The creatures never came.
Kota didn't understand it at first. The clicking had surrounded them, growing louder, closer, until he was certain the next moment would bring teeth and claws. He'd stood there with his pathetic branch raised, his body trembling with exhaustion and terror, waiting for the attack.
But the sounds had stopped at some invisible boundary. Circled. Retreated.
And then... silence.
That had been two days ago.
Two days of sitting in this small clearing, his back against a twisted tree that hurt to look at too long, watching Aisha's chest rise and fall. Two days of listening to every sound, gripping his branch until his hands cramped, waiting for the creatures to work up the courage to cross whatever line they'd drawn.
Two days without food. With only the water he'd managed to collect in his cupped hands from a small, oily-looking stream nearby—water that tasted wrong but was better than dying of thirst.
Two days of watching Aisha sleep and wondering if she would ever wake up.
Kota's eyes burned. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually slept. Every time he started to drift off, his head would snap up at some sound—real or imagined—and the adrenaline would spike through him again. His body was running on fumes and fear, and he knew he couldn't keep this up much longer.
But he couldn't sleep. If he slept, he wouldn't see them coming. If he slept, Aisha would be defenseless.
So he stayed awake.
He'd tried talking to her at first. Telling her about Marcus, about the creatures, about how they were going to get out of this. His voice had given out somewhere around the end of the first day, reduced to a croak. Now he just sat and watched and waited.
The forest around them pulsed with wrongness. The trees here didn't follow normal patterns—they grew in spirals, their bark shifting colors when he wasn't looking directly at them. The ground was covered in something that looked like moss but moved occasionally, rippling like water. And the sky, what little he could see through the canopy, was the wrong shade of blue. Too bright. Too saturated.
Gateway influence. They were sitting in the heart of it.
Kota's stomach cramped with hunger. He'd tried eating some of the strange vegetation, but one taste had made him gag and spit it out immediately. Everything here was wrong. Poisonous, probably. Or worse.
His left hand still clutched the torn piece of Aisha's skirt. He'd held onto it this whole time, a talisman, a reminder of why he couldn't give up. The fabric was stiff with dried blood now—some of it from the creatures, some probably from his own scraped hands.
Movement.
Kota's head snapped toward Aisha, his heart lurching. Her fingers had twitched. Just slightly, but he'd seen it.
"Aisha?" His voice came out as barely a whisper, raw and broken. He crawled closer, ignoring the protest from his cramped legs. "Aisha, can you hear me?"
Her eyelids fluttered. A soft groan escaped her lips.
"Come on," Kota urged, his hand hovering over her shoulder, afraid to touch her, afraid he might hurt her somehow. "Wake up. Please wake up."
Her eyes opened slowly, unfocused at first, staring up at the twisted canopy above. Then they found his face and widened.
"K-Kota?" Her voice was hoarse, confused. "What... where..."
"Don't move too fast," he said, even though he wanted to grab her, to make sure she was real, that she was actually awake. "You're okay. You're safe. Well, relatively safe. You're—"
Aisha tried to sit up and immediately gasped, her hand going to her head. "Ow. God, what happened? My head is killing me and I feel like I got hit by a—"
She stopped. Looked down at herself. Her eyes went very wide.
"Why," she said slowly, her voice climbing in pitch, "is my shirt in pieces?"
Kota felt his face heat up despite everything—despite the exhaustion, the fear, the fact that they were probably going to die here. "The creatures. They had you wrapped in webbing and I had to tear you out and it kind of... destroyed your clothes. I'm sorry. I tried not to—I mean, I wasn't trying to—"
"Kota." Aisha's voice was flat. "Are you telling me you've been staring at me half-naked for—how long have I been out?"
"Two days. And I wasn't staring! I was keeping watch! There are creatures out there and—"
"Two days?" The embarrassment on her face shifted instantly to alarm. She tried to stand, swayed, and Kota caught her arm. "Two days? Kota, where's my dad? Where are we? What happened?"
The question he'd been dreading. Kota's throat tightened. "I don't know. About your dad, I mean. He told me to run, to get you out, and I did. But the sounds... the fighting stopped and I don't know if he..."
He couldn't finish. Couldn't say the words.
Aisha's face went pale. She looked around the clearing, really seeing it for the first time—the wrong trees, the moving moss, the too-bright sky. "Where are we?"
"Deep forest. Convergence zone. I went the wrong way when I was running and we ended up here. The creatures won't come into this clearing for some reason, but they're out there. I can hear them sometimes."
Aisha was quiet for a long moment, processing. Then her stomach growled, loud enough that they both heard it clearly.
"How long since you ate?" Kota asked.
"I don't... I don't remember. Before I went looking for..." She trailed off, her hand going to her torn shirt again, but this time the embarrassment was gone, replaced by something more immediate. "I'm so thirsty. And hungry. Do we have anything?"
"Water. Sort of. There's a stream but it tastes weird. No food. Everything here looks poisonous."
"Show me the water."
Kota helped her to her feet. She was unsteady, leaning on him heavily, and he realized how weak she must be. Two days unconscious. No food or water. Whatever the creatures had done to her.
The stream was only a few meters away, a thin trickle of water that ran over rocks that seemed to shift colors. Aisha knelt beside it, cupped her hands, and drank deeply despite Kota's warning about the taste.
She made a face. "That's... yeah, that's not good. But it's wet." She drank more, then splashed some on her face. "Okay. Okay, I can think now. We need to get out of here. We need to find my dad. We need—"
The clicking started.
