What the hell?

It’s too bright. Too overpowering. Cora shields her eyes as she awakens, assaulted by the blinding light of both suns peeking over the forest. Every part of her body hurts, and that’s an understatement in itself. Where she was able to shrug off her soreness days before, today she cannot get up.

There’s somebody beside her. Immediately, she resists the impulse to shake Liam awake before seeing the clothes stacked neatly at the end of his blanket, the rest curled around Liam’s body. His mouth is slack and breathing shallow.

If only she had more energy. She sprawls on her back, relishing a few more minutes of sleep. What had they been doing yesterday? Boiling water, and she breathed in flakes of that branch. Right. Her sinuses are sore, as is her throat. Everything is sore. She feels like she’s been thrown into a washing machine and spat out hours later.

Especially her legs and feet. She’s not used to walking so far or running so much. Even moving a leg costs tremendous effort, feeling like a block of cast iron she’s pulling with a string.

“Ugh…” she groans, dragging her hands down her face. Clears her eyes, stretches out her tense arms and legs, lets her vision adjust to the blinding brightness of morning. When the dirt grows dark enough that it doesn’t strain her eyes, she checks her phone. No alarm. “Huh?”

She unlocks her screen and goes to her alarm. The alarm is off, as if she never turned it on in the first place. She looks up at Liam. Scowls, because she knows what he must’ve done. Why he’s still knocked out cold despite daylight assaulting their senses.

“Why can’t you just trust me?” she says, her tone growing louder. “Why do you have to go out and protect me all the time? It’s nice of you, but it’s annoying. I can do things myself, too.” A short stride away, the rest of the bottles are buried a quarter into the dirt. One of them is empty. The rest looked untouched, their caps screwed tight.

If that’s all she has, then so be it. She crawls a few feet and reaches to grab the nearest bottle. Her fingers find purchase and she yanks it out, nursing it in her lap. Judging by Liam’s reaction to it yesterday, she doesn’t want to drink it.

But he never got sick. At least, he looks fine. Asleep, but after the long night keeping watch, she understands. Even if she disagrees with why he stayed up. “Here goes nothing,” she says, unscrewing the cap and placing the bottle to her lips. Her heart beats harder. “Three. Two. One.”

The water tastes horrible. She gags, forcing herself to drink half of the bottle before the torturous acrid taste forces her to stop. She shudders as she swallows the last of the water, but a bitter aftertaste remains.

She needs more water, but no way will she drink more. Instead, she opens up her phone’s camera and takes several pictures of their surroundings. They made it through the night without any incidents. At least any she’s aware of. They’ll be camping here then, and she wants a lay of the land so they aren’t as lost.

Her stomach grumbles. “Come on. Not now.” She pockets her phone, rubbing her stomach. Maybe it’s her imagination, but she feels her ribs more easily. They weren’t as prominent before she arrived here.

For some reason, her hunger hurts less than it did days ago. Bad sign, she guesses. Not that anything out here looks remotely edible save for the strange white pumpkin-things growing at the base of each bush, themselves taller than her and just as wide. If they’re anything like the branches entrapping each pumpkin-thing, she wants nothing to do with them.

Still. She needs food. They need food. Her last meal was a hearty breakfast, omelet with a side of hash browns and lightly toasted bread. She shuts her eyes to break up the memory. No such thing exists here, so she has to forget about it.

Still. She has to confront reality. That’s the world she lost, and that’s the world she yearns to return to. All because of the box. It looks ordinary in the daylight, glistening with dew.

“Is it your fault, or mine?” Of course it doesn’t answer her, but she presses on. “Somebody wrote that warning. How was I supposed to believe it when everything else said the opposite?”

Her shoulders slump. She might as well make do with what she has. Liam’s company and the items they brought over from Earth. She regrets not packing a lunch box into her backpack when she set out. Then she remembers it was a Saturday, and she hadn’t planned that day to be it.

She tears her gaze away. Whatever. None of it matters. They are here in the now, and that’s what she chooses to focus on. That’s why she really wants to wake Liam. They need to start scouring for food. Any. She doesn’t trust the pumpkin-things, but maybe the creatures swimming in the river can provide some food.

That adds another level of complexity. They have to cook that fish, if it even is a fish or looks like one, and they don’t have anything to cook the fish on, or with. Her head starts to hurt again with the hurricane of thoughts ripping apart her hopes.

They’re hopeless. She curls up and rests her chin on her knees. Wraps her arms around her legs and draws them into her chest. They’re prolonging their deaths. The thought bolts through her mind, hare-like, gone before she grasps the futility she feels.

No.

“I’m not gonna give up,” she whispers. “I’m not gonna die here. I’m gonna come home. Just wait for me.” It’s easier said than done. But she returns to her normal self, the pinched sensation in her throat fading.

Focus on something else, then. She nods. Sitting without action invites those types of thoughts into her mind, and that’s the last thing she wants or needs.

She wriggles her toes. Her feet are the ones that hurt the most, and she hasn’t taken her boots off since being teleported because of her fear that she’ll injure herself. But it is stupid being afraid, because she’s been scratched before and nothing happened. Surprisingly.

