The bag split just before the world did.
Evelyn felt the handle give way first, plastic digging into her fingers and then snapping, onions and lemons lurching toward the pavement. She swore under her breath, tried to catch the bag with her other hand, misjudged, and watched a tomato roll away in slow motion.
The ground vanished before it hit the street.
There was no warning. No noise. No sense of falling.
One step she was on the cracked sidewalk outside her apartment building, traffic humming, a siren wailing in the distance, the smell of exhaust and burnt coffee in the air.
The next step landed on nothing.
Light rushed up around her—not bright, not blinding, just… too much. Colors smudged together like wet paint. The air went thin. Her body remembered how to panic before her mind did; her stomach turned over, her throat closed, her hands clawed at empty space.
A sound roared in her ears, huge and strange. For a second she thought it was wind. Then she realized it was her own heartbeat.
Then it stopped.
Everything stopped.
She hit the ground hard enough to knock the air out of her lungs.
For a while there was only breathing—hers, ragged and uneven. The rest of the world stayed quiet, like it was waiting to see what she'd do.
Evelyn rolled onto her back and stared up at a sky that wasn't hers.
It was too clear. That was her first thought. No plane trails, no murky gray washed over blue. A deep, steady color washed from pale at the horizon to almost indigo overheard, clouds stretched thin and long like brushstrokes.
She lay there until the edge of panic sharpened again.
This isn't right.
Her chest tightened. She sat up slowly, palms stinging, and looked around.
Trees ringed the small hollow where she'd landed, trunks thick and straight. Their bark wasn't brown so much as a dark, cool gray veined with faint, ghostly silver. Leaves rustled high above, a soft constant noise that didn't match any tree she knew. The air felt cool against her skin, with a light scent of damp earth and… something else. Something green and unfamiliar.
Her grocery bag lay beside her, fully intact.
Evelyn frowned at it. The tomatoes, onions, lemons—all there. The bag itself didn't even have the tear she'd felt.
"Okay," she said quietly. "That's not comforting."
Her voice sounded wrong too, thinner without the usual city backdrop. No traffic. No people. No distant sirens or construction. Just leaves and a slow, steady drip of water somewhere behind her.
She dug her phone out of her pocket with hands that shook more than she wanted to admit.
Black screen. No buzz of a waking display. She held the power button down long enough her thumb started to hurt.
Nothing.
"Come on," she whispered. "Not now."
She tilted the screen toward the sky, more out of habit than sense, searching for a bar of signal. The glossy surface caught her reflection instead—wide green eyes, freckles across a small nose, hair spilling out of a ponytail in waves of light brown that always looked blonder than it really was in bright light.
Her face looked younger like this, stripped of the city's tired gray. Babyish, almost. Like she'd borrowed the world and was about to be caught.
Her throat tightened.
"This is a dream," she told the reflection. "Or a stroke. Or something. You're going to wake up, and there will be a very judgmental tomato on the floor."
The reflection didn't argue.
She tried the cheek-slap thing. It hurt. The trees stayed. A small insect drifted past her face, wings catching light in a faint blue shimmer.
Dreams didn't usually worry about consistent lighting, did they?
She sat there for a long minute, fingers pressed hard around her phone, forcing herself to breathe in slow counts.
One. Two. Three. Four in.
One. Two. Three. Four out.
Her brain wanted to sprint in circles—Where am I? How? Why?—but panicking had never actually fixed anything for her. It just made her say stupid things and forget her own name at counters.
"Okay," she said again, to herself this time. "Fine. Fine. Scenario."
She made herself look. Really look.
Trees. Underbrush. No path, at least not nearby. The ground sloped slightly downward to where a small trickle of water ran between stones. Light filtered down in soft patches, dappled and green.
If this was some kind of psychotic break, her subconscious was very committed.
If it wasn't…
Her stomach turned over again. Not hunger yet. Fear.
"Home," she whispered.
