"Sit down before you fall down."
Aisha's voice cut through the fog in Kota's head. He realized he'd been swaying on his feet, staring at the alien sky while blood dripped steadily from his arm onto the glowing grass below. Each drop seemed to sink into the luminescence, disappearing like it had never been.
"I'm fine," he said automatically.
"You're bleeding everywhere and you look like you're about to pass out." Aisha grabbed his good arm and pulled him down to sit on a chunk of carved stone. "Sit. Now."
He sat. The world tilted slightly and he had to close his eyes until it steadied.
When he opened them again, Aisha was already tearing strips from the bottom of her shirt—what was left of it anyway. Her hands were shaking, he noticed. Just slightly, but enough that she had to stop and take a breath before continuing.
"Let me see it," she said, her voice tight.
Kota tried not to look directly at her. The creatures had shredded most of her clothing, leaving her in tatters that barely covered anything. He kept his eyes fixed on his arm, on the ground, on the alien sky—anywhere but at her exposed skin. His face felt hot despite everything they'd been through.
Kota held out his arm, grateful for something to focus on. The gash ran from his elbow nearly to his wrist, deep enough that he could see things he really didn't want to see. The edges were ragged where the creature's claw had torn through skin and muscle. Blood still seeped from it, dark and steady.
Aisha's face went pale. For a moment she just stared at it, and Kota saw something crack in her expression—saw the fourteen-year-old girl beneath the hardened exterior, the one who'd just woken up in an alien world after being kidnapped by monsters.
"It's not that bad," Kota lied.
"Don't." Her voice came out sharp. "Don't do that. Don't pretend it's okay when it's not."
She was right. They were past pretending. Past the comfortable lies they told themselves in the outskirts to make survival feel less desperate.
"Okay," he said quietly. "It's bad. But I'm not dying. Not yet."
"Not ever." Aisha's hands steadied as she spoke, like saying it out loud gave her something to hold onto. "We didn't survive those things just to die here."
She had water from the canteen—the weird-tasting water from the stream near the gateway. She poured it over the wound and Kota hissed through his teeth, his vision going white at the edges. The water stung like acid, but it washed away the blood, let them see the damage clearly.
"I need to wrap it tight," Aisha said. "It's going to hurt."
The gash was deep, the flesh torn and angry-looking, but at least it was clean. No signs of infection yet, though Kota knew that could change quickly in a place like this.
"Everything hurts."
"Yeah." She met his eyes, and he saw his own fear reflected back at him. "Everything hurts."
She worked quickly, wrapping the torn fabric around his arm, pulling it tight enough that Kota had to bite down on his lip to keep from crying out. Her fingers were steady now, moving with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd patched up injuries before. Growing up in the outskirts meant learning first aid young—there weren't always doctors available, and sometimes you couldn't afford them even if there were.
"My mom showed me how to do this," Aisha said quietly as she tied off the makeshift bandage. "After that surge three years ago. Remember? When half the outskirts got torn up and the hospitals were full."
Kota kept his gaze fixed on her hands, not letting it wander. Not now. Not when they were both trying so hard to hold it together.
Kota remembered. He'd been eleven. Aisha's mom had spent two weeks helping patch up neighbors, teaching Aisha as she went. Teaching her because in the outskirts, you never knew when you'd need to save someone's life.
Or your own.
"She'd be proud," Kota said. "You did good."
Aisha sat back, looking at her handiwork. The bandage was already seeping red, but it would hold. For now.
"We need to find water," she said. "Real water. And food. How long has it been since you ate?"
Kota tried to remember. "Two days? I had some of the dried meat from my pack, but I ran out yesterday."
"And you gave me the last of the water."
"You needed it more."
"Kota—"
"You were unconscious for two days, Aisha. You needed it more." He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the way the world swam. Pain shot up his arm, sharp and immediate, making him gasp. "We can't go back through the gateway. That thing might be waiting. Or worse—what if it can follow us through? We don't know the rules here."
Aisha stood too, steadier than him despite everything. She crossed her arms over her chest, trying to cover herself. "So we go forward."
