Two months.

Two months marching along narrow passes and treacherous ledges.

Two months of bone-chilling cold and exhaustion.

Two months among foreigners.

Two months with a near-silent Sean.

I never knew two months could be an entire lifetime. But, somehow, these have been. It's as though someone plucked me out of my home and dropped me in another world. The language is different, the culture is different, the entire rules of survival are different. There's never enough food to go around, and I spend any meal we eat just hoping their appetite never outweighs their superstition. As long as they stay scared of Sean, we'll survive on what scarce rations they parcel out.

I have never gone hungry before. Never even considered it. I've passed beggar upon beggar in the streets of Erreliah, and the thought never struck me, That could be me. I could be that person begging, sitting on the cold curb in my rags, my bony fingers holding a cracked teacup to passersby.

But here, I ache for that woman on the curb. I am that woman on the curb, reliant on the grudging generosity of strangers looking on me with contempt. Here, my skin is ice, my clothes are grime, and my stomach is insatiable.

Here, endurance is key.

Before, surrounded by scientists, the only thing my strength was useful for was popping the seal on jars of formaldehyde. Instead, in this world of endless marching, my intelligence is what holds all that triviality. The sole thing it's done so far is let me decode a little more of their language. Other than that, the only learning I accomplish is physical. The cotton-top boy stops showing up, and my hands learn to tie the tent knots. Marches lengthen, and my feet learn to walk no matter how much they blister. Rations decrease to one meager noonday meal, and my stomach learns to appreciate whatever it gets.

We'll be in Xela soon, I tell myself. Just a little longer, and this will all be over.

At least the traveling has gotten easier as we've gone on. The Traders led us down into a valley. Its flat land stretches so far I can't even see the mountains that wait for us beyond the horizon. It's warmer here, more autumn than winter. Drizzling rain replaces biting snow. It's not as pretty, but it's easier to cope with. There are no more narrow paths or steep drops to navigate, just even terrain.

All of it's a needed relief, and I don't question it. Just like they have been, my feet keep moving, relishing the small respite. Just like it has been, when my head hits my blankets, I fall straight asleep. And just like they have been, my thoughts stay mechanical, fixed on moving one foot in front of the other.

Which is why it takes me two days to realize—

In my blankets, I tremble, but I throw them off and stumble out of the tent. Behind me, Sean calls, "Riveirre, where are you going?" The wind blows my hair to the side, and the wet grass slides across my bare feet. I trip over a loose stone but hurriedly push back up, eyes locked on the edge of camp.

The tents give way, and I stutter to a stop. Before me, the world is wide and open, the horizon endless. The stars drape over us like a suffocating blanket, and the moon's lonely face searches the sky with me, waiting for the mountains to reappear.

Because we're not in a valley. And we haven't been for a long time. How in the world could we be in a valley if there are no mountains around? My heart wrenches in my chest, every muscle tensing up as if I can fight the emptiness. What in skies' name is this?

A hand grabs my wrist, and I spin around swinging.

Sean ducks my punch. "What the blazes?" He straightens, startled eyes looking me over. "What's gotten into you, Riveirre?"

Shocked and guilty, my hand drops. I turn away, trying to pull my wrist loose, but Sean's grip stays tight. Fear and anger brew poison in my mouth, numbing my tongue. My head shakes in short, sharp motions.

"Riveirre?"

Desperate, my lips spew the poison out. "They lied to us, Sean. They betrayed us. They—"

"Hey, hey, calm down there. What are you talking about?"

I try to still myself and look him straight in the eye, but my body doesn't feel like my own. Deliberately, I repeat, "They lied to us."

He stares at me, grey eyes even. His grip on my arm feels like both a chain and an anchor.

"They told us they'd take us to Xela, right?" He pauses, then gives a single curt nod. "This"—I gesture wildly with my other arm at the vast nothingness of land—"is not Xela. I don't even think it's the High Valleys." A heavy, expanding dread climbs its way from my stomach to my throat, and my voice tightens. "Look at it! There are no mountains. When in your life have you not been able to see mountains?" I break off, my head shaking in those quick, violent bobs again. "They've taken us from our home. They've taken us from our home, and we have no way to get back." My hand slices through the air.

