Kota woke to sunlight streaming through the cracked window and the smell of something burning.
His birthday. Fourteen years old. The beginning of the window.
He lay still for a moment, staring at the water-stained ceiling, waiting for something to feel different. But his body felt the same—tired, sore from yesterday's scavenging run, hungry. No surge of power. No sudden clarity. Just another morning in the outskirts of Okala, in a room barely big enough for the mattress on the floor.
From downstairs came the sound of Yuki's voice, singing off-key, and the clatter of pans. Kota smiled despite himself. She was making breakfast. Which meant something was definitely burning.
He pulled on his worn jeans and a faded gray shirt, both patched multiple times by Yuki's careful hands. The shirt had belonged to Marcus once, back when he'd been younger and thinner. Now it hung loose on Kota's frame, but it was clean and whole, and that was more than most people in the outskirts could say.
Downstairs, the kitchen was filled with smoke.
"Happy birthday!" Yuki beamed at him from behind a pan of what might have once been eggs. They were now a concerning shade of brown-black, welded to the metal like Marcus's projects. "I made your favorite!"
"My favorite is... charcoal?" Kota asked, coughing.
"Scrambled eggs," Yuki said firmly. "With cheese. The cheese is the black part."
Marcus appeared in the doorway, already dressed for work, his welding goggles pushed up on his forehead. He took one look at the pan and sighed. "Yuki. Love of my life. Mother of my child. Please step away from the stove."
"I'm making birthday breakfast!"
"You're making a fire hazard." Marcus gently took the spatula from her hands and kissed her forehead. "Go wake Aisha. I'll handle this."
Yuki pouted but relented, heading for the stairs. "Aisha! Your brother's awake! Get down here!"
Kota felt the familiar warmth in his chest at the word. Brother. Not by blood, but by choice. By six years of shared meals and shared struggles and shared hope.
Marcus scraped the ruined eggs into the trash and started fresh. "Fourteen," he said quietly. "Big day."
"Doesn't feel big."
"It will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But it will." Marcus cracked eggs into the pan with practiced efficiency. "You scared?"
Kota thought about lying. But this was Marcus. "Yeah."
"Good. Fear keeps you careful. Just don't let it keep you frozen." He glanced over his shoulder. "Whatever comes, you've got us. Remember that."
Yuki's voice echoed down the stairs. "She's not up here!"
Marcus frowned. "What?"
"Aisha's bed is empty. Made up, even. You know she never makes her bed."
Kota's stomach tightened. He moved to the bottom of the stairs. "Maybe she went out early?"
"Without telling anyone?" Yuki descended, worry creasing her face. "On your birthday?"
Marcus turned off the stove. "Did she say anything to you yesterday? About going somewhere?"
Kota shook his head. But even as he did, something nagged at him. The way Aisha had smiled at dinner last night. The way she'd hugged him before bed, longer than usual. "Happy early birthday," she'd whispered. "Tomorrow's going to be special. I promise."
"She was planning something," Kota said slowly. "For my birthday. She said it would be special."
Marcus and Yuki exchanged a look.
"She probably just went to the market early," Yuki said, but her voice was uncertain. "To get something nice. You know how she is."
"The market doesn't open until eight," Marcus said. He checked the old clock on the wall. "It's barely seven now."
They waited.
Eight o'clock came and went. No Aisha.
Nine o'clock. Marcus left to check with neighbors, asking if anyone had seen her. No one had.
Ten o'clock. Yuki was pacing, wringing her hands. Kota sat at the kitchen table, his untouched breakfast cold in front of him, his mind racing through possibilities. Each one worse than the last.
By eleven, Marcus returned, his face grim. "Old Chen saw her. Around dawn. Said she was heading toward the eastern edge. Toward the wasteland."
"The wasteland?" Yuki's voice cracked. "Why would she—"
"There's nothing out there but ruins and creatures," Marcus said. "Unless—" He stopped, looking at Kota. "What did she say, exactly? About making your birthday special?"
Kota tried to remember. "Just that she had something planned. That it would be special. She seemed... excited. Happy."
Marcus closed his eyes. "She went looking for something. A gift. Something she thought you'd want."
The realization hit Kota like a fist to the gut. Six hours. Aisha had been gone for six hours, alone, in the wasteland where things with too many teeth and not enough mercy hunted in the ruins of the old world.
"I'm going after her," Kota said, standing.
"Absolutely not," Yuki said immediately. "Marcus will go. You stay here."
"I'm going," Marcus agreed, already moving toward the door. "Kota, you stay with your mother—"
"She's my sister." Kota's voice was hard. "And she went out there for me. I'm going."
"You're fourteen years old—"
"I've been scavenging in dangerous places since I was eight. I know how to move quiet. How to hide. How to run." Kota met Marcus's eyes. "And I know Aisha. I know how she thinks. Where she'd go."
Marcus stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. "We go together. We stay together. And if I say run, you run. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Marcus—" Yuki started.
