She hit the ground wrong.
Her shoulder hit first. Then her hip. Something in her ribs made a sound she'd never heard a body make before. The breath left her lungs in a single violent exodus, and for three heartbeats she couldn't inhale, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but lie in grey dirt and wonder if this was what dying felt like.
Above her, three moons burned in a sky the color of old bruises.
Yuna's lungs finally remembered how to work. She sucked in air that tasted wrong, metallic, faintly sweet, like blood mixed with rotting flowers. The ground beneath her was cold and gritty, somewhere between sand and ash, and it clung to her skin where her jacket had ridden up.
She tried to sit up. Her ribs screamed. She gasped and fell back, and the grey sky wheeled overhead while she fought down nausea.
Where am I?
The question felt stupid even as she thought it. She knew where she was: somewhere impossible. Somewhere that couldn't exist. Somewhere her mother's crazy theories about consciousness and connection had apparently been preparing her for, though she hadn't believed a word of them until a crack of light swallowed her whole.
Yuna forced herself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The same pattern the therapist had taught her after the funeral, back when she'd still been going to therapy, back when she'd still been doing any of the things normal grieving people were supposed to do.
She counted to ten. Then she tried again to sit up.
This time, she made it.
The world around her was dying.
She knew it the way you know a house is empty before you check the rooms. Something fundamental was wrong here, something that went deeper than the strange sky or the ash-colored earth. The landscape stretched in every direction like a photograph left in the sun too long: washed out, faded, exhausted.
Hills rolled toward a horizon that seemed too close. Their slopes were covered in what might once have been grass, now just brittle grey stalks that crumbled at her touch. A tree stood alone on the nearest ridge, leafless and twisted, its bark the white of old bone.
And everywhere, the silence.
Not peaceful silence. Hungry silence. The kind that pressed against your ears until you could hear your own heartbeat, your own breathing, every small sound your body made as it insisted on existing in a place that didn't want anything to exist.
Yuna got to her feet. Her ribs protested, but nothing felt broken, just deeply, viciously bruised. She checked her pockets by instinct: phone (dead, or maybe just not connected to anything anymore), wallet (useless), keys to an apartment in a world she might never see again.
Her mother's coat. She was still wearing her mother's coat.
She pressed her face into the collar and breathed in, searching for any trace of her mother. Perfume. Shampoo. Anything. But the coat had been washed since the funeral. It smelled like nothing. Like absence.
Yuna started walking.
She walked for what felt like hours.
The three moons crawled across the sky in patterns she couldn't predict. Sometimes together, sometimes apart, their light shifting from gold to silver to a deep violet that made shadows look like bruises. There was no sun that she could see, but the light came from somewhere, diffuse and directionless, casting no shadows at all for long stretches and then suddenly casting three at once.
The landscape didn't change. Grey hills. Grey earth. Occasional ruins that might have been buildings once, now just suggestions of walls and foundations, their stones worn smooth by time or something worse.
She found water eventually: a stream running through a shallow gully, its surface dull and cloudy. Yuna crouched beside it, cupped her hands, hesitated. The water smelled like copper. When she let it run through her fingers, it left a faint residue, slightly oily.
She was so thirsty.
She drank anyway. It tasted the way the air smelled, wrong, but not deadly wrong. At least, she hoped not deadly.
When she stood up, something was watching her from the other side of the stream.
It had been human once. She could see that much in the shape of it: two arms, two legs, a torso, a head. But the proportions were wrong now, stretched and hollow, as if someone had taken a person and pulled them like taffy. Its skin was the same grey as the landscape, and its eyes.
Its eyes were empty. Not closed, not missing. Just empty. Sockets filled with nothing, darker than dark, pulling at the light around them like tiny black holes.
Yuna's heart stopped. Then it started again, too fast, slamming against her bruised ribs.
The thing tilted its head. The motion was almost curious, almost human, and somehow that made it worse.
"Hello?" The word came out of Yuna's mouth before she could stop it. Stupid. Suicidally stupid. But her body was doing things without permission again, the same way it had frozen at the hospital door, the same way it had stepped through the crack in her apartment wall.
The creature opened its mouth. No sound came out, but Yuna felt something, a pressure against her mind, a sensation like someone pressing their thumb against the inside of her skull. Cold. Hungry. Empty.
She ran.
She didn't look back. She couldn't. If she looked back and saw it following, saw it gaining on her, she would freeze again, she would become exactly the person she'd been in that hospital hallway, useless and paralyzed and insufficient.
So she ran.
Her feet slammed against grey earth. Her ribs screamed with every breath. The strange metallic air burned in her lungs, and somewhere behind her she could hear it—not footsteps exactly, but a sound like wind through dead leaves, like whispers in a language she almost understood.
The ground sloped upward. Yuna's legs burned as she forced herself up the incline, her shoes slipping on loose stone, her hands scraping raw when she stumbled and caught herself. The dead tree loomed above her, bone-white against the bruised sky.
She reached the top and her legs gave out.
She collapsed against the tree's trunk, gasping, her vision swimming. When she turned to look back the way she'd come, the gully was empty. The creature was gone. Or maybe it had never followed her at all. Maybe it was still there, watching her from a distance she couldn't see, waiting for her to exhaust herself.
It doesn't matter, she thought wildly. Nothing matters. I'm going to die here in this place that doesn't exist, and no one will ever know what happened to me, and I deserve it. I deserve it because I couldn't walk through a stupid door.
She pressed her forehead against the dead bark and laughed. It came out jagged and wrong, more sob than anything else.
Mom. Mom, what the hell did you know about this place? What were you trying to tell me?
The tree didn't answer. The grey world stretched out below her, endless and empty and dying, and Yuna was completely alone.