She got to her feet. Her knees wobbled. She waited until they stopped. She picked up the grocery bag because it felt wrong to leave it, like leaving proof of her old life behind, and slung it over her shoulder.
Then she stood very still, turned in a slow circle, and tried to find something—anything—that looked like a direction.
Behind her, the hollow cut up into denser trees. Ahead, the ground dipped, a faint suggestion of open space between trunks.
Evelyn closed her eyes for a second.
"If this is a portal fantasy," she muttered, "there should really be a manual."
No manual appeared.
She picked the way her feet wanted to go—the clearer space, where the light felt a little less claustrophobic—and started walking.
It wasn't graceful. Her flats slipped on damp patches, caught on roots. The bag bumped against her hip. Every crack of a twig or shift of leaves made her shoulders jerk.
She kept going.
After a while her breathing evened out, matched to the rhythm of her steps. Her mind cooled enough to let one coherent thought through:
If this is real, I might not get back.
The idea landed heavy. Too big to look at straight on. She skimmed it instead. Like glancing at a bright light out of the corner of her eye.
It pulled other thoughts with it: the library, the chipped mug on her desk, the way the sun filtered through high windows at three in the afternoon. The little notebook by her bed with rough sketches of a café that didn't exist yet—floorplan scribbles, lists of menu items, names she crossed out and rewrote until "Blue" circled itself.
The front window had plants, in the sketches. Shelves of donated books. She'd drawn it so often she could see it clearer than her own reflection.
She swallowed hard.
"No," she told the trees. "No big decisions until at least one meal. That's the rule."
Talking helped. Made the forest feel less like something with its own thoughts. She didn't narrate constantly, just enough to keep from sinking into silence.
Her world shifted again when she reached the edge of the trees.
The forest thinned without her quite noticing when. One more step and she was out of the shadow, standing on the rise of a hill. Below, the land rolled gently away, a patchwork of grass and scattered copses of trees. Far in the distance, something glinted—a line of light that might have been water, or a road, or just the sun catching on stone.
Wind hit her full-on, cool and clean, carrying a smell that wasn't car fumes or fried food. It smelled like wet soil, crushed leaves, and faintly—she blinked—like something yeasty and warm, as if someone had opened a bakery miles away and the scent had wandered here by accident.
Her stomach chose that moment to remember it hadn't had dinner.
Of course it did.
She let out a shaky, surprised laugh. It sounded more like a hiccup.
"Of course," she told the air. "Of course you betray me now."
The laugh broke something tight inside her chest. Not in a bad way. Just enough that she could breathe a little deeper.
She shaded her eyes and squinted toward the glint.
If it was a river, people might live near it. People meant buildings and roads and… answers. Maybe even a way to send strange, lost girls back where they'd come from.
If it wasn't, she'd still be closer to something than this hill.
Evelyn adjusted her grip on the bag strap and started down.
The slope looked gentle from above. It wasn't. After ten minutes her thighs burned, her feet ached, and she had developed a personal vendetta against rocks that disguised themselves as shadows. By the time she reached the flatter ground, she was out of breath again, hair sticking to her forehead.
She paused under a tree to rest, leaned her shoulder against the trunk, and let her forehead press against the cool bark. Her eyes closed on their own.
Just a minute, she told herself. Then you keep moving. Sitting here doesn't fix anything.
The bark under her skin felt… odd. Faintly warm, almost as if the tree had a pulse of its own. She pulled back, frowning, and laid her palm flat.
Something like a vibration hummed against her skin. Very soft. If she hadn't been touching the tree, she wouldn't have noticed it.
She held still.
The world didn't change. No bright lights. No whispering voices. Just that slow, alive thrum, like the tree had a heartbeat a hundred times slower than hers.
She snatched her hand away.
"Okay," she whispered. "Trees shouldn't hum. New item on the list."
She didn't touch another trunk after that.
The glint became a line. The line became water—a river, wide and steady, moving with the kind of calm that made thoughts slow down just from watching it. The bank sloped gently down to the water's edge, pebbles the size of her toes scattered like someone had been skipping stones and given up.
