Kota woke to the feeling that the world was the wrong shape.
Not just his body—though that hurt too, every joint aching—but everything around him. The air, the light, the ground beneath his back. It all felt… off. Tilted.
He forced his eyes open.
The first thing he saw was color.
Not the rust-gray and acid-yellow of Inkto Town, not the smeared browns of the slums, but a sky painted in impossible shades—a vast dome of deep purple stretching above him, streaked with long, twisting veins of pale yellow. Those yellow bands didn't sit still; they pulsed faintly, as if something slow and distant moved behind them, bleeding light through old scars.
Between those bands, the purple deepened toward almost-black, clouds forming in slow, coiling whorls that glimmered at the edges with a muted, electric sheen. The entire sky looked bruised and luminous at once, like a storm caught just before it broke and then held there.
Kota blinked, once, twice.
The sky didn't fix itself.
He dragged his gaze down.
He lay on a bed of grass that was wrong too. Each blade was familiar in shape, but the color twisted somewhere on the way to his brain. The lower halves of the blades were a vibrant, healthy green—but toward the tips, they shifted, shading into a soft blue that grew brighter and almost translucent at the very ends. In clusters, they glowed faintly, casting a ghostly aqua light over his hands and sleeves.
Here and there, fat drops of moisture clung to the grass, beading together into pearls that shivered but didn't fall. The droplets weren't clear. They held color—subtle, like diluted ink—pale violet and faint gold, catching and refracting the strange sky above in miniature.
Beyond the grass, the ground broke into dark, smoothstone plates, each one veined with hair-fine lines of light. Those lines moved. Not fast, not obviously—but if he watched long enough, he could see them pulsing along invisible paths under the rock, violet and white currents flowing away into the distance.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow, ignoring the flare of pain from his right shoulder.
The world around him rolled into fuller view.
It was overgrown in every direction—choked with life that didn't belong on Earth.
Low shrubs spread in thick, tangled mats, their leaves broad and flat like some kind of succulent, but colored in gradients: deep emerald at the center fading to turquoise at the edges, each leaf rimmed in a hair-thin line of pale silver that caught the light like metal. Some of those leaves quivered as if in a breeze he couldn't feel. Others twitched more sharply, bending toward the faint hum that seemed to live in the stone.
Farther out, taller plants rose, halfway between tree and vine. Their trunks twisted upward in spirals, bark the color of scorched bone, smooth in some places and ridged in others where dark nodules swelled like knuckles. Their branches didn't fork normally. Instead, they curved back on themselves in looping arcs, forming warped, asymmetrical hoops hung with curtains of narrow, translucent fronds.
Those fronds moved.
They swayed with a motion too regular to be wind, folding and unfolding in slow, measured patterns that reminded Kota uncomfortably of a creature breathing. When two frond-curtains from neighboring plants brushed each other, a faint shower of sparks—tiny blue motes—fell between them and sank into the ground, leaving behind a stronger pulse in the veins beneath the stone.
Higher still, the canopy thickened into a warped tangle. Some "trees" grew at angles that made no sense, trunks bending against gravity, jutting horizontally before curling back up, as if the forest had grown in a different direction once and then changed its mind. Where branches crossed, the air seemed to distort, edges of leaves blurring as if seen through water.
Looking at those parts too long made his eyes ache.
He realized he was holding his breath.
Something brushed his palm.
Kota flinched, instinctively tightening his fingers.
Warmth met him.
He glanced down.
Aisha's hand was still wrapped tight around his, knuckles pale even in sleep. Dirt streaked her wrist. A thin cut traced along one cheekbone, dried and flaking. Her blond hair lay in a tangled spill around her head, strands half-lit by the grass's glow, half-shadowed by his body.
Relief hit so hard it was almost pain.
"Aisha," he said, voice rough. "Hey."
He shifted, using his good arm to brace himself, and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. His shoulder protested the movement, sending a hot, sharp throb through half his torso.
