"Another cave?" I ask, stuffing the wings inside his satchel with the arrows as he directed.

"I know where a lot of them are. So, it's just easy to head for one when the winds start."

He's crouching in the corner using a flint to try to start a small fire. He looks up, and I can just see the outline of his face in the darkness.

"You want to try one of your wishes?" he asks.

"What if I only get so many?"

"I doubt it works that way," he says, confident.

I close my eyes and think about heat and fire. I remember what it was like to sit by a fireplace on the Third Realm or to be warming my toes by a fire pit on the Second Realm. My cheeks start to warm and my forehead feels hot like I have already been close to the fire too long. The small pile of sticks that Mason gathered start to smoke and then they burst into flame.

He sits back on his heels and watches the fire for a moment, lost in thought. He doesn't meet my eyes when he asks, "You have that sequence?"

I pull the sheet out from the front of my dress and move closer to the flames. I look down and scrawled across the top is the number one. Beside it are the words wings of the black foil. I look up and meet Mason's eyes.

"How did you know that we'd need the wings?" I ask.

Mason's smile is muted. "It's almost always the opening move from the tree. It just determines how badly you want to get out. Some people don't even chase the fly; it just ends there."

I think about how quickly Mason acted, how I stood there, paralyzed. "You've never tried to get out?" I ask.

His smile vanishes. "Not this way, no."

"How do you know the moves?" I ask, oscillating between curiosity and suspicion. 

He shrugs, and I get the sense that he's feigning nonchalance. "The moves become progressively more personal, testing your strength and resolve." He meets my gaze. "The tasks will call into question everything you think you know about yourself."

"Has anyone ever made it out this way before?"

Mason looks at me out of the corner of his eye. "One that I know about." He looks back at the flames and puts his hands closer, rubbing them together. "You know her."

"Maizie." The chill from the rocks beneath me makes me shiver, and I shuffle a little closer to the fire. I think about what she was like when I first met her, full of insecurities, twitches, probably riddled with nightmares. "She was a mess on the Second Realm when she emerged. She was a shell of a person for quite a while."

"Not surprising."

I sit in silence, thinking about how much Maizie changed once she remembered her Third Realm self and once she remembered what happened to her on the First.

"Do you think that's going to happen to me? I make it back to Ryan, but I'm not really me anymore?" I ask. I don't know what's more terrifying, not making it back or not being me.

Mason doesn't say anything for a while, and I think he isn't going to answer. Finally, he says, "I don't know, Hannah. I don't have that answer, but I do have a lot of questions. About you, about all of this."

"Maizie also said something similar the other night," I admit.

"So, you did have a bad dream."

"Maizie's not a bad dream." My tone is defensive. "She just reminds me of what I don't have and why I don't have it." I look into the flames, watching the flickering red and orange. "That's not her fault." I let my words sit between us for a moment before speaking again. "You're trying to avoid the conversation. What do you think is going on?"

"I don't want to say yet. I have some suspicions, but I need to do some more digging."

"How can you dig? You're not connected anymore, right?"

Mason smiles broadly. "Oh no, I'm still connected. Ryan lets me in. But, he's hard to latch onto sometimes because of all his 'oh Hannah' thoughts. It's a little annoying. I have other people I can use."

"How do you latch onto someone? Do they always have to let you?" I pause for a second, thinking about his phrasing. "What are you, anyway? You aren't like me."

He stands up and brushes off his legs. "Let me patch that hand of yours and then we should get some sleep."

"Wait. Why isn't there anything else on this list? Why is there only one item?"

"You've only done one thing so far. I think that would be pretty self-explanatory." He pulls a salve out of the bottom of his satchel.

"But, how do we know what to do next?"

"What we need to do will appear either on the list or we'll just know it when we see it. The better question is what we'll need to collect next," he says.

He wraps my hand with an unexpected tenderness. When his green eyes connect with mine, I feel a brief moment of peace seep over me, as though I can handle anything that's thrown my way. Without saying another word, he lays down on the far side of the fire and rests his head on the satchel of arrows.

"Night, Queenie."

I fold the sequence, careful of my newly bandaged hand and stuff it back down my dress. My fingers touch my scar and I sigh.

"Night, Mason."

####

"This feels aimless." I look around the forest, wondering how this wandering is supposed to turn up something important. We haven't connected with anyone else in the last two days, my hand healed perfectly, and I'm starting to think that this whole sequence thing is an exercise in futility.

"The tree is teaching you some patience, Hannah," Mason says wryly.

