Tejas was the first to stand.
He got his feet under him, steadied himself against a tree trunk, and immediately knew something was wrong. Not the disoriented wrong of waking somewhere unfamiliar. Something deeper than that — a wrongness in the air itself, in the quality of the light, in the smell of the soil beneath his boots.
Too quiet. Too still. Like the world was holding its breath.
"Where are we?"
Kiara was already on her feet, turning in a slow circle. Her voice wasn't confused — it was sharp, controlled, the way she got when she was scared but refused to show it.
Mia pushed herself upright and looked around once, twice, a quick panicked scan. "This isn't the trail." Her voice started to fracture at the edges. "This isn't — we were just there, this isn't where we were—"
"Nobody panic," Tejas said quickly.
It was already too late for that.
Diya moved to Mia's side without being asked, one hand on her back. "Hey. Look at me. Just breathe."
"How is this okay?" Mia snapped, tears rising fast. "We were right there — how are we here? How did we get here?"
Kiara stopped turning. "Did we walk somewhere? Is this a joke? Is someone—"
"No one's joking," Tejas said.
Anish hadn't said anything. He stood a few feet apart from the group, eyes moving steadily across the trees, the ground, the gaps between trunks. Not panicking. Not reassuring anyone. Just looking, the way he did when he was building a picture of something.
Mia took a shaky breath, wiping her face with her sleeve. "Okay. Okay. We just… we go back the way we came. That's all."
Diya gave her a small nod. "Exactly."
"I don't think that's going to work."
Anish said it quietly. He wasn't looking at them. His voice had no drama in it, which somehow made it worse.
Tejas turned. "Why not?"
Anish didn't answer right away. His gaze moved from the trees to the ground to the light filtering down through the canopy — assessing, methodical.
"…Just a feeling," he said finally.
Kiara let out a short, humorless laugh. "A feeling. Right. Super helpful."
"We'll try anyway," Tejas said.
They walked.
No one spoke. The forest pressed in around them, dense and close, the trees stretching so high their branches tangled together far overhead, weaving a ceiling that let in only thin, pale light. The ground was soft underfoot — not the dry, packed earth of the mountain trail, but something wetter, heavier, each footstep sinking slightly and releasing with a dull sound.
That was the only sound.
No birds. No insects. Not even wind moving through leaves.
After a while, Diya slowed without meaning to. "We should've reached something by now," she said quietly.
Tejas didn't answer.
He knew she was right.
Mia's grip tightened on her phone, knuckles pale. "We didn't go that far into the trees. Did we? We couldn't have gone that far."
Her voice had taken on that quality — the one that wasn't really asking a question so much as asking someone to agree with her. To say yes, of course not, we'll be back in a moment.
No one said it.
Kiara frowned at the trees ahead. "…No. We didn't."
Anish stopped walking.
The others took a few more steps before they noticed. One by one they slowed and turned back to look at him. He stood very still, crouched now, pressing two fingers into the earth. He rubbed the soil slowly, feeling it.
"It's wet," he said.
"What does that mean?" Kiara asked.
He stood, tilting his head back to look up at the canopy. At the height of the trees. At how dense the growth was — not just tall but layered, the undergrowth thick and tangled in a way that was different from anything they'd walked through before.
"The trees are too tall," he said. "The density is wrong. The moisture content in the soil—" He paused. "This isn't the same place we were."
The words settled over them like cold water.
"Then where are we?" Tejas asked.
Anish was quiet for a moment.
"Somewhere like a rainforest. The vegetation pattern, the humidity—" He hesitated. "Something like the Amazon."
Silence.
The word sat in the air between them, too large for the space, too absurd to be real.
"That's not possible," Diya said. Quiet. Not arguing — just unable to make it fit.
"Obviously it's not possible," Kiara muttered, and for once the sharpness had gone out of her voice. It just sounded tired. "We were in a temple on a mountain and now we're in a rainforest. Sure. That's — yeah."