"The city." Kota looked toward the ruins in the distance, keeping his eyes there. "There might be water there. Shelter. Something."
"Or more things that want to kill us."
"Yeah. Probably that too." Kota managed a weak smile, still not quite looking at her. "But at least it's a plan."
Aisha looked at him for a long moment, and he saw her making the same calculation he was. They were fourteen years old, stranded in an alien world, injured and running out of supplies. By all rights they should be panicking. Crying. Giving up.
But they'd grown up in the outskirts of Okala, where giving up meant dying. They'd survived poverty and hunger and the constant threat of creatures from other worlds. They'd watched people awaken and go mad, watched surges tear through their neighborhood, watched the strong prey on the weak.
They'd survived worse than this.
They had to believe that.
"Okay," Aisha said finally. "Let's go find some alien water and hope it doesn't kill us."
"That's the spirit."
They started walking.
The landscape was like nothing Kota had ever seen. The grass beneath their feet glowed with a soft bioluminescence, pulsing gently with each step they took. It felt wrong at first—like walking on something alive—but after a while he got used to the rhythm of it. Step, pulse, step, pulse.
The floating lights drifted around them, and up close Kota could see they weren't just lights. They were insects. Or something like insects. Translucent bodies no bigger than his thumb, with wings that seemed to be made of pure light. They moved in lazy spirals, leaving trails of luminescence in the air.
Each step sent a fresh wave of pain through his arm. The wound throbbed in time with his heartbeat, a constant reminder of how close they'd come to dying. How close they still were.
One landed on Aisha's shoulder. She froze.
"Don't move," Kota said, his voice strained.
"Wasn't planning on it."
They both watched as the creature sat there, its wings slowly opening and closing. Each movement sent ripples of color across its body—blue to green to purple to gold. It was beautiful. Alien and strange and beautiful.
Then it lifted off, rejoining the swarm, and Aisha let out a breath she'd been holding.
"I think it was just curious," she said.
"Yeah. Let's hope everything here is that friendly."
They walked on. The sparse trees that dotted the landscape were unlike any trees Kota had seen. Their trunks were smooth and pale, almost white, and their leaves—if they could be called leaves—glowed with multiple colors. Some were deep blue, others bright green, still others a purple so dark it was almost black. The colors shifted as they watched, pulsing in patterns that might have been random or might have been some kind of communication.
"It's like the whole world is alive," Aisha whispered.
She was right. Everything here felt aware somehow. Watching. Waiting.
Kota barely registered it. The pain in his arm was getting worse, a deep, burning ache that made it hard to focus on anything else. He kept walking because stopping meant giving up, but each step was harder than the last.
As they passed a cluster of flowers growing from a crack in a fallen stone pillar, Aisha stopped.
"Kota. Look at this."
He looked, squinting through the pain. The flowers—tall stalks with bulbous heads that glowed a soft pink—were turning. Following them.
"They're watching us," Aisha said, her voice uneasy.
Kota took a step. Through the haze of pain, he saw the flowers track the movement. "Everything's watching us," he muttered, cradling his injured arm. "This whole world feels... aware."
"Should we be worried?"
"I don't know. Nothing's attacked us yet."
"Yet."
They kept walking. Aisha kept glancing at the flowers, at the trees, at everything around them with cautious curiosity. Kota just focused on putting one foot in front of the other, on not passing out from the pain.
More flowers appeared as they traveled, growing in clusters around the ruins. Aisha pointed them out—how they all turned to watch as they passed. Some were small, barely reaching their ankles. Others were massive, their stalks as thick as Kota's leg, their bulbous heads the size of his torso.
Kota saw them peripherally, registered them as a threat to be aware of, but the pain made it hard to care about much else.
The trees became more frequent as they got closer to the ruins. Their glowing leaves created patches of colored light on the ground—blue here, green there, purple shadows that seemed deeper than they should be. Walking through them felt like moving through stained glass, the light painting their skin in alien hues.