She didn't wake.
He squeezed again, a little harder.
Her lashes fluttered. A faint line appeared between her brows. Slowly, like someone swimming up from too deep underwater, her eyes opened.
For a moment, they were unfocused—pale irises catching reflections of purple and yellow from above. Then they blinked, cleared, and fixed on his face.
"Kota?" she whispered, voice hoarse. "You're…?"
"Not dead," he said. "You either. So that's something."
Her gaze slid past him and caught on the sky.
Whatever color was left in her face drained.
"What…?" Her mouth stayed open, words failing her as she took in the streaked violet, the pulsing bands of yellow, the warped canopy.
He followed her gaze, then looked back down at her.
"Not Inkto Town," he said quietly. "Not anywhere near it."
She swallowed, throat working.
"You took us through," she murmured. "The Rift."
He didn't answer that. He didn't have a good answer to give.
Instead, he eased his hand out of hers—she clung for a second before letting go—and pushed himself all the way upright, legs folding under him.
His head swam. The air felt thicker than he was used to, every breath heavier. Underneath it all, that low hum persisted, a vibration in the soles of his feet, the bones of his forearms, the hollow behind his eyes.
Aisha pushed herself up too, wobbling. She sat hunched for a second, one hand pressed to the side of her skull as if it hurt.
She looked around slowly.
"It's…" She struggled for the right word. "Wrong."
Kota almost laughed.
"Yeah," he said. "You always wanted to see a Rift world, right? Happy birthday."
She shot him a weak glare, then dragged her fingers through her hair, wincing when they snagged on a knot.
"Are you hurt?" she asked.
He glanced at his shoulder.
The bandage looked worse than it had before the jump—split, stained through in two places, edges curled. Dried blood clung to the exposed skin above it, dark against the paler flesh.
"I'll manage," he said. "Nothing new opened that wasn't already open."
She didn't seem entirely convinced, but she accepted it for now.
Her attention drifted outward again.
The overgrowth pressed close in every direction—a riot of shapes and colors that would have been beautiful if it didn't feel like it might be alive in ways that had nothing to do with animals. Thin, reed-like stalks dotted the nearer patches of ground—each one tipped with a bulb that pulsed faintly from within, cycling through colors: blue to green to a hot, unsettling magenta before dimming back down. One bulb popped suddenly, soundless, releasing a puff of glittering dust that hung in the air, refusing to fall.
Beyond that, a cluster of squat, fleshy plants huddled together, their surfaces glossy and almost translucent. Their colors ran in gradients—orange melting into red, red into deep plum. As Kota watched, one of them split at the top with a wet, slow peel, revealing a ring of fine, needle-like tendrils within that waved gently across the air as if tasting it.
He didn't like the way those tendrils seemed to orient toward sound.
Further off, something else shifted—what he'd first taken for a tangle of roots extruding from a stone ledge uncurled, revealing itself as a dozen slender, segmented stalks, each ending in a blunt, paddle-shaped leaf. They moved independently, sweeping the ground in slow arcs, tapping and lifting, tapping and lifting, as if mapping whatever lay beneath the thin soil.
"Don't touch anything you don't have to," Kota said quietly. "Pretty is probably poisonous."
Aisha huffed a humorless breath.
"Learned that from the slums," she said. "Fluorescent mold, bright red vents, shining insects… the more they glow, the faster you end up in Yuki's care."
"Or in the ground," he said.
They both fell silent for a moment.
The hum in the stone seemed to grow louder when they weren't talking.
Somewhere high above, a distant shape glided across the sky—a long, thin silhouette, too far to make out clearly, leaving a faint distortion trail that twisted the yellow bands behind it before they smoothed back.
Kota dragged his attention back down.
"So," he said. "We're alive. That's good. We're not where we're supposed to be. That's less good."
"We can't go back the way we came," Aisha said, more to herself than to him. "Rift geometry doesn't… loop cleanly. Even if it did, the chances of re-entering at the exact point—"
She cut herself off, biting her lip.
