I always believed that if things went off the rails, I'd be the one to pull us back. That if the world twisted itself into a knot, I could find the thread that unraveled it. But now? I wasn't sure I could even tell what was real anymore.
The forest was quiet.
Too quiet.
Since Evelyn vanished into that flickering shimmer, no siren had rung. No hum of dimensional shift, no glow from the portal. Just silence. And that, more than anything, was starting to get under our skin.
We hadn't entered the rift in days. Not since the last time it spit us back out into a version of reality that didn't quite fit. Bobby said we needed to regroup. Jacob was pushing to find Evelyn again. Ambrose kept cracking jokes, but I could see it in his eyes—he was scared.
And me? I just wanted to understand.
We started keeping to a new routine. Mornings were for comparing notes. Afternoons were for mapping the terrain around the cottage, just to make sure nothing had shifted. Nights were quiet. Uneasy. No one wanted to be the first to fall asleep.
It was Bobby who first noticed something was off.
"My mom's voice on the call," he said one morning, pouring too much sugar into his coffee, "it wasn't quite right. Like she was talking slower. Like she was... thinking too hard before answering."
Jacob raised an eyebrow. "You think she knows something?"
"No," Bobby replied, looking down into his cup. "I think... it wasn't her. Or not our version of her."
None of us laughed.
A few days later, Ambrose got a video call from his sister. I was nearby when he took it, lounging in the sun like it was just another lazy day. But his face changed mid-call.
"You okay, man?" I asked when he hung up.
He shrugged. "She called me by a nickname I haven't heard since we were kids. Like... old-old days. And she asked if I was still working at the comic shop. I haven't worked there in three years."
We all started checking in with people back home. Friends. Parents. Coworkers. The responses were unsettlingly consistent.
Wrong details.
Offhand comments that didn't line up with our reality.
As if we'd fallen into a world that was... close. So close. But not quite ours.
That's when the dreams started.
Not nightmares, exactly. But vivid. Hyperreal. We dreamed of alternate versions of ourselves. Some thriving. Some broken. Some strangers entirely. It was like the rift hadn't just touched our reality, but all realities we were tethered to.
One night, I dreamed I was back home with Anita. Only it wasn't my home. It looked the same, but the light fixtures were different. And she called me Andrew.
I woke up shaking.
"This place," Bobby said the next day, slamming a notebook onto the table, "is more than a gateway. It's... a memory of every version of us. It remembers too much."
Jacob sat back, arms crossed. "And if it remembers everything, what happens when it forgets? Or decides to overwrite us?"
We didn't have an answer.
Later that afternoon, we received a delivery from the town. A bag of supplies. A few letters, too. But one caught my eye.
It was addressed to me.
In Anita's handwriting.
Only... it wasn't her words. It was a letter full of inside jokes I didn't recognize. Stories we'd never shared. Memories we never made.
I folded it carefully and didn't mention it to the others.
That evening, we sat around the fire pit behind the cottage. The forest stretched dark and deep around us. Ambrose tossed a marshmallow into the flames.
"Maybe we died," he said suddenly.
Jacob shot him a look. "What?"
"Maybe we died in that rift. And this is... I don't know. The echo."
"You're not dead, Ambrose," I said quietly.
He looked at me, eyes rimmed red. "Feels like something is."
There wasn't much left to say.
Eventually, we agreed to return to the rift. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But soon.
Bobby had been refining his scanner—trying to track patterns in how the rift opened and closed. He believed there was a rhythm to it. A beat. We just had to learn the song.
But none of us wanted to admit what we feared most:
That maybe the rift didn't send us to different places.
Maybe it made different versions of us.
The siren didn't ring that night.
But in the middle of the silence, I saw Ambrose sitting alone at the edge of the trees, staring into the dark.
I almost went to him.
Almost.
Then I saw the glow return.
Faint.
Around his hands.
As if the forest was waking up again.
Ambrose looked down at his palms. "Well, that's not terrifying at all," he muttered. Then with a half-grin, he added, "Guess I really am becoming a superhero. Finally—origin story unlocked."
I didn't laugh. Not really.
Because beneath the joke was something fragile.
A tremble.
A question he was too scared to ask aloud.