Bo slammed on the brakes and let her hopper drop to the ground as she hopped off and raced toward the mangled metal in front of her. If the vehicle looked like this, what would the body that had been riding it look like? Her mind shied away from the thought as soon as it entered her head.

The engine of her dad's hopper was cold, which meant the crash wasn't new. The seat was empty. Crouching, she ran her hand along the ground until she found what she was looking for. Tracks. A pair of boots. One side was less imprinted than the other, which meant a limp that her dad had not left the camp with. An injury from the crash, then? A little further on, the tracks were dotted with droplets of blood, confirming her theory.

This was territory she was wholly unfamiliar with. It would be increasingly easy to get lost, and if her radio ran out of batteries or the signal was lost... Well, she knew she wouldn't be finding her way out.

She circled back to the hoppers and checked over the wreckage again. One of her dad's good satchels was nearby, but it had been shredded into strips. Not the sort of damage a crash did. Only wrappers were left of the food that had once been in it. It looked like animals had gotten to it. And even worse... wolf prints circled the crash site. They were clear, but old enough to be at least from the day before. Which meant that she had been attacked well after this crash. Her stomach roiled as she remembered what had saved her. The wolves had just eaten.

Her hand flew to her radio, wanting to tell Aston. He might think of something. The receiver was at her mouth when she paused. Aston might think of something, but he could also demand she return. This new evidence was condemning, and Aston would want to use it to get her to come home. She tucked the radio back onto her belt.

Bo returned to her hopper, and turned it to follow the trail of her father's footprints leading away from the crash. She could see the wolf prints following his, and she only hoped she wouldn't be too late. 

Her vehicle plowed through the forest. She pushed every single ounce of speed out of the hopper in the hopes that she could stop her fears from becoming real if she could just get there fast enough. 

Her dad was the only one who could comfort her when she began her worrying.  He'd smiled and tell her that  all she had to do was calm down and it would be all right. Most of her worries never had a basis, a good enough reason to exist. But what happened when the worries did have a basis? A basis as horrifyingly real as the dark blood stains that she followed. There was no calming down from that.

Bo was so focused on the trail, that it took her a second to realize that reality itself had shifted around her. It was nothing at all magical or flashy; just a feeling of mist against her skin and a slight blurring in her eyes that cleared up almost immediately. But when the blur disappeared, so did the orange forest. It was replaced with a different world.

Coolness was nearly all her senses had time to register as she sped through the damp air. Glimpses of brilliant greens fused together in her peripheral. She took her eyes off the path ahead of her for only a second to gape in wonder at these new colors and textures, and that was when her front wheel collided with a massive root.

She flew over the handlebars, and slammed into the ground with a crunch. Her limbs tangled together as she rolled with the momentum of her ejection. Elbow, knee, foot, hand, head. Everything got its chance. She grunted in pain with each slam until she came to a stop, winded and throbbing. Her lungs struggled to pull in air and all she could do was lay paralyzed.

Her vision swam for a moment as she stared at the sky and tried to stop the feeling of wanting to throw up. But as they slowly began to focus again, she saw that she was looking up toward a million tiny lights. At first, she thought perhaps the impact to the back of her skull had been hard enough to knock them into her vision, but even after she blinked hard a few times they stayed in front of her. Pricks of light against a velvet backdrop.

...Stars?

The word felt strange. Of course, it wasn't one that got used on a regular basis since stars hadn't been visible to the naked eye in over ten years.

As she stared in stunned silence at a sight she never should have been able to see, she slowly came to the realization that she was laying on something soft and cool. Whiskery strands brushed her fingers, slick and damp with moisture. Moving her head carefully, she took in the view of an endless swath of green carpeting the ground. Grass. Untamed grass. The scent stirred her mind, bringing up foggy memories from when she was little.

Was this death? Had the crash killed her? No, it couldn't be. She shouldn't be in pain if this was death, and yet her knee felt like it was on fire. She gathered up the energy to ignore the grass and stars and all the other impossible things to lift her head and look down at her leg.

She immediately regretted it.

A dark stain ran down one of her legs, oozing through the fabric and dripping into her boot. A shredded mess of torn skin peeked through a ripped hole in her pants. Pain radiated from it like a heat. Bo bit down hard on her tongue as she attempted to maneuver her leg. Red-hot pain blasted through her knee-cap, and she bit back a scream as she steadied herself against it. But she knew she couldn't lay around forever and wait for a rescue. Not to mention that she was in a place that shouldn't exist, which set her nerves even more on edge.

Bracing herself for the inevitable, she scrambled to her feet with many curses and grunts. It was nowhere near graceful, but she was finally on her feet and able to glance around at her surroundings from a better angle.

A straight gravel path cut through the grass about a hundred yards away, with large lights set in intervals down its length. Their strong beams lit up trees standing sentry and sporting delicate pink flowers and dark green leaves. Bushes cut into perfect squares filled the spaces between the trunks. 

This was obviously a well-kept yard. Bandits seemed a likely group to have such ostentatious grounds. Somehow they must have figured out how to filter out the damaged air, and maybe had irrigation sprinklers hidden somewhere to supplement water to keep everything so green?

