They ran.
The forest exploded with sound—the creatures' screams, the crash of undergrowth, Marcus's ragged breathing beside him. Kota's legs pumped, his lungs burned, and behind them the clicking grew louder, closer, multiplying into a chorus that made his teeth ache.
"Split up!" Marcus shouted. "I'll draw them—"
"No!" Kota grabbed his arm, but Marcus shoved him hard, sending him stumbling sideways into a tree.
"Get to Aisha! When you see an opening, you grab her and you RUN! You don't look back, you don't wait for me, you RUN!"
The first creature burst through the trees, its segmented body flowing over roots and rocks like water. Marcus didn't hesitate. He grabbed a fallen branch—thick as Kota's arm, studded with broken limbs—and swung it like a club.
The impact caught the creature across what might have been its face. The branch shattered. The creature recoiled, shrieking, and Marcus was already moving, circling away from Kota, away from the nest, drawing the thing's attention.
"GO!" he roared.
The second creature emerged from the opposite side, cutting off Marcus's retreat. It was smaller, faster, and it moved with a predator's intelligence. Marcus saw it coming and dove, rolling under a low-hanging branch as the creature's claws raked the air where his head had been.
Kota stood frozen, watching Marcus scramble to his feet, watching him grab another branch, watching him plant himself between the creatures and the nest.
Between the creatures and Aisha.
"KOTA! NOW!"
The command broke through his paralysis. Kota ran toward the nest, his heart hammering so hard he thought it might burst. The webbing was thick, sticky, and it clung to his hands as he grabbed at it, trying to find where Aisha was wrapped.
Behind him, Marcus screamed—not in pain, but in fury, a battle cry that echoed through the twisted trees. There was a wet, crunching sound. More screaming. The creatures' clicking rose to a fever pitch.
Kota's fingers found fabric—Aisha's shirt—and he pulled, tearing at the webbing. It came away in stringy clumps, revealing her face, pale and slack. A cut on her forehead had bled down her cheek, but her chest rose and fell. Alive. She was alive.
"Come on, come on," he muttered, ripping at the webbing around her torso. It stuck to everything, stretching like melted plastic, and his hands were covered in it now, making it harder to grip.
A crash behind him. Marcus shouting: "Stay down! STAY—"
The sound cut off abruptly.
Kota's blood turned to ice. He wanted to look, wanted to see if Marcus was okay, but his hands kept moving, kept tearing, because if he stopped, if he looked, he might see something he couldn't unsee.
The webbing around Aisha's legs finally gave way. She slumped forward and Kota caught her, nearly buckling under her weight. She was the same size as him, maybe even a little taller, and completely limp. Dead weight.
He got his arms under her shoulders, tried to lift her, and immediately knew this was going to be a problem.
Another crash. The sound of something heavy hitting a tree. Marcus's voice, strained: "Kota... if you're still here... I swear to God..."
"I'm going!" Kota shouted back, even though he knew he shouldn't, knew he was giving away his position. He got Aisha halfway up, her head lolling against his shoulder, and started moving.
It wasn't running. It was barely walking. More like stumbling forward with a hundred and ten pounds of unconscious girl draped across him, his legs shaking, his arms already burning.
Behind him, the sounds of fighting intensified. Marcus was still alive. Still fighting. Still buying him time.
Kota pushed into the undergrowth, away from the nest, away from the clearing. Branches whipped at his face. Roots tried to trip him. Aisha's weight kept shifting, threatening to pull him down, and he had to stop every few steps to readjust his grip.
"Come on, Aisha," he panted. "Little help here. Wake up. Please wake up."
She didn't respond. Her breathing was steady but shallow, her body completely slack.
He kept moving. The sounds of fighting grew more distant, but he couldn't tell if that was because he was getting farther away or because the fight was ending. He didn't let himself think about what it meant if it was ending.
Marcus had told him to run. Had ordered him. So he ran.
Or tried to. His foot caught on a root and he went down hard, twisting at the last second to take the impact on his shoulder instead of crushing Aisha beneath him. Pain shot through his arm. He bit back a cry and forced himself up, got Aisha positioned again, and kept going.
The forest pressed in around him. Every tree looked the same. Every shadow could hide a creature. His sense of direction, already shaky, was completely gone now. He thought he was heading back the way they'd come, back toward the forest edge, but everything looked wrong. Felt wrong.
He stumbled over something and looked down to find more webbing, old and dried, clinging to the undergrowth. His stomach dropped. Was he going in circles? Had he somehow looped back toward the nest?
No. The webbing was different. Older. Which meant...
Which meant there were more nests.
"Shit," he breathed. "Shit, shit, shit."
He adjusted his grip on Aisha again and realized with a start that his hand was on bare skin. He looked down and felt heat flood his face despite everything.
Her shirt was torn—not just torn, but shredded, hanging in strips from the webbing and the creatures' claws. One sleeve was completely gone. The neckline had ripped down to expose her shoulder and part of her—
Kota jerked his eyes away, his face burning. This was not the time. This was absolutely not the time. They were running for their lives, Marcus might be dead, and he was noticing that Aisha's shirt was basically destroyed and her skin was—
Stop it. Focus.