On the far side, the land rose again. No buildings. No bridges. Just more trees.
No road.
No lights.
No city.
The hope she hadn't wanted to admit having sagged inside her.
She went to the edge anyway, crouched, and leaned over to see her reflection.
It wobbled, broken by the current, but she could make herself out: round face, cheeks too soft to look properly serious, eyes too big in this much light. The green looked brighter here, the ring of darker color around the iris more obvious. Her hair had partially escaped its tie, waves of light brown—almost gold in this sun—tumbling around her face.
She looked like she'd been dropped into someone else's painting.
Tears burned hot and sudden at the backs of her eyes.
"No," she told her reflection, teeth clenched. "Not yet. You do not get to cry until you at least try something."
She scrubbed a hand over her face and sat back.
What could she try?
Walking the riverbank one way or the other might eventually lead somewhere, but "eventually" could be days. She had… groceries. Not survival rations. Tomatoes, herbs, pasta. Cooking ingredients, not wilderness supplies.
She stared at the bag for a few seconds.
A ridiculous thought crept in.
"If this is some kind of… portal situation," she said carefully, as if someone might be listening, "then there might also be a… portal back."
It sounded stupid out loud. But so did falling through the sidewalk.
Portals were doors, in stories. Archways. Mirrors. Places that felt like thresholds.
The river didn't look like any of those things. But the space between the trees behind her, where forest gave way to hill, had felt like a border.
She turned to look back the way she'd come.
Trees, hill, nothing else.
If she walked back exactly the way she'd come, step for step… what? She'd trip over the same roots and end up in the same hollow. The ground would not magically turn into her city.
But doing nothing was worse.
"Fine," she muttered. "We're going to be irrational productively."
She stood, wiped her palms on her jeans, and retraced her own footprints as best she could.
Up the slope. Past the humming tree. Back to the spot where the forest had closed behind her. Her heart thudded harder with each step, some small, desperate part of her braced for the sidewalk to appear like a stage trick. One blink and she'd be back, groceries on the ground, traffic in her ears, the smell of asphalt and rain in the air.
She walked until she was sure she was standing in the exact place she'd first noticed the road was wrong.
The trees stayed trees. No concrete slid into place.
She let herself stand there until the hope bled all the way out.
The tears came then, because there was nothing else left to try and she had run out of distractions. They weren't dramatic, heaving sobs—just a quiet, stubborn overflow, tears rolling hot and steady down her cheeks while she stared at the same not-sidewalk and the same not-city.
She wiped them away with the heel of her hand before they could really fall.
"Okay," she whispered. "Then we do it the long way."
Long way meant staying alive.
Staying alive meant water, shelter, and food.
Water, she had. River. Easy.
Shelter… the forest could have something—a dry hollow, a low branch to sit under until she figured out more. She'd slept in worse places once or twice waiting out overnight shifts.
Food…
Her eyes drifted down to the bag.
She had enough to make a half-decent meal. Maybe two, if she was smart and didn't get precious about portions.
Somewhere in her chest, under the fear and the hollow ache, a familiar, quieter part of her stirred. The part that woke early on weekends to knead dough. The part that calmed down over a chopping board and the hiss of a pan.
Fine, she thought. If the universe is going to be strange, it can at least be fed.
She found a spot tucked back between two roots of a huge tree—not the humming one—where the ground was dry and mostly shaded. It felt small enough to feel safe, big enough she could sit up without banging her head.
She unpacked the bag and spread the food out on the ground. The normalcy of it helped—the glossy red of tomatoes, the pale bulbs of onions, the bright, sharp scent of lemon when she nicked the skin with a fingernail.
She didn't have a knife. Or a pot. Or anything resembling cookware.
It would've been funny if it weren't hers.
She scanned the forest floor—found a branch that had fallen cleanly, about as thick as her wrist. She snapped it in half, hands scratching at the rough bark, until she had two shorter pieces. One could be sharpened if she found a rough stone to grind it against.