Bo shook her head, jamming the heel of her hand into her eye socket. No, none of this made sense. There was no way to filter out the grit in the air, and there certainly wasn't a way to return the ground to fertile soil. The chemical bomb had destroyed almost all living matter, which was why the area was known as the Blast Zone. The nearest bit of land that Bo knew of that was this green was beyond the militarized boundary fence, and heavily guarded by the Terra Preservation armies.

As she took in the strange vegetation and clear night sky, Bo walked the path with a rolling limp and a grimace against the pain. As she went, a massive house slowly revealed itself from out of the darkness. Ivory stone and white crenelations, with two towers jutting up from the back and long windows staring into the night sky. No lights on inside. It was a building from a time long, long past. Something from the ancient annals, a place she had no idea could still exist after more than a thousand years. Somehow, this house belonging to a bygone era, surrounded by grass and trees and flowers, made Bo's blood course icy cold through her arms and legs. 

Even though everything inside of her shouted at her to leave, she knew that she wouldn't get far out in the Dead Wood with a knee as damaged as hers. The smell of blood would draw every ravenous wolf within a mile radius, and she'd end up a tasty dinner in a matter of minutes. She needed to find some bandages indoors, and maybe some medicine. If bandits were the owners, they surely had medical supplies. 

Bo crept closer to the house, keeping to the grass and away from the beams of light that lit the trees and the front of the house. Her leg shook with exertion already, but she kept her eyes glued to the front porch and the massive oak door. By the time she reached her destination, her whole body felt drained and she had to grip the railing as she pulled herself up the double tiered stairs. 

Pain flared through her entire leg with each step up, and all she wanted was for her dad to show up out of the thin air and take her home. For a split second she allowed herself to imagine it. Him stepping out from behind somewhere, restored to the rugged, strong man she knew from her childhood. He'd pick her up, cradled in his arms, and walk her home while she slept.

But that was only for a split second. She wasn't stupid enough to believe in nonsense like that. Her father was in trouble somewhere-- old, feeble, and injured. He had spent all his energy and youth on keeping them safe, and now she needed to save him after so many times of him saving her. So she put the silly fantasy out of her mind, and pressed on until she was at the top of the stairs and within a few feet of the oak door.

The lights that sent beams up to illuminate the front of the house didn't quite reach the porch, and Bo was thankful for the shadows she could hide in. She edged closer to the house walls and reached for the doorknob. As her palm hit the metal, she instantly pulled it back when something sticky and wet met her skin.

With a hammering heart, Bo turned her hand to look at it in the dimness. Something dark coated her fingers and stuck in the creases of her palm. She raised her hand to her nose and smelled the familiar metallic tang of blood. Her eyes skimmed back to the doorknob, now noticing the streaks that coated it and the streaks that covered the wood around it. Her eyes traveled down, then, and saw a pool of darkness at her feet. Someone had walked through the blood and tracked boot prints all over the porch and across the threshold into the house. Bo felt her heart sink as she realized she recognized the worn tread.

Her father.

Was the blood his? Most likely, as she'd followed his injured trail here. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she thought of him, injured and alone in the eerie house.

She had to get him out as soon as possible.

She tried the doorknob again, but found that it was locked. Judging from the footprints, her father had been able to get inside at some point. It didn't bode well that the door was now locked.

Bo turned to find another way in, walking down the stairs and to the side of the house where no lights lit up the facade. Here she was free to try the windows, and she almost immediately found one that wasn't locked. A brief sense of surprise washed over her, that someone with such an expensive house and lawn would leave a window open for intruders, but she quashed the tiny seed of worry as she thought of her father trapped inside.

The glass pane opened outward on well-oiled hinges. Thankfully it was a low and long window, only a foot off the ground. Bo barely had to bend her knee to hoist herself up onto the sill, and she was able to muffle the small burst of curse words that tumbled from her mouth along with her bandanna. It dangled around her neck, and she briefly thought of using it to wrap her knee up. But she didn't want to waste any time... or at least that's what she told herself. If she was being a bit more truthful, she didn't want to look at the mess that her knee had become, or put herself through any more pain of prodding and poking it.

When she finally was inside, she latched the window behind her and turned to see that she was in square room that echoed with each step she took. She didn't spend much time looking around, only enough to note that, besides the shiny floors and ornate wallpaper, she was alone. The room was wide and long, stretching farther than Bo could see in the gloom to her right, but she ignored this side of the cavernous room and bent her painful steps toward the double door that sat on the opposite wall.

This time, the handles were not covered in blood, but instead were highly polished and smooth. Bo got a general sense of them being carved in the shape of some sort of animal, and that the doors themselves had some sort of floral design, but the light was too bad and her mind too focused on finding her father for her to care much.

She pressed down on the handles, relief spreading through her when they clicked out of place and the door popped open. Light spilled through the crack, illuminating her face and making her narrow her eyes against the glare. When they finally adjusted, she saw a huge entrance hall before her, made of white and black tiles and pink marble carvings. A large chandelier cast light onto the floor, and it glinted off the blood smears marring the ground and coming inward from the front door.

The smears lead to a small door just under the massive staircase. The wood looked oddly damaged and worn in comparison to the rest of the mansion, and Bo felt a sense of unease rise at the sight of it. 

Taking a deep breath, Bo started to step into the entrance hall. Her boot hit a black tile, her hand still pushing one of the double doors open, when the worn door under the staircase burst open with a slam on the wall, and a massive dark figure appeared in the gloom beyond.