"I can't leave him here, Yuki. Not when Aisha's out there because of him. He'd just follow anyway." Marcus grabbed his pack from beside the door, checking the contents. A knife. A length of rope. A battered flashlight. "We'll be back before dark. Both of them."
Yuki pulled Kota into a fierce hug. "You be careful. You be smart. You come home."
"I will," Kota promised.
But as he followed Marcus out the door and into the harsh midday sun, he wondered if it was a promise he could keep.
The outskirts of Okala were dangerous, but they were familiar danger. Kota knew which alleys to avoid, which buildings were stable enough to enter, which shadows might hide something with claws. He'd spent six years learning the geography of survival.
But the wasteland was different.
They moved east, past the last of the inhabited buildings, past the final checkpoint where bored guards waved them through with barely a glance. Past the point where the walls ended and the wild world began.
The change was gradual at first. Buildings became more ruined, more overgrown. Vines with thorns as long as Kota's fingers crawled up walls and through broken windows. The pavement cracked and buckled, weeds forcing their way through like grasping fingers.
Then the ruins gave way to open ground.
The wasteland stretched before them, a scarred landscape of dead earth and twisted vegetation. In the distance, the dark line of the forest loomed like a wall of shadows. Between here and there: nothing but danger.
"Stay close," Marcus said quietly. "Watch for tracks. Disturbed ground. Anything that looks wrong."
They walked in silence, Marcus slightly ahead, his eyes constantly scanning. Kota tried to do the same, but his mind kept conjuring images of Aisha. Aisha running from something with too many legs. Aisha hurt, bleeding, calling for help that didn't come.
He forced the thoughts away. Focus. She was alive. She had to be alive.
The sun beat down mercilessly. There was no shade out here, no cover. Just the cracked earth and the skeletal remains of what might have once been trees, now bleached white and twisted into shapes that looked almost deliberate. Almost intentional.
"There," Marcus said, pointing.
Kota saw it: a disturbance in the dust. Footprints. Small. Recent.
"That's her," Kota said immediately. He recognized the tread pattern—Aisha's boots, the ones Yuki had traded for last winter.
They followed the tracks east. Always east. Toward the forest.
The landscape grew stranger as they walked. The ground became softer, almost spongy, and the air took on a thick, humid quality that made breathing difficult. Strange plants grew in clusters—things with bulbous purple flowers that pulsed like hearts, vines that writhed slowly even though there was no wind.
"Gateway influence," Marcus muttered. "There must be one nearby. Leaking."
Kota had heard about gateway leakage. When the portals between worlds weren't properly sealed, their influence bled into the surrounding area. Changed things. Made them wrong.
They passed the skeleton of something massive, half-buried in the earth. Ribs like cathedral arches, a skull the size of a car with eye sockets that seemed to watch them as they passed. Kota couldn't tell if it had been human once, or something else entirely.
"Don't look at it too long," Marcus advised. "Some things out here, looking is enough."
The tracks continued, but they were joined now by other marks. Drag marks. Claw marks. Something had been here. Something big.
Kota's heart hammered. "Marcus—"
"I see it." Marcus's hand went to the knife at his belt. "Stay alert."
They moved faster now, following the trail as it wound between patches of that wrong vegetation, past pools of water that reflected the sky in colors that didn't exist. The forest grew closer with each step, its darkness seeming to reach out toward them.
And then they found the blood.
Not much. Just a few drops on a rock, dark and fresh. Kota's breath caught.
"Could be from anything," Marcus said, but his voice was tight. "Could be an animal she startled. Could be—"
"It's hers." Kota didn't know how he knew, but he did. The same way he'd known when his parents died, even before the soldiers came to tell him. Some truths you felt in your bones.
They ran.
The forest loomed ahead, a wall of twisted trees with bark like scales and leaves that whispered in a language Kota didn't understand. The boundary was sharp—wasteland on one side, forest on the other, as if someone had drawn a line and said: here, the rules change.
Aisha's tracks led straight to it.
Marcus slowed as they approached, his breathing heavy. "Kota. The forest is... it's different. Worse. Things live in there that don't live anywhere else. Things that came through the gateways and decided to stay."
"She's in there."
"I know. But we need to be smart. We need to—"
Kota saw it.
A scrap of fabric, caught on a low branch at the forest's edge. Blue and white checkered pattern. The skirt Aisha had been wearing yesterday, the one Yuki had made from an old tablecloth.
It was torn. Ragged. Like something had grabbed it and pulled.
Kota picked it up with shaking hands. The fabric was still warm.
"She's close," he whispered. "She's close and she's in trouble and we have to—"
A sound cut him off. From deep within the forest, echoing between the trees: a scream.
Aisha's scream.
Then silence.
Kota looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at the forest. At the darkness between the trees. At the place where the world ended and something else began.
"Together," Marcus said finally. "We go together. We find her. We bring her home."
Kota clutched the torn fabric in his fist and stepped forward, crossing the threshold into the forest's shadow.
The trees closed around them like teeth.