I wasn’t nearly so cold as I’d been the night before. Despite the dampness of my clothes, the heap of moss provided good insulation. I woke feeling cramped and filthy, and with a headache and a stomach ache, but at least I’d slept.

When I pushed my way out of the moss, I was met with an audience — dozens of tree-’puses covered the trunks and larger branches all around me. Several had even come down onto the ground, turning green to blend with the ferns and mosses.

As soon as I appeared, the closer ones began to hold out offerings. I didn’t feel much like eating, but I collected worms, snails, frogs, moths, and other creatures, thanking each ’pus for its gift. The cache included several more huge dragonflies. Their bodies were longer than my hand. I’d never seen ones so big.

No, that wasn’t quite right. I had seen huge dragonflies before — in drawings of the prehistoric Earth.

Maybe some essence-worker had made this place millions of years ago.

How many millions?

I looked at my collection of dead creatures. There were no mammals or birds.

Well, whenever the place had been made, I still had to find help. I stood up and squared my shoulders.

“Guys,” I said to the tree-’puses, “I’m going to keep heading uphill, today. I need to find a village or a road or something, someone who can help me get back to my world.”

Dozens of oblong pupils stared back at me silently.

“Thank you for taking care of me. I really appreciate it.”

I gathered the food offerings up and was momentarily stymied on how to carry them. Eventually I took off the T-shirt I was wearing under my sweater and bundled the creatures up in it. Hardly ideal, but it should keep them contained. I would eat them as soon as my stomach settled.

I looked for the tree-’pus who’d accompanied me the day before and found it on the same trunk. It reached several tentacles out to me.

“Are you sure you want to come with me, little guy? I’m taking you farther and farther from your home.”

It kept stretching toward me, detaching a few more tentacles to reach out.

I was torn. It might be helpful to have the ’pus with me, but if I found help, I might have to leave it someplace where there was no good habitat for it.

The ’pus had seven tentacles stretched out to me and was clinging to the trunk with just one. Its skin was pulsing from blue and cream to pearly white.

“Okay, okay,” I said, going over so it could climb onto my hip. “I hope you understand, little fellow.”

It settled itself on my jeans. One of its tentacles snuck under my sweater, and its suckers gripped my bare skin — damp and shivery.

Waving goodbye to the other tree-’puses, I headed uphill.

As it turned out, my ’pus had nothing to worry about — I found nothing all day except massive trees, rain, and a steady incline. I stopped a few hours into my walk to eat the more bearable of my food choices, giving the extras to my passenger. Then I continued on, hour after hour.

By late afternoon, I hurt all over. Not only was every muscle in my body screaming, but as I grew more fatigued, I fell down more, so I had a lot of new bruises. Fortunately, the ’pus proved adept at flinging itself away from me when I fell, so I hadn’t landed on it.

When evening approached, I assembled another moss pile for sleeping. I was again provisioned by the tree-’puses.

As I ate, I felt my mind worrying a bad thought that hadn’t quite emerged from my subconscious.

Well, best to keep it buried, I thought. Likely there’d be nothing I could do about it, anyway. I crawled into my moss and went to sleep.

Unfortunately, when I woke up, the bad thought was parked in the center of my mind, all touched up with fresh paint and a body kit.

The S-Em was made up of multiple strata, Cordus’s document had said — layered versions of parts of the world, as reshaped by different workers. Most of the strata were connected to others, but some weren’t. My thought was this: what if I couldn’t get from here to somewhere else? More importantly, what if others couldn’t get from somewhere else to here?

I’d assumed there would be people here, even if this part of the S-Em was made before humans evolved. After all, humans were nothing if not colonizers. All of the Earth had been around for eons before humans evolved, and we’d covered the whole planet.

But what if people had never found their way to this place? What if I was the only vertebrate here bigger than a frog?

Should I have stayed down near the shore?

No, what would be the point of that? I had to look for help. It was either that or hunker down and wait for a rescue that might never happen. And hope the tree-’puses remained generous. That was no way to confront my situation. I’d be back in passive-victim mode.

It was better to try to find help. If Cordus had sent a rescue party, they’d be tracking me and would probably catch up to me quickly.

I just had to keep looking for people — a village, a shack, a road, anything.

Resolved, I gathered up my ’pus and the morning offerings, and headed uphill.

By the end of the day, I still hadn’t reached the summit. The mountain seemed to go on forever.

As I bedded down for the night, I watched the ’puses on the trees around me. There was a period every evening, right around dusk, when they abandoned their camouflage and put on a short symphony of color. It started as I lay there. Pulses and flashes of color lit up the trunks and branches as far as I could see. They hit every shade in the rainbow, and then some, the colors moving across the forest in vast waves.

The display was completely silent and quite beautiful. Even as exhausted and frightened as I was, it was hard not to be filled with wonder. How many people got to see something like this?

Not many, I thought.

Let’s just hope you’re not the only one, ever, pessimistic Beth chimed in.