He died with the wrong orange eating a tower and one last, stubborn thought—At least I did one thing right. Then the world pinholed and went out.
Darkness took him.
Not clouded night. Not sleep. A perfect, airless black—like being lowered into a puddle of oil big enough to drown the idea of sound. No weight. No breath. No time. He tried to count to ten to calm himself, the way you count sheep before bed, but he lost the numbers in the sludge of his thoughts. Pictures rose and fell in rapid succession: every failure, every rejection, the stumbles no one saw and the small kindnesses no one clapped for. It felt like judgment. He didn't know why he was seeing it, only that something seemed to be waiting for regret to bite—and Bruce felt no such thing. He'd never been chosen, never been celebrated, never figured out how to make friends or how love worked. But he had carried, and lifted, and tried to leave people better than he found them. If he ached for anything, it was the work left undone: the strangers he wouldn't reach, the fires he wouldn't put out, the messes he was leaving behind—Amber struggling without him to clean the apartment, Frank and his family grieving his death, the plants on his balcony going thirsty if Amber forgot them, and those two ninja girls and the old man he'd dragged from the burning tower—were they all right?
With that last thought, the visions of his life seemed to smack against a wall inside his thick skull and fall away. A new idea surfaced.
He wanted to move, to check the world and make sure it was okay, so he tried a dumb idea—Engage thrusters—because cartoons insisted that sometimes thinking made the button press. Nothing pressed. The void stayed void, cool and endless and entirely uninterested in Bruce.
Then the black tore, as if a beast had raked it with a single claw.
A hairline seam of light opened and settled like water. Through that crystal pane he saw a summer day. Heat pooled. Color breathed. With the light came shape, and with shape the thin outline of himself—no body, just a tight white warmth the size of a fist. It pulsed slow and steady, like a second heart made of light, still learning how to beat.
He couldn't turn; the water wouldn't move; it seemed intent on showing only what it chose. The view brightened, as if seen through clear shallows: noon burning on the forgotten back corner of a parking lot hemmed by scrub and trees, one road leading in and out. Weeds leaned into cracked asphalt. A green dumpster threw a hard-edged shadow. Beyond the trees, the bored backside of a mall slouched the way buildings do when they've seen better years. He knew the bones of the place the way you know a hometown skyline—University Mall's rear lip; Vermont heat pooling where no one looked.
Half-hidden by the dumpster, a black sedan slouched on cooked shocks—boxy-shouldered, seventies or eighties, paint baked dull, plates that didn't look like they belonged, windows tinted the way people with bad ideas liked them. Dents like old medals. It was an old model and poorly kept; it shouldn't have run, and yet somehow it still did.
The scene in the water rippled and slid closer without moving. The world gave up its outside skin, and he was inside the car.
Heat lay on everything like wet wool. Air trembled. The scents came back in a rush: boiled vinyl, old cigarettes, plastic sweet as melted toy. Trash drifted across the floor—the crushed square of a juice box, a paper bag with grease spiders, shirts with the tags still on, price guns' little white flags. The smell said stolen and never worn and nobody cleaned in a while.
On the back seat a little girl with blazing red hair wrestled herself free of a too‑tight seat belt. Sun‑bleached pink cotton clung to her, thrift‑thin and ripped at the hem. Cheap sandals with dying straps slapped at her heels and then fell away as she crawled. Her blue eyes searched the cabin for a trick that would turn the oven back into a car. Heat made her breaths short and fast. She did what a six‑year‑old body could think to do: she crawled forward and mashed the horn—dead. She tugged the door pins—stuck. She worked the useless rear handle. Her fingers worried the bare metal spline where a crank should have been. She lay on her back and kicked the door until tears cut clean tracks through sweat. The air didn't want to be lungs.
No one heard. No one came.
Bruce tried to move. He meant to rip the door off, carry her out, hand her water, say something wise he'd heard Frank say and pretend it was his. But he was only a palm‑sized white light suspended above the scene, and he did not yet know how a ball of light moved. He thought left and down and go, and the light stayed exactly where it was, polite and useless.
The girl's breaths shortened to hiccups, then to almost nothing. Her mouth shaped words, a small sound you had to lean in to hear. "At least I didn't steal, I was a good girl." The sentence bloomed and hung in the oven air like a child's prayer, and she went very still.
