Beginning

Cold.

That came first. Not the cold of the water. The cold of the thing around her neck. The stone burned against her chest; cold could have embers too, and V knew that now. Her hand went to the necklace. Beneath her palm, the stone was slowly calming down, going from ice to merely cool. As if it had finished a job and was catching its breath.

She headed for the surface. Her strokes were automatic; muscle memory did not care if your head was a mess.

The moment her face broke the surface, she released her breath, rubbed her eyes and turned towards the jetty.

There was no jetty.

No music. No laughter. The speaker, the tables, the three kinds of pastry, the aunties… gone.

On the shore, where a cake with sixteen candles had stood a moment ago, knee-high grass bent and rose in the wind. Where the grass ended, the trees began: a dense, dark, interlocking wall.

“Elenie?”

Her voice struck the lake and came back. Thin, wet, alone.

“Ginny! Deren!… Come on! This isn’t funny!”

She had not actually meant to say something that made so little sense, but she had felt obliged to say something. The part that “wasn’t funny” was not her friends playing a joke; it was that, whatever they did, they could not make a jetty disappear and plant bushes and a forest in its place. She had called out so she would not have to hear herself think, and now she swam towards the shore for the same reason.

She climbed out. Her dress, the dark green one that had brought out her eyes in the mirror two days ago, clung to her legs and had gained five kilos. One shoe was missing; she did not even know when it had come off. She looked around for her phone, but her phone was missing with her bag, her bag with the table, the table with the world. Oh, come on. This scene had been in a thousand films. It could not be real.

She walked to the edge of the forest and stopped. Took two steps inside. Could not take the third. The trees were so dense that the light getting through them turned late afternoon into night; ten paces ahead was pitch-black, and there was no evidence that the blackness ended anywhere. V backed away with the instinct of any swimmer who wanted to see the bottom before jumping into a dark pool. Can’t see the bottom here.

She went back to the shore. The lake was the same lake. Its shape, its curve, the outline of the far shore. Only everything around it had been erased.

Given a choice between panic and procedure, her brain chose procedure. How did you get here? You got thrown into the water. Then that’s the way out too.

She went to the water’s edge. Dipped a toe in, pulled it straight back out. The water felt even colder than it had when she climbed out, or her body was beginning to give up. Eyes shut. One quick go. The plaster principle.

She closed her eyes and jumped.

The cold clamped her chest in a vice, but V was ready; she pulled with her arms, waited for the light. Yes, there was light above her, it was working, it had to be… she surfaced, let out her breath, opened her eyes.

The forest looked back at her from exactly where it had been. Again.

She tried again: this time with her back to the lake, letting herself fall backwards. It was like going into ice instead of water. And it was May. It was May, the voice in her head corrected. At least, an hour ago.

She surfaced. Forest.

“Oh, no. Come on!”

Her body vetoed a third attempt. By the time she crawled ashore, her fingers had turned purple and her jaw had settled into a rhythm independent of its owner. If she went into the lake again, she might not come out again; she had spent enough time in water to know that.

Shivering inside the wet dress, she looked at the sun. It was sinking.

All right, she told herself. Priorities. One: don’t freeze. Two: everything else.

The idea of fire came from films, and films, as V learned that evening, lied.

She found dry sticks. Set one against a flat piece of wood and spun it between her palms. Spun it. Spun it. Her palms went red, but the stick did not even get warm! She changed the angle, changed the stick, changed the technique. She thought she remembered a man in a documentary making a little hollow first, so she made a hollow. The hollow did not help either.

She also tried striking two stones together. In films, stones showered sparks; V’s stones settled for a dull clack and hurting her palm. Perhaps you needed a special kind of stone too. Perhaps you needed a special kind of everything, and V did not have a special kind of anything.

Half an hour later, her palms blistered, she looked at the sticks and announced the official finding: “Right. If I die, it’s because documentaries are underfunded.”

There was no fire. Wet fabric draws heat away many times faster than dry fabric. She had heard that in a survival film, not a documentary, and the man in the film had responded by taking off all his clothes.

V looked at the forest. The dark, motionless forest whose bottom she could not see.

