???

Sai-ee sticks his hands in and pushes apart the sides, arms shaking with the effort.

“Wait,” I say. “Don’t make it bigger.”

Lil sticks her fingers through.

“And Lil, don’t do that.”

She pulls her fingers out with a defiant look. “How come? I think we’ve got to go inside, to investigate it and fix it if it needs fixing.”

“Leave it alone, both of you, or at least let me go get Cass.”

They let me go get him—he’d gone back to my parents’ house, it turned out—but when he saw the gap he had a different opinion than me.

“I’ll go in.”

“You can’t go in on your own,” I told him immediately.

“Yes, I can?” He looked at it from all angles again, considering. “Though I think it would be alright if you came, or Sai-ee, since he’s so powerful. I just think it would be best to sort it out directly.”

I don’t know why, but I feel like Cass should be more pessimistic. The guy standing in front of me now feels so familiar, but also like a stranger.

“Let’s go, then!” Lil says.

“Cass didn’t say you could come,” I tell her.

“C’mon, Jayla. How come you’re so scared?” Sai-ee asks.

I’m not scared! I want to complain, and maybe throw something else at him. Instead, I say truthfully, “It feels like something’s missing in my brain.”

The gap in reality is big enough now for Lil to stick her head through. It looks like she’s been guillotined, her neck cutting off in the middle.

“Lil!” I admonish, but she’s already coming back. She retreats shaken, clutching her chest, and grips Sai-ee tight by the hair.

“H-hey,” Sai-ee says. “Hold my hand or something.”

She takes his hand and holds onto his hair at the same time, with her other hand.

Cass looks at that, pursing his lips, and says, “Actually, let me go in first.”

Sai-ee uses his foot to push the bottom of the hole down, until it stretches three feet tall in front of us. Cass gets on his hands and knees and crawls in.

And then, inside the rift, crashes down.

At first I don’t comprehend what’s happened to his body. His face is blackened; his hair burnt off; his ears turning to ash. Clothes half gone. Twisted.

Someone’s screaming. Oh, I’m screaming.

I recover myself and pull him out. On the other side, he goes back to normal. He doesn’t even look upset, just confused. “I blacked out?”

“You died,” I say, voice coming apart at the seams. “You—died! We’ve got to go and figure this out, sorry, you can’t—you should get far away.”

“What do you mean, I died?”

“You were a corpse.” Sai-ee’s grayed out and looks nauseous. “Like how Lil got all rattled when she stuck her head through.”

“Pull me out if I die,” Lil says, recovered from her need to hold onto Sai-ee and the proactive one out of the three of us as always. She crawls through.

I know she was fine before but this seems like a horrifically bad idea. Still, I focus on pushing Cass away rather than stopping her. “I died?” he asks again.

Lil enters and her eyes go wide, her breathing goes fast—for a moment, then she pulls herself together and stands. I can see her skirt, her legs and the top straps of her sandals through that three-feet gap, but can’t monitor what her face is doing.

“I won’t go in,” Cass tells me, pushing my hands away.

I nod, trying to slow the pace of my heart with careful, deliberate breaths. “Sure.”

“Sai-ee, Jayla, come check this out.” Lil’s voice comes out distorted through the gap. “It’ll mess you up for a second, but you’ll be okay.”

“I think it’s in degrees though, like Cass is one end and you’re the other,” Sai-ee says. “Jayla, duck your head in.”

I do.

My head spins with sick anger again. This time, not at Sai-ee. I’m thinking of the people who burned Cass—who burned Cass? I don’t know, but I have faces in my mind, blurry and indistinct. And I want to cry from guilt. A tear or two slips down my face.

With that though is a desire to be proactive. Crouching, I step fully through the gap.

Lil catches me and hugs me again. Holding onto her, I can regain my sense of self. I push those emotions down, balling my hands into fists tight enough that my nails cut my palms and blood trickles out onto my fur.

Then I can look around.

Ash sits piled on the ground like snow. The trees stand dead and black, frozen ranks of sentinels, prison bars. The wind whistles through destroyed buildings and barren forest floors.

And yet it’s definitely where we came from. We’re standing on the street opposite the school. It was still there, and it was intact—testifying to how it was built with clay and stone, with no brush or wood. Behind us is what was Sai-ee’s family’s general store, except it’s not there, there’s a burnt-down little house instead. I can see where the road leads to the town square, and the sun still hangs low in the sky, a couple notches above the peaks of Ry’keth’s Amins mountains. The tree it was hiding behind is a stump.

Sai-ee comes through after us, stumbling for a second as he makes his way through. He hugs himself, shivering even though it’s hotter.

“Shit,” he breaths, “why’s it hitting so hard?”

Lil reaches out towards him and he flinches away. So, Lil takes off her scarf instead, a thin cotton thing, and holds it out. He wraps it around himself, and stands a little straighter.

Cass watches us worried through the gap.

I walk around, up and down the abandoned streets. Really abandoned—where is everyone? What happened here?

Sai-ee takes out his sheet of metal again, along with his thin engraving knife. A few modifications to earlier lines and a jotting down of two new ones, and then a green aura appears above the metal, projecting a sequence of images.