The keyhole's view glided outward, as if the mirror itself took a step back. An old police cruiser rolled past the far mouth of the lot. Two handcuffed shapes rode the vinyl bench in back: a blond man and a red‑haired woman with blue eyes too much like the girl's. They glanced toward the weeds and the black sedan, their faces doing a quiet guilty math. The glance turned to nothing; they cursed the officer for catching them at the mall and let the cruiser carry them away. If those were her parents—and the look said they were—they were not good ones.
Bruce recognized the shape of that hurt. He had been eight when his own parents vanished from the story. There were people the world forgot on purpose and people it forgot by accident. Both kinds burned the same way.
The view pulled back again and settled on the car. To Bruce it seemed like a choice was being presented to him without words: do nothing or do something impossible. Even in death there was no rest for him it seemed, there was only the next right thing he needed to do.
And so he gathered himself—the small light that was him—and suddenly by the sheer will and want to do the right thing he flew toward the water like window in the darkness. And as he hit, the water stretched like rubber under a thumb. He pressed harder. It stretched further and thinned and then popped like a balloon, and the void spilled him into the noon sun.
Heat struck like a shove. He hung above sun-struck asphalt, no larger than a child's cupped hands. No London here: no burning tower, no Frank or his family, no sirens—just the car, the weeds, the small body already gone quiet on the back seat. He slid for her.
Metal and glass meant less than a thought. He slipped through the door skin as if it were only a suggestion, and the car—hot as an oven—shut around him. He hovered over the girl's chest. He had no plan. He only had the pressure that had driven him up stairwells and through smoke: help.
"Okay," he told no one, because talking had always made hard things easier. "Let's pretend I know what I'm doing."
He lowered himself, trying to give CPR—if such a thing could be done by a ball of light—to an unconscious girl.
Light touched heat and soft, cooling skin, but the girl's chest didn't move. First-aid class said press harder, but how did a ball of light apply force? He pressed himself more firmly against her—and without meaning to, he was drawn into her the way a prayer sinks into silence. Completely.
His world flashed white, and darkness took him again.
Unknown to him, the light sank into her chest and seated itself around the ordinary heart like a second, quieter heart—warmer, patient, unseen by mortal eyes or machines. There it began to knit with the girl's own pulse; within the sphere of light, his core settled and started becoming one with her. From that singular core, life began to bloom outward. The living brightness held him. It began to beat.
With each pulse, threads of white unspooled through the small body—veins of light tracing nerves and vessels and every road breath might travel. Light-blood ran those roads, strong at the source, fainter at the edges, leaving changed ground behind. Heat rash soothed. Small, mean scars from hard places softened. Freckles thinned to ghosts. Tangled red hair took on the crackling color of a fresh-cut rose. The body did not become a stranger; it became the best version of itself, as if some careful hand had found the dust and wiped it away.
Two hearts learned each other's rhythm—the flesh one thudding soft and mortal, the light one tapping patient time beneath. At last the first heart gathered itself and kicked. Blood moved. Breath tried to return and got it wrong—plastic and old smoke and toy-sweet air slapped him back to awareness.
A cough tore him awake.
His eyes snapped open—blue and too bright—and air clawed its way in like a rude guest. It wasn't the right kind of air. It was toy-sweet, plastic-hot, thick enough to chew. The seat under him burned like a griddle.
Move, his body decided, before his brain clocked in.
He jackknifed up—thunk—and the car's roof head-butted him back to earth. Pain rang his skull like a bell and dumped him onto the hot vinyl again.
Okay, lesson learned, he thought, blinking stars. Pain equals alive. Alive equals good.
He looked down. At… spaghetti.
Arms—skinny, pale, all noodle, no bulge. No manly biceps. No gym veins. No thick wrists. His legs were matchsticks. The torso: small. The chest: not a chest; a tiny sternum with opinions. The frame was wrong in every direction. And the dress—sun-bleached pink, torn hem—was the opposite of Neo.
He patted his face. No sunglasses.
A small panic skittered across his ribs. Sunglasses meant being Neo. Neo meant strong, and cool, and protected. No sunglasses meant… well, him. Naked, but with fabric.
He didn't get to spiral. The heat insisted—now, or don't.
Air first, Frank whispered from the emergency-drill part of Bruce's head. Then think. Then move.
"Thinking is hard," he told the oven, bell-bright voice startling in his own ears. "Moving is easy."
He went for moving.
He mashed the door pin—stuck. Yanked the handle—dead. He shoved the door with both spaghetti arms—nope. He punched the glass with his palm—owie. He tried a forehead tap for emphasis—ow ow ow. He hissed through small teeth, embarrassed at himself and at the glass for witnessing this.
