Life before the global rift opening wasn't glamorous. It wasn't even particularly happy, most days. It was just busy. The never-ending kind of busy that grinds you down until you forget you ever had a hobby that wasn't folding laundry or googling "why won't my toddler eat anything that isn't beige."
Diapers. School runs. Grocery shopping on a Sunday night because you finally have thirty minutes to yourself and you spend them staring at pasta shapes. I knew exactly which brand of wipes didn't tear.
I knew which snack would stop a tantrum before it fully ignited. I knew the precise tone of voice that meant "I am not angry, I am just disappointed," which works on a seven-year-old but absolutely does not work on a three-year-old.
That was my life. Small. Tiring. Mine.
Then reality between time and space shattered.
I don't know the science of it. I don't think anyone does. One day the news was talking about the USA and Iran, political scandals and celebrity breakups, and the next day they were showing footage of a crack in the sky above Tokyo.
Green light pouring out like a wound. Then another crack over Cairo. Red that time. Then London. Then Mexico City. Then everywhere.
In my city alone, we got five massive rifts. And one of the highest-ranking ones internationally.
I don't know what the government guys used to measure rank. Color, maybe? Green, yellow, orange, red, then purple. That seemed to be the pattern. Green was bad but manageable, like a weather warning. Red meant the National Guard got involved. And purple?
You don't want purple.
Our city had a massive purple one. A high-end rift that vomited monsters. Not the kind from movies, either. These things were wrong in ways that hurt to look at. Too many joints. Skin that moved like it was thinking for itself.
They came out of that purple tear in the sky above the old industrial district, and they ate people. Dozens died every day. The news stopped reporting exact numbers after the first week because the numbers made people stop going outside entirely, and the economy can't survive that.
So we adapted. We learned which streets to avoid. We learned the curfew. We learned that if you saw purple light from a distance, you ran the other way and didn't look back.
That was the plan, anyway.
The plan did not account for me being mid-diaper change.
My youngest, Lily, one and a half, red hair like her father, a scream that could shatter glass, had just executed a perfect escape maneuver. One second she was on the changing mat, the next she was naked from the waist down, crawling toward the TV stand with the kind of speed that made me question whether she was secretly an Olympic athlete.
"Mama no," I said, which is the grammatical equivalent of a toddler's logic, but she understood. She stopped. Looked at me with those huge blue eyes. Considered her options.
She chose chaos.
I lunged. Got her by one ankle. She shrieked with laughter as I dragged her back to the mat. The clean diaper was in my left hand. The wipes were scattered. There was a faint smell that suggested we were running out of time.
Upstairs, my middle daughter, Mia, three years old, feral energy, currently convinced she was a cat, was hissing at her older sister. I could hear it through the ceiling. The actual hissing. Like a cat.
"Stop hissing at your sister!" I yelled.
"She stole my crayon!" That was Chloe, seven years old, dramatic, currently in her "I'm the victim of an international conspiracy" phase.
"I didn't steal it! I borrowed it!"
"You didn't ask!"
"Mia, give it back. Chloe, stop screaming like someone's dying. I'll be up in one minute. One minute. I'm timing it."
Lily chose that moment to produce a truly impressive amount of bodily fluid. I sighed. I wiped. I reached for the new diaper.
And then the apartment turned purple.
Not like a lightbulb. Not like a sunset. Like someone had dipped the entire world in purple ink. The walls. The carpet. My hands. Lily's confused little face. All of it washed out and replaced by that color,the color from the news, the color they told us to run from, the color you don't want.
I looked at the window.
The purple rift had opened. Not miles away over the industrial district. Not at a safe distance where we could pretend it wasn't our problem.
It was right outside our apartment building. The glass of the window was gone,not shattered, just absent, like someone had erased it,and beyond that absence was a swirling vortex of purple light and something that looked like the inside of a storm cloud if the storm cloud hated you personally.
I had time to think one thing: I'm still holding the diaper.
Then the vacuum hit.
Not a real vacuum. Not the kind you push across the carpet while your kids scream about which cartoon they want to watch. This was a force, a pull, that grabbed me by the lungs and the ribs and the skin and yanked.
I felt my feet leave the ground. I heard Lily scream, a thin sound of pure confusion, because her mommy was floating toward the window and that wasn't supposed to happen.
I tried to grab her. I really did. But my hands were full of diaper and my body was already through the window frame, and then I was outside, and then I was in the light, and then I wasn't in my city anymore.
The fall lasted forever and no time at all.
I tumbled through purple. There were other people,I saw them, spinning past me like leaves in a storm. A man in a bathrobe, coffee mug still in his hand. A teenager in pajamas, eyes wide, mouth open in a scream I couldn't hear.
An elderly woman clutching a cat carrier. Dozens of us. Hundreds. All snatched from our apartments, our streets, our lives, and poured into this impossible space like water from a broken jug.
We fell together. We screamed together. Nobody heard anybody.
Then the purple parted, and we dropped.
The ground came up fast,dirt, not pavement, dark and soft and covered in something that looked like moss but smelled like rust. I hit it shoulder-first and rolled, which is not a skill I possess, so I assume the ground was simply softer than it looked.
Other bodies thudded down around me. The man in the bathrobe landed badly. I heard something crack. He didn't get up.
I lay there for a moment, staring at the sky. Except it wasn't a sky. It was a ceiling of purple mist, churning slowly, lit from within by that same sickly glow. No sun. No stars. Just mist and the occasional flicker of what might have been lightning.
The forest.
That's what my brain called it, because my brain needed a word. But it wasn't a forest like any I'd seen. The trees, if they were trees, had bark that looked wet and veined, like the underside of a tongue.
Their branches didn't fork so much as bleed into thinner and thinner strands until they disappeared into the mist. And the mist itself made a sound. A low, constant hum that vibrated in my teeth.
Not a hum.
A scream. Distant and layered, like a thousand voices all screaming at once, faded to a whisper.