Michael's jaw went slack.
For a heartbeat, the world held its breath with him.
The cup hung there in the blonde woman's hand, tipped at a wrong angle.
The water didn't spill.
It hardened.
A jagged growth of ice surged up and over the rim as the escaping sheet of water flash-froze in mid-arc. The freeze didn't stop at making it solid—it kept going, the ice thrusting outward in a tapering spike as if the spill had decided to become structure. White mist curled around the blonde woman's fingers. Rime raced along the cup's lip.
For a heartbeat, the world held still.
The spike continued to grow.
It wasn't a web or a lattice—just one hard, tapering pillar of ice, the spilled water flash-frozen and driven downward with intent. It struck the floor with a sharp crack and held there, bracing the cup at its wrong angle as if the spill had decided to become a support. The air around the blonde woman's hand whitened; fine mist curled and vanished. Frost raced along the cup's lip.
Then everything moved again.
The spike shivered.
It cracked with a brittle tick that became a sharp snap, and the frozen brace collapsed. Ice clattered across the floor in bright, hard pieces—skittering, chiming against the wood, sliding to a stop. The cup stayed in the blonde woman's grip, trembling, a thin film of frost clinging to it.
Michael's legs went out from under him.
He landed on his back with a dull thud. The breath whooshed out of his lungs, and the strange razor-sharp awareness he'd been riding on just… vanished. One moment he'd felt like his mind was running twenty threads at once; the next, it was like someone had yanked the plug.
All that was left was exhaustion. Heavy, bone-deep, all through his undersized body.
"Ow," he thought uselessly.
For a few seconds he just lay there, staring up at the ceiling, heart pounding in his chest, every muscle trembling. His thoughts tried to sprint ahead and kept tripping over themselves.
He replayed what he'd seen: water, turning to ice. A spill becoming a spike.
"That's not how anything works," he told himself, because the alternative was admitting he had no idea what the hell just happened.
Footsteps hammered across the room.
She was there in an instant, all wide eyes and wild breath. Her gaze flicked between the scattered ice, the frost-rimed cup, and him sprawled on the floor. He expected her to stare at the impossible part.
Instead, her focus locked onto him and stayed there.
She scooped him up like someone had cut strings inside her and this was the only motion left.
Her hands shook a little as she checked him over, fingers brushing over his head, his arms, his ribs. Her voice tumbled out in that strange language—sharp at first, then softening, like she'd started with a curse and fallen back into a lullaby.
He didn't catch a word, but he knew panic when he heard it.
And relief.
The ice on the floor might as well not have existed.
She carried him back to the crib and laid him down with exaggerated care, as if he might fall apart if she moved too quickly. The blanket came up around him, tucked just right. Her face was still too pale. Her mouth pressed into a thin line as she studied him.
He realized, distantly, that he wasn't crying.
No tears. No wailing. Just fast breathing and trembling limbs.
For an infant who had just taken a fall, that probably wasn't normal.
The woman seemed to notice. She brushed a thumb under his eye, as if expecting to find wetness there, and frowned when there was nothing. For a second, confusion flickered through her expression, something like, Why aren't you making a fuss?
Then her shoulders dropped a fraction. Whatever questions she had, she shelved them in favor of stroking his hair—what little of it there was—and murmuring whatever passed for a lullaby in this place.
Her voice, even without meaning, was… nice.
He let himself relax into the sound, just a little. His eyelids grew heavy. The adrenaline spike bled out, leaving nothing but a hollow tiredness.
He drifted under.
**
When he surfaced again, the light had changed.
The room was dimmer, shadows longer. He had no idea if it had been hours or most of a day. Time, without clocks or beeping machines, blurred together.
The first thing he saw was a curtain of blonde hair.
She was slumped in a chair pushed right up against the crib, her head resting on folded arms by his pillow. Someone—maybe her husband, almost certainly—had draped a blanket over her shoulders. It had slipped down one side, threatening to fall.
Her face, in sleep, looked younger. Softer. The constant edge of worry he'd seen while she was awake had smoothed out, leaving only fatigue.
He stared at her for a moment, listening to the slow, even rhythm of her breathing.
There were a thousand things he could think right now. He chose the simplest: She stayed.
She could've left him alone in the crib and gone to deal with… whatever adults dealt with in this world. Instead, she'd planted herself right next to him and stayed until she passed out.
It shouldn't have mattered. It did.
He eased his head a little to the side, wincing at how much effort that took, and looked up at the ceiling. The incident with the water came roaring back.
Water becoming ice. A spike growing from a spill.
If water freezes that fast, something has to rip a lot of energy out of it. Fast. Usually, the environment pays for that. He and Aerwyna should have felt it—air biting cold, skin tightening, breath fogging thick.