He let that hang there for a second, then nodded once.
"Food and water," he said. "That's first. Then shelter. Then we worry about… everything else."
"You sound like Marcus," she said.
"Marcus has survived longer than both of us," he replied. "Might be worth copying him for once."
She didn't argue.
They both climbed fully to their feet, unsteady. The world's scale felt subtly wrong—the distance between objects not quite matching what his eyes told him. What should have been a short step sometimes stretched into two; what seemed far closed quickly.
Kota scanned the clearing's edge.
No beasts moved among the plants.
But there were signs that something had.
On one of the twisted tree-trunks to their left, four deep gouges scored the bark in parallel, the exposed inner tissue a darker, almost black color that oozed slowly, dripping thick, tar-like sap that hissed when it hit the luminous grass. The ground beneath the marks was disturbed—grass crushed, stone-veins dimmed where something heavy had passed.
Further on, half-hidden behind a curtain of translucent fronds, lay a patch of flattened vegetation where something large had rested or rolled. A faint, sour smell hung there, cutting through the metallic tang of the air.
"Tracks," Kota said softly. "Not human."
Aisha followed his line of sight and paled.
"No corpses," she said. "No bones. That's… something."
"Means whatever eats things here isn't leaving leftovers," he said dryly. "That's something, too."
She shivered.
He forced his shoulders to square, ignoring his body's protests.
"We stay close," he said. "We don't go far until we know what's around us. We look for water first. Plants this dense, there's got to be some. Low ground, mist…"
He turned slowly, and there it was: in the middle distance, beyond a weave of strange trunks, a faint smear of white rose from a dip in the land—mist or vapor, glowing faintly where the sky's yellow bands caught it.
Aisha saw it too.
"There," she said.
They started toward it together, picking their way through the alien growth. Every few steps, one of them would pull the other back from something questionable—a patch of ground where the stone-veins flickered angrily, a cluster of tiny, jewel-bright insects swarming over a stump.
The insects were the size of his thumbnail, bodies a translucent amber with organs shining faintly inside like scattered beads. They moved in tight formations, swirling and re-knitting patterns with a kind of coordinated intelligence, and where they settled, the underlying plant tissue darkened, shriveled, and then disappeared entirely.
"Don't breathe too close to that," Aisha whispered.
He didn't plan to.
A low-lying plant to their right suddenly jerked as they passed, its broad, pale leaves snapping shut around empty air with a soft, meaty thwap. Thin filaments crisscrossed its inner surface, flexing like tiny muscles as they sought something that wasn't there.
Kota stepped a little farther away.
"Everything's hunting," he muttered. "Even the plants."
"That's what high-resonance environments do," Aisha said quietly, half-reciting something she'd read. "They speed evolution. Make everything adapt, twist, fight harder to live."
Her eyes were bright despite her fear.
He knew that look.
Even here—especially here—part of her was cataloguing, analyzing, fascinated.
"Save the lecture for when we're not on the menu," he said.
She shut her mouth, but her gaze kept flicking from plant to plant, cataloguing all the same.
They pressed on, the hum in the ground following, the purple sky watching.
No beasts yet.
But the claw marks and crushed paths whispered that it was only a matter of time.
Hours blurred into color and caution.
The world here didn't make distance easy. What looked like a short walk on flat ground turned into constant detours—around thickets of razor-edged leaves, over slick stone plates pulsing with slow violet light, sidestepping patches where the grass had gone glassy and brittle, cracking underfoot with a sound too much like thin ice.
More than once, they had to backtrack when a plant shifted into their path—broad fronds folding down like a curtain, their undersides lined with hair-fine tendrils that swayed toward warmth.
Kota kept his eyes moving and his steps deliberate, scanning for movement that wasn't rooted to the ground.
The hum in the stone never faded.
If anything, it grew a little stronger, a little more present, the deeper they moved toward the dip where the mist rose. The back of his neck prickled constantly, like static building under his skin.
