The building shuddered as something massive slammed against the outer wall. Dust and small fragments of ceiling tile rained down on us. The lights flickered, threatening to plunge us into darkness.

  A wrench flew through the air, smashing against the wall. It too crawled upward, joined by dozens of other metal objects all scrambling toward some unseen point like insects to a flame.

  Nessy stuffed one of the small sandwiches from the tree into my mouth. "Eat!"

  "Wha—why?!" I sputtered, but instinctively chewed the morsel, hunger overriding my confusion. The sandwich tasted oddly sweet, like bread infused with honey and something else… filling like eggs and salmon?

  Warmth blossomed in my chest, not the warmth of a space heater, but the warmth of the ‘vibes’ when I stared into Nessy’s eyes beneath the drawn violet constellation of the Mini-Mart’s manager.

  Silver text flashed inside my eyes:

  [Reconstitution: 7%]

  The numbers flickered down, shifting as the energy diverted to my most pressing injury:

  [Reconstitution: 0% | Hp: 74%]

  The pain in my stomach subsided as the metal shard worked its way out of my flesh, dropping to the floor with a soft clink. I stared at the wound in my sliced shirt, watching it knitting together.

  The building shook violently, a deep, structural groan emanating from its foundations. The lights winked out, plunging us into darkness broken only by the violet flashes of the Celestorm outside. A massive crack spiderwebbed across the ceiling, raining dust, ceiling panels and debris onto our heads. Windows cracked and shattered, a chorus of breaking glass accompanying the magnetic creature's rage as it moved around the smaller shop.

  "This way," Calvin barked, gesturing for us to follow. "Quickly!"

  We scrambled after him, dodging falling shelves and flying metal objects that flew and smashed into whichever wall the magnetic beast moved at.

  Calvin led us to his office, the space now in disarray—sticky notes peeling from the walls, his carefully arranged artifacts tumbling from their places. He threw open a closet door, revealing a concrete wall upon which a simple door had been drawn in pink chalk.

  I stared at the crude drawing, not sure what was happening and how this would help us get away. The situation seems hopeless.

  A circle with a symbol shaped like a snowflake was drawn in the same pink chalk on the floor.

  "Stand in the circle and think of where you want to go!" Calvin urged, his expression wild beneath his tinfoil hat. "The door will take you there... or about there... Give or take a few meters… So picture an open space where landing won't hurt too bad. Hurry now!"

  "Home!" Nessy yelped beside me, her voice cracking with fear and hope. "Think of home! Of Ferguson! Ferguson quarry!!!"

  A distant memory surfaced.

  A beach of glass stones, cold, sky-blue clear water, my last summer there, three years ago when my grandfather died and left me his old, broken RV permanently parked in his yard filled with a mountain of wood palettes and random junk.

  Me standing at the edge of the quarry next to the blocky limestone park ranger building looking at the view of the picturesque Ferguson valley below. A dark purple, black and emerald-colored starling singing at me from the trees.

  Calvin somehow reached into the wall and grabbed the drawn handle and pulled. Reality twisted and wobbled like heat rising from summer pavement.

  More cracks rushed across the office ceiling behind us, sticky note eyes raining down like autumn leaves. The deep, unnerving howl of the magnet-lynx reverberated through the air, a physical force that made my bones ache.

  People had iron inside them, I recalled. Not enough to be pulled into the beast's chest cavity, but enough to feel the abomination’s roar.

  The chalk door swung open, revealing nothing behind it. Pure, impossible nothing—or perhaps everything, collapsed into a single point, a void that was somehow neither black nor white nor any color at all.

  "The fuck is that?" I cried, instinctively recoiling.

  "Nullspace," Calvin replied. “The nowhere-everywhere door! Your way home!”

  "And you?" Nessy asked, her ears flat, the orange bucket containing our fragile tree clutched protectively against her chest.

  "That magnet cat hunts you, lovely dog Lady, it is not after me," Calvin shook his head. "The beast will stop assaulting my domain once you are gone."

  The building gave another violent lurch. Part of the ceiling collapsed in the main store, the crash followed by an irate metallic roar.

  Nessy's free hand found mine, claws pressing lightly into my skin.

  "Thank you," she said to Calvin. “For… everything. For a safe night and for being our Sensei.”

  He nodded, a strange smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Plant your tree somewhere safe. Watch it grow. Love it and water it and feast on its fruit and it will help you bloom and prosper!”

  The office door splintered and cracked behind him, struck by a metal shelf.

  "GO!" Calvin roared. “Now! Before my ward is breached!”

  We didn't hesitate. Hand in hand, we leaped through the doorway curtain made from rippling un-rainbows, leaving Calvin and his domain behind.

  The sensation of passing through the doorway was like being simultaneously crushed and stretched, compressed and expanded. My consciousness fractured, each piece experiencing a different reality before being violently snapped back together.