"Hey," he scolded the window. "Open up. I'm a hero."
The window did not care.
Fine. The girl had tried the back. The girl had almost had it. He copied her.
He scrambled onto the rear bench, planted bare feet against the side glass, and kicked. His heels slid on sweat and vinyl. The force translated mostly into self-launch. He shot backward like a badly aimed cannonball and dropped—thump—into the footwell, ribs catching the edge of the seat on the way down. The thump had enough comedy in it that he winced and blushed at the same time, which seemed unfair.
Stars. Grit. Breath that wasn't air. Heat everywhere.
"Great plan, Bruce," he muttered, voice tiny and offended. "Ten out of ten. Very Neo."
He stayed down for a second because the floor, while horrible, was not as horrible as the seat. From down here, the car looked different: a dark cave of knee-shadows and under-seat secrets where adults never bothered to clean. Loose pennies, a fossilized fry, the square dent of a juice box. The smell sharpened—resin-sweet, toy-plastic, old smoke.
Think, imaginary Frank said again in his head, patient. Assess. Use what you've got.
What he had: a dress; bare feet; snot; tears he refused to spend; a head that hurt; and a small body that wanted water and shade and out. Also: hands. Hands were tools. Tools liked friends.
He squinted under the front seat. Something stubby and wooden waited in the shadow like buried treasure.
"Hello?" he asked the darkness—because sometimes, if you spoke to a problem, it got nervous and confessed.
The shadow did not answer, but it hinted hammer. There—under the front passenger seat—the wooden handle of what looked like a hammer. He pushed to his knees, crawled over the hump, got onto the front passager seat and reached down. His forehead clipped the glove box. It popped open, coughing up secrets: rolling papers, a bent lighter, a baggie that smelled like a skunk learned chemistry, two more with off-white powder, a pocket mirror scarred with lines, a razor, a twist of foil, a cheap plastic straw that told stories he didn't want to hear, and a pair of syringes that did not look hospital-clean.
"Yeah," he told the oven air, bell-bright voice strange in his ears. "Definitely not parent material."
The smell sharpened—resin-sweet, toy-plastic, chemical. He shoved his arm deeper. Fingers found the hammer's neck and dragged it free. Rust salted the head, but one cheek wore a darker stain rust couldn't explain. Someone had tried to wipe it. Tried… not hard.
"Cool," he lied to himself, because he allowed one lie per crisis. "Hero hammer. Excalibur. Already stained with the blood of high-level dragons."
He hugged it to his ribs, scooted back onto the rear seat, and set his knees under him. One breath. Two defiant ones. He raised the hammer with both hands—small arms shaking—and declared, in a tiny, absolutely serious voice, "Behold! The hammer of promised victory, legendary glass-shatterer: Excalibur!"
He swung for the window.
The car did not care.
He hit again. Again. By the eighth—or the twelfth—his new, undersized muscles were filing complaints, but his stubborn heart refused to clock out. He reset his grip, glared at the glass like it had insulted his guild, and gave it everything he had.
The window surrendered in its own ridiculous way: the regulator coughed, the pane slumped into the door with a panicked rattle, and safety glass avalanched into sugar-bright cubes inside the panel.
Hot summer air rushed in—useless and perfect. He pumped a victorious fist because the hammer was suddenly too heavy to lift. "Flawless victory," he wheezed.
A thousand glittering squares chimed in the door like applause. He grinned at them—sweat-salted, woozy, proud—then braced both hands on the sill as heat rolled over him again like a wet dog blanket.
"Okay," she told Excalibur and the empty car in her best Frank voice. "Step two: outside."
She leaned over the broken window and peered down. The drop wasn't far—kid-sized at best—but from her new, undersized frame it looked like the side of a skyscraper. She glanced at herself: noodle arms, matchstick legs, a sun-bleached pink dress. Right. She was a she. Probably Emma's size—maybe a bit younger. Six-ish.
"Uh-oh," she whispered. "Tiny girl body, big cliff, big problems."
She considered climbing—careful, belly first, easy down. Then a stupid idea arrived grinning. Action movies. The Matrix. Neo doing the impossible by believing very hard. Parkour guys bouncing off concrete like cats. If they could do it, why couldn't a lightweight little girl?