"Overrated."

"Maybe for some," he says, clearly implying I'm not one of those people.

"Why do you speak like the tree is alive?"

"It is alive."

"Oh God, please don't tell me you're saying it's alive with people's hopes and dreams or something weird like that," I say, mockingly.

He makes a noise and frustration is written on his face. "No, it's actually alive. The tree's brain is in its roots, which is why you have to dig for the sequence."

"Have you ever had a conversation with the tree?"

"The only conversations it has are through its sequence sheets. I told you it was alive, I didn't say it could speak." His voice suggests that I'm the crazy one to even ask. "Though there are those that can communicate with the trees. I'm not one of them."

We fall into an uncomfortable silence again. I sigh, unused to feeling so much continual tension.

"Are there any colonies or anything on this realm? We haven't even met another person yet," I complain.

I look around the forest and the hairs on my arms stand up. I can't explain the sudden feeling of dread, but the atmosphere of the forest shifts imperceptibly. I learned to trust my instincts without question when I was on my own.

"Mason?"

"Yeah, I felt it too. Something's coming."

He motions for me to creep closer to the nearest tree and at the base is a small hole, just enough to wiggle into if we duck down and enter sideways. He pushes me into the crevice and then follows. We crouch there in silence, waiting for whatever we both feel to pass. 

Tiny feet start to scamper by the hole and I try to catch a glimpse of the animal, wondering why such tiny feet would elicit a sense of fear in me. Mason pulls my head back away from the opening and shakes his head furiously. The forest bursts to life and the ground thunders. Birds scream in the sky. From inside the tree, I suddenly see thousands of feet darting, frantic and disconnected. 

I want to ask Mason what's going on, but when I give him a questioning look he puts his finger to his lips. The sound that comes next is like water crashing on the shore. There's a sporadic popping sound and high pitched cries pierce the chaos of the forest. 

I want to look out, to get a good view of what's chasing the herd of tiny feet, but I know I can't risk it. Instead, I watch the slit in the tree as it's covered by smooth, black skin. A shiver snakes its way down my spine. Whatever is out there, is huge, almost a glossy black and moves like water. I watch the shifting flesh as it advances past our tree.

Once we can see the landscape again, I turn to speak to Mason. "What was..."

"Check your sequence." He springs up and is peering outside, watching the creature retreat.

I yank the paper out of my dress, quickly unfold it and read, "The heart of a quillore."

Mason scoops up his arrows, lets the pack melt into his back and squeezes out of the tree saying, "We need to follow that quillore then."

"Was that the beast or the little feet?" I squeeze out behind him and jog beside him, matching his pace.

He laughs. "I wish it was the tiny feet!"

"Do you know how to kill it? To get its heart?"

"Yeah. But, I'm not going to be the one killing it." He throws the next part over his shoulder as if it's supposed to comfort me. "Don't worry, I'll give you a few pointers."

Apprehension blooms in my chest. My weak stomach threatens to revolt. I look around the forest as we run, trying to keep my mind off the task ahead. The giant, leafy trees have small black holes on their trunks and there doesn't seem to be any obvious pattern.

"Why do some of the trees have those black holes?" I can see the dark tail of the quillore in the distance.

Mason glances over at the trees. "Ah...The quillore has bad aim?"

I don't stop running, but I shift closer to the next tree to get a better look at the holes. They look like they were burned into the tree.

"The quillore shoots fire?" I ask.

"Acid. If that makes you feel any better."

I think of the few times I was scalded by something. I look down at my hands and arms as I keep pace with Mason and wonder what it'll feel like to have them covered in black acidic pock marks. I touch my face and wonder if I'll still be pretty.

"Stop thinking about it, Hannah."

"Am I going to get burned?" I ask.

"No risk, no reward."

I look ahead again. We aren't gaining on the quillore, but it isn't outdistancing us either.

"I think I liked it better when I didn't have time to think. Or when we were wandering aimlessly and I was complaining that I wanted some action. I would take either of those right now."

"Queenie, you're going to be just fine. If there is one thing I can guarantee you, it's that you're a survivor."

I give him a hopeful look. "Maybe a tiny grain of like creeping in there?"

"Let's not get carried away," he says, picking up his pace as the quillore disappears behind a cluster of giant rocks. "We need to make it to those boulders. The quillore will have its home somewhere in there and if we lose the trail, we'll never find it."

Author's Note:

What do you think about the first point on Hannah's list? Would you have chased down the fly?