But nothing lunged out at them.
No beasts crashed through the undergrowth.
No unseen jaws snapped at their heels.
Just plants, shifting and tasting and hunting in their own slow ways.
By the time the land began to angle gently downward, his legs ached and his shoulder was one continuous, throbbing knot. Sweat stuck his shirt to his skin, and his mouth felt dry, his tongue heavy.
"We're close," Aisha said quietly.
He could hear it now too.
Under the omnipresent hum, a second sound had emerged—a soft trickle, irregular but distinct. Water.
They pushed through a final curtain of hanging, translucent fronds—Aisha holding them gently aside with the edge of her sleeve to avoid skin contact—and the world opened again.
A shallow basin lay before them, its sides formed by gently sloping banks of dark stone and thick, luminous grass. At its center, a pool rested—wide as a small house, its surface still and glassy except where a thin stream poured in from a crack in the rock wall, sending out delicate ripples.
The water wasn't clear.
It held color, faint but real—a pale blue sheen that deepened toward the center, where it almost seemed to glow from below. Every few seconds, tiny motes of light drifted up from the depths, reached the surface, and winked out with soft, soundless pops.
Mist rose from the pool in a low, steady plume, carrying that faint metallic tang stronger than before, touched now with a hint of something almost sweet.
Kota's throat clenched at the sight.
"Finally," he breathed.
Aisha's eyes were wide, reflecting the pool's glow.
"It's beautiful," she said, then immediately ruined it by adding, "and probably full of things that want to dissolve our insides."
He snorted once, then coughed—his throat too dry for even that.
"Can't be worse than slum runoff," he muttered, eyeing the water.
Up close, the shore was a mix of smooth rock and patches of thick, spongey moss that gave under his boots. Strange, reed-like stems jutted from the water's edge, each tipped with small, bulbous nodules that blinked dimly on and off, like sleepy eyes.
He knelt carefully at the boundary where stone met damp moss, ignoring the complaints from his knees and shoulder.
"We can't drink that straight," Aisha said, kneeling beside him but stopping just out of reach of the damp. "You've seen what Resonance-heavy water does in those academy reports. Mutations. Organ stress. That lake could be half liquid, half… whatever that humming is."
"I know," he said. "We boil it. Filter it. Like Yuki taught us."
He looked around for anything that might serve as firewood.
The nearest shrubs were thick and moist, leaves heavy with sap. The ground plants looked more like wet sponges than dry tinder. Twisted, hoop-limbed trees grew farther back, but their bark gleamed with a slick sheen that didn't promise easy burning.
He found a few dry-looking sticks wedged under a stone overhang—thin, gray, flaking at the touch.
He gathered them anyway.
Aisha watched, skeptical.
"Those'll burn for about ten seconds," she said.
"Ten's more than zero," he replied. "We just need a start."
He cleared a small patch of ground a safe distance from the moss, scraped away the glowing grass with the side of his boot until dark stone peeked through, and arranged the brittle sticks in a careful little teepee. It looked pathetic. He tried not to think about that.
No lighter. No matches.
Just friction and stubbornness.
He found two pieces of wood that looked denser, sat back on his heels, and started rubbing them together with the grim determination of someone who'd once seen it work in a training vid and decided that meant it was possible for him, here, now.
For the first minute, he managed to convince himself he was making progress.
By the fifth, his arms ached and his palms burned, a raw spot forming near the base of his left thumb. His shoulder pulsed with each movement, a hot warning that he ignored.
Sweat dripped down his temple.
The brittle wood grew warm under his hands. A thin puff of dust curled up once, then vanished.
No ember formed.
"Don't," Aisha said quietly from where she was crouched, scanning the perimeter. "Kota. You're going to tear your stitches for nothing."
He gritted his teeth and kept going.
She sighed, stood, and brushed off her knees.
