The last person–or group of people–who used the campsite was kind enough to leave heaps of shorn leaves a few paces away from the campfire. Cora has no idea how to start one, much less knows if anything growing in this world is combustible.

Liam, though, wastes no time clearing the last fire’s old remains, throwing handfuls of dried leaves into the center after he finishes. He reaches out towards the branches of the nearest bush, presumably to snap them off, and once again Cora has to swat his hand away.

“You’re gonna be hurt!”

He crosses his arms. “No, I won’t.”

“How do you know? Don’t you remember the trees? I literally told you not to touch the white part of that one tree earlier, too.”

“Because…” He buries his hands in the remaining leaf pile. She bites back a warning to get back before he hurts himself. “See? Nothing. These leaves all belong to the bushes. Look.” He holds a dried leaf next to the bush. Perfect match.

“But they’re leaves. It was the wood that made the trees burn. We don’t know anything about the branches.” They look wooden. Close enough to the purple trees' bark minus the color that she instinctively shrinks away. “You can’t risk it.”

“We have no other choice. What else can I use?”

“Use my scissors. They should be in here somewhere.” She rummages through her backpack, first the front pocket, abandoned after she fails feeling the metal’s cool surface, then the bigger pocket, stuffed with plastic bottles and the box. She stuffs a hand into the bag, fingers reaching under the box and lifting it. Nothing.

“Oh… um. ” She mentally slaps herself. “I dropped them the first day. When I didn’t know where I was or what was going on.” Why did she pull them out? Right, to defend herself against the boar-creature, which she hadn’t expected to be so big.

Stupid.

“Use the plastic, then. Wrap that around your hands and use that.”

“Okay, fine. Let’s see if it works.”

She passes Liam the bright packaging, relieved to have extra space in her backpack, and he wraps the plastic around his hands, leaving it loose so he can bend his fingers enough to grip the branches.

He grabs the first branch. Surprisingly thin, it caves under his fingers the moment he starts to bend both sides he’s holding inwards. “Huh,” he says, before he grabs a thicker branch, struggles to break it off, and manages to fracture it down the middle. “What the fuck? This feels completely different from that.”

There’s no difference as far as Cora sees. “Maybe it’s just you being tired.”

“Being tired?” He laughs. “No way. I can handle breaking a simple branch off.” His muscles strain as he breaks the thicker branch, piece by piece. A piece of green plant tissue holds both sides of the branch, resisting Liam’s constant pulling.

She wrinkles her nose at the smell of fresh pine and vanilla air freshener. It overpowers the slight sulfuric odor she grew used to and drives sharp pain into her sinuses, making her nose itch. She resists the urge to sneeze, but finds the tingling sensation building until she has to sneeze–but the wave falls and she’s left with the horrible feeling of the fading tingling.

“Pass me one of the rocks,” he says, breathing heavily, releasing his grip on the branch. Does the smell seriously not bother him? Cora takes the sharpest campfire stone and gives it to him, taking care that the sharp edge is facing neither of them.

He turns his attention towards the green piece of wood and with one hand holds the dangling edge taut. His other, free of the plastic packaging, swings the stone down in a wide arc towards the center.

The stone severs the connection, freeing the branch. He sighs and hands the stone back to her, takes the broken piece of branch and stabs it into the ground.

“Well, that’s the first one,” he says.

Something tickles the back of her mind. A big part of her memory that eludes her concentration. “Wait…”

“What?” He places his hands on his hips. His eyes widen. One hand pats his torso and traces the outline of his knife through his pants. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“We forgot about your knife.”

He pulls it out. The blade glints in the sun, finely smoothed so the edge is sharp enough to cut with enough applied force. Sharp enough to sever the branches without much effort.

“How? What in the world?”

“We all make mistakes. Honestly, I don’t know how you forgot, but yeah. I guess all the stress got to us, huh?”

Liam’s eyes glaze over. He runs a finger over the hilt, then over the side, keeping his finger far from the edge. “How could I just forget? How could you forget? That knife is the only reason why both of us are still alive.”

