Emmett
Emmett opened his eyes to darkness and Siena’s screams.
He rolled to his stomach and crawled, lashing out with his hands until he found her. He grabbed her shirt and yanked her toward him, his hands roaming her body as she hyperventilated. Checking her ribs and her limbs, he ignored the intimacy of it all because that no longer mattered. All that mattered was that she was okay. Scared, but okay.
When he was done, she threw her arms around his neck and held on to him, her chest rising and falling against his like she’d just run a marathon. He breathed heavily, too. A dull ache throbbed in his head. He must have hit it when...
What the hell happened?
They’d descended into hell after the mountain crumbled out beneath the cabin. After that, he couldn’t remember.
Emmett’s eyes adjusted to the light, the cabin around them a muddled ensemble of silhouettes against the dull, burnt glow coming from outside. There were no signs of structural collapse. Not even a toppled chair. The air wasn’t full of dust, but void of anything at all, even smell.
And the silence... even Siena’s gasps as she caught her breath were muted.
“Are you okay?” He could hardly hear his own voice. Something about the fall had dampened his hearing.
Siena sniffed. “I don’t know.” She pulled away from him and wiped her eyes. “We must have eaten something by accident. Mushrooms in our food supply. This is a bad trip. Tell me this is a bad trip.”
Emmett felt distressingly sober, which meant whatever had happened to them was real. God, he wished he were on drugs right now and had an excuse to wait this out. But he had to face this, now. Whatever this was.
Isaac’s silhouette lay slumped against a wall, unmoving. When Siena let go of Emmett, he pushed himself to his feet, more shaky than sore. He stumbled toward Isaac and knelt again.
Isaac’s eyes were open and unfocused, his chest rising and falling. His expression was—well, he had no expression. Not a muscle in his face was tense or moving, and his skin was covered in a sheen of sweat.
“Hey,” Emmett said.
Isaac did nothing.
“Hey!” Emmett grabbed Isaac’s shoulders and shook him.
Isaac’s eyes flicked to Emmett, and then Siena. His cracked lips moved around the words “I failed,” and something snapped inside Emmett. He grabbed the collar of Isaac’s t-shirt and yanked him forward before slamming him against the wall, and Isaac whimpered, jerking to attention.
“What the hell is going on?” Emmett seethed. “What the hell did you do?” He slammed Isaac against the wall one last time, letting his anger get the best of him. But it was okay, because at any moment, Siena would rush over and pull Emmett off Isaac. That was what she did.
Except she didn’t come. The front door moaned in despair as it opened, and Emmett hopped up and turned right as Siena stepped out onto the porch.
“Sen, stop!” Emmett scoured the floor of the main room for the rifle, but it was still too dark to see clearly. He couldn’t let her run off... not again. Not after...
Emmett stopped in the doorway. Siena wilted against one of the porch’s posts, and Emmett’s pulse thrummed in his throat as he tried making sense of the landscape before them.
The burnt, hazy light emanated from nowhere in particular, but about thirty feet away, just beyond the cusp of a handful of trees, the light ended and there was nothing. The tops of the evergreens disappeared into a dome of nothing. Not darkness, but nothing. Like they were inside the only snow globe of matter left in the universe.
Emmett’s head swam, his neurons firing like machine guns without targets, uncomprehending of how the world simply ended thirty feet in front of him.
“Sen,” he whispered in warning, too paralyzed by fear to stop her as she pushed herself from the post and stepped forward. His voice was quiet and dull, the surrounding space soaking up the noise. The air had the acoustics of an anechoic chamber.
He thought of COtwo. Belmont’s unwillingness to send rescue. How Emmett had only exacerbated the situation by keeping the call from Siena and Cam. He’d fought to stay here because of what? His boss?
They could have left this place yesterday, and maybe they would have if he hadn’t tried sowing doubt in Siena’s mind. This—whatever it was—was his fault.
Siena crept across the clearing and reached toward one of the pine trees at the edge of the amber glow. She pressed her hand against the trunk, running her fingers down the bark, and then extended her other hand toward the nothingness. It wavered there, her fingers splayed and trembling, and she whimpered like an injured animal.
Emmett’s hackles rose with a sudden compulsion to protect Siena, and he hurried toward her. He halted at her side, lifting his hand toward the nothingness. Weakness washed over his arm before it fell numb, like his muscles had atrophied. Grabbing his wrist with his other hand for a brace, he unsuccessfully tried ramming himself through with brute force.
Emmett pulled his arm back and turned his palm inward to study it, strength returning to his limb. He curled his fingers into a fist and punched outward, his knuckles connecting with nothing, bent arm refusing to move any further. His heart beat so violently against his rib cage that it hurt.
He was dreaming. Either that, or he was having a stroke.
Siena said something he could hardly hear over the cotton sensation in his ears. Trees... something about the trees. All were equidistant from each other and the cabin. The backs of their trunks melded with the darkness, as though the two were soldered together.
Emmett fought a wave of dizziness and spun back toward the cabin, resting his weight against the nearby tree to keep from falling. Sweat dripped down his neck as he counted the remaining pines that circled the entire cabin, perfectly spaced and confined by the dying ember light. There were less than a dozen.
This wasn’t the wilderness. It was a wilderness diorama.
Siena scrambled around the pine perimeter, yelling something unintelligible and ramming her shoulder against the nothingness. It didn’t matter which part of the circle’s edge she forced herself against. It was all the same: impenetrable.
They were trapped.
Emmett rubbed at his eyes, squeezing them shut and opening them again. He roughly pinched the skin of his arms. “Wake up,” he said. He could hardly hear his own voice. “Wake up.”
Siena stumbled on her second loop around the cabin. She slumped over as her knees hit the ground, and the scream she released reflected the nuclear terror in Emmett’s own chest. Before he realized he’d even moved, he was already with her, holding her as she collapsed into his shoulder.
“WE CAN’T GET OUT,” she screamed. “Emmett... Emmett, we can’t... Emm...”
He couldn’t respond, not even as her words dissolved into nonsense and the sobbing took over. He couldn’t respond because he was also sobbing. He’d never cried like this before, and if he spoke at all, then he would hear what his own sobbing sounded like. He wasn’t ready to face that noise. Facing it meant he also had to face the reason why. And he didn’t know. He didn’t know what had happened to them. He didn’t understand why they were trapped here.
Only that they were.