They hadn't.
Not beyond that brief curl of white mist around her hand.
"It froze," he thought. "But the heat didn't go here*."
His skin prickled at the memory.
Aerwyna hadn't reacted to it the way he had. No staring at the ice like it was blasphemy. Just one quick look, then all her attention on him. Shock, yes—but more the "my baby is walking" kind than "the universe just broke in front of me" kind.
So either this kind of thing was normal for her, or she had stranger priorities than he did.
He wasn't sure which option was worse.
"New universe?" he wondered. "Different constants? Or same universe, different… add-ons?"
His brain defaulted to the frameworks it knew best. Multiverse theories. Braneworlds. Pocket universes sliding alongside each other, each with their own slight tweaks to the rules. On Earth, this kind of data would have gotten him laughed at, then, if it held up, handed a Nobel and his pick of institutional funding.
Here, it just made him a confused baby in a crib.
Working off the little he'd seen so far, he couldn't even be sure this wasn't still Earth. The language sounded like someone had smashed German and Latin together and then let it mutate for a few centuries. Maybe he'd been flung forward. Or backward. Or sideways.
He caught himself spiraling and forced a slow breath.
"You don't even know what the night sky looks like yet," he reminded himself. "You're making universes out of a cup of water."
Still, the image lingered. Ice climbing the rim. A frozen brace, grown in a blink.
Even if he grudgingly accepted that he'd… died and woken up in a new body, part of him clung to smaller explanations. Time travel. Some bizarre experiment. A simulation run by a very, very bored god.
The more he tried to make simulations fit, the less they did.
He had to make something of his situation for now.
First: accept that, for now, he was stuck in this body.
The earlier exertion had proved his body wasn't normal infant stock. Bones too dense. Muscles too quick to answer when he slipped into that strange, heightened state. But the crash afterward was real. He didn't know what would happen if he strained himself at that was a scare in of itself.
Second: learn the language.
Without words, he was deaf and mute in the ways that mattered. He needed nouns, verbs, names. He needed to know what they called him when they weren't panicking, and what they called each other when they thought he wasn't paying attention.
With his memory, vocabulary wouldn't be the problem. Getting enough examples to reverse-engineer their grammar would just take time and patience.
Third: figure out where he sat in the social mess.
Their clothes weren't cheap. The nursery was simple, but well-made. No obvious signs of poverty. The way Aerwyna carried herself, the way Reitz had looked and moved earlier—there had been an ease there, a lack of fear around anyone walking in on them.
That suggested some level of status. Nobility, or something like it.
If he had landed in the equivalent of a noble house in a world where people could freeze water into spikes without screaming, then he had… options. And responsibilities he'd never asked for.
Fourth: test the world.
Not now. Later. When he could stand without feeling like his spine would fold in half.
He could start small. Drop toys. Watch how fast they fell. Scratch metal against stone and listen for familiar timbres. Stir hot water and cold together. Nothing fancy. Just… watch, measure, compare.
If gravity and basic chemistry held up, he could treat this place as "Earth with extras" rather than "new universe entirely." His comfort level with that distinction was embarrassingly low for someone supposed to be dead, but he'd take what he could get.
Lastly: take stock of the body, properly.
It still bothered him, the ease with which he'd moved when he'd pushed himself earlier. Babies weren't supposed to pull themselves upright like that. The gap between "normal infant" and whatever he was now felt important.
"Why did that state make everything so sharp?" he wondered. "Why did it make moving easier? What exactly did I do?"
He replayed the feeling: the sense of something spreading out from him, brushing the room, then snapping back through his limbs, turning jitters into semi-coherent movement.
He didn't have a good label for it. He didn't trust any label yet. But he knew it wasn't nothing.
As a scientist, all of this should have been pure gold. New data. New rules. A playground of unknowns.
As a human being who'd already died once, it was terrifying.
He closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the blonde woman's breathing again. Inhale. Exhale. Steady, warm, so close he could have reached out and brushed her arm if his own would cooperate.
He hadn't asked to be here. He hadn't asked for her, or Reitz, or the strange second chance wrapped in this unnerving package.
He also hadn't asked for her to stay.
The thought softened something in his chest that he refused to name.
Drowsiness crept up on him again, creeping under his skin, dragging his thoughts down. His muscles felt like they'd been swapped for wet cloth. Every blink came slower than the last.
He fought it for a little while, out of habit more than anything. Old instincts said: don't sleep in strange places. Don't let your guard down unless you have to.
But his guard, at the moment, was about the size and strength of a housecat.
His vision blurred around the edges. The ceiling smeared. The warm shape of Aerwyna beside him was the last solid thing left.
Sleep was going to win.
"Poor woman," he thought as his eyes slid shut. "Having a freak for a child."