Jeff stayed crouched, staring at the blue light, feeling the pull of it in his chest like a hook.
"I need a better look at this place first," he said finally, standing. "I'm gonna go up."
"Up."
"I've got wings."
"Of course you do." Yogi folded his arms. "Go on, then."
Jeff pulled off his hoodie, then his undershirt-”tank top”, and tied both around his waist. In the dappled light, his tattoos showed dark against his light-brown skin: the yellow outline of a smiley face on the right side of his stomach, one red teardrop falling from its left eye, and black runic script running up his left forearm.
"Why'd everything just go quiet?" Yogi asked.
"Taking my shirt off. Wings don't come out through cotton."
"And you're telling a blind man this because?"
"Transparency."
Then Jeff folded his tongue in three places at once, a trick that looked deeply wrong from the outside and that he had absolutely no plans to explain, and the wings arrived.
They didn't unfold so much as "appear", attached to his back as if they'd always been there, white-feathered and wide enough to shade them both. Yogi turned his head a half-second later, one hand coming up toward his left side.
"Did you just grow something?"
"Wings. I told you."
"What'd you do to get them out?"
"Folded my tongue three times at once."
Yogi was silent for a moment. "I'm glad I can't see that."
Jeff locked his pinky, the double joint bending back at an angle that made strangers wince, and wind answered. It gathered under him in a rush, and he jumped up in it, wings beating hard. His thumb rolled against the side of his finger like a joystick, steering the gust, and he climbed through a gap in the canopy into open sky.
---
From above, the forest stopped being a forest.
It was a maze.
Mirrors stood among the trees. No frames, no stands, nothing holding them up, just enormous sheets of perfect reflection planted upright in the earth at angles that couldn't have been accidental. The forest reflected the forest reflected the forest. The gaps between the mirrors made corridors, the corridors folded back into each other, and Jeff's eyes kept trying to follow a path and kept arriving somewhere they'd already been.
Between the mirrors, crystal formations jutted from the ground in clusters: red, violet, a green so bright it looked fake. Each one sat inside its own faint shimmering colored aura, like haze with a tint. The violet cluster near the pond explained the boar. Whatever else had been living down there long enough, soaking in those auras hour after hour, was going to have powers too.
Past the forest's edge, trails widened into roads and ran out into rolling grass fields. Far off, there was a smudge of rooftops that might be a town. Farther still, where the horizon went hazy, the land broke up into red rock and shadow.
Jeff hovered, turning slowly, taking it in.
That was when he saw it.
In one of the mirrors, the fourth from the pond, someone was standing at the base of an oak tree with their face tipped up toward the sky.
Toward him.
Jeff's heart kicked. He banked hard, searching the actual forest for that oak and that figure. But mirrors were reflecting mirrors, every angle was a lie that led to another lie, and there were a thousand oaks down there.
He whipped back to the fourth mirror.
His angle had changed. It showed only branches.
"Jeff?"
Yogi's voice came up through the canopy, calm, pitched to carry.
"Jeff. Were you just standing behind me?"
---
Jeff hit the ground hard enough to leave knee-prints.
Yogi stood exactly where he'd left him, head turned slightly over his right shoulder, one hand pressed flat against his lower back like a man who'd just felt a tap there.
"No," Jeff said. "I was two hundred feet up."
"Then somebody stood right behind me," Yogi said, "for about as long as it takes to read a sentence. Then left. Didn't touch me. Didn't try anything."
"Your aura didn't—"
"My aura answers attacks. That wasn't an attack."
Jeff's adrenaline surged, and he felt the familiar heat in his eyes as his irises lit up glowing neon yellow. Yogi couldn't see it. For once, that felt like a mercy.
He turned a full circle. Trees. Portals. The pond. His own carved name on the pine.
Nothing.
"Anybody inside twenty-seven feet of me, I'd see," he said, thinking it through out loud. "They wouldn't be able to be fully invisible. They'd be see-through, but I'd be able to see them. That's in the book."
"So they're farther."
"So they're farther."
He looked at the ring of trees just beyond that distance, at every gap between trunks, at every patch of shade that might be shade or might not be.
Somebody who'd walk up behind a genie, a being with more power than Jeff could reasonably picture, and stand there on purpose.
A few people Jeff had heard of were that crazy. And then there was the category of people the VRC had told him about during his interview, the ones who didn't need to be crazy. The ones who went home at the end of their shift. But they're generally pretty blatant.
A black orb was already forming in his right hand, pulsing, dense, dragging a little of the light into itself.
He felt himself getting angry. And he could feel exactly who was waiting on the other side of that anger, patient in the passenger seat of his own skull.
He breathed in. Held it. Let it out slowly.
"Your breathing just changed," Yogi said.
"Ring thing."
"If you're about to blow up a tree to make a point, the tree didn't do it."
Jeff almost laughed. He closed his hand, and the orb went out.
That was when his pocket went off.
Both of them jumped. Jeff's phone was buzzing hard against the tank top tied around his waist, notification after notification stacking up so fast the screen stuttered:
**LEGENDARY CREATURE ENGAGED — LIVE**
**REWARD POSTED**
**REWARD INCREASED**
**REWARD INCREASED**
And under all of them: *Alicia calling.*
He answered. "Hey, I'm bringing comp—"
"*Are you watching this?*"
"Watching wh—"
"*Come home. Come home right now.*"
The call ended.
Jeff stood in the forest of doors, holding his phone and his own quickened pulse, and he looked at the footprints one more time. The edges had dried. They were shrinking.
He looked at the bluish door they led into.
He looked at his phone.
Yogi, who could not see any of this, somehow saw all of it.
"Let me lay it out," the old man said. "The man you've been looking for walked through a door about ten minutes ago. Somebody watched you come looking for him. And someone called your smartphone." He tilted his head. "So. Which one are you going to go chase?"
"I'm coming back," Jeff said. "With Alicia. I've got two wishes left.
Jeff put his hand on the carved pine as they passed it, a quick touch, like touching a doorframe for luck. Then he took Yogi by the elbow and led him back through their portal.
---
On the far side, back on the trail where he'd found the die, Jeff pulled his wings in close and looked at the old man.
"How do you feel about flying?"
“I'm not sure.”
"Wind it is."
"I've died multiple times," Yogi said. "There's not a lot left that scares m—"
Jeff locked his fingers. The wind came up underneath Yogi and lifted him off his feet like a hand under a kite.
"Why am I spinning."
"Working on it!"
"WORK FASTER."