The drone didn't attack.
It just hovered there, camera-eye staring, like a fly that learned how to film.
Raku squinted at it. "You think that thing followed us from the facility?"
Osio wiped glowing leaf dust off his face. "If it did, I hope it sends an apology to my spine."
The drone drifted a little higher, adjusting its angle. A small red light blinked on its side. Somewhere far above, some half-dead server probably stirred and pretended it hadn't retired years ago.
"Stop looking at us like that," Osio told it. "Pay for the trauma first."
Raku shook water from his hair. "Ignore it. If it wants to be weird, let it be weird. We need to figure out where we are before something eats us."
"Bold assumption that something hasn't already tried," Osio muttered, glancing up at where they'd fallen from.
The pond behind them glowed softly, disturbed surface slowly calming. Bioluminescent trees leaned over the water. The sideways rivers in the air glided past like lazy snakes made of glass.
Raku turned in a slow circle.
No obvious path. Just forest in every direction—glowing trunks, dangling roots, plants that looked like they'd voted against chlorophyll and gone for neon instead.
A faint breeze carried the smell of damp earth and something sweet, like fruit left out too long.
His stomach growled.
Loud.
Osio raised an eyebrow. "Wow. Your organs are really out here trying to solo this new world."
"I'm hungry," Raku said. "And we fell through a building and half the planet, so forgive my digestive system for complaining."
Osio opened his mouth to answer.
A twig cracked somewhere nearby.
Both of them froze.
Raku's heart jumped into his throat. He scanned the trees, body remembering gorilla and anomaly claws and deciding to panic first, ask questions later.
"Did you hear—"
"Yeah," Osio whispered. "Definitely not the wind. Wind doesn't step on things."
Leaves rustled.
Something moved between the glowing trunks. Light shifted, shapes flickered.
Raku took a breath and grabbed the nearest object that looked like it could be used as a weapon—a branch thicker than his wrist, heavy and damp. He held it in both hands like a discount baseball bat.
The drone drifted sideways to get a better angle.
"Of course you're still here," Raku muttered.
Osio shuffled closer, putting himself partly behind Raku. "If it's another science project, punch it before it fills out any forms."
A figure stepped out from behind a tree.
It was not a monster.
It was a girl.
She looked maybe a year younger than them, maybe their age—it was hard to tell under the glow. Her hair was dark and pulled back with a strip of cloth. Her skin had the pale look of someone who didn't see real sunlight, but her eyes were clear and sharp, reflecting the forest light.
She wore a short, layered tunic, patched in places, with a belt full of small tools and pouches. Her feet were bare and dirty, toes gripping the moss like she was part of the landscape.
She looked at them.
Then at the overturned chair.
Then at the drone.
Her head tilted very slightly.
"You're loud," she said.
Raku blinked.
The language was the same as theirs. Accent different, a little stretched in places, but fully understandable.
Osio leaned toward Raku. "Okay, so we're dead," he whispered. "This is clearly a tutorial NPC."
Raku elbowed him. "Hi," he said to the girl, voice cracking a bit. "We, uh… fell."
She glanced up at the ceiling—at the distant mist, the veins of light, the impossible height.
"I saw," she said. "You broke three branches on the way down."
"Sorry?" Raku said automatically.
Osio lifted a finger. "Just to clarify, you're not, like, here to stab us, right? Or harvest our organs? Or sell us to the nearest weird lab?"
The girl's eyebrows crept up. "Why would I want your organs?"
Osio looked genuinely offended. "Wow. Okay. Rude. I'm sure they're very high quality."
She ignored that.
Instead, she stepped forward and crouched by the edge of the pond, scooping some water into her hand. She let it run through her fingers, watching the ripples disturb the light.
"You're surface-born," she said.
Raku's throat went dry. "How do you know that?"
"You fell," she said simply. "People from here don't fall from there."
She pointed up again.
"Also," she added, eyeing Osio's half-untucked uniform shirt and Raku's soaked hoodie, "you're dressed like stories."
"Stories," Osio repeated. "Like… fairy tales? Legends? 'Once upon a time, there were two dumb idiots who ignored warning signs'?"
She frowned, thinking.
"They tell us about sky-people who used to visit more often," she said. "Before the cracks went quiet. Before the last big sleep."
Raku exchanged a look with Osio.
"Big sleep?" he asked carefully.
"Later," she said. She stood up, dusting her hands on her tunic. "If you stay here, something will find you. The wrong kind. Come."
"Come where?" Osio asked.
"Luma," she said, as if that explained everything.
Raku's brain filed the name away. "Is that… a village?"
She considered that. "It's where we live," she said. "You look like you might die if no one feeds you. Luma has food."
His stomach growled again, answering for him.
Osio smirked. "Okay, well, she makes a strong argument."
Raku hesitated.
He'd been kidnapped, drugged, thrown into murder rooms, then dropped into an impossible forest. Trusting the first stranger they met felt like a terrible idea. But staying here, in the open, with who-knew-what watching from the trees and the ceiling…
He glanced at the drone.
It drifted a little closer, red light blinking faster now, like a curious eye.
"Fine," Raku said. "We'll come. But if you try to sell us, just know I punch harder than I look."
She looked him over, clearly unconvinced. "You look like you fell on your face."
Osio snorted. "She's got you there."
"What's your name?" Raku asked, trying not to sound as exhausted as he felt.
The girl paused.
"People here call me lots of things," she said. "But my grandmother named me Lila."
"Lila," Raku repeated. "I'm Raku. This is Osio."
Osio gave a small wave. "Osio Bonodefasi, professional fall survivor."
Lila stared at him for a beat too long, then turned away.
"Come," she said again.
She started walking, bare feet silent on the glowing moss.
Raku and Osio followed.
The drone came too, buzzing softly behind them.