Excalibur in hand, she scrambled onto the door, toes gripping the metal where the glass used to be. She wobbled, squared her shoulders like Neo about to fly, and tried to lower her voice into cool.
"Here we go."
She jumped.
In her head: glorious—brave forward spin, slick tuck, perfect roll. In reality: late tuck, lopsided spin, and asphalt that did not accept new students. Her head clipped hard; the world flashed white and then went very far away.
For a breathless instant there was only ringing heat.
Then warmth pulsed through her chest—steady, rhythmic—a second heart waking. Light pushed outward through skin and bone, tugging her back from the dark. She blinked up at a sky that wobbled in the heat and discovered her shoulder blades sizzling on the blacktop.
"Ow," she croaked. "Definitely not Neo."
Instinct beat thought. She groped for Excalibur—faithful, clanging nearby—clutched it, yelped as the pavement bit her palms, and scrambled upright. Bare feet slapped fire. She bolted across the lot for the tree line, hammer bouncing against her chest, little legs pumping like a cartoon getaway.
She didn't stop until patchy shade fell over her. The grass was cooler here; the air just barely less cruel. She folded down, hugging the hammer to her knees, and listened to both heartbeats settle—mortal thud over quiet, patient tick.
"Okay," she told Excalibur between breaths. "Step two: escape car, mission is now completed. Step three: no more stunt work. Being small and light does not equal instant spin ninja."
Shade held for three breaths. The grass needled her bare soles; Excalibur was a reassuring weight across her lap. Confusion arrived in a wave big enough to surf.
Where am I?
Vermont, her brain offered, helpful and unhelpful. But that made no sense. She was supposed to be a large man in London; it had been night—almost two in the morning—and the wrong orange had been eating a tower. Now she was small, and the sun was bossy and high, and the sky…
She squinted up. The blue looked too pretty, like somebody had washed it and hung it to dry. It felt cleaner than she remembered, the way a postcard cheats. The sun sat somewhere near noon, not shy about it. Maybe that tracked? The UK was basically on the other side of the ocean; time did weird gymnastic things when it crossed water. Still—night in London didn't add up to midday in Vermont. It felt like the world had cut a piece of film and taped a different piece in its place.
She made herself look, properly. The back lot was a forgotten fort: cracked asphalt, clover in the seams, a green dumpster throwing a perfect rectangle of shade, a tree line hemming three sides, and the bored, beige rear wall of University Mall closing the fourth. Out past the roofline, a shoulder of mountain breathed—a calm profile she knew from a hundred drives and a thousand daydreams.
"Mansfield," she said, surprised by how steady her bell-bright voice sounded. The word clicked something in her chest. If that was Mansfield, this really was Vermont. Different in some small way she couldn't name—trees fuller, green edged darker—but unmistakable. So: yes, Vermont.
How?
A warm tickle slid down her temple. She touched the spot and her fingers came away red. Her stomach dropped—and then eased when her scalp turned up no open hurt, no split to explain the blood. The skin there felt… already mended. The second heartbeat under her sternum tapped once, twice, as if raising a hand.
"Thank you," she told it. Thank you for saving me from my own dumb stunt.
Take stock, Frank would say. So she did, properly this time.
Legs: skinny, knobby-kneed. Toes: present and wiggly. Feet: small, sore, heat-bitten. Arms: noodle class, no gym stories. Belly: flat in the wrong way—hunger-flat, not strong-flat. Dress: sun-bleached pink, sweat-sticky. She became aware of elastic at her waist and, with a quick glance nobody was around to see, lifted the hem just enough to check. Pink cotton. A tiny cartoon bunny looked up with an expression that might have been encouragement.
"Cute," she conceded, equal parts offended and amused. "Still not Neo." Hem down. Dignity rescued.
A red curtain fell across her cheek. She tugged a lock forward. The color was foxfire-bright—rose-true in the shade, almost glowing where sunlight poked through the leaves. When she looked toward the car's side panel she caught a funhouse reflection: a little face smeared with sweat and road dust; big, very blue eyes; a button nose; a mouth that looked braver than she felt. She blinked and shadows from frankly ridiculous lashes brushed her cheeks. Her fingers went to her brow.
Eyebrows.
Real ones. Tidy tawny-red arches where, as Bruce, there had been nothing since the burning-car-and-rat incident. "The aliens gave me eyebrows," she whispered, awed, and stroked them once like trophies.
And that word cracked the door on the next question: How is any of this possible?
Her brain, now that it had something to do, made a mess of doing it.