"Maybe we should stay put," Mia said. She was trying to keep her voice steady. "Someone will notice we're gone. They'll come looking. Right? People will come—"
"That's not likely."
Tejas looked at Anish. "Why not?"
Anish met his eyes. Held them for a moment. "Because we're not on the mountain anymore."
The words hit differently than they should have. They were simple words. Logical. Just a statement. But something about the way Anish said them — without flinching, without the small cushion of uncertainty people usually offer when they know the news is bad — made them feel final.
Mia heard them differently.
Her breathing changed.
She looked down at her phone. Opened it. The screen showed no signal, no bars, nothing — just the pale icon that meant it was searching, searching, finding nothing.
She tapped it again.
"No signal," she whispered. "There's no signal—"
"Mia—"
"There's no signal!" Her voice broke. "We don't know where we are, our phones don't work, we don't — we can't—" Her chest heaved. "I don't want to be here. I want to go home. I don't want—"
Diya wrapped both arms around her from behind and held on. "Mia. Hey." She didn't try to fix it or minimize it — she just held on, her voice low and steady near her ear. "We're together right now. That's real. We're all still here. We'll figure the rest out."
Mia clutched Diya's arms and didn't let go.
Her hands were shaking.
Diya's were too, very slightly, if you looked closely enough to see.
Tejas pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.
Think. Just think.
"Does anyone have a downloaded map? Of the mountain?"
"That's not going to help us." Anish still wasn't looking at him. "We're not on the mountain."
"You don't know that for certain—"
"I do."
The flatness of it stopped Tejas cold.
Kiara turned on him. "Then what do we do? You're full of observations — what's the actual plan?"
"I don't have one yet."
"Great. Fantastic." She turned to Tejas. "And you? Big leader energy back there in the temple. How's that going for us?"
"I'm trying to think—"
"Think faster. Because standing in a rainforest with no signal and no map isn't really a great outcome."
"Well running headfirst into the temple definitely helped, didn't it—"
"I found the temple—"
"You opened the book—"
"Stop."
Diya's voice, usually so measured, had an edge in it that made them both go quiet.
She was still holding Mia, but her eyes were on them, and they were not patient eyes.
"We're scared," she said. "We're all scared. Don't do this right now."
A beat.
"She's right," Anish said.
Kiara exhaled sharply through her nose and looked away. Tejas ran both hands through his hair, jaw tight.
The silence stretched.
And then—
A sound.
Low. Resonant. It didn't echo off the trees so much as absorb into them, roll outward, fill the space under the canopy like pressure filling a closed room. Deep in a way that bypassed the ears entirely and registered somewhere in the chest.
Everyone went still.
Mia's fingers locked around Diya's wrist.
"…What was that?" she breathed.
The forest had gone silent in a different way now — not the waiting silence from before. Something reactive. Like even the forest was listening.
Then—
a shadow swept over them.
Slow. Wide. Moving from east to west and covering them completely for three full seconds before passing on.
Tejas looked up.
The shape above the canopy was enormous. It moved with a kind of effortless weight, wings spreading the length of the gap between trees — great, arching, leathery wings that displaced the air as they beat, sending a wash of pressure down through the canopy that stirred their hair and clothing.
It was not a bird.
It wasn't anything that should exist.
It circled, lazy and unhurried, high above the treeline.
"…That's not…" Kiara's voice came out barely above a whisper.
Her sentence didn't finish. There was nowhere for it to go.
Mia made a sound — small and soft and completely broken — and pressed her face into Diya's shoulder.
The creature banked. Turned. And then it opened its mouth.
The roar came down through the trees like a physical thing. Not just loud — heavy. It hit their chests like a wave, rattled their teeth, compressed the air in their lungs for one terrible second.
A warning. Definitely a warning.
Tejas couldn't feel his hands.
His mind had gone completely, mercifully blank — and in the blankness, something older took over. Something that didn't need words or plans or logic.
"Don't move," he said.
His voice came out steady.
He had no idea how.
End of Chapter 2