Osio glanced back at it. "Creepiest third wheel ever."
The forest was stranger up close.
Some of the glowing "leaves" weren't leaves at all, but thin, flat fungi clinging to the trunks, pulsing faintly in time with their own rhythm. Insects the size of Raku's thumb flickered through the air, leaving trails of light behind them like tiny comets.
Every step released new smells—wet bark, mineral water, something floral, something sour.
Osio reached out to poke a plant that looked like a cross between a fern and a jellyfish.
Lila smacked his hand without looking back. "Don't touch that."
"Why?" he complained, nursing his hand. "It looks squishy."
"It bites," she said. "And then you forget things."
"Okay," he said. "New rule: I don't touch the brain-eraser plants."
She stopped once to pull a round, glowing fruit off a low branch. It fit neatly into her palm, faintly translucent, like a lantern made of jelly.
She tossed it to Raku.
He almost dropped it. "What's this?"
"Memfruit," she said. "You're hungry."
He looked at it warily. "Does it bite too?"
"Only if you insult it," Osio muttered.
Lila actually snorted at that—quiet, surprised, like she hadn't meant to.
"It shows you something you remember," she said. "Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. But it fills your stomach. One each."
"One each?" Osio perked up. "That's a terrible loophole to tell us about."
He grabbed one off another branch before she could argue.
Raku stared at the fruit in his hands.
It was warm.
Not like it had been in the sun—there was no sun here—but like it was holding onto a memory of heat.
"What happens if I don't want to see anything?" he asked.
"Then eat slowly," Lila said. "Or don't eat. But you look like you'll fall over if the wind gets slightly emotional."
Osio had already taken a huge bite.
"Bro," Raku warned. "We don't know if that's safe—"
Osio froze.
His eyes unfocused.
Raku panicked. "Osio? Osio?"
Osio blinked rapidly. A slow smile spread over his face.
"I'm on the roof," he said softly.
Raku frowned. "What?"
"We're on the school roof," Osio said, still staring somewhere far away. "It's that day before the exams, remember? You brought those terrible chips. I said they tasted like cardboard with depression."
Raku's grip tightened on his own fruit.
He remembered.
The cheap chips, the wind on the rooftop, the way the city looked almost pretty from up there. Osio pretending to drop his phone off the edge just to watch Raku have a heart attack.
"It lets you… relive it?" Raku asked.
Osio chewed slowly, the glow from the fruit flickering against his cheek.
"Not exactly," he said. "More like… it plays it in your head while you're still here. Like watching two screens at once."
Lila plucked another fruit and bit into it without ceremony.
"My grandmother says they grow from old days," she said. "The forest keeps everything that falls into it."
Raku looked down at the Memfruit.
"Everything," he repeated.
He lifted it to his mouth and took a small bite.
Sweetness flooded his tongue—sharp and bright at first, then soft, like biting into a memory of summer he'd never had. The glow from the fruit brightened, and the forest around him blurred at the edges.
He was sitting at the kitchen table again, pencil in hand, homework spread out in front of him.
His mom stood at the stove, humming under her breath, stirring something that smelled like garlic and tomatoes. The window was open. The city noise felt far away.
"Raku," she said without turning, "don't forget your jacket tomorrow. They said it might rain."
"What's rain?" he'd joked.
She'd thrown a napkin at him without looking.
He swallowed.
The forest snapped back into focus.
His chest ached.
He stared at the half-eaten fruit, now pulsing very gently, as if it knew it had hit something tender.
"That was…" He cleared his throat. "Okay. That was weird."
Osio wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. "No, man, I'm fine," he said before anyone could comment. "I always cry when food's good."
Lila eyed them both, then looked away, as if the air had gotten too personal for her liking.
"You're slow," she said. "Luma is close. Eat and walk."
They walked.
The drone followed, a silent shadow.
The forest gradually thickened, trees growing closer together. The ground sloped gently up, then leveled out on a kind of natural terrace.
Raku noticed it first: rope.
Thin, sturdy lines stretching between trees, almost invisible in the glow. Some hung vertically like ladders; others formed handrails or barriers.
Ahead, light brightened.
"Stay behind me," Lila said.
Osio whispered, "That's usually a boss-room thing to say."
They pushed through a curtain of leaves.
And stepped into Luma.
Luma wasn't a city.
It wasn't even a village in the surface sense.
It was a cluster of platforms and walkways woven into the trees themselves, suspended above the glowing ground. Wooden planks, knotted rope, bits of repurposed metal. Lanterns hung from branches—some real flame, some glowing stones in cages.
People moved along the bridges: carrying baskets, talking quietly, tending to hanging plants. A child ran past, bare feet thudding on the boards, chased by a slightly older child holding a wooden stick like a sword.
Raku and Osio froze at the edge of the clearing.
Every head turned toward them.
Conversations stopped.
The air tightened.
Lila stepped forward.
"They fell," she said simply. "From the Veil. They're surface-born."
Murmurs rippled through the crowd.
An older man with braided gray hair and a scar down one cheek stepped out from a higher platform, leaning on the railing. He wore layered cloth armor and carried a spear that looked like it had actually been used, not just for show.
His eyes were sharp.
"Sky-people," he said slowly. "Again."
Raku's spine went cold.
"Again?!" Osio whispered.
A frail voice cut through the tension.
"Don't just stand there," an old woman snapped from somewhere up on the platforms. "If they fell that far and lived, the least you can do is offer them a seat before the forest decides it wants them back."
The man with the spear didn't smile, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
He lifted his spear and pointed it—not at Raku, but at the drone hovering behind them.
"And who," he asked, "invited that?"
The drone turned its lens toward him slowly, as if offended.
Raku swallowed.
He had a feeling whatever happened next, "normal" was officially not on the table anymore.