She shrugs. “We’ve been here for days. I don’t know how long, but that’s a long time we’ve gone without everything we need. Food, showers, the Internet, yada yada. The whole shebang.”

She recoils when Liam looks at her with an expression of distrust she hopes to never see again. Her heart hammers. “What did I do? Is there something behind me?” Just to make sure, she checks, frowning when all she sees are endless bushes and distant trees.

“You’re acting different.”

“What? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m still the same person.” Come to think of it, why is he holding a knife? Her memories struggle to recollect where she saw that knife. All she remembers is orange and red. So much red. His shirt is dark in some areas, darker than navy blue should be. Crusted over with something that must’ve splattered on his clothes.

And he’s holding a knife. And the look he gives him, it’s enough to give her nightmares. “St-stay away from me,” she mutters, walking backwards. Towards the safety of the river. “Why do you have a knife? Why do you have blood staining your shirt?”

“Cora…”

Her name in his mouth pushes her to her limit. She turns to run away from this imposter, whoever he is that replaced the guy in her memories who saved her. He drops the knife next to the campfire and catches up to her before she secures a good speed.

She struggles to break his grip, kicking and flailing. Her foot catches the back of his leg and he releases a pained groan, but his hold over her remains tight. “It has to be the branch’s smell or the river or something. Cover your nose!” None of his words make sense. They sound distorted, an eerie impersonation of the Liam she knew.

“Who are you?” she yells, going limp. His grip loosens, and that’s all she needs to deliver a surge in strength, breaking free from his grasp and running. Anywhere but here. “Please, go away!”

She runs along the riverbank, down and down and down, towards the two fiery globes missing a third of their path before disappearing behind the horizon. Splitting pain in the arch of her foot almost forces her to stop. Almost.

She has to get away. The pain is nothing compared to what Liam’s imposter will do to her. The knife. She has to get away from the knife before it gets her. The same way it probably got Liam.

But the fake Liam catches up to her, and this time he grabs the hem of her shirt and yanks it up over her nose. She kicks him and drags her nails down his arms. He holds her tight, suffocating her with her own shirt, pressed tight over her nose. She isn’t getting enough air. Her lungs burn. Her throat aches to feel the cool, sweet sensation of air.

Then the burning lessens. She can breathe again through the fabric. A heavy presence holds her down on the ground, pinning her legs and arms.

She’s powerless, but her heart slows and her panic drops, because when the world pieces itself together again, it’s Liam’s face she sees first, desperation written on his features. And a single line spoken over and over.

“Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.”

“What are you doing?” The fear isn’t quite gone. Where it came from in the first place, she struggles to remember. But why is he pinning her down? “Please, Liam. Whatever you’re doing, whatever just happened, please, let me go.”

He scrambles off her faster than she blinks. She rubs her wrists, still burning from his palms pressing them down, then her legs, where he’d pressed his knees to immobilize her. “What the hell just happened?”

Cora’s head pounds. She struggles to remember anything past the branch’s pine smell. Every thought forced through her brain sends a spike of raw, throbbing pain that makes her gasp and clutch her head.

“The branch. The smell. It made you… forget who I was. It made you paranoid.”

“Why’d you pin me down?”

“Because you were running away. You didn’t stop or listen to me. I thought you would get lost and I’d never be able to find you.”

He sounds heartfelt, at least to Cora, so she nods and groans, rubbing her temples. The pain is a helmet of pressure too tight to remove. Whatever was in that branch hit her hard. “Why not you?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m immune to it.”

The world starts spinning around her. “Uh huh,” she says, before falling onto her back, closing her eyes and riding out the wave of vertigo. Nausea creeps up her throat until it’s knocking at the door to get out. She forces it down through focusing on the pain itself, the need to vomit becoming less important.