Theory A – Respawn Logic (Comforting, Bad Science).
She must have died in London and—because of some cosmic glitch or admin joke—respawned in Vermont as a red-haired six-year-old. Not a game exactly, but the logic was game-adjacent: randomize race, gender, class, drop player into starting zone. Roll a new toon. Grind back the years. Level one. Wooden hammer. No gear. No quest markers. No HUD. Just Vermont heat. Maybe she'd hit "hardcore" mode without knowing it. Maybe some celestial GM had pressed "new character" and thought this will be hilarious.
She pictured a cosmic loading screen: "Reincarnation Patch 1.0 – Now With Realistic Permadeath. Choose your avatar." She hadn't clicked "redheaded orphan girl," but here she was.
Theory B – Government Tinfoil (Area 51 With Maple Trees).
Or maybe not a game at all. Maybe a secret government program—the kind Alex Jones used to yell about on InfoWars—MK-Ultra for toddlers. Area 51's piney cousin: Facility 802. Vermont edition. A laboratory in the hills where lizard men in expensive suits pumped fluoride and frog-juice into the water to turn kids into sleeper agents and souls into USB sticks. She pictured a shed behind the mall with a satellite dish disguised as a maple tree, black SUVs with Vermont plates, and men in sunglasses—her sunglasses—taking notes and calling her "anomalous subject" in clipboards, never once saying "please."
In her head the scenario bloomed: a basement full of buzzing CRTs, green text scrolling "PROJECT REDHEAD – SUCCESSFUL TRANSFER," interns eating Dunkin' Munchkins while a colonel in plaid barked "run the test again!" because Alex Jones was right about frogs and aliens but wrong about which state.
Theory C – Aliens for Clout (The YouTube Hypothesis).
Or aliens. Actual aliens swapping souls like baseball cards because the interstellar algorithm rewarded "content." "We Possessed a Guy and Gave Him a Kid Body (Social Experiment)!" They'd film the before and after, get billions of galactic views, monetize with asteroid-belt sponsors. The History Channel equivalent on Alpha Centauri would run a twelve-part miniseries called The Redhead and the Eggheads: Identity Crisis?! complete with badly rendered CGI of little glowing souls being yoinked out of towers and dropped into car seats. She imagined hidden cameras blinking from the maples, an alien producer whispering, "Can she cry on cue? Great. We'll cut to a commercial for crystal skulls."
She laughed at herself—at aliens and eyebrows and the sheer cartoon of it—and the laugh stole water she didn't have. She swallowed air and called it good until the world steadied. "Aliens gave me eyebrows," she told the leaves, and it still sounded like a joke—until it didn't. Because what else explained a big man named Bruce waking up as a tiny, red‑haired girl with a hammer and two heartbeats in her chest? The second one ticked back, patient as a metronome.
Thirst pressed first; hunger flapped behind it like a flag. The dress stuck to her in unflattering geography. So—priorities. Water, shade, plan. She made herself look past the weeds and the green dumpster and the rear wall of University Mall to the distant shoulder of Mansfield, familiar as a screensaver. Vermont. Burlington. Good. If this was Burlington, then "home" lived close to the water, third floor, a stair landing that complained every time you put groceries down halfway. You could follow the lake-smell to it on a good wind. If she could get to the blue, she could get to the bricks, and the bricks would turn into the street with her mailbox.
"Okay. Home." The word felt like a glass of something cold.
Then the obvious tripped her: "Phone, wallet, keys." None of those. Her pockets were just dedicated sweat collectors. The car—her car—wasn't here either; last she remembered it was sitting at the airport like a dog waiting by the door. Even if she found the building, she couldn't magic the lock with bell voice and wishful thinking.
She went statue-still under the tree for half a beat, letting panic try a door. It rattled; it didn't get in.
Amber, she thought, and the plan assembled itself like Legos.
Amber might be home doing the eyeliner thing that made strangers confess tax fraud, or she might be at the gym doing the deadlift thing that made the world behave. Either way, at some point in the day Amber would be behind that third-floor door. Amber did not scare easy and didn't pretend to when she did. Amber protected her phone like a dragon, the one with the four Chinese characters on the lock screen—"a journey of a thousand miles…"—and if aliens could hand out eyebrows, aliens could probably explain the rest once Poppy got a browser open. But first: knock. Say the ridiculous sentence. Let Amber look at you and decide to believe you even if the nouns were out of order.
