Several thoughts flash through his mind the moment he decides he will save the mysterious girl.

She’s going to die. She’s going to get skewered in front of his eyes and he’ll have witnessed yet another death he’ll have failed to prevent.

The bowie knife catches the light of both suns, startling him when he inspects the chrome surface. Lucky him to have brought it over when he was teleported here. Every creature in the forest had attacked him as soon as he materialized, and every creature that touched him had been sliced open like fish.

When he saw the girl for the first time, stumbling through the forest in the direction the orange creature had vanished off to, he dismissed her as a hallucination. She was just too out of place among the wild nature, her jeans and black shirt at odds with the purple tints that seem to hang everywhere. But when she pulled out her phone and checked it, disbelief written across her features, he knew that everything that happened up to this point actually happened.

And that she might’ve held the answer to the question of why he suddenly appeared in the middle of an extraterrestrial forest.

The blood seems to have clung to his clothing, because when he rushes towards the beast, his survival instinct roaring against his self-will, the scent leaves a bitter tang at the back of his throat. There’s nothing but red when he brings the knife down on the creature, the knife slicing its flesh as easily as it did to the other creatures that attacked him. The smell and blood splashes onto his clothing, but he doesn’t care.

When he catches the girl’s defeated eyes, something akin to a fiery defiance sparks in them, a brief glimpse of the girl she might’ve been before being stranded here. Her amber eyes linger in his mind when he severs the tendons attached to the back of the creature’s leg. The back of the creature’s legs buckle, forcing it to the ground.

Her eyes seem to criticize him. In response, he wants to defend his actions, but when he turns back to face her, awe and gratitude are scrawled across her face.

He helps her up. She flinches when he jostles her left wrist. He makes a mental note to ask her later if she injured her wrist.

For some reason, he feels compelled to ask her name. No, scratch that. He wants to know more about her. About why she was stranded here with him.

“Who are you?”

The howls of the creature deafen him, but through the stirred up noise, he catches her name.

“I’m Cora.”

That’s when everything comes roaring back to him.

***

He knew a name like that, once. Ascribed to a face that has blurred over the years, eventually rebuilt into the image of what he thinks she once looked like, a long-held perception shattered when he sees the same heart-shaped face staring back at him.

It’s first grade, and he nurses a bruise he acquired when he swung his knee into a pole while playing. The bell rings, and soon enough everybody is heading back to class, but he’s on the verge of tears, hands massaging the purple area.

Nobody bothered to ask him if he’s okay. They never do, anyways. It’s unfair. What did he do for them to abandon him? He sniffles, wiping the snot away with the back of his hand, cleaning it off on his balled-up jacket stuffed inside his backpack. Nobody will see, anyways. Nobody will care.

Somebody else moves at the edge of his periphery, probably to head back inside, too.

Leaving him all alone, as they always did. But instead, a shadow darkens his bruise further. A girl about his height and age stands a few feet away, sheepishly adjusting her backpack so that it faces her front. She digs through the contents and pulls out a bandage, peels off the paper, and hands it to him, smiling.

He doesn’t say a word. He takes the bandage and slaps it onto his bruise, feeling better already even though the pain is still there. The girl sits next to him, arms resting on her knees, backpack separating the distance between them, but he doesn’t care.

It’s enough. He waves, and she waves back.

“Hi. Thank you for the bandage,” he says, patting his bandaged knee with light fingers.

She beams. “You’re welcome. My mom always tells me to help people, and you need help,” she responds, giving him a grin that will stick with him for years. A missing front tooth decorates her smile. Her chin tilts up slightly as she grins. Her amber eyes crinkle when she hands him a granola bar. “Do you want it? I’m not hungry.”

His own stomach rumbles. He hasn’t eaten breakfast because his family can’t afford it. “Yes, please. Thank you so much.” He has to pause to wipe away the first grateful tears that spring to his eyes before taking the granola bar from her and peeling the wrapper back. He chews off little bites, savoring the flavor that bursts across his tongue, watching his knee bounce with anticipation at the bell ringing any second now. He doesn't want to leave the girl whom he just met.

His new friend.

“What’s your name?” he asks, half of his mouth full. He chews some more while the girl answers.

“Cora. It's nice to meet you. What’s your name?”

He swallows and answers rapidly. “Liam. Want to go back inside?”

She giggles. “We're going to be late. Come on, silly.”

They stand and run back towards class. He doesn’t want to forget Cora, so she tells him where she lives, a few blocks away from his own house. They can play out in the streets while her parents watch. They can play at school. It’s perfect.

But all good things come to an end.

A year of fun passes as they transition from first to second grade, and he doesn’t feel terribly lonely anymore when he heads to school, because he knows Cora will be there, waiting. They play soccer at recess or talk to each other during class or eat together during lunch. She’s in two of his classes, so he gets to be with her most of the time.