“I guess that means no fire,” she mutters, regretting opening her mouth as the nausea comes full-force. She clutches at her shirt, jerks up like a limp puppet and doubles over. The scale almost tips towards her dry-heaving, the vertigo and pressure building in her throat too much to bear.

"Cora!" Liam comes close to her side. Once again, the nausea recedes and she gags. “We need to get back to our stuff. Can you walk?” he asks, breaking through the hazy static she hears. She shakes her head, the tiniest motion to keep the pressure from flaring. “Do you mind if I carry you like last time?” She shakes her head again.

She sits up, grabs onto Liam’s arms, and he drapes her over his shoulder. She’s too nauseous to feel embarrassed, too much in agony to immediately care when she catches a glimpse over a bush of a distant clearing. Scorched away of forest and bushes, a perfect circle excised from the land, the all-too familiar sight eating up every available inch of her thoughts.

Each mental image she has of the other two destroyed sections of forest compete for attention. Another one of those? Her and Liam are far out from civilization. Well, far out from their original places, far out from the light that startled them awake a few nights ago. Coincidence?

The pain deepens and splits her head in two.

She lets out a muffled scream, rubbing her temples, concentrating on making her thoughts disappear. All of them. But Liam must learn about the circle. “Liam–” She lets out a shaky breath. “Burnt circle. Behind you.”

She hears it. A quick inhale. Liam’s body goes rigid, his posture straightening, head raising so that the hairs on the back of his head tickle her arm. The fresh, jagged pain crashing upon her skull drowns out all other sensations.

Cora’s world narrows to her own mind. Turned against her. She cannot think. She can only feel and be tortured by whatever the branch did to her. It hurts. It hurts. She grits her teeth and grabs her head, silently screaming, the movement itself inflaming the pain so it’s all she is.

Cool wind blows past her face as Liam takes off upstream, holding her tight. The sun nips at her neck, and through the pain dares open one eye. A single blade of grass shines brighter than the rest. Burning. Not far from the river, deeper into the forest, in the direction of the circle.

Liam runs faster and the flame grows too small to see anymore. She’s burning up from the inside out. The headache encapsulates her entire head, every strand of her hair aching with the swishing movements generated by his running jolting her up and down.

Never has she felt something on this degree. She's going to go insane from the pain. Already she forgets where he is taking her. As far as she knows there is no civilization here. Just pure unaltered wilderness, which left her paralyzed from pain.

She feels the hard surface of the ground pressing against her back. Plastic presses to her lips, driven by Liam's caring hand.

"It's our last one. I hope it helps."

Last of what exactly she can't figure out, but because she trusts him, she nods and accepts the plastic. Fresh, sweet water pours forward, momentarily alleviating the pressure. It becomes manageable enough that she opens her eyes to find Liam's crinkled own.

“Hey, I got you. Whatever you’re going through, I’ll be there to help you the whole time.”

Oh, how she misses Jenny and Ben. Were they here, they’d do whatever they could to keep her safe, and her the same. But she has Liam now, and for that she is eternally grateful. She keeps drinking until she satisfies her thirst, the headache lighter somehow, and he pulls the bottle away.

As she’s swallowing the last of the water, some of it goes down into her lungs instead. She coughs violently, the sudden movement intensifying her migraine. She lurches forward and sputters, feeling the rhythmic hard pats on her back.

Just as quickly as she started coughing, the horrible sensation is gone and she wipes away remnants of her saliva with the back of her hand. Her head hurts badly again. Food. They need food. She should have cared sooner.

No wonder she feels so weak and in pain. They need food which the river cannot provide. The creatures in it maybe–she lets out a stifled gasp as the pain begins to strip away in layers, starting from behind her ears and concentrating upwards, white-hot pinpricks of agony running from her nose to the top of her head.

And then, the pain weakens. A single flutter, crashing the singular line, each pinprick dulling in intensity until all that remains are memories. Memories, which she’s already starting to forget, mercifully so.

On the bare patch of soil she coughed on, a few green flakes are coated with blood, her blood, and slick with whatever substance coated her throat. She’s sure of it now–when she breathed in the pine scent, a few flakes belonging to the severed branch must’ve been inhaled, somehow.

