The belt bit into his wrists.
"Awake?" The voice hung behind a paper mask and a smile that didn't need lips. "Kidneys like yours don't come in every day."
Ash blinked grit out of his eyes. Ceiling the color of old teeth, water stain shaped like a continent. No window. Door with paint scabs and a crooked No Smoking sign. He lay on a narrow bed. Leather pinned his wrists to metal rails. Another strap hugged his chest. The air tasted of iodine and failure.
The nurse wore pink as if cheerfulness could be sterilized. Her gloved hand hovered a penlight over the black sutures that ran across his lower belly. "Stay still," she said, kind only in pronunciation. "You don't want those popping."
Stitches. The word found a cold place under his ribs. Memory tried to line up: van, cloth bag, needle-sweet smell, someone promising this would be easy. You handed them your throat and asked them not to cut.
He flexed his fingers. Blood prickled back. The belt gave a whisper. Not enough.
"Quick healer," she said, studying his eyes instead of his hands. "That's good."
"Good for who?" His voice came dry, a splinter. "You or me?"
She turned to a tray where instruments pretended to be clean. Bleach lost a long fight with copper. A compressor thumped awake inside the wall. Somewhere a drain gargled like a drunk clearing his conscience.
The belt gave another grain. On three. He didn't count.
The walls hummed.
Not the compressor. Not the drain. A tone from nowhere and everywhere, two notes, almost a bell, and the hum rose like an elevator that forgot floors. Pressure settled through his body as if a large hand pressed down with interest. His sutures tugged inward—not pain, the shape of it.
The nurse looked up. "What was—"
A hairline crack forced itself through the ceiling stain. Light pushed through like a blade. Dust came to life and glittered. The penlight in her hand went out as if embarrassed. Her fingers opened without her.
Ash tore at the wrist belt. Skin burned. Leather parted. He rolled off the bed as the ceiling separated, each tile deciding it was a door. Straps snapped with the sound of failed promises. The instrument tray slid, scalpels skittering like quick fish.
"Stay down!" she shouted, but the shout stretched thin, a ribbon pulled to breaking—
—because the room was peeling. Paint sloughed in damp curls. Posters lifted and drifted like jellyfish. A seam opened in the far wall and widened until there was nothing but light.
Floor lost meaning. He fell without moving. The nurse's pink became smear and then thread and then nothing. He tried to speak and the air that knew his voice belonged to the old room refused to come along.
Light took smell with it.
Cold hit him like honest glass. He struck rough stone on hands and knees. Wind raked his clothes flat. He curled on instinct, guarding the cut. Fire didn't come. Only that deep tug, like a zipper someone had closed fast and not quite right.
He got breath back, then knees, then feet.
A lighthouse rose where sky should have had the last word—white tower set in a black rock knuckle jutting through a sea of cloud. At its crown a lantern room of brass and thick glass turned with ceremonial patience. The light inside didn't simply shine. It chose.
A transparent shield arced over him—a dome faint as breath on a window. The platform ran to a knee-high rim of metal, frost-bitten in places by height. Beyond the glass the world went on, oblivious. Below, through tears in the cloud, a city unrolled in miniature.
Ash covered his face and laughed once, without sound. Alive. He didn't say it. Don't dare the dealer.
Footsteps scraped to his left. Two people: a man hugging himself as if he might disappear if he let go, and a woman mouthing prayers she hadn't believed in last week. They kept their distance, a herd that hadn't picked a direction yet. He obliged them by staying where he was.
He lifted his shirt. Black thread laddered his lower abdomen. The incision was true. The bruises at his wrists had the yellow of poor decisions aged a few hours. When he pressed the cut, the ache behaved like a memory rehearsing itself.
Behind him, the lighthouse breathed. The lens's rotation shaved a note off the air, a hush-thrum that set his molars humming. Each pass of the beam left a white scratch in his vision that refused to sting. This wasn't light interested in blindness. It was a library eyeing spines.
"Do I applaud, or do you stamp me?" he asked the machine.
Wind answered by inspecting his pockets. The two strangers tried the dome with their palms. The surface flexed like a drumhead and gave back everything it took.