"I'm going to see if there's anything I recognize as remotely edible," she said. "If you die of stubbornness while I'm gone, I'm haunting you."
"Bring back something that doesn't bite you first," he muttered.
She rolled her eyes but there was fondness in it. Then she slipped away along the basin's edge, moving with careful steps, eyes sharp.
He kept at the friction.
His hands hurt worse. His shoulder had passed pain and moved into a numb, hot throb that scared him more than the earlier sharpness. The sticks frayed. Nothing caught.
After what felt like a small eternity measured in splinters, he sagged back on his heels, chest heaving.
His vision wavered slightly at the edges.
"Fine," he rasped at the unlit pile. "You win."
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
He looked at the pool again.
The water's surface seemed calm, almost inviting. Little motes of light still rose and vanished, rhythmically. The faint blue glow from its depths made the whole thing look like an enormous, waiting eye.
Every instinct said: This is a bad idea.
Every dry muscle said: Do it.
He sat there a few moments longer, wrestling himself.
The hunger could wait. The thirst couldn't.
"Yuki's going to kill me," he muttered. "If the water doesn't first."
He edged forward on his knees until he could lean over the bank, bracing one hand on the stone. Up close, the water's scent intensified—that metallic note sharper, the hint of sweetness more obvious, like overripe fruit hiding rot.
He dipped his fingers in.
The liquid was cooler than he expected. Not freezing, just… dense. Thicker than normal water. It clung to his skin in a strangely uniform way, beading perfectly around his fingers, coating them without dripping immediately.
His fingertips tingled.
He stared at the slight warping of his submerged fingers, the way their shape seemed to wobble just a fraction. When he pulled them out, the droplets that fell back to the pool were faintly luminous.
No burning. No pain beyond the tingling.
He brought his damp fingers closer to his nose and sniffed.
Metal. Sweet. Ozone.
He glanced over his shoulder.
Aisha was still some distance away, half-hidden behind a clump of blue-lit shrubs, examining a hanging cluster of pale orange ovals that might have been fruit.
"Don't be stupid," he told himself.
He cupped his hand anyway.
His fingers shook a little as he scooped up a small amount of the water. It beaded in his palm, almost reluctant to move.
He hesitated.
Then he brought it to his lips and took the tiniest sip he could manage.
Cold slipped over his tongue.
The taste hit a second later.
It was like drinking air from a storm—sharp, metallic, with a weird clean note that made his teeth ache. Under that, a faint sweetness lingered, the ghost of fruit or flowers so alien he couldn't place them.
His tongue tingled.
He swallowed.
For one terrible heartbeat, his throat seized, muscles spasming.
His heart hammered.
Then it passed.
The water slid down to his stomach, leaving a cool trail in its wake. No immediate convulsions. No burning from the inside. Just a buzzing under his skin that might have been the hum of the world getting louder or might have been his own panic.
He waited.
One breath. Two. Ten.
The buzzing didn't intensify.
His vision didn't blur more than it already had from exhaustion.
He dipped his hand in again, took another, slightly larger sip.
Still weird. Still sharp. Still… not killing him.
"Of all the idiotic—"
Aisha's voice cut through his focus like a thrown wrench.
He jerked, half-turning, his wet hand dropping, droplets flinging in an arc.
She stood a few meters away, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, fists clenched around a makeshift bundle of gathered shapes—berries, fruits, something that looked like a spiky root. At his flinch, her fingers slackened and half of what she'd collected tumbled to the moss at her feet.
"Kota!" she snapped, closing the distance in three quick strides. "What are you doing?"
He opened his mouth to answer.
She smacked his shoulder. Thankfully, the uninjured one.
"Are you out of your mind?" she demanded. "You find unknown water on an unknown world and your first thought is 'I bet that belongs in my mouth'?"
"I tried to make a fire," he protested weakly. "You were busy picking alien snacks."
Her cheeks puffed, eyes flashing.