"Hi. It's… me," she rehearsed to the hammer. "Long story. Please don't call anyone yet."
If the door opened, she'd get water and the fan and the good couch pillow that pretended it wasn't the good couch pillow. Then the PC that had promised her legend and delivered a lot of driver updates: fire it, log in, find Frank, tell him I'm okay, tell him about the tower, tell him I'm shorter. Maybe even queue for a dungeon and let Happyman—level 79, forever almost—swing something cathartic at something made of numbers. More importantly: search for why. Body-swap. Brain-swap. Ball‑of‑light swap. Vermont aliens who preferred malls to cornfields. Anything.
And after why came work, which smacked different now that she had a handspan of wrist and a dress. Next week she was supposed to be back under covers—both kinds—chasing three unfunny problems: gerbils allegedly smuggled over the border to a rich guy's cabin and now playing Oregon Trail in the woods; raccoons committing nightly dumpster opera; the maple‑street squirrel war whose ceasefire had fallen apart over cashews. Also the usual: be the cop who moved gently through rooms and left them calmer than she found them. Undercover meant blending. A six‑year‑old with a hammer did not blend.
She rubbed her face and found no sunglasses. "Not Neo," she sighed, small and offended. Her old clothes wouldn't fit; her badge wouldn't fit; her life wouldn't fit. She needed a shower and something that wasn't a sun‑bleached pink dress—and that meant home anyway. Thinking in circles just dried your mouth.
So go. Follow the blue. Knock. Explain. Drink water like it owed you rent.
One more problem put a hand up: names. You could not knock on Amber's door in a six‑year‑old body and introduce yourself as Bruce if, somewhere in London or in the space between, Bruce was also walking around being Bruce. Two Bruces would break people. A buffer name would help. Something that fit a small red‑haired girl who looked like she should be fed soup immediately.
She opened the character‑creation screen in her head and started doing what she always did there: get it wrong quickly. Men's names first because muscle memory. Arnold (too bicep). Rocky (too montage). Hercules (too… Hercules). Vlad, Dracula, Damon (no impaling, no biting). Joffrey (never), Tyrion (not that clever), the Mountain (not that altitude). She pivoted into capital‑G Girl Names and tripped on the hem: Kamala (already taken by someone real), Cruella (villain tax), Mikasa (right woman, wrong universe), Violet (sweet, not accurate), Pamela, Padmé, Leia, Lara—each one a costume from someone else's closet. Her brain, unhelpfully, offered HappyGirl as a female skin for Happyman. She made a face. "Absolutely not."
"Think red," she told herself. Red Sonja (axe energy). Rose (postcard). Then the obvious bloomed, late as always: pop. She had popped out of the dark seam like a bubble; popped into this body; popped out the car window; popped her forehead on the parking lot like a chump. Pop to poppy to Poppy.
"Poppy," she said out loud, and the second heartbeat tapped in quiet agreement.
She tried it a few ways—"Hi, I'm Poppy"—and it fit in the sternum place where truth lives. "From today, I'm Poppy," she told Excalibur solemnly, because vows need witnesses. "Level one, zero gear, dubious starting zone. We will hit max level one day. Whatever max level is."
The hammer didn't object. Good sign.
Water cut through everything then, not as a thought but as a need with teeth. The lake was a long walk; gas station sinks existed in the short world. She eyed the hammer. "Trade you for a bottle?" she asked it, half-joking, half-not. The thought of giving up Excalibur made her hand clench. "Second bottle," she compromised, and immediately felt better.
Plan set. Name set. Feet complained but lined up for duty. She pressed a palm to the scab‑free place on her forehead and whispered a thank‑you to the extra heartbeat for mending what her stunt had broken. Then she tucked Excalibur against her ribs like a baton she might be asked to pass to a faster runner and stood.
Heat rose in waves off the lot, smelling like tar and some summer of someone else's. Past the scrub, the road out waited with its white line like a quest marker. She breathed once—shallow, because the air was still an argument—tilted her face to the lake she couldn't see yet but could almost taste, and stepped out of the shade.
"Okay, Amber," she said to the day. "I'm coming home."
She started walking, small and stubborn, toward the bright edge of the lot and the Blue that would lead to bricks and stairs and a door. Behind her the shade held its breath; ahead of her the air shimmered with boxy cars and old signs that felt a half‑step wrong. She didn't notice the wrongness; she had thirst and a plan and a new name to carry. The sky said summer. The calendar—quietly, invisibly—said 1983.