  I saw flickers of places—a hollow city of glass spires; a wasteland where massive, dead birds picked through the wreckage of civilization; a suburban street where identical houses stretched to infinity, each one containing the exact same family performing the exact same actions in perfect, nightmarish synchronization.

  Then darkness. Complete and enveloping.

  I was still clutching Nessy's hand, her presence the only real thing in the void. I could feel her pulse against my palm, rapid but strong.

  We fell forever. We didn't move at all. Both truths existed simultaneously in the impossible space between realities.

  Then light—blinding, painful after the darkness. The sensation of falling became real, air rushing past as gravity reclaimed us. We hit water with a stunning impact, cold enveloping us as we plunged beneath the surface.

  The shock of it drove the air from my lungs. For one terrible moment, I was back in that bathtub, cartel enforcers holding me under, water filling my lungs.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Terror gripped me, paralyzed me as I thrashed in confusion.

  Then Nessy was there, her arm around my waist, pulling me upward. We broke the surface together, gasping for air. She kept me afloat as I coughed and sputtered, the phantom memory of drowning slowly receding.

  "I've got you," she rasped, spitting water. "I've got you, Alec."

  As my vision cleared, I took in our surroundings. We were in a quarry lake, surrounded by steep walls of exposed granite and limestone. The water was clear and cold, reflecting an ordinary blue sky crossed by wisps of gray and white clouds.

  The orange bucket bobbed nearby, the Sandwichu Tree miraculously still intact within it, its glass branches glittering in the daylight.

  Nessy began swimming toward the shore, one arm still supporting me while the other sliced the water. She also reached and gripped the bucket's handle between her teeth. I found my strength returning and helped, kicking my legs to propel us forward.

  In a few seconds of paddling, we reached the pebbly, sparkling beach, emerged from the water and collapsed on the smooth stones, exhausted and dripping.

  The air was clean and smelled of pines and birches, not filled with eerie wrongness that had permeated Calvin's domain and the world outside of it.

  “We made it,” I let out.

  Nessy pushed herself up on her elbows, her fur plastered to her body, making her look smaller and more vulnerable. Her blue eyes scanned the shoreline, the quarry walls, the distant trees silhouetted against the mid-day sky.

  "Yeah," she said, sniffing. "Ferguson Quarry. My little hometown..."

  She emphasized the 'my' subtly but unmistakably.

  We had arrived in her world, not mine. A place where dogs walked upright, spoke human languages, wore clothes, and worked jobs. A place that existed in parallel to the world I had known. I would be a stranger here, taking the place of another me.

  I should have felt more alarmed by this realization, but exhaustion and the lingering effects of our passage through nullspace left me oddly calm, perhaps slanted sideways a little. If nothing else, we were away from the city without a name, far from the massive magnetic beast, away from the hungry nippers, the Celestorm and ghostly echoes that had worn the faces of my past.

  Nessy looked into the bucket, checking on our tree. The delicate living artifact had survived our journey intact, its branches tinkling softly in the gentle evening breeze. Small sandwich buds still clung to its limbs, promising future sustenance and impossible powers.

  She grabbed a few sandwiches and stuffed them into her mouth and then pulled off two and brought them to me. “Nom. You’re still bleeding.”

  I opened my mouth to reply and Nessy instantly leaned forward, stuffing a small sandwich into my maw.

  “You know, you don’t have to feed me,” I commented, chewing.

  “Yeah, but I wanna,” she fired back with a grin, gently shoving another small, triangular sandwich into my face. “You need this as much as I do. So shush n’ accept the magic noms.”

  I did. It was nice to have Nessy at my side. She fed me more tiny sandwiches until my Health ticked up all the way to 100% while my Reconstitution got to 39%.

  “We should save the rest,” I said. “Maybe they'll get bigger or we can grow more sandwich trees.”

  “M’kay,” she agreed.

  I turned my gaze to the quarry beach, the water lapping gently at the shore. Calvin had told us to think of where we wanted to go, and Nessy and I had chosen this specific place—the site where, in both our worlds, she had saved me.

  A connection point between realities. A place where, despite all differences, our stories intersected the most. The beach where I had nearly died and been rescued by my grandfather's dog. The beach where, in Nessy's version of reality, she had saved her best friend.

  I looked at her—this impossible creature who had crossed worlds to find me, who had fought beside me, who had dragged me from the water not once but twice now. Her soaked fur was sticking up at odd angles, glistening, water dripping onto the glass pebbles below us.

  She shook herself, throwing water droplets everywhere and splashing me and then engulfed me in a hug, licking my face.

  “Home,” she grinned. “We’re home.”

  “Your home,” I said.

  “Ours,” she shook her head. “Mine and now your.”

  I chose not to argue, rising as she helped me up.

  “Where are we heading to?” I asked, following as she pulled me across the beach by the hand.

  “Mmmmmm… my place,” she said. “Then yours.”