“No,” she told it. “We don’t know each other that well.”

A compromise was reached: she took off the dress and immediately turned towards the water, as though the forest might be watching, then twisted and wrung the fabric. A surprising amount of lake poured out. She put the dress back on, damp, cold, but no longer dripping, and sat down in the grass with her knees pulled to her chest. She was somewhere below zero on the comfort scale, but water was no longer dripping off her, and by that evening’s standards, this was victory.

The sun went down behind the trees and the world, wherever this world was, switched off the lights.

In the dark of your bedroom, thoughts grew. But the dark of your bedroom and the dark of miles of forest were not the same kind of dark. Here, sounds grew.

The first sound was the water itself, small waves licking the shore. She got used to that. The second was a bird, probably a bird, something like an owl but not; it called at intervals, as if asking a question, and V flinched every time. The third sound…

The third sound was something heavy walking through the forest, trampling dry branches without a care.

V held her breath. The sound did not come closer; it passed from right to left, somewhere deep inside. But after it had gone, something happened that V found more frightening than the sound itself: the questioning bird fell silent. Everything fell silent. For a few minutes, the forest seemed to hold its breath.

Then the bird started again, and V let hers out.

Thinking was better than being afraid. At least her hands did not shake while she was thinking, well, they did, but from the cold, which did not count. Sitting on the wet grass, V opened the possibilities file and laid the labels on the table, one by one.

Label one: I’m dead. Fit with the evidence: partial. If this was Heaven, standards had slipped. If it was Hell? Could Hell be cold? Possibly, actually; no one had come back with a report. But she felt there ought to be some kind of reception in either place; a committee, a sign, something. An empty place where all you did was wait… V knew what that was called. Limbo. The waiting room. Your number: unknown. The label stuck with alarming ease, and V left it there for now because at least there would be no predators in Limbo. Probably against the rules.

Label two: I’m in a coma. Head meets jetty, hospital room, machines beeping, Ginny crying at her bedside. Not a bad scenario; the only snag was that a person in a coma ought not to have such cold toes. Though V did not know what people in comas felt. The label was peeling at one edge, but it stayed on.

Label three: I’ve gone back in time. Or forwards… Since the lake was the same lake, its shape, its curve, its far shore. Perhaps the place was the same and the time was different. Before the jetty. Before the shopping centre. Before people. V turned this label over in her hand, and the logic department lodged an objection: where are all the dinosaurs, then? Or whatever those things were, flying, flesh-eating things that were always chasing someone screaming in textbook illustrations. If you spent a night in a forest millions of years old, something ought to try to eat you. She remembered the heavy footsteps in the forest and pushed this label to the farthest corner of the table. Don’t think about that. Think about it in the morning. Everything’s less carnivorous in the morning.

Label four: there was no four. Where four might have been was the stone around her neck turning to ice before it touched the water, and V was not looking there.

She was not going to sleep. She had decided: you did not sleep alone, out in the open, beside a forest that made noises. Everyone knew what happened to people who fell asleep in films.

She gave herself jobs to stay awake. Recited her swimming times in chronological order. Then reverse chronological order. Sorted every excuse Elenie had ever made for being late into categories. Tried to remember which shop Ginny had spotted the blue dress in, and when she remembered, something caught in her throat, so she stopped playing that game.

Then she lifted her head and saw the stars.

The sky was more crowded than it ever was in the city. Thousands of stars, real, alive, twinkling. Not half dead like the ones on V’s ceiling; all of them on duty. V looked for a long time. Searched for the Great Bear, could not find it. It was the only one she knew, but she could never find it at first glance anyway. Nothing new there. Perhaps there were clouds. Perhaps the angle was different.

Reporting was the most stubborn of habits.

I turned sixteen two days ago, she began her first report to real stars. The cake was good. Then my friends threw me into the lake and the lake threw me… somewhere else. Now I’m sitting on a shore and the forest is making noises and I couldn’t light a fire and my dress is still damp. Tell Mum I…

The report stopped there. V swallowed and finished in official language: Situation under control. Further data to be collected tomorrow.

The stars said nothing. But at least these might actually be listening.