"So you decided to poison-test it with your face?" she said. "Do you have any idea how many resonance-based pathogens could be swimming in there? Organ liquefiers, neuro-reactive parasites, adaptive—"
"I took a sip," he said. "A small one. I'm not dead yet."
"That's the bar we're setting now?" she shot back. "'Not dead yet'?"
He couldn't help it. Despite the fear, despite the ache, a breathy huff of laughter escaped him.
Her outrage burned hotter for a second, then faltered, some of the sharpness draining out.
She sighed, long and frustrated.
"You're impossible," she muttered.
"Water's… weird," he admitted, gesturing weakly to the pool. "But I think it's drinkable. Tastes like a lightning rod and cheap candy. No burning."
"That is not a scientific metric," she grumbled.
He dipped his hand once more, slower this time, and brought up a fuller handful.
"Watch me," he said. "If I start convulsing, you know we need a Plan B."
"That is not funny," she said—but he saw the way her eyes tracked the movement of the water in his palm. Her lips were dry. She'd been moving as much as he had.
He took another sip, larger now. The cool spread further through him, dampening the rasp at the back of his throat. The buzzing rose with it, but no sharp edges of pain followed.
He handed what little was left in his palm toward her.
She stared at it for a long second, jaw tight.
Then she leaned in and let a thin stream spill into her mouth, careful not to touch his hand.
She swished it like Yuki swished questionable medicine, then swallowed with a grimace.
"Ugh," she said. "Like someone bottled a thunderstorm."
"Better than slum paste," he said.
She considered that.
"Barely," she conceded.
They refilled their cupped hands a few more times, taking small, measured sips until the worst dryness faded and their heads felt a little less floaty.
Aisha retrieved the scattered things she'd dropped, dusting them off carefully. She laid them out on a relatively clean patch of stone away from the glowing moss.
"We're not eating all of this," she said. "Half these might kill us faster than thirst."
Kota eyed the collection.
There were small, deep-blue spheres clustered on a faintly translucent stem; waxy, bell-shaped pods mottled with darker spots; a long, ridged thing that looked somewhere between a root and an insect carapace. One fruit—or what he assumed was a fruit—was ovular, with a thick, pale yellow rind and patches of iridescent scales near the top.
"How do you know any of it's safe?" he asked.
"I don't," she said. "But some patterns carry over. Sharp colors, raised pustules, things that move when you don't touch them—that's usually a no. These—" she pointed at the blue spheres "—had bite marks from something smaller than us but bigger than those insects. That's a maybe. The pods leaked clear fluid when I nicked them and immediately made the ground smoke. That's a no."
"Good to know," he said, nudging one of the pods further away with the tip of his boot.
They sorted for a while, setting some things aside as absolute rejects, others as maybes to test in tiny amounts later. The long ridged "root" smelled faintly of pepper and metal; the yellow, scale-patched "fruit" had no visible holes or signs of predation.
Kota picked that one up.
The skin felt oddly warm under his fingers, faintly yielding, like flesh rather than rind.
"Careful," Aisha warned.
He turned it over in his hands, looking for a seam.
"Maybe if I peel it—"
The "fruit" twitched.
He froze.
"Did you see—"
The thing shivered all over, scales flaring once like tiny gills opening. Then, with a dry little chirp, it sprouted four stubby, root-like legs from beneath itself, flexed them, and bolted.
It scuttled across his palms, scrambled up his wrist, and launched itself off his arm with surprising speed, hitting the moss with a soft thump before vanishing into a tangle of blue grass, little legs a blur.
Kota stared at his empty hands.
Aisha made a strangled sound that was somewhere between a squeak and a laugh.
"Did you just try to peel a lizard?" she demanded.
"I—" He looked at the grass where the thing had vanished, then back at his hands. "It looked like a fruit."
"That's what it wanted you to think," she said, shoulders shaking now. "Predator decoy. Classic."
He snorted, then actually laughed, the sound bubbling up unexpectedly. It hurt his ribs and tugged at his shoulder, but he couldn't stop.