Aisha reached out to touch one of the trees. The moment her fingers made contact, the leaves nearest to her hand flared bright, the color rippling outward through the entire tree like a wave. Other nearby trees responded, their leaves pulsing in sequence, and for a moment the whole grove lit up in a cascade of color.
Then it faded, returning to the gentle pulse they'd seen before.
"Did I do that?" Aisha asked, pulling her hand back.
"I think so," Kota said through gritted teeth.
"Should I not touch things?"
"Probably not." He paused, leaning against a tree trunk for support. The world swam. "But I don't think it was hostile. More like... acknowledgment."
"Are you okay?"
"Fine. Just need a second."
He wasn't fine. His arm felt like it was on fire, and he was pretty sure he'd lost more blood than was safe. But they couldn't stop. Not yet.
The floating insects grew more numerous as they walked. Hundreds of them now, maybe thousands, drifting through the air in complex patterns. Sometimes they'd cluster together, forming shapes that almost looked intentional—spirals and spheres and geometric patterns that held for a few seconds before dissolving back into chaos.
Several of them landed on Kota—on his injured arm, his shoulder, his chest. Their wings pulsed with a soft golden light. He was too exhausted to brush them away, too focused on the pain to care.
"Kota," Aisha said quietly. "They're landing on you."
"I know."
"Should we—"
"Just let them. I don't have the energy to fight off bugs."
The insects stayed for maybe a minute, their combined light bright enough that Kota had to squint. Then, as if responding to some unheard signal, they all lifted off at once, rejoining the swarm.
The pain was still there, constant and grinding, but Kota kept moving. One foot in front of the other. That was all he could manage.
The ruins were closer now. Close enough that Kota could make out details through the haze of pain. The architecture was impossible—angles that didn't quite make sense, curves that seemed to fold in on themselves. The stone was covered in those symbols he'd seen before, thousands of them, carved into every surface. Some glowed faintly. Others seemed to absorb light, creating patches of darkness that were somehow darker than shadow.
Massive archways stood broken and tilted, leading to nothing. Towers lay on their sides, cracked open to reveal hollow interiors. Domes had collapsed inward, their pieces scattered across the glowing grass like the bones of some great beast.
But there was beauty in the destruction. Vines with luminescent flowers grew through the cracks. The floating insects nested in the hollow spaces, their light turning the ruins into lanterns. And everywhere, that sense of age—of something ancient and powerful that had once stood here and was now gone.
"What do you think happened to them?" Aisha asked. "The people who built this?"
"I don't know. War? Disease? Maybe they just... left."
"Or something killed them."
"Yeah. Or that."
They reached the outskirts of the ruined city as the larger sun finally dipped below the horizon. The sky shifted from orange and red to deep purple, and the smaller sun—still visible but sinking fast—cast everything in an eerie blue-violet twilight. Shadows grew longer, deeper, and the ruins ahead looked less like ancient architecture and more like the bones of something dead.
It was getting dark. Soon it would be night in this alien world, and they had no idea what came out when the suns set.
The ruins loomed above them now, massive and broken and beautiful in the fading light. Kota could see doorways leading into darkness, windows that looked out on nothing, staircases that climbed to nowhere.
Somewhere in there, they might find water. Shelter. Maybe even answers.
Or they might find whatever killed the civilization that built this place.
Kota glanced at Aisha, then quickly looked away. In the strange twilight, with her torn clothing and the alien glow painting her skin in shades of blue and purple, she looked like something from another world. Which, he supposed, she was now. They both were.
"Ready?" Aisha asked, hugging herself against the growing chill.
Kota looked at his bandaged arm, at the ruins ahead, at the darkening alien sky above. He thought about Marcus, who might be dead. About Yuki, who must be terrified. About home, which felt impossibly far away.
Then he looked at Aisha—his best friend, his sister in everything but blood—and saw the same determination in her eyes that he felt in his chest, even through the pain.
They'd survived this long. They'd survive longer.
They had to.
"Ready," he said, keeping his eyes on her face.
Together, they walked into the ruins of the dead city as the second sun touched the horizon and true darkness began to fall.