At some point in the night, with no clock and no time, the feeling of being watched arrived. A familiar feeling: that prickling at the back of your neck when someone behind you in class was staring. V sat up and turned towards the forest. The dark was dark. Nothing moved. Even the questioning bird had fallen silent, again, and V listened to the silence, listened, until finally she told herself, “Paranoia.” Out loud, so the forest could hear. “This is called paranoia, and it’s perfectly normal.”

The forest did not answer. A minute or two later, the bird picked up where it had left off.

She was not going to sleep.

She slept.

Morning came with light on her face and a stiff neck. V opened her eyes, searched for the stars on her ceiling for a second, found none, and yesterday came back over her like a wave.

She was still here. Wherever here was, there she was.

Her dress could pass for dry. Damp inside, crumpled outside. Her stomach growled in memory of yesterday’s lunchtime meatballs. She looked at the lake: innocent in the morning light, sparkling, inviting.

What if I tried once more?

She had already made it to the water’s edge. Then she stopped and did the sums: if she went in, she would get wet. If she got wet, she would have to dry off. She had no fire to dry off by; last night had established that. Another night in a wet dress… V remembered last night’s shivering and backed away from the lake. “You win,” she told it. “For now.”

That left only one direction.

She stood at the edge of the forest and looked into the dark. Even in daylight, ten paces into the trees it was twilight. Hunger, thirst and the fact that “you can’t just sit here and die” were making themselves heard.

But she was not going to get lost. Getting lost was for amateurs.

She picked up her one shoe and examined it: a hard heel, a pointed end. Useful as a tool. Its work as a shoe was done. The system was this: notch a tree every fifteen or twenty paces, each notch within sight of the last. On the way back, follow the notches in reverse. V approved her system, took the shoe in hand and entered the forest.

Barefoot forest was a lesson of its own.

From a distance, the ground looked soft. Moss, dead leaves, earth. A lie. Under the leaves were broken twigs, under the twigs were stones, and all of them were determined to put her city-softened soles through an exam. On the third step, something jabbed her heel; on the seventh, she put her toes into something wet that she was almost certain moved. After ten paces, her walk had changed: short steps, test first, tread second, weight always held back.

Heels to a party, she noted. Never again. Boots for every occasion from now on.

She dug a notch into the first tree at eye level, pressing hard. The bark peeled away, leaving a fresh, pale mark. Visible. Good. Seventeen paces. Second notch. The heel was beginning to come loose, but it worked. Nineteen paces. She chose the third tree, raised the shoe.

Something struck her forehead.

Something small, hard, fast. Pain arrived half a second after surprise; sharp, pinpoint, just above her eyebrow. V jumped back, dropped the shoe, clapped a hand to her forehead. A tiny wetness touched her fingers. On the leaves at her feet lay a grey stone the size of a hazelnut.

She looked up. Branches. Leaves. No one.

She looked around. Trees. No one.

Stones don’t fall out of trees, said the analytical department, clocking in early. Well, they do, but they don’t hit your forehead head-on. That stone was thrown.

“… Hello?” V said to the forest. Her voice was an octave higher than she had hoped.

The forest did not answer. But V felt that every bird within earshot had stopped to stare at her. Under enormous trees like something out of the Amazon, in this silence, her fear shot through the roof.

V waited a while. When nothing moved, her reason proposed an experiment from that narrow corridor between fear and curiosity: variable: notch. Hypothesis: the notch caused the stone to be thrown. V picked up the shoe and, keeping one eye on the branches, raised it towards the tree in slow motion.

The second stone hit the shoe. Not her hand. The shoe. Right on the heel. The shoe fell to the ground again.

A perfect shot. A warning shot. Both at once.

“All right!” V raised both hands above her head. “All right, I get it! No notches! Message received!”

And then she saw her: to her left, two trees away, a girl sat on a thick branch. One leg dangled, relaxed, unhurried. There were leaves in her red hair. Not as though they had fallen there. As though they belonged. Green eyes were fixed on V, and there was nothing to read on her face. A third stone turned lazily between the fingers of her right hand.