"You're one to talk," he managed. "You brought it from the murder foliage."
"I am expanding our options," she said primly, even as her lips quivered. "You are trying to commit taxonomic crimes."
They both lost it for a few seconds after that, the laughter too loud in the alien air, dissolving some of the tightness that had been coiled in Kota's chest since the forest.
When it finally faded, they were both breathing easier.
"Alright," Aisha said, wiping at the corners of her eyes. "We eat nothing that tries to run away first. Agreed?"
"Agreed," he said.
They settled into a rhythm—small sips of water, tiny nibbles of the least-threatening blue "berries" (which were tart and left their tongues faintly numb for a few seconds), constant checking of each other's reactions.
Nothing immediate. No dizziness beyond what they already had. No burning.
It was enough for now.
The sky's yellow bands had shifted by the time they considered stopping for the "night," though without a sun's clear movement it was hard to judge the hour. The light had gone slightly dimmer, the purples deepening, the hum in the ground changing key in a way that made his body feel slower.
"We need somewhere to sleep," Kota said. "Not here. Too open."
Aisha scanned the basin's edge.
"There," she said softly.
Near the pool's far side, the roots of one of the larger, hoop-limbed trees had burst up from the ground before diving back under, leaving a hollow space beneath them. The gap was big enough for two if they didn't mind being close. The back of the hollow pressed against a raised stone ledge, forming a solid barrier. The front could be partly screened by hanging moss if they pulled some down carefully.
It wasn't a house.
It was better than lying out in the open waiting for something to sniff them.
They gathered what dry-ish plant matter they could find—brittle fronds, shed bark, a few non-glowing grasses—to form a rough mat inside the hollow, then crawled in, making sure their heads were toward the stone and their feet toward the opening.
The tree's roots arched overhead, twisted and thick, their surfaces rough but strangely warm. Faint lines of light ran under them too, slower than in the stone, like sap that glowed.
Kota lay on his back for a moment, staring up at the interlaced wood and the sliver of purple-yellow sky visible beyond.
Aisha shifted beside him, turning onto her side to face him. In the cramped space, there wasn't much room to move without bumping knees or shoulders.
"Is this okay?" she asked softly. "Your arm?"
He turned his head toward her.
Her face was close—close enough that he could see the tiny flecks of darker color around her irises, the way her lashes clumped from earlier tears. Dirt streaked one cheek. A leaf was still tangled in her hair near her temple.
"It's fine," he said. "Just don't roll onto it."
She made a small noncommittal sound.
A moment later, she edged closer, careful of his injured side, until the front of her body pressed along his left. She tucked her forehead under his chin, one hand resting lightly against his chest, fingers curled as if afraid to grab too hard.
His heartbeat spiked.
He hoped she couldn't feel how fast it had suddenly gotten.
"You're cold," she murmured.
"World's weird," he said. "Air's weird."
"You're blaming alien climate for your shivering now?" she whispered, a ghost of a smile in her voice.
"Maybe," he said.
Her breath ghosted warm against his throat. The scent of her—sweat, dirt, the faint lingering trace of Yuki's soap—cut through the metallic tang of the world outside.
He shifted his left arm, the good one, and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling her in a little closer. She made a small sound—half-sigh, half-relief—and relaxed into him, muscles unwinding by slow degrees.
For the first time since the forest, since the beast, since the jump, he felt something like… anchored.
Outside, the hum of the world went on, indifferent.
Inside the hollow, tucked under alien roots on an alien world, Kota stared at the slice of wrong-colored sky and tightened his hold on the only familiar thing he had.
"Don't disappear again," he said quietly, the words barely more than breath.
Aisha's fingers curled against his shirt.
"I'll try not to," she whispered.
He closed his eyes, listening to her breathing even out, counting each rise and fall of her chest against his side until, despite the aching shoulder and the humming ground and the wrong sky, sleep dragged him down too.