“If only I knew,” Liam says, staring at the same area she’s staring at. “It’s my fault.”

“We needed the fire.” Wrong. “We need the fire.”

“After seeing what the trees did, after getting attacked back in the forest, I should’ve known how dangerous everything here was. We never evolved to be here. This is no man’s land. But it’s so hard to think when we’ve gone days in the wilderness without food. That isn’t an excuse for putting you in danger like that, though.”

“Liam…”

“I’m sorry. No, that doesn’t cut it. I hope you can forgive me.” He looks at her, then away, then back at her. His usually-hardened expression is vulnerable, a ghost of the boy who charged in and saved her despite being a complete stranger.

“You were trying to save us. It’s okay.” Her stomach grumbles once more. The ill reminder that they need to eat soon. “That burnt circle…” Why she thinks of mentioning it now she’s unsure, but then she calls back the hazy recollection of the singular grass blade on fire. “Is that why you ran?”

Liam looks down. “No, I ran because you were suffering. I don’t know if you saw what I saw, though.”

“The tiny little fire?” She rubs her temples to dispel the soreness. It feels like somebody took a sledgehammer to her head minus the pain.

“Exactly. It burned the grass blade out of nowhere. I didn’t want you to get hurt and I had no way to defend you without putting you down on the grass–”

“Which could’ve also lit on fire, so you took the only smart choice.”

“On point. Are you doing better now?”

“Yeah. I don’t feel absolutely destroyed anymore, so that’s a big plus for me.”

Cora runs her hands through her hair. Tangled and coarse, frizzy at the edges and pulling at her scalp uncomfortably, all it does is make her head even more sore when what she needs is a break. Rest, and food.

The food has to wait. She’s drained of energy and can’t imagine herself getting up to forage, much less pick something that looks edible only to find it ripe with poison. But she can take care of herself, if they’re going to camp for a while.

With the circle relatively close to camp, though, she’s hesitant. She wants to tell Liam to move upstream. Anywhere but here, so close to the circle. Their bodies have limits, though, and although Liam keeps silent about how he feels, she sees the way he relaxes, his entire body slumping when he sits.

He takes the packaging and uses it to grab the branch, tossing it far into the bushes. It rebounds off a dense patch of bush and lands with a soft thud on the ground. He drops the packaging and presses his hands on his thighs. “You know, I feel that was my second smartest choice for today.”

Despite the lasting aches from that brief migraine, her sore body, pulsing feet, deep-set hunger eating into her body’s energy reserves, general tiredness, homesickness, and fatigue, she cracks a smile. “Thanks. I needed to hear that.”

“Glad to know. Now the fire…”

“We don’t have one, but that grass somehow did. How do we get something like that to happen to this?” She gestures towards the pile of leaves.

“Not like we have any clue how this world works, but… huh, I wanted the branch to set up something I remember from the Internet, but I hadn’t thought to skip all those steps. Do you have a magnifying glass?”

“I see what you’re doing.” She pulls open her backpack’s front pouch and passes her magnifying glass over to him. For once, she is grateful that she never bothered to clean out her backpack like her mother told her to do. “I liked to burn leaves back home. Honestly I thought it was fine until my dad shouted at me for almost burning our shed down.”

Cora aches at the memory. What are her parents doing now? They’re probably desperate, having told local authorities about where she’d said she was going to go. Maybe the state authorities caught onto her case. She’d told them she was going to Walmart, but the cameras won’t show anything. It won’t be too hard for them to comb through other cameras and see her true path.

She’s sure there were no cameras when she disappeared into the portal, but life never goes perfectly. Not that anybody on Earth will ever be able to do anything. Just like how she can’t do anything here for herself.

“I can only imagine,” Liam responds, stifling a laugh. She snaps into the real world. Into this world. “I burned leaves, too, mostly because of how cool I thought it was that something I learned actually applied to real life. Convex lenses and the focal point, honestly those times weren’t half-bad.”