Both of them froze. It was different this time—not the chorus from before, but a single source. Close. Very close.
Kota grabbed his branch and positioned himself between Aisha and the sound. His heart hammered against his ribs. "Get behind me."
"Kota, I can—"
"You can barely stand. Get. Behind. Me."
For once, Aisha didn't argue. She moved behind him, and Kota could feel her hand gripping the back of his shirt.
The undergrowth rustled. The clicking grew louder, accompanied now by a wet, dragging sound.
And then it emerged into the clearing.
Kota's mind tried to reject what he was seeing. Tried to make it make sense and failed completely.
Six legs, each ending in something between a claw and a hand, carried a body that looked like it had been assembled from parts that didn't belong together. The torso was vaguely humanoid but wrong, twisted, the skin hanging in loose folds that peeled away to reveal something glistening and raw underneath.
But the worst part—the part that made Kota's stomach lurch—was the faces.
Two of them. Side by side on what should have been a head. Both human-looking, both slack and dead-eyed, their mouths hanging open to reveal rows of needle teeth. One face was male, the other female, and they moved independently, the eyes rolling in different directions, the mouths opening and closing out of sync.
The clicking was coming from somewhere inside the thing's body.
"Oh god," Aisha whispered behind him. "Oh god, what is that?"
The creature took a step forward. Then another. Its movements were jerky, uncoordinated, like a puppet with tangled strings.
"Stay back!" Kota shouted, raising his branch. His voice cracked. "Stay back or I'll—"
The creature lunged.
It was fast—impossibly fast for something that moved so awkwardly. Kota swung the branch with everything he had, and by some miracle, he connected. The impact jarred his arms, and the creature recoiled, one of its faces opening wide to scream.
The sound was like metal scraping on metal, high and piercing. Kota's ears rang.
"Run!" he shouted at Aisha. "RUN!"
But there was nowhere to run. The creature was between them and the way they'd come. The only other direction was deeper into the convergence zone, toward—
Toward the gateway scars.
The creature lunged again. Kota tried to dodge, but his exhausted body was too slow. He felt a line of fire across his left arm as one of the creature's claws connected, cutting deep.
He screamed. The branch fell from his hands. Blood poured down his arm, hot and fast, and the pain was so intense his vision went white for a second.
"KOTA!" Aisha grabbed him, pulling him backward. "Move! MOVE!"
They stumbled away from the creature, Kota clutching his arm, blood seeping between his fingers. The gash was deep—he could feel it, could feel how wrong his arm felt, how the muscle wasn't working right.
The creature followed, clicking, dragging itself forward on those horrible legs. Both faces were focused on them now, the eyes tracking their movement with predatory intelligence.
"There!" Aisha pointed with her free hand. "That shimmer in the air—that's a gateway scar, right?"
Kota looked. She was right. Between two trees that grew in an impossible spiral around each other, the air rippled and bent, showing glimpses of something else. Another place. Another world.
"We can't," he gasped. "We don't know what's on the other side. Could be worse. Could be—"
The creature lunged again, and this time there was no dodging. Its claws reached for them, those faces opening wide, and Kota knew they were out of time.
"GO!" Aisha shoved him toward the gateway.
They hit the rippling air together, and reality came apart.
The sensation was indescribable. Like being turned inside out and stretched across an infinite distance all at once. Kota felt his body pulled in directions that didn't exist, felt his mind trying to process input that made no sense. Colors that had no names. Sounds that were also textures. The taste of purple and the smell of sharp angles.
It lasted forever.
It lasted less than a second.
They tumbled out onto solid ground, Kota's wounded arm screaming as he landed on it. He rolled, gasping, his mind still trying to reassemble itself after being scattered across whatever space existed between worlds.
Aisha landed beside him, retching, her hands pressed against the ground.
For a long moment, neither of them could do anything but breathe and try to remember how to exist in three dimensions.
Then Kota looked up.
The sky was wrong.
Not wrong like the forest had been wrong. Wrong in a completely different way. It was blue—a bright, clear, beautiful blue that reminded him of pictures he'd seen of Earth's sky before the gateways opened. But running through it in vast swirls were bands of purple. Deep, rich purple that moved slowly, like oil on water, creating patterns that were almost hypnotic.
Two suns hung in that impossible sky. One was yellow-white, familiar. The other was smaller, dimmer, tinged with red.
"Kota," Aisha whispered beside him. "Where are we?"
He couldn't answer. Couldn't find words for what he was seeing.
They were on a hillside covered in grass that was the wrong shade of green—too bright, almost luminescent. In the distance, he could see structures. Or what remained of them. Ruins sprawled across the landscape—broken towers and shattered domes, their alien architecture all curves and spirals that had once defied gravity but now lay crumbled on the ground. Massive chunks of carved stone were half-buried in the luminescent grass, covered in symbols that hurt to look at too long. Whatever civilization had built this place was long gone, leaving only the bones of their cities behind.
And everywhere, floating in the air like dandelion seeds, were small lights. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Drifting on a breeze that Kota couldn't feel, pulsing gently with their own inner glow.
"We're not in the forest anymore," Kota said stupidly.
Aisha made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. "No. We're definitely not."
Kota looked down at his arm. The gash was still bleeding, though slower now. It hurt like hell, and he knew he needed to do something about it soon or he'd pass out from blood loss.
But for now, all he could do was stare at the alien sky with its two suns and purple swirls, and try to process the fact that they'd just left their world behind.
They were somewhere else now. Somewhere other.
And they had no idea how to get back.