Cameron
Above the tree line, Cam could see the world for miles. If she let her eyes relax a bit, it all looked just like the forest she’d entered. But she was trained to notice the detail—every ridge and valley, every seismic altering of the landscape.
It was wrong.
First was the extra mountain—the stepsister of the triplet peaks. That was the obvious difference. But the valley was deeper, the carpet of trees thicker. She saw nothing beyond other than more wilderness—no haze from the city or hints of civilization.
The melted glacier still rested in the cirque beneath the summit. Against the murky green light that patinated the very air, the tarn no longer looked like blue Gatorade—something she’d written on a geology report when she was in seventh grade. Now it was dull and dark, like a pond in some backwater dale.
Cam hardly remembered the reckless walk up here. Hell, she’d summited without a weapon, only a half-full Nalgene. She didn’t even know why she’d made the climb other than to see the whole of this world beneath her, like she’d be able to pinpoint its exit. Either that, or find where in this hinterland the radio transmission was coming from.
She’d never met Janet Warren. Avery had invited Cam to one of Janet’s shows about a month after they’d first met, since Brittani thought folk music was lame and Avery had no one else to go with. But Cam had been too afraid to be alone with her. At the time she didn’t know Avery was a hiker, and didn’t know what they’d talk about. Awkward silence was the worst form of slow torture. She needed that on a mug, or something. Maybe she’d get it on a mug if she ever escaped this place, though that was looking less likely by the second.
Cam set the water bottle at the lip of the shore and followed the still surface right to the wall of rock and oxidized copper. The water there was as dark as night, but as she stared at it, the tension in her chest uncoiled.
The water looked warm. Everything seemed sort of hazy out there, muddled in a steam that rose off the surface. Was that why the glacier had melted? New geothermal activity? It didn’t seem plausible, but it would explain everything.
Cam stepped past the shoreline. Cold bled through the leather of her boot.
The heat wasn’t here, but out there. If she could just swim out, the heart of the tarn would wrap around her like a blanket and infuse her with warmth. She would relax and clear her head. She’d be able to think straight for the first time in days.
Cam shivered when the surface lapped the hem of her t-shirt. She pushed off the rocky bottom of the lake and dove forward, her toes numb in her boots. The deepest part of the tarn was right in front of her, just a few more breaststrokes, the promise of heat still undelivered. It wasn’t cold, either. The water didn’t even resist her, and she sliced right through it like a blade, weightless. Or at least, she thought so.
She only realized she was sinking when darkness swallowed the sun.
Water hit the back of her throat. She choked and panicked, her cry drowning in an inexplicable current that pulled her under. The more she thrashed against it, the quicker she sank, until she wasn’t sinking at all, but falling right through the tarn into the onyx belly of the mountain.
The rest of her breath left her in a sputter. Pressure as dense as bricks slammed into the sides of her skull. She thought of Grandma June, and then every capillary in her body burst at once.
Her heart stuttered. Her lungs collapsed. Jackknife pain lanced her eyes and drained them of their vitreous. Blood poured from her mouth, her scream silent beneath the shrieking in her ears.
There was a pop, and then nothing.
She couldn’t breathe, but didn’t need to. She could see beyond the deflated sacks in her eye sockets—a pinpoint of light above, another below. Stars, maybe. Or tiny little worlds floating in a darkly vast universe.
She would not survive this, nor would she make it to either of these worlds before she died. She would die here, in this emptiness, alone and unready. Maybe now or maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a year or years or decades, she’d suffer sightless and voiceless. She could not quantify this expanse of time without the ability to track the rise and fall of her corporeal breath, but she would have to fill it with something. Life wouldn’t flash before her eyes; nothing flashed here. She would have to dredge life up with her remaining electrical impulses—sounds, smells, memories—jigsawing together some meaning, some point to it all, because this nonworld was making more sense than the place she was from.
Love and ambition and hope eluded her. Pleasure eluded her. She’d once been born into a world beneath the spell of emotion, but there was none of that here. No meaning to dredge up. No point to anything.
She rallied the last of her firing neurons to conjure the most meaningful moment of her existence. But she found nothing.
The back of her head slammed into something hard, the pain as bright as the fucking sun.
Cam pushed away from the rock and floated upward until she broke through the surface.