Then she remembers that it’s been days. She can’t imagine the smell, refuses to. She stands up, every joint aching, and limps towards the water. Not directly in front, but to the side where the riverbank begins to rise, forming a nice ledge for her to sit on.

She begins untying the laces of each boot, loosening them so she can wiggle out of them easily. Pauses with her hands gripping the first boot, scanning the water for anything that looks dangerous. The shadowy creatures that inhabit the water are farther out, where she can’t see the bottom.

Where she plans to dip her feet is shallow, maybe a few inches deep. Covered with fine sand and missing plant or animal life, it looks like the perfect spot. She holds her breath and yanks each boot off.

Surprisingly, her socks are clean, although damp. She wrestles them off, stuffs them into each boot, places them behind her, and dunks her feet into the river. The water is even chillier than she remembers, numbing her toes and soles of her feet.

A pleasant shiver runs through her body as she soaks in the bliss of finally being freed from her feet’s confines. She tosses her head back, savoring the strengthening sunlight, its warmth at odds with the chill slowly creeping up her legs.

Soon enough, though, the water feels lukewarm, and she buries her feet deeper into the sand despite the more logical part of her brain protesting that there could be creatures hiding under. She silences it with an airy sigh that overtakes the river in sound and spreads the tingling sensation all over her skin.

“I told you it’d be good,” Liam says, yawning after.

Cora whirls around, planting one foot on the river bank and leaving the other dangling over the water. “What the?”

“How are you feeling?”

She can’t help it. She smiles. “My whole body hurts, that’s it.”

“And your headache?”

“Gone. My head feels as normal as ever.” She runs a hand through her hair. “Normal enough. I’d kill for some shampoo at least.”

“Same. I couldn’t sleep last night though.”

The momentary calm breaks. “Yeah. No kidding.” Her smile dies. She crosses her arms, glaring at him. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” But he knows. She sees his nervous tugging on his collar.

“Turn off my alarm. I was supposed to keep watch after and you were supposed to sleep.”

“You’re going to call me insane if I tell you why.”

Cora keeps her eyes on him. He breaks contact first, turning his head to view the remnants of the campfire. “I don’t need you to tell me why. I know you wanted to keep me safe and help me recover, but we’re a team. You even overslept again with neither of us being alert. What if something happened?”

“I took a quick nap, that’s all.” Liam rubs his eyes. They look bloodshot, weary and sensitive to light. He’s still squinting. “Trust me. I think I slept when the first sun started coming up.”

“That’s not the point. We’re supposed to do equal work. I set the alarm so you could rest. Now you’re even more tired and won’t get better until you let me do something for once.”

Liam purses his lips. Looks ashamed, even, or so Cora thinks. “I… I keep getting ahead of myself. I learned to always protect girls no matter what. That’s the way my life went.” Cora pulls up her other leg and sits with her legs crossed. “I’ll stop being so overprotective. You’re right. We’re not on Earth, we’re in a new world that requires both of us to work together.”

“Yeah, it’s a team effort.” She turns sideways, dipping a foot into the water again.

“I overreacted,” Liam says, “I’ll let you share the work if you want to. I’m sorry for bothering you like that.”

“I do. And it’s fine. Thank you for understanding.” She dips her other foot into the water. It is cold again, but she knows it will grow warmer soon. “So. Why would I call you insane for wanting to protect me by staying up all night? It made me annoyed, but not that angry.”

“That was part of the reason.”

A dark shape pushes against the current some distance beyond where she’s dipping her feet. She hesitates to dig into the sand. “Then why?”

“I think I saw another person walking around last night.”

Her breathing slows. The rushing current invades her ears, a constantly varying sound like her emotions. “You what?”

This time, Liam projects strength into his voice. “There was somebody else walking around last night. I don’t think they saw us, but I saw them walk off into the bushes.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t some new animal we haven’t seen?”

“I’m one-hundred percent sure. They walked on two legs, had arms, held one of those pumpkins or whatever they are. They weren’t looking anywhere specific. After they were gone, I turned off your alarm because I didn’t want it going off and pinging our location to them.”

Cora stares at the dark shape struggling to push upwards. “Another person…”

“I want to check out the area I saw them last in. But I want this to be a team effort.”

“If you didn’t want us to be found, then why do you want us now to find them?”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Because we need to know what we’re dealing with. Last night we weren’t as prepared. Today is a different story. You’re awake and we have daylight on our side, but I want this to be a team effort.”

The dark shape swims further uphill, hidden underneath the faster-moving currents. “A team effort.” Another person. She blinks. Could it be… Liam got yanked into this whole mess because of her, despite being thousands of miles away.

Sure, she had lived in Oregon before, but that was a long time ago. That person might be another human, like them. Wandering this world, probably without a clue why they got here or why it was them who got taken and not somebody else.

Another person, whom Liam and her can team up with, making it easier to survive and find a way out. She has the key, even if the door it opened apparently doesn’t exist anymore. They can figure something out, though.

The alternative is that it’s an alien. An actual, living, breathing alien, with its own biology, its own thoughts, its own reasoning. How will they see him and her? As friends, as prey, as enemies?

The freezing knots in her stomach make the river water seem warm by comparison. “Let’s do it, then.”