks her head, relaxing when she sees the gloomy forest behind her.

She hears trickling water. In the biggest clearing she’s seen yet, she follows a path built of needles and pebbles, growing slick until she finds the source of the trickling sound.

Cora’s being generous when she thinks of it as a stream. It’s more like a creek, or a brook, or something even smaller, if a word for it exists. Lilac-tinted water churns over flat expanses of pitch black rock. Sediments form the illusion of cracks between rocks, like some giant slammed its hammer down.

She won’t drink the water. Even if she licks her lips and stares hungrily at how the water wets the tree roots worming their way into the stream. It’s a start. She’s headed in the right direction, and she’s right about there being a river, probably, but there’s no happiness.

Only a deep relief soaking into her bones.

The vegetation grows too thick at either side of the stream, and too many purple trees block any alternate routes she can take. She could try to find a detour where she came from.

Theoretically. The weight of her exhaustion cripples any desire to continue walking.

Her muscles protest as she sinks to a sitting position. Her wrist, unsurprisingly, hurts more than her legs as she shifts position and leans against a brown tree. Soon, they’ll disappear, and she’ll have to get used to the ground.

For now, she’s content basking in her hard-earned comfort.

As her breathing slows, the cold seeps into her body. She hadn’t even noticed it in a while. Teeth chattering, she draws her legs in for added warmth, making sure her wrist doesn’t jostle.

She shivers. “Day one, I guess.”

She loses herself in the slow-moving stream. Her eyes follow the trees up to their mushroom canopies, then back to the ground, down the stream to a mound of leaves and needles near a sharp turn. The mound rises to her height, maybe more.

On either side of the mound, where the water doesn’t touch, the soil peeks through. She squints. The dim lighting blurs the details, but she swears footprints mark the mound.

Paw prints. As long as her forearm. It has to be the lighting. Or her brain. Didn’t her psychology teacher once say that the brain is good at finding patterns where there are none?

Of course the world chooses at that moment to send a breeze her way. She hugs herself tight, keeping her wrist immobile. It’s too cold. She’d do anything to get a jacket. Even a long-sleeved shirt would help.

Mari would've given her one.

Cora tenses her jaw. Still, despite the shivers wracking her body, her eyelids start to droop. She jerks herself awake and stifles a yawn, careful to keep her wrist pinned to her chest.

Her limbs are iron, her head foggy. Cora shakes her head. Just a slight break and she’ll get moving again, maybe reach the mountains before she collapses from exhaustion. The more time she waits, the more time everybody back home will realize she disappeared into thin air.

What would her parents do?

Cora shuts down the line of thought before it explodes in her face.

Her attention settles on the markings. The more she focuses, the more the markings stand out as paw prints. She imagines the animal pausing and drinking from the stream, all rippling muscle and fur. Like a wolf.

Except the paw prints are too long, too rectangular. Three holes dot the end of the imprints. Shouldn’t they look more like dog footprints?

Over the mingling static of water trickling over stones and her own heavy breathing, a lone howl pierces through.