Forest of Enchantment

The first thing I noticed about the new world wasn't the magic, or the twin moons hanging in the sky like a pair of curious eyes, or even the fact that I was still alive after the bus should've turned me into a smear on the I-5.

It was the smell.

Loam and pine resin and something sweet I couldn't name, like crushed berries left out in the sun. I lay on my back in a clearing, staring up at a canopy so thick the twin moons only came through in coins of silver light. My ribs ached. My left hand was still curled around the strap of my backpack, which was the only thing that had come through with me. No bus. No driver. No other passengers.

Just me, a backpack, and a forest that definitely wasn't Washington State.

I sat up slow, because my head was ringing like a struck bell, and took inventory. Two arms. Two legs. All the fingers. The scar on my right palm from the time I'd grabbed a hot pan at fourteen. Everything accounted for. I stood, and the world tilted, then righted itself, and I noticed the river.

It was huge. Not a creek, not a stream. A proper river, maybe two hundred yards across, moving with the kind of lazy confidence that said it had been there for ten thousand years and would be there for ten thousand more. The far bank was a wall of dark trees. The near bank, where I stood, had a sandy shelf maybe thirty feet wide before the forest took over again.

And on that shelf, sitting on a flat rock with her feet in the water, was a girl.

She was maybe nineteen, with hair the color of dark honey and a dress that looked like it had been sewn from leaves and regret. She had a fishing line in her hands, no rod, just a line, and she was staring at me with an expression that mixed terror and hope in equal measure.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said.

"Join the club."

She didn't laugh. She stood up, and the line went slack, and I saw that her feet were bare and her ankles were scratched from brambles. She was thin in a way that wasn't fashionable, the way people get when they've missed a lot of meals. But her eyes were sharp. Dark green, and they didn't miss anything.

"The rift closed," she said. "I watched it close. Three days ago. Nothing comes through after it closes."

"I don't know what a rift is."

That stopped her. She tilted her head, and the fishing line slipped from her fingers into the water, and she didn't seem to notice.

"You're from the other side," she said. Not a question.

"I was on a bus. Heading to Portland. There was a truck, I think. Then here."

"Portland." She said the word like it was a foreign food she was trying to decide whether to trust. "That's a city? On the other side?"

"Yeah. You've heard of it?"

"No." She stepped off the rock and onto the sand, and I noticed she moved like someone who was used to being quiet. "I'm Sera. You're the first person to come through in eleven years. The last one died."

"Died how?"

"He didn't wake up. The crossing takes something from you. Usually." She looked me up and down, and I felt it, a kind of pressure behind my eyes, like someone pressing a thumb to my forehead. "You don't look like it took anything."

I didn't feel like it either. That was the strange part. I'd been hit by a truck. I should be dead. Instead I felt like I'd just woken up from a long nap, the kind where you don't know what day it is. My ribs ached, but the ache was fading fast, and the ringing in my head was already gone.

"I feel fine," I said.

"That's not possible."

"Okay."

She stared at me. I stared back. The river moved behind her, and somewhere in the trees a bird called out, a low whooping sound I'd never heard before.

"You should come with me," she said finally. "The others will want to meet you. And you can't stay out here. The night things come out after full dark."

"Night things."

"Yes."

She didn't elaborate. She just turned and started walking along the bank, and after a second I followed, because what else was I going to do? My phone had no signal. My wallet had a debit card that wouldn't work here. My entire life had been reduced to a backpack and a girl I'd known for ninety seconds.

We walked for maybe twenty minutes. The forest thinned, and then we came to a clearing that wasn't a clearing so much as a settlement. Six cabins, rough-hewn and low to the ground, arranged in a loose circle around a fire pit. A garden plot off to one side, half-tended. A drying rack with fish on it. And people. Five of them, all women, all turning to look at me like I was a ghost.

Which, I guess, I kind of was.

"Sera," one of them said. She was older, maybe forty, with gray streaking her black hair and a face that had seen hard winters. "What did you bring back?"

"He came through the rift."

"That's not possible."

"I know."

The older woman walked up to me. She was shorter than me by a head, but she looked at me like she was measuring me for a coffin. "Hold out your hands."

I did. She took them, turned them over, pressed her thumbs into my palms. Her hands were warm and rough. She closed her eyes, and I felt that pressure again, the thumb-to-the-forehead feeling, but stronger this time. It pushed into me, probing, and then it hit something and stopped.

Her eyes flew open.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." She dropped my hands like they were hot. "Nothing. You're clean. No taint. No rift-madness."

"Is that good?"

"It's impossible." She stepped back. "Sera, he stays with you tonight. Tomorrow we figure out what he is."

"What I am?"

"You're something," the older woman said. "I just don't know what yet."

She turned and walked to one of the cabins, and the other women followed her, and I was left standing in the middle of the clearing with Sera and the fire and the weight of a world I didn't understand pressing down on me.

Sera touched my elbow. "Come on. You can have the floor. I've got an extra blanket."

"Thanks."

"My cabin's the one on the end. The one with the blue door."

I followed her. The cabin was small, one room, a bed in the corner and a pile of furs on the floor that I assumed was for me. She lit a candle, and the light made her look softer, younger.

"You're not scared," she said.

"I'm terrified."

"You don't act like it."

"I'm good at hiding it."

She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled her knees up to her chest. "The last one who came through, he screamed for three days. Then he stopped. Then he died. You've been here an hour and you're making jokes."

"I'm not making jokes. I'm just... I don't know. I don't know how to react. I should be dead. I was on a bus. I was going to see my sister. And now I'm here, and there's a river, and you, and I don't know what any of this means."

Sera was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "The river's called the Vela. It goes all the way to the sea. No one's ever followed it to the end."

"Why not?"

"Because the things that live in the deep water don't like visitors."

She blew out the candle, and the dark came in, and I lay on the floor with a blanket that smelled like woodsmoke and listened to the river moving outside, and I thought about my sister, who was probably wondering why I hadn't texted her back. I thought about the truck. I thought about the way the older woman had looked at me when she'd touched my hands, like I was a door that had opened when it shouldn't have.

And then I slept, and I dreamed of the river, and in the dream I walked on the water like it was solid ground, and the water didn't mind.