“The what now?”

“It’s nothing. I can teach you a few things about light later, when we have time. I haven’t had physics in years. I might be a rusty teacher, I’ll warn you about that.”

“It’d be interesting to learn.”

Physics? She doesn’t think he’s dumb, but she reserved physics for her senior year, like everybody else in her grade level did save the students going into STEM. And he hasn’t had it in years.

What in the world?

Smoke curls up out of the pile of leaves starting to wither under the concentrated sunlight. Luckily, a faint breeze picks up and blows the smoke away from them, adding fuel to the fire that should bloom into a brilliant existence soon.

“What are we gonna use to fuel it once we get it going?”

“All these leaves.” He gestures at the remaining mound, more than enough to keep the fire burning at least a day in advance. Or so she guesses. Not that she’s started a campfire before. “But I’m only testing to see if the physics is the same. Should be, or I think we wouldn’t be able to exist.”

“I’m just a figment of your imagination.”

“Very funny,” he says, hiding a smile by turning his head away. “Hey, Cora.”

“Yeah?” She’s weary and prefers to stay seated, but she suspects she knows what he’ll want her to do.

“Do you think you can fill up those water bottles? If you can. I don’t know how bad that branch affected you, but it’s fine if you can’t–”

“Don’t worry,” she says, struggling to get up. She removes the box and sets it on the ground, a safe distance from the campfire. The remaining plastic bottles are in varying states, the first few they drank crumpled, the rest mostly intact. “Oh, and try figuring out a way to catch the water we boil.”

“We don’t even know what we’ll boil our water in,” he says, but he nods. “I’ll do my best. Don’t push yourself hard. I’ll keep watch once night comes so you can rest.”

Cora’s eyes widen as a miniature flame breaks out. “It’s working!”

He turns his head aside. Liam grins when the fire grows in strength, on par with the flame coming out of a lighter. “I was worried the magnifying glass wouldn’t work,” he says. Promptly, he smothers the flame under his shoe, crushing the burnt leaves into ashes. “You know what, I’ll go fill the bottles up. You go rest.”

She passes the backpack over to him and sits again, facing the leaves. She grabs the packaging and crushes it in her hands. “Thanks. I hope I made the right choice for us.”

“Well, looks like we’re safe here at least. Whoever was here left a while ago. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

Yeah, right. That type of thinking is dangerous here. “They must’ve left in a hurry, though. That leaf pile makes me worried something happened here. Why get so many and not use them? Maybe it’s tied to that circle back there.”

But it’ll be nice to let go of her worries and sleep properly, without fear. She has to at some point. The crippling migraine that struck her left her feeling weak, like the aftermath of strep throat or the flu.

“We’ll worry about it later. We have to stay here, anyways. You said it yourself. And I trust you. You led us here to all of this.”

In a sweeping gesture, he captures the whole of the river. “Now we know not to touch the branches, but the leaves are safe. Now we know there’s at least one other person out there, human or otherwise.” She doubts they’re human. It’s an instinctual feeling, and one solidified by the second burnt circle. “Now we know how to start a fire. We don’t know anything else, but for now, we’re safe.”

“Yeah… Okay. You’re right. We’ve learned some stuff already that’ll help us stay alive. We should hurry before it gets dark, though.”

“Sounds good.”

She waits until he goes down to the river, then sighs. This is a far shot from home. From anything, really. Just another place out in the wilderness with nothing but the stuff they brought and their wits. And each other, too. She can’t imagine enduring a new world alone.

But they’re here now. She pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on top, squeezing the plastic packaging. Closing her eyes to reduce the soreness gripping her head, worsened by the light. At least they’re here now. She begins to recall everything she remembers about evaporation and condensation, and how to use the plastic they have using that knowledge.

It’s a lot of mental gymnastics. Not unlike the harder days at school. It’s a start, really. One step closer to normalcy.

One step closer to home.