It's warm and beautiful.

I'm smiling and dreaming of the beach. The reality is much different. The ground is hard, not sandy at all. I can feel the sun on my face though. I open my eyes.

I'm laying in the entrance of a cave. The front is built up with different color stones. Emma is sitting up closer to a smoking pit, which I guess contained a fire last night.

She's eating some leafy greens. The monster nowhere to be seen. I hug her.

"I'm ok Lus. I'm really ok." I'm crying, but so is she. I'm just glad we're alive, alive and out of that cave. It isn't lost on me that I'm currently at the entrance to a new, larger cave.

I leave Em to explore the area. There are steep cliffs all around. We're on some kind of huge plateau as far as I can tell. The trees are pretty thick, and I'm too tired to climb very high.

I smile because I can't remember the last time I climbed a tree. I've been living in the city for a long time, but growing up rural Vermont meant that I spent a lot of time in the woods. Nothing's exactly the same here, but I've got a good idea of what we can eat and what might kill us. I can also tell we're pretty far from where we started out. Vegetation looks fairly different than where we started.