She must have slept, though she didn't remember deciding to.
One moment she was slumped against the tree, watching the three moons trace their strange paths across the sky. The next moment she was opening her eyes to different light—greyer, flatter, the moons all in different positions—and every muscle in her body had stiffened into knots of pain.
Also, she wasn't alone.
"Don't scream," said a voice. Male. Young. Strained with something that might have been fear or might have been exhaustion. "Please. I know how this looks, but if you scream, they'll hear."
Yuna's throat tightened around the scream that had been building. She swallowed it and forced herself to focus.
A boy was crouched about ten feet away, watching her the way you'd watch an unfamiliar dog. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty, with East Asian features and shaggy black hair that looked like it hadn't been cut in months. His clothes were strange: a long coat that seemed to shift colors slightly when he moved, pants tucked into boots that were caked with the same grey dust that covered everything here.
But what caught Yuna's attention were his hands. He was holding them palm-out, deliberately visible, in the universal gesture of I'm not a threat.
"Who are you?" Her voice came out as a rasp.
"David. David Park." He paused, something flickering across his face. "No relation. Probably. Unless, are you from Earth?"
The question should have been absurd. Instead, it cracked something open in Yuna's chest.
"Yes," she whispered. "How did you"
"The clothes. The phone shape in your pocket. The way you're looking at everything like it's going to eat you." His mouth twitched into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Also, I was you. Three years ago. Fell out of the sky, landed in the Grey Wastes, nearly got hollowed my first night."
"Hollowed?"
"That thing you saw. By the stream." David's jaw tightened. "They used to be people. Human, some of them. Others were from here, before. Now they're..." He trailed off, shook his head. "We should move. This isn't a safe place to talk."
Yuna didn't move. Her body was screaming at her to stay still, stay small, trust nothing, risk nothing. The same impulse that had kept her rooted outside her mother's door.
But she'd already run from one monster today. And this boy was human, or at least he looked human, and he was offering something she desperately needed: information.
"Why should I trust you?"
David laughed, short and sharp. "You shouldn't. You absolutely shouldn't. I'm a stranger in a world you don't understand, offering to lead you somewhere you can't verify is safe." He stood, slowly, keeping his hands visible. "But I'm also the only person within a hundred miles who isn't going to try to hollow you, mark you, or leave you for the Unraveling. So. Your choice."
He started walking.
Yuna stayed by the tree for three more heartbeats, her mother's coat wrapped tight around her, the taste of copper still coating her tongue.
Then she got up and followed him.
David moved fast, his strange coat billowing behind him, his boots finding footing on the treacherous grey earth with an ease that spoke of long practice. Yuna struggled to keep up, her bruised ribs protesting every jarring step.
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere with walls. Roof. People who might help you." He didn't slow down. "Assuming they decide you're worth the resources."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you fell out of the sky three days before the worst part of the cycle starts. It means the Unraveling is accelerating, and nobody has time to hold your hand while you figure out which end of a resonance blade is the sharp one." He glanced back at her, his expression unreadable. "No offense."
"None taken." It was a lie, but it felt like the right thing to say.
They walked in silence for a while. The landscape gradually changed, still grey, still dying, but with more ruins now, structures that had clearly been larger once. Yuna saw what might have been a fountain, its basin cracked and dry. A collapsed archway covered in writing she couldn't read. A statue lying on its side, its face worn smooth to featurelessness.
"What happened here?" she asked.
David's stride faltered for just a moment. "The short version? This world is dying. Has been for a long time. The long version involves a lot of history you won't believe and a lot of politics you won't understand." He picked up his pace again. "The important thing is that there's a countdown. One hundred and twenty days from the next moon alignment. After that, there won't be a Valdris anymore. Just Unraveling, all the way down."
One hundred and twenty days.
The number lodged in Yuna's brain like a splinter. She thought of her mother's research. The counting of seconds in the hospital hallway. The way time had become her enemy the moment she'd stopped being able to move.
"What happens after the countdown?"
"Everything ends. The Unraveling finishes what it started. The Hollow consume whatever's left." David's voice was flat, the voice of someone who had stopped being afraid of abstract apocalypse long ago. "Unless someone stops it. Which is why you're here."
Yuna stopped walking.
"What?"
David stopped too, turning to face her. The strange light caught his face, and she could see now how tired he looked, the shadows under his eyes, the hollows in his cheeks, the way his hands were trembling slightly despite his obvious effort to keep them still.
"The portals don't open randomly," he said. "They call specific people. People who are..." He hesitated, choosing his words. "Insufficient. That's what they call you here. People who were broken in some fundamental way, back on Earth. People who failed when it mattered most."
The word landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.
Insufficient.
"The theory is that whatever broke you, whatever made you insufficient, also made you sensitive. Open. Capable of hearing the resonance that most people can't." David's expression softened slightly. "I don't know if it's true. I don't know if any of it's true. But you're here now, which means the world thinks you might be able to help save it."
"I couldn't even save my mother," Yuna whispered.
The words came out before she could stop them, raw and broken, the truth she'd been carrying for three months like a stone in her chest.
David didn't flinch. Didn't look away. Just nodded, once, as if she'd confirmed something he already suspected.
"Neither could I," he said quietly. "My little brother. I was supposed to be watching him, and I wasn't, and he drowned. I was seventeen."
The silence stretched between them, full of things that didn't need to be said.
"Come on," David said finally, and started walking again. "We should get to the refuge before the second moonset. After that, the Hollow come out in force."
Yuna followed him.
And in her chest, beneath the guilt and the grief and the bone-deep exhaustion, something new flickered to life. Small and fragile and painful, like blood returning to a frozen limb.
Not hope exactly.
But something adjacent to it.