Maya POV
The floor tilted beneath my feet.
Not a small shake. Not an earthquake tremor. The entire fortieth floor of Westbridge Tower—my building, the one I'd designed, calculated, and triple-checked—dropped three inches to the left.
"Everyone out!" I screamed, but my voice drowned in the screech of twisting steel.
My assistant Jenny grabbed my arm. "Maya, come on!"
I yanked free. Twenty-three workers on this floor. I'd memorized every name, every face. I was the lead architect. These were my people. "Go! I need to check the eastern support columns!"
"You'll die—"
"GO!"
Jenny ran. Smart girl. I sprinted toward the construction area, my hard hat bouncing against my skull. The blueprints flashed through my mind like a movie. Eastern columns were load-bearing. If they failed, the whole building would fold like a house of cards.
Please let it be a minor shift. Please let everyone have time.
The floor groaned again. A sound that made my bones vibrate. Steel doesn't groan unless something's catastrophically wrong.
I rounded the corner and my heart stopped.
The main support beam—solid steel, rated for three times the building's weight—had a crack running through it like a lightning bolt. How? I'd inspected this personally last week. The metal was perfect. This shouldn't exist.
My radio crackled. "Maya Chen, evacuate immediately! The building is compromised!"
"I see it," I gasped into the radio. "The contractors used substandard steel. Oh God, they switched out the materials—"
The world exploded.
Not fire. Worse. The sound of a thousand car crashes happening at once. Metal screaming as it sheared apart. Concrete pulverizing into dust. The floor beneath me didn't just tilt—it disappeared.
I fell.
Forty stories of free fall through collapsing building. Chunks of concrete the size of cars tumbled past me. Steel beams spun like deadly spears. Dust so thick I couldn't see, couldn't breathe, couldn't scream even though my mouth was open.
I'm twenty-eight years old and I'm going to die because someone wanted to save money on steel.
Time stretched like taffy. I saw everything. Jenny's terrified face as she ran. The crack in the beam spreading like a wound. My coffee cup still sitting on my desk, steam rising from it. I'd never drink coffee again. Never see my mom. Never design another building. Never fall in love because I'd been too busy with work, always telling myself I had time.
A concrete slab slammed into my side. Pain exploded through my ribs. The world spun. More impacts—shoulder, leg, back. Each one should have killed me. Maybe they were killing me and my brain just hadn't caught up yet.
Please let it be quick. Please don't let me be crushed slowly, buried alive, suffocating in the dark—
Something massive hit my head.
Everything went black.
I woke up choking.
Not on dust. On air. Clean air that tasted wrong—too sweet, too thick, like breathing honey.
My eyes snapped open. Trees towered above me, but they were wrong. Too tall. Too thick. Leaves the size of dinner plates in colors that didn't exist—purple, silver, deep crimson. The sky between the branches glowed violet instead of blue.
Hallucinating. I'm hallucinating from head trauma. I'm actually dying in the rubble and my brain is showing me pretty things as it shuts down.
Except the pain was too real. My ribs screamed with every breath. Blood trickled down my forehead. My business suit was shredded, hanging off me in strips. Cuts covered my arms and legs.
I tried to sit up. Bad idea. The world tilted sideways. I vomited into the strange purple grass, heaving until nothing came up but bile.
"Okay," I whispered to myself, a habit from working alone late at night. "Okay, Maya. Think. Assess the situation."
Situation: Impossible forest. Wrong-colored sky. Body broken but moving. No building collapse around me. No rubble. No screaming workers. Just alien wilderness.
This isn't real. It can't be real.
A roar shattered the silence.
Not a lion roar. Not a bear. Something that made every animal instinct I had scream RUN. Deep, guttural, ending in a shriek that hurt my ears.
Another roar answered from a different direction. Then another. And another.
Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
I forced myself to stand despite my screaming ribs. My legs shook but held. Engineering brain kicked in automatically: assess, plan, execute.
Assessment: Unknown environment. Multiple threats. Zero resources. High probability of death.
Plan: Find shelter. Find water. Find out what the hell is happening.
Execute: Move. Now.
I stumbled forward through the trees, using trunks for support. Every step hurt. My vision swam. Maybe I was dying. Maybe this was the final hallucination before my brain gave up.
Then I heard something worse than roars.
Voices.
Male voices, deep and aggressive, speaking a language I shouldn't understand but somehow did. The words formed in my head like magic.
"The eastern border is ours!"
"You cross the marker stones, you die!"
"Then we die fighting, wolf-scum!"
I pushed through a massive fern and froze.
A clearing stretched before me. In it, two groups of... things... fought with claws and fangs and brutal strength. They looked like men—muscular, tall, humanoid. But they had animal features. Fur. Tails. Wolf ears. Tiger stripes. They moved with inhuman speed, tearing at each other, blood spraying across the grass.
Not real. Not real. Head trauma. Dying.
Except it felt completely, terrifyingly real.
One of them—a massive creature covered in brown bear fur—grabbed another by the throat and lifted him off the ground with one hand. The victim's wolf-like face twisted in agony.
I must have made a sound. A gasp. A whimper. Something.
Because twenty heads turned toward me in perfect unison.
The fighting stopped.
Silence crashed down like a physical weight.
Then one of them—a lean tiger-man with orange and black stripes—smiled. It wasn't a friendly smile. It was the smile of a predator seeing prey.
"A female," he purred, the words somehow reaching me clearly across the clearing. "An unclaimed, unmarked female."
Run, my brain screamed. RUN NOW.
But I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything but stare as three of them broke away from their groups and started walking toward me.
Not walking.
Stalking.
Like I was a wounded deer and they were starving wolves.
My paralysis broke. I spun and ran.
Behind me, I heard them laugh.
Then I heard them chase.
And I knew, with absolute certainty, that whatever killed me in that building collapse, whatever brought me to this nightmare world—
—it hadn't finished with me yet.
The worst was still coming.