It was tedious. It left her fingers raw. But the act of doing something absorbed her enough that, for a blissful twenty minutes, she didn't think about portals or cities or the word "never".
She only thought about the point forming at the tip of the wood, about how to slice a tomato without smearing it everywhere.
By the time the sun had shifted noticeably, she'd managed to cut vegetables into uneven chunks, scraped them into a hollow in a flat stone she'd found down by the river, and was staring at the materials of a fire with growing irritation.
Fire was easy on a stove. Knob, click, blue flame.
Here, it was damp sticks, stubborn bark, and two rocks that refused to cooperate.
She tried anyway.
Stone against stone. A scrape, a clack. Nothing.
She adjusted her grip, tried again. Something sparked at the edge of her vision.
She went still.
Very slowly, she did it again. Same angle, same pressure.
This time, the spark was clear—a tiny, sharp flicker of light where the stones met. It flashed, then vanished.
Her first thought was, Of course stones spark, that's friction, that's normal.
Her second thought was that she had seen people do this in movies and it never looked quite like that.
She lit the smallest curl of dry moss she'd found with a third strike.
The flame caught like it had been waiting.
It was a small success. A fragile, flickering one. But as she bent over it, coaxing it with careful breaths, arranging the tiniest sticks around it, something unfamiliar mixed with the fear.
Satisfaction.
The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched. The forest stayed what it was—a stranger's place—but now it had a circle of fire in it that belonged, at least a little, to her.
She sat cross-legged beside it, stirring vegetables in a heated stone bowl with a stripped branch, making something halfway between stew and apology. The smell—onion, seared slightly too far, tomato sweetening as it softened—ran straight through her chest and lodged where homesickness sat.
"This is not a café," she told the fire. "But it's a start."
Wind shifted.
Somewhere in the trees, far off, something called—long and low, like a hunting horn or a beast testing its voice. She froze with the makeshift spoon mid-stir, listening.
Footsteps answered.
Not the careful creep of an animal in underbrush. Human—or human-adjacent—rhythm, more than one set. Coming closer.
Her mouth went dry.
She set the spoon down without thinking, wiped her hands on her jeans, and reached for the grocery bag like it might offer advice.
Too late to run. The fire's glow marked her out as clearly as a lit window in a dark street.
Branches rustled. Shadows broke.
Voices, low at first, then clearer.
"…smoke. Someone's ahead."
"Could be a bandit camp."
"Bandits don't usually smell like onions."
Evelyn swallowed, hard.
She kept her hands where they were, visible and empty, as the first figure stepped into the circle of light.
He wasn't quite like anyone she'd seen before. Taller than her, lean and stringy, hair braided back from a face lined more from weather than age. Ears, she noticed distantly, ended in a slight sharp point under the braid.
Behind him, more shapes moved between the trees.
Evelyn's heart beat so loud she almost didn't hear her own voice when it finally came, thin but steady.
"Hi," she said. "Um. I think I'm lost."
The man's gaze swept over the stone bowl, the small flame, the battered grocery bag, her face.
He didn't look impressed. Or terrified. Or mystically enlightened by her arrival.
He looked like a tired traveler who had expected trouble and found, instead, an inconvenience he hadn't planned on.
"Seems so," he said.
He shifted his weight, and the firelight caught for a heartbeat on the edge of a blade at his hip.
Evelyn resisted the urge to lift her hands higher.
"Right," she said softly. "So. That's… one thing we have in common already."
More figures stepped into the light—someone with hair pale as straw, someone with skin dappled like stone, someone with eyes that caught the fire oddly, as if reflecting more than light.
The world tilted again.
This time, she kept her feet.
She didn't know yet that this moment would matter. That these strangers would become anything but a story she told herself to stay awake at night.
Right now, she only knew three things.
She was lost.
She was hungry.
And for the first time since the ground had vanished, she wasn't alone.