She wore a belt. Three pouches on the left. Knives on the right.

Knives. Plural. And she had chosen to throw stones.

“Hello,” said V, her hands still in the air. “I’m lost. I came out of the lake yesterday and… I don’t know where this is.”

Silence. The girl watched.

“Sorry about the notches. They were so I wouldn’t get lost. It’s a wayfinding technique, I don’t know if you know it. Anyway. Forget the technique.” V slowly lowered her hands. “I need to get home. Is there a way out of here? Any way?”

Silence. The stone turned between the fingers.

“All right. Let’s try another angle. What… language do you speak? I mean, can I understand you? Can you understand me right now?” When no answer came, V scraped the bottom of her reserves: “Parlez-vous français?” Her French was the wreckage of two years of optional classes, and the sentence tumbled out like a tourist brochure. Not a muscle moved in the girl’s face. “Hola? Ciao? Danke?” Though that last one was a thank-you.

Silence.

“Fine. Names, then. I’m Vivienne. Vi-vi-enne.” She pointed to herself. “If that’s too much, V. Everyone calls me that anyway.” She turned her palm towards the girl like a question. “You? Have you got a name?”

Silence.

Somewhere high in the tree, a leaf rustled; a breeze less silent than the girl.

Something inside V, something sharpened by twenty-four hours of loneliness, hunger and fear, snapped, and everything came pouring out unfiltered:

“Are you a figment of my imagination? Serious question. Am I talking to a tree right now? Because yesterday I came out of the lake and the world wasn’t there, do you understand, the world wasn’t there, and I spent the whole night listening to a forest and something heavy was walking around in it and I couldn’t even light a fire and now the only person sitting in front of me is twirling a stone instead of answering me, so yes, it’s entirely possible you’re a hallucination produced by my nearly frozen brain. I’d better go and look for food. I haven’t had anything to eat since I got here and I…”

“Tishar.”

V’s sentence hung in the air.

With her left hand, the girl took something gleaming from the rearmost pouch on her belt and tossed it towards V. Vivienne flinched back a step. The thing at her feet looked like a piece of fruit. Without shifting a millimetre on the branch, the girl continued in the same flat voice. Unhurried, item by item, as though reading a list:

“Yes. Yours. Sirel. I’m real. Not a tree.”

A pause. Her chin indicated the fruit at V’s feet.

“Eat.”

Silence… from V this time. Mouth half open, she rewound what she had just heard. The words were there, but without labels; which answer belonged to which question?

Then the analytical department rushed to work, thrilled to have a job it liked for the first time in two days. V raised her fingers and did the matching aloud, as usual, because thoughts were less frightening outside her head:

“Wait. Wait, wait, wait.” Thumb: “‘Where is this?’ ‘Tishar.’ This place is called Tishar.” Index finger: “‘Is there a way out?’ ‘Yes.’ There’s a way out!” Middle finger: “‘What language do you speak?’ ‘Yours.’” She got stuck on this finger for a second, because that answer opened up a bigger question than the one it answered; V shoved it onto the “think about later” shelf and went on. Ring finger: “Your name. ‘Sirel.’ Nice to meet you. And you’re real and you’re not a tree, though you could still be a hallucination saying that, but that line of thought gets me nowhere, so I’ll take it.” She lowered her hand. “Five questions, five answers. In order. You… listened to all of them.”

Nothing changed in Sirel’s face. But now V knew: this face’s “nothing” was not inattention. Quite the opposite.

“Eat,” Sirel said for the second time.

V looked at the fruit. Fist-sized, it looked like the offspring of a forbidden affair between a pear and a dragon fruit; pinkish skin, green at the tips. V had a rule. A fresh rule, made yesterday: never eat anything if you don’t know what’s in it. The rule was sound, sensible, defensible.

Against hunger, the rule lasted eleven seconds.

The first bite was cautious; the second was not. It really did taste somewhere between a pear and something else: juicy, sweet, faintly floral. Halfway through, V stopped for breath and asked with her mouth full:

“What is this?”

“Druvil.”

“Druvil.” V looked at the remaining half. “If it’s poisonous, I don’t want to know. Let me have a nice ending.”