He doesn’t have any other friends, but he doesn’t need them, anyways. He has Cora, and she has him. Day and night, they laugh and play and talk about all the things they will do together when they grow up. She wants to go to Italy. He wants to go to Canada. She says she went there once last year, but that her parents wouldn’t mind taking him with them to Canada if they visit again. It’s a prospect that burns in his mind every time he cowers under his blanket while his parents fight in the background.

That’s why it hurts so much when he doesn’t see her at school the next day. Despite the dread in his stomach, he continues his day alone, eating silently and eyeing the other students who are smiling and laughing so much. He wants to be with them, but they don’t want to talk to him.

Another day passes and she still isn’t there. He’s growing desperate. The dread punches a hole through his stomach when she doesn’t appear for the rest of the day. It’s right after the last class of the day that he dares himself to approach his math teacher.

“Where’s Cora?” he asks, his voice wavering.

Mrs. Brooks folds her hands over her desk and sighs. “She moved to another city, Liam. I know how much you liked her. Her parents moved without even alerting us about the change, but her mother called after. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

He doesn’t stop saying those words for years after she’s gone. He blames himself for her disappearing without giving him a goodbye. Every night he swallows his sorrow and falls asleep, knowing his dreams are dead. But as he grows older, and his mind matures, and he meets new people in middle school, and later in high school, he slowly forgets about his first friend.

She’s the last person on his mind when a rush of color explodes around him and he materializes in the middle of a forest. She’s the last person on his mind when he sees the girl through gaps in the trees, venturing towards the beast that he’d barely escaped from.

But those amber eyes. Cora.

She’s back.

***

He finishes off the writhing creature with a slash to the neck. Almost instantly, it stops moving, torrents of blood spurting out of its neck, matting its fur and forming a pool around its fallen body. He yanks out the knife and wipes it on the dirt, considers whether to use the creature’s fur as a cloth, and decides to wipe it off there, leaving smudges on the orange fur.

Cora looks shocked, her awe gone, but she's weary enough to not care, silent as he finishes cleaning his knife and slips it back into his waistband, where a piece of square cloth prevents the blade from nicking his skin.

“Is your wrist okay?” he asks, gulping down the torrent of words he wants to ask her. What happened occurred a decade ago. What he needs to focus on is surviving in this damned world, but every time he glances at her, his mind freezes up.

She rubs it absent-mindedly. “Yeah. It’s fine. Thank you for rescuing me…”

Her voice is hoarse. He takes note of that and regrets not having brought a bottle of water with him. At least an entire pack was ripped away from Earth with him and dumped here. There’s still hope.

“You won’t be safe until you come with me back to the place I set up. It’s not much, but it’s better than being out here.” Cora nods, glances back at the fallen creature and squares her shoulders, suppressing any shivering she had before. “Do you think you can walk there? It’s not far, but I don’t know if you’re injured or anything-”

“I’m fine. Just lead me there, please.”

He’s stung by her clipped response. Silently, he leads the way, checking back every so often to make sure she’s following him. Along the way, he turns around a bend in the path he hacked out and spots one of the dead yet dreaded rat-like organisms that had jumped on him, its intestines pooled outside of its body. He kicks it out of the way and kicks some dirt on top of the dark stain, though it barely contrasts against the rust-colored soil anyways.

Cora shuffles past a second later, but she doesn’t seem to have spotted the bloody rat tail lying outside of a bush. Or if she has, she doesn’t care. He’s relieved when he sees the grove of trees where he set up camp, as far away from the purplish tree trunks as he could move.

He’s lucky he never suffered the fate one of the rat-organisms had when he kicked it into a tree. The bark had warped or simmered around the area the body hit the trunk, and by the time the rat-organism fell dead, its entire back was scorched, the fur burnt off, the skin melted down so that he saw the remnants of a spine.

He’d been thinking about climbing one of those things to escape the endless hordes that had descended upon him the moment he raised his knife. Shuddering, he approaches the shallow channel where he’d held his ground on the opposite side, delivering swift death to whatever rat-organism dared jump at him. This time, there’s no hiding the dozens of bodies laying in the dirt, light brown bodies stained red to match the rusty soil.

There’s no movement, so he lowers his defenses, checking back on Cora to make sure she’s still following him. She is, but when he turns his head forward again, he swears he sees her brow furrow into… annoyance? Likely for constantly believing she’ll run off or get lost at a moment’s notice. But after suddenly being stranded here, he doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore.

He tells himself it’s to check up on her safety, but some distant corner of his mind whispers that he’s just making sure he’s not hallucinating her. He clenches and unclenches his hand on his knife’s handle, breathes slowly, paces himself so he’s practically strolling towards safety. It feels good to let his defenses down for a second. It’s been an hour since he arrived and he’s stressed out too much.