But his hands were still on that bare skin, still feeling the warmth of her, and he was fourteen and stupid and even in the middle of a nightmare his brain apparently had room to be completely inappropriate.
He forced himself to look at her face instead. Still unconscious. Still pale. The cut on her forehead had stopped bleeding but it looked bad, the edges swollen.
"You're going to kill me for this later," he muttered, readjusting his grip to something less mortifying. "When you wake up and realize I've been carrying you around half-naked through a monster forest, you're going to actually murder me."
The thought was almost comforting. It meant he believed she would wake up. That they would get out of this. That there would be a later for her to be embarrassed and angry.
He kept walking. His legs were trembling now, muscles screaming. How long had he been carrying her? Ten minutes? Twenty? It felt like hours. The forest stretched endlessly in every direction, and he had no idea which way led to safety.
A sound behind him made him freeze. Clicking. Distant but distinct.
They were being followed.
Kota forced himself to move faster, ignoring the burning in his arms, the way his back felt like it might snap. Aisha's head bounced against his shoulder with each step. He tried to be gentle, tried to keep her steady, but he was exhausted and terrified and—
His foot caught again. This time he couldn't recover. They went down together, Kota twisting to take the fall but still landing hard enough to drive the air from his lungs. Aisha rolled off him, coming to rest against a tree root.
For a moment he just lay there, gasping, staring up at the canopy. The trees here were different. Taller. The branches twisted in ways that hurt to look at, forming patterns that seemed almost deliberate. Almost like symbols.
The clicking came again. Closer.
Kota forced himself up, crawled to Aisha, checked that she was still breathing. She was. He got his arms under her again, lifted with his legs, and nearly collapsed. His body was done. He had nothing left.
But he lifted her anyway. Got her positioned. Started walking.
The trees grew stranger with each step. The bark was darker here, almost black, and it seemed to pulse faintly in the dim light. The undergrowth was thicker, more aggressive, thorns catching at his clothes and skin. The air tasted wrong—metallic and sweet at the same time, like blood and honey.
Kota's mind was starting to fog. Exhaustion and fear blurred together until he wasn't sure if he was thinking clearly or just moving on instinct. He needed to rest. Just for a minute. Just long enough to catch his breath and figure out which direction to go.
He found a massive tree with roots that formed a small hollow at its base and carefully lowered Aisha into it. She slumped against the wood, her head tilting to one side. He collapsed beside her, his whole body shaking.
The clicking had stopped. Either the creatures had lost their trail or they were being quiet. Hunting.
Kota closed his eyes and tried to think. They'd entered the forest from the south. The nest had been... north? Northeast? He'd run... which direction had he run?
He opened his eyes and looked around, really looked, trying to find something familiar. Some landmark he recognized from the way in.
That's when he saw the gateway scar.
It was carved into a tree about twenty feet away—a spiral pattern that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking directly at it. He'd seen scars like that before, in the wasteland outside Okala. They marked places where gateways had opened and closed, leaving reality permanently damaged.
But the scars near Okala were old. Faded. This one was fresh, the edges still raw, still bleeding that strange light that came from between worlds.
And there were more of them. Now that he was looking, he could see them everywhere—on trees, on rocks, carved into the earth itself. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.
His stomach dropped.
Gateway scars concentrated like this meant only one thing: this was a convergence point. A place where multiple gateways had opened, where the barrier between worlds was thin. Unstable.
Dangerous.
The forest near Okala's edge had maybe three or four old scars total. This place had hundreds of fresh ones.
Kota stood slowly, turning in a circle, taking in the twisted trees, the wrong angles, the pulsing bark, the thick undergrowth. The air that tasted like another world.
He'd been so focused on running, on carrying Aisha, on putting distance between them and the nest, that he hadn't paid attention to where he was going. Hadn't noticed the forest changing around him. Hadn't realized he was heading deeper instead of out.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, no."
He'd gone the wrong way. In his panic, in his exhaustion, he'd run directly away from the nest without thinking about direction. Without thinking about anything except getting Aisha away from those creatures.
And now they were here. In the deep forest. In the convergence zone.
In the worst possible place they could be.
The clicking started again, and this time it came from multiple directions. Surrounding them.
Kota looked down at Aisha, still unconscious, still vulnerable, and felt something break inside him. He'd failed. He'd gotten them lost, gotten them trapped, and now they were going to die here in this wrong place where reality itself was coming apart.
Marcus might already be dead. And soon they would be too.
The clicking grew louder. Closer. More voices joining the chorus.
Kota picked up a fallen branch—not much of a weapon, but it was something—and positioned himself between Aisha and the sounds. His hands were shaking. His legs could barely hold him up. But he would not let them take her without a fight.
The undergrowth rustled. Something was coming.
Multiple somethings.
Kota raised the branch and waited for the end.