Something moved at the corner of Sirel’s mouth, half a millimetre, a distant relative of a smile, and was promptly brought back into line.

As V finished the fruit, her brain grumbled into life like a machine that had finally found fuel, and she put the pieces together aloud again:

“Let’s assess the situation. You speak my language, but French meant nothing to you, so it’s not that you know languages. It’s that mine somehow… works here. There’s a way out, but you haven’t said where it leads. You live here, the trees are yours, you throw stones at people’s heads with pinpoint accuracy and you carry knives on your belt, so this is a forest that requires knives. And the heavy thing walking around last night wasn’t you, because you don’t make a sound.” She lifted her head. “Conclusion: wherever I am, I’m a long way from home, and my chances of survival depend largely on you. Fair assessment?”

Sirel looked at her for a while. For the first time, there was something readable in her gaze, and V read that too: it was the look of someone thinking, “this girl talks to herself, and I’m going to have to get used to it.”

Then, in a single fluid movement, Sirel drifted down from the branch. Did not jump. Drifted, like a falling leaf; landed without a sound, gave V one last look, turned and began to walk away.

“Wait! Wh… where?” V took a step, and a broken twig underfoot exacted its penalty at once. “Ow! Wait! You said there was a way out. Ow. will you stop!”

Sirel did not stop. Her steps made no sound on the moss, and she was not even walking fast; she was simply walking, and with every hop V took, the gap grew. V limped past three trees, jumped when she stepped on a stone at the fourth, and conceded the race.

“Fine!” she shouted after her, far too loudly for the forest’s silence. “Go! If I had shoes, we’d see about this! You could at least have left a lighter! Matches! Anything!… Thanks for the Druvil!”

A flash of red showed between the trees one last time and vanished. Somewhere far away, the questioning bird called in a mocking tone. V knew birds could not have mocking tones. She took it personally anyway.

The notches brought her back to the lake. The system had worked, and even with her world in pieces, V felt embarrassingly proud that something she had devised had worked. The shore was as she had left it: empty, silent, indifferent.

The afternoon went on inventory. Assets: one lake (broken), one dress (damp), one shoe (now a tool), one name (Sirel), one word (Tishar), one way out (location unknown), one fruit stone (would it grow if she planted it?). Missing: fire, food, a plan, family, the world.

And one uninvited addition to the assets: a small sore throat.

V swallowed, then swallowed again. The pain was there. Still slight, still something she could ignore, but there. She did not know whether it was the fruit, sleeping in a wet dress, or the first letter of resignation from a body she had spent two days shivering through. All she knew was that it was not good. Tonight would be cold again, and she had no duvet to pull over herself and sweat under. The label collection offered her an “it’s just tiredness”; V took the label but did not stick it on. Her hands knew it would not hold.

Towards evening the wind picked up, and V resumed yesterday’s position: in the grass, knees to chest, back against a rock. The pain in her throat had grown with the evening and brought a chill along with it. Not cold from outside. Cold from within, the kind that seeped between the bones. V knew this too. She was coming down with flu.

That night’s star report was short and disjointed: “Today… took inventory. Sirel. There’s a way out. My throat…” She could not finish the sentence. Did not even look for the Great Bear. Did not fight sleep.

She woke to crackling.

Her first thought was the heavy-footed thing. She tried to sit up and could not. Her muscles received the order and did not carry it out. Her head lifted halfway off the rock and the world swayed as though suspended in a hot, heavy liquid.

There was light. Fire. Three paces away, in a neat ring of stones, a small but determined fire. And beyond it, at the edge of the forest, a silhouette. One last orange gleam in red hair.

“Thank…” Her voice did not come out. What came out did not resemble a voice; it was a dry, cracked rustle, and her throat charged her for the word in fire.

The silhouette stopped. Turned. Took a step towards her, V saw this, she was sure she saw it, then darkness flowed in from the edges and took everything.

After that, V’s memory was not a film but a stack of photographs. Jumbled, undated, burnt at the edges.