  “I have a place?” I asked.

  “Your grandfather’s RV,” she replied. “I have a copy of the key.”

  “This is going to be very awkward when the other Alec shows up,” I said. “Because I never gave you a key to my place in Ferguson.”

  “Shush you,” she shook her head. “It wasn't you, your grandfather gave me a copy. I helped him out when he got sick during his final years.”

  Shivering slightly we walked uphill and then got onto the stairwell carved from gray limestone.

  The limestone steps wound upward from the quarry beach, worn smooth by years of foot traffic. As we climbed, the quarry revealed itself fully – a near-perfect cube carved into the landscape, exactly as I remembered it. The vast, geometric body of water sat like a mirror reflecting the cloudy sky, corroded on one side into the beach section where we'd emerged. Surrounding us, an ocean of trees washed over Ferguson Valley in undulating waves of deep green and gold, the foliage seemingly untouched by the end of the world and System bullshit.

  For a moment, I froze, transfixed by the familiarity of it all. This place existed here just like in my memories – not distorted by Systemfall, not warped into something nightmarish and unrecognizable.

  Just... normal.

  "It's exactly the same," I murmured, the words barely audible. "Like nothing happened."

  “Eh,” she rubbed the back of her head. “Some… stuff happened. Just not as bad as in the big cities. I think that wherever there were more people, more shit became iffy.”

  We continued upward, passing scattered pines that clung tenaciously to the rocky outcroppings. The bucket with our Sandwichu Tree swung in Nessy's free hand. My lime-green sneakers squelched uncomfortably, still waterlogged from our abrupt arrival.

  As we neared the top of the steps, the ranger's station came into view – a weathered building carved from the quarry limestone decorated with rough-hewn logs and river stone at the edges of windows and doors.

  A faded sign depicting a forest silhouette hung above the door, gently swinging in the afternoon breeze. The words “Ferguson Quarry National Park” were there just like I remembered them.

  However, standing on the porch with a cardboard box in clawed hands, was... something I'd never seen before, a colorful absurdity utterly alien to my memories.

  Another pradavarian.

  She was human and reptilian at the same time, with scales the color of forest shadows – deep greens fading to dark violet along her slender snout, iridescent like the shell of the Chrysina gloriosa beetle. Green and black feathers erupted from her head and ran down her neck in lieu of hair. Her uniform – a green ranger's outfit with a badge pinned to the breast pocket – strained slightly over her curvy and tall frame. A holstered gun sat at her hip.

  A raptor. A woman. A raptor-woman ranger.

  I froze, my brain struggling to process her appearance.

  Nessy had mentioned other Pradavarians besides dogs, but seeing one in person was entirely different from the purely theoretical knowledge that they existed.

  For a moment I was entirely overwhelmed with cultural shock, akin to seeing an alien live for the first time.

  The raptor-girl's amber eyes, previously focused on her task, suddenly turned with her head to meet mine. The box she'd been carrying tumbled from her clawed hands, landing with a heavy thud on the concrete porch. Her mouth–a dangerous-looking beak with jagged, serrated edges–opened in shock just as mine did.

  "Alec?" Her voice was distinctively feminine.

  Before I could formulate a response, she bounded down the porch steps with inhuman grace, crossing the distance between us in a few fluid strides. I barely had time to register what was happening before I was enveloped in a tight embrace, her scaled and feathery arms wrapping around me.

  "You're alive," she cried, her voice breaking. "You're alive! For so long... I thought you were dead! The detective told me that…”

  Her body trembled against mine, and I realized with a shock that she was crying–small, clicking sounds escaping her throat as moisture gathered at the corners of her amber eyes.

  I stood rigid in her embrace, arms hanging uselessly at my sides, completely at a loss. Who was this person? Why did she know me? My eyes sought out Nessy over the raptor-woman's shoulder, pleading for some explanation.

  What I found was not helpful.

  Nessy's ears were flattened against her skull, her tail bristling, pupils narrowed to dangerous slits. A low, warning growl rumbled from her chest – a sound so primal and threatening that it raised the hair on the back of my neck.

  The raptor-girl must have heard it too. She stiffened against me, then slowly released her hold, though one clawed hand remained on my shoulder as she turned to face Nessy.

  She saw the bucket with the sandwich tree and then her expression suddenly changed to pure, incandescent rage.

  “YOU! You brought one of those cursed things to Ferguson?” She growled. “You do know that this shit is illegal here, right? What if it infects my forest? What are you thinking you stupid fuck?! Damn it all, I already have enough work as it is, now I have to burn that effing cursed thing too… What is that even… a fucking sandwich tree?! Slayer!”

  “I… erm,” Nessy stammered.

  “I’ll deal with you later, you effing knobfold,” she turned to me. “Alec… Why are you looking at me like that? What’s wrong? Aren’t you gonna give your girlfriend a kiss?”

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