That’s why another rat-organism clamps its teeth down on his exposed calf the moment he crosses the shallow groove where a wide variety of weeds tumble over each other in their eternal thirst for sunlight, obscuring the few rat bodies the carnivorous plants beneath the weeds haven’t taken yet.

“Fuck!”

His shout startles a flock of those fiery red birds out of the trees, their miniature bodies taking flight and disappearing off into the lilac skies. He whips his knife out and impales the rat-organism, swinging his arm so that the body slides off the tip of his knife and strikes a patch of carnivorous plants. In a few minutes, the heat-seeking barbed vines will clamp their barbs on the still-warm body, dragging it to the center of the mass of vegetation for consumption, however the plant does it.

“Hey! Are you okay?” Cora shouts, breaking out of her paralyzed stupor and rushing next to his side. He groans when he sees the bite marks through his pants leg, blood soaking through the thin fabric. She kneels next to him and sets her backpack down, procuring a bandage in moments. “Here. I’m sorry I don’t have anything else I can give you-”

“Thank you.”

When he says that, a huge weight lifts off his shoulders. His pants are loose enough that he rolls up his pants leg, exposing the bite marks, and she peels off the paper and is about to stick the bandage over his wound when he uses his other hand to stop her.

“Wait. I have water. I’ll use that to clean it before putting on the bandage.” Upon hearing the word water, her eyes widen. “Hold onto it. My camp’s right over there.”

After determining that the bite marks aren’t too deep, he rolls his pants leg back down, and he shifts his blanket so it covers most of his injured leg. Anything could be buzzing around looking for an entrance into a fresh wound. Surprisingly, he hasn’t seen any insects, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be this world’s hellish versions of mosquitoes, if that’s even possible.

This time, he holds the knife in one hand while Cora accompanies him by his injured side. He’s eternally grateful for her providing cover despite having nearly died. She is quiet the rest of the trip to the camp, her mannerisms stiff, head hunched forward, eyes trained on whatever next threat might pop up.

He wants to break the silence, but fears losing her to the memories of those final few moments where her life must’ve flashed before her. He’d seen the light go out of her eyes. The kind of despair he nearly fell to when the rat-organisms had jumped over each other in their bloodthirsty craze to prey on his flesh.

He can’t imagine what must be going through her mind. Luckily, they reach camp before he starts to second-guess himself about keeping silent or helping her out. The only definable boundaries of his camp are the grooves he made in the soil with his shoe, and the crate of water sitting at the center, bright plastic packaging a comical contrast against the soft yet shimmering splendor of the surrounding forest. The water’s a bright neon sign screaming “I’m here!”

Which is the most likely reason why he was ambushed moments after he materialized here.

Cora seems to regain some energy as she rushes to the center and tears into the packaging, grabbing a water bottle and unscrewing the cap and chugging the water in the time it takes for him to hobble over to her. He grabs another bottle, opens it, and pours a tiny trickle of water over his open wound. It washes away some grime that accumulated in the puncture wounds, leaving the exposed flesh a raw pink.

He hears her draining another water bottle, or she must’ve judging by the soft click of a second cap giving way to pressure. He decides against finishing off the rest of the bottled water he used, instead choosing to save it later. He doesn’t know where he’ll find more water after his supply runs out.

Cora seems to realize this too, because her fingers freeze inches from the third bottle, instead shooting towards her backpack and producing the bandage. “I’m sorry. I-I didn’t mean to drink so much.” She wipes off her lips with the back of her hand. Her eyes crinkle when they land on his. So much pain in hers. So much internal conflict that he can see.

It’s a useful skill he learned from hopping from foster home to foster home, and later when he chose to live on his own. What people are thinking behind their complacent faces. What emotions churn beneath a smiling person. It’s saved his life several times, and saved several other people’s lives. He’ll be damned if he doesn’t save Cora’s life, too.

“It’s fine.” He’s surprised by how earnest he sounds. She opens her mouth, but he runs over her. “You didn’t have any water, and I’m guessing you didn’t drink much before you landed here. I bet you wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t need it. Just save what’s left, because I don’t know where we can find more water.”

She licks her lips, then nods. “Thank you. I’ll make sure to do that.” Her fingers open the bandage and she closes the distance between them. He pulls back his blanket and pants leg, exposing his bitten calf. “What’s your name?” she asks. His heart sinks. How can she not remember when she’s repeating the same actions from ten years ago?

But it’s been too long. Of course she wouldn’t remember him. Unless…

“I’m Liam.”

There’s no recognition that registers on her face. Yet she nods again and bandages his wound. There's no need for her to. She can give him the bandage so he does it himself, but he feels warmth spread over his body upon seeing her do it herself. “Nice to meet you, Liam. Thank you for saving me." Her fingers linger on the bandage a split second too long. "It’s something I can never repay.”

“You don’t need to,” he says. “I’m glad you made it out okay.”

It’s a small start, but she finally smiles. Her smile outshines the two suns themselves.

“And I’m glad I met you, Liam.”