He walked toward the door. Nearby a brass plaque shone with the rich, pointless polish of things that meant more yesterday. Blank. He saw his face in it—the cut, the worry baked into the corner of his mouth. "Pick a direction," he told the plaque. "Or it'll be picked for you."
The door hummed under his palm like the throat of a bell. Hinges kept their secrets. Air spilled out cooler than the wind and smelled of dust, oiled brass, and books earned honest damage.
A round room waited. A spiral stair threaded up through it, narrow iron steps worn to a shine by repetition. At the room's center stood a pedestal under a piece of cream-colored cloth stitched along the edges with neat little Xs. The cloth was too deliberate to be a dust cover.
He lifted it. A hollow the size of a small cube looked back. The fabric remembered the weight it had sheltered.
A box. The kind that pretends to be a riddle and turns out to be a door.
He put the cloth back the way it had been. It made no sound, like a secret pleased to be noticed and returned.
Another bell-notion trembled down the stairwell from above, not noise exactly, more the memory of noise. He climbed, hand on the rail, each step taken as if the stair might decide halfway that it wasn't a stair after all.
Halfway, the tug at his belly sharpened. He stopped. Breathed. Went on.
The lantern room opened like a glass crown. Ribs of brass and glass held back a weather meant to erase. The lens nested concentric prisms—Fresnel, sure, and then something that treated light like policy. Gears below ticked in patient argument with one another.
The beam turned. It passed over him and through him, both true at once. For a second a schematic of him existed—pulse, breath, shallow dents where leather had owned him. Then the light declined to be interested and moved on.
"Do you need my name?" he asked, and felt ridiculous and correct in the same breath.
The beam paused by a hair's width. A seam in the clouds below admitted a river, a black rope cinched with bridges. The beam leaned and held. Streets brightened in a crooked crescent. The certainty arrived without asking: London. Old city. The year had sharp shoulders.
"All right," he said to the lens that pretended not to listen. "We're doing this."
Down the stair again, counting not because numbers help, but because rhythm gets you sane where reason doesn't. The two strangers hadn't moved. The woman had stopped praying and started counting her breaths. The man had his forehead on the dome like it might finally decide he belonged outside it.
The beam slid across Ash's cheek and left a warmth there the size of a thumbprint. It felt like sight. When he turned, it moved, not following his head but keeping its opinion.
He crossed to the platform's edge. Wind pressed him hard enough to suggest a negotiation. Through the dome, the clouds ahead began to show structure: hairline lines of frost knitting into a trellis, then panels, then the hint of a corridor extended from the shield into the open air—a geometry insisting there had always been a bridge here and he had only just remembered it.
Behind him the blank plaque reflected the smallness of his back. He ignored it. He had never been fond of mirrors while choosing.
A voice from the other arrivals tried on authority and found the sleeves too long. "Don't go," the man said. "We should wait. Somebody will come."
"Somebody did," Ash said without looking, and set his boot on the first pane of cold light.
It accepted the weight and strengthened beneath it.
He tested a second step. The pane built itself in the instant before his foot fell, polite, efficient, terrifying. Air tasted of rain not yet admitted by the clouds ahead. The thumb-warmth on his cheek steadied, as if the beam had him in its reticle and kindly refused to tremble.
The corridor grew by his decisions. Behind, the lighthouse's breathing became distance. Ahead, a seam in the sky darkened the way a fish darkens as it turns under water.
He glanced back once. The woman at the dome had both hands to the glass, not in prayer now but in the simple human act of measuring goodbye. The man had sat down hard and was negotiating with panic like it owed him money.
"Suit yourselves," Ash said to the wind that carried every word away. He adjusted his coat and shifted his weight into the forward step.
The panels answered by unfolding farther, shot through with hairline frost that looked like writing no one had meant him to read.
The bell-note gathered again, nearer this time, a clean strike on something that did not physically exist and yet shook his bones. The line of warmth at his cheek tightened as if a hand settled there.
He smiled, because the body sometimes knows when a choice fits.
He leaned into the cold light and stepped.