One photograph: weight. Something lay over her. Thick, soft, faintly animal-smelling. Fur, said the last working corner of her brain. Fur? I didn’t have a fur. It was warm, but V was shivering, and before she could work out how both could be true, the photograph ended.

One photograph: coolness on her forehead. Something wet, smelling of plants… A leaf? A cloth? And two fingers adjusting it. V opened her eyes a crack; a face was there in the firelight, green-eyed, frowning. Not an angry frown. The frown of someone trying to do a job properly.

One photograph: the rim of a wooden cup against her lips, a warm, bitter liquid trickling into her mouth. V grimaced, tried to turn her head.

“Drink.”

The voice allowed no argument. V drank. It was bitter. Burned on the way down, and then… There was no then. The photograph had ended.

One photograph: night. The fire had sunk to embers. From deep in the forest came that sound. Something heavy walking without a care for dry branches. And between the fire and the forest stood a motionless silhouette: Sirel, her back to V, her face to the dark, a knife in her right hand catching and returning the red glow of the embers. V knew she ought to be afraid, but the fever had melted even fear; the only thought left as she slipped back into sleep was an absurd comfort: Someone’s on watch.

One photograph: her mother’s voice. “Breakfast’s ready. Your food will get cold.” The smell of pancakes, the yellow kitchen light, Elenie laughing as she came through the door. V said, “Coming. I’m coming, just a minute…” and when she opened her eyes there was sky through the leaves, strange and grey. She did not investigate whether the wetness on her cheeks was sweat or something else. She put the photograph at the very bottom of the stack, where no one would find it.

One photograph: daylight. Perhaps another day’s daylight. Above her head, something that had not been there before: a sloping roof. A low shelter woven from branches and covered with broad leaves. “Who made…” The question melted without waiting for its answer.

“Eat.” A hand held something mashed and sweet to her lips. V ate. “Sleep.” V slept. The world had shrunk to a place of two words, and V was in no state to object.

Then one morning, the stack ran out and the film came back.

V opened her eyes and, for the first time, did not regret it. The headache had eased; her body was heavy but hers again, responding to orders. Thin lines of light filtered through the gaps in the leaf roof. The thick grey-brown fur covering her to the chest smelled faintly of smoke, its edges carefully tucked in.

She sat up. This time, the world did not sway.

The fire ring was still there, smoking. Beside it, on a flat stone: two Druvil, a wooden cup and, V narrowed her eyes, a pair of… things. Two leather foot-wraps with rough but sturdy stitching and thin leather cords threaded through instead of laces. You could not call them shoes. But you could no longer call it barefoot, either.

Sirel sat on a log a little way from the shelter, whittling a branch with her knife. She had seen V sit up. There was no way she had not, but she did not look up, did not fuss, did not ask how she was. Kept whittling.

V’s voice creaked open like a door that had not been used: “How many days?”

“Three.”

Three days. V tried to take that in.

“For three days you’ve been covering me with fur, making me drink bitter things, putting leaves on my forehead, standing guard over me, and somewhere in between you sat down and sewed me shoes. In my world, people don’t even do that for people they know.”

Something tightened in V’s throat, and it had nothing to do with being ill.

“Sirel.” Her voice was still cracked. “Thank you. I mean, that isn’t enough of a word, but it’s the one I have. Thank you.”

Sirel finished whittling, raised the branch to eye level to check that it was straight, and answered by tipping her chin towards the cup on the stone.

“Drink.”

The cup held that bitter stuff again. This time V drank without grimacing. She had grown used to it; both the bitterness and the one-word sentences that allowed no argument. She ate the Druvil and slipped the leather wraps onto her feet. A little loose, but snug once she tightened the thongs; Sirel must have measured her feet while she slept, and V decided not to dwell on that thought.

She stood. Her knees objected first, then agreed. She took a few steps towards the lake and looked at the water: it glittered as though reminding her of an account left unsettled three days ago. V rejected the account. Later. Staying alive comes first.

When she turned, Sirel was standing. Her small bag over her shoulder, the freshly whittled branch in her hand, which V understood now: it was a walking stick, cut to the right height for her.

Sirel held out the stick and tipped her chin towards the path through the forest.

“Come?”