I gulp in a breath, striving to compose myself. The anger plays anesthetic to my lips, but I try to talk around it. "Who—" My tongue trips. "Who the blazes do they think they are? What makes them think they have the, th—" I pull ragged air through my lungs. "The right to drag us out to this wretched, backwards, empty place of—" My hand spikes up toward my face, looking for the right word. "Nothing!" Outrage quivers through my body, and I look back from the endless sky to the boy who is trapped here with me.

He pauses, a long one, two, three full seconds. "You didn't know we weren't in the High Valleys?"

My jaw creeps open, words frozen.

I explode, shoving his shoulder. "You knew?" Shocked, he lets go of my wrist, and I advance, pushing him again. "You knew? And you didn't tell me?"

Fire lights in his eyes akin to the moment the Ufir hit him all that time ago, and he bites back, "I didn't realize you were stupid enough to need telling."

I stare at him, stunned and hurt.

"What?" he presses, his single word twisted into a sharp and jagged weapon.

"I—" I'm broken. I was red-hot glass, ready to burn the world to get us back, but you dropped me in a pail of ice-cold water, and I shattered.

Beneath that, a small voice whispers, I just wanted to go home.

I blink back blurry eyes. My lips numb again, but this time for a different reason. I swallow, then dare to meet his eyes. "Nothing, Sean."

I push around him. The full moon watches me hurry back into the tent. My bare feet are cold and dirty, and I hastily wipe them clean before burying myself in my pallet. Hot tears leak out of my eyes, and I press my face into the blankets to hide them. Sean Rahkifellar will not see me cry.

The tent flap rustles as he enters. He crosses to his side of the structure, sitting to tug his boots off. Soon, a steady rhythm of clacks fills the dead air. The noise simultaneously comforts me and sends a sickening twist through my stomach. My dad has awful handwriting, so he's always used a presswrite. It sits on the great bronze desk in his library. When I was a kid, I would sneak in during the evenings and curl up in the armchair by the fire. He always saw me come in, but he'd pretend not to. He never asked why I wasn't studying or what I was doing with a silly chapter book. He just kept typing. When the tap of his fingers against the keys eventually lulled me to sleep, he'd slip the novel from my hands and toss a blanket around my shoulders. Then he'd scoop me up, tuck me into bed, and hide the book under my pillow.

I'll probably never sit in that armchair again. I'll never watch the flames crackling in the hearth, never catch his ink and leather scent, never feel his arms wrapped around me. I'll never run my hand along the wood-paneled walls of our hallways, dig my toes into my bedroom carpet, watch the firelight play off the bronze coffee table in our living room. My window seat will stay conspicuously empty, the smudges of my nose against the glass wiped away by the woman who comes to clean once a week. The stuffed animals on my shelf will stare vacant, gathering dust, and the pages of the books I hid from my mother will yellow and crumble.

We're in the Outerlands now, a place that's supposed to be no more real than magic or monsters under the bed. It's a children's story, and any scientist worth their degree knows there's no such thing as truly flat land. The world is mountains, and the mountains don't end. A chill runs through me, and I pull the blankets tighter.

I don't know the way back. Even if I somehow found my way to my mountains, I'd still be wandering through the wilderness. Hopelessly lost, my only chance at getting home is sticking with people who look at me more and more suspiciously each day.

"Would you please put that thing away?" My voice is thick as I tug my throw closer around my face. "I'm trying to sleep."

The tapping peters off. The silence I thought would be comforting sounds eerily like death.

A sob wracks my chest, and I try to muffle it. I cry for Erreliah, the home that was, that might never be again. The home that could so easily be touched and swallowed by the plague. The home I didn't bother to wait for news of.

The Blistering Death isn't the first plague to creep through the caves of the High Valleys. School children still sing chants about the last one, which ended less than a hundred years ago. That epidemic began in an average city, just like Karsix, finally infecting what was then the capital, a full week's journey away from ground zero. Less than five percent of the old capital's population survived.

What used to be only a cold fact now sends tremors through my body, because I know that my Erreliah has every potential to become that doomed capital. But rather than stay to learn its fate, rather than try and fail—but at least try—to help find a cure, I left. I broke quarantine. I ran. I abandoned my family, my colleagues, my friends, and now I cry because I miss them. I ran away from Karsix, and now I mourn because I've left my homeland. I don't deserve these tears.

But I'm in the Outerlands. I've left the realm of reality and entered a world I know nothing about. A world with no mountains. A world with a flat, dead horizon.

A world alone.