Air came first. It forced its way into him, thick and wet, and his ribs opened around it whether he wanted them to or not. Something in his chest clenched, let go, clenched again. The air went in cold and came back out warm, leaving a film of salt on the back of his throat. He tried to stop it. He tried to hold his breath the way you do underwater, just to prove that he could, and his body ignored him and went on breathing.
What's happening to me?
The question took a long time to finish forming. Every thought had to be hauled up from the bottom of a well. Something was wrong, badly wrong, and he couldn't get a grip on what it was. Pieces of another life drifted past him: a crowded sidewalk at rush hour, the steering wheel of a car with a cracked dashboard, sun on a face that needed a shave. A grown man's face. His. He told his fingers to move. He told his arm to rise and his head to turn. Nothing answered. His limbs stayed where they were, soft and heavy, as if they had been lent to him by someone who hadn't finished assembling them.
Panic should have hit him hard. It arrived as a dull, muffled pressure instead, as though whatever part of him was meant to handle fear hadn't been installed yet. He made himself think in a straight line. My name is… It took a while. Erick. That was right. Erick. The name sat on him oddly, like a shirt pulled out of the back of a closet. The rest came back in no particular order: cheap beer and loud laughter at the corner bar, nights spent falling asleep over college textbooks, eight hours a day under the drone of an office air conditioner. Then something sharper. A pain in his chest that wouldn't fade. Lights, voices, and after that, nothing at all.
Did I die?
The thought should have sent his heart racing. It kept the same steady, indifferent beat, and his lungs went on filling and emptying as if none of this concerned them.
He tried to open his eyes. The lids felt glued shut, stiff from never having been used, and it took everything he had to pry them apart. Light poured in without bringing any shapes along, only a smear of white and gray with soft edges, the way the world looks through a fogged window or from a few feet under the surface of a pool. He blinked, or thought he did. Dark forms moved at the edges of the haze, slow and far away. The air was warm and damp, and beneath the salt was another smell, metallic and faintly sweet. Some old part of his brain recognized it as blood well before the rest of him was willing to.
A dream. A coma. Hospital drugs. He went through the options and preferred every one of them to whatever the alternative might be. Dreams didn't come with this much detail, though: the strange weight of his body, the weakness in every joint, the breathing that kept going no matter what he wanted. He gathered his will and pushed all of it toward one hand. For a while nothing happened. Then a twitch ran up his arm and the hand jerked into motion, crooked and unsteady, a marionette with someone else holding the strings. He dragged it toward his face. He needed to see it.
It drifted into view.
It was small. Absurdly small, with short, plump fingers and nails so soft they barely counted as nails. The color was wrong too. The skin was gray with a blue cast to it, the shade lips turn after too long in cold water. He squinted past the ache building behind his eyes. The hand shook. He tried to close it into a fist, and the fingers curled and uncurled on their own, grabbing at nothing, a reflex with nobody behind it.
What the hell is this?
That thought, at least, came out clear. His hand was bigger than this. It had a scar across the knuckles from a fight he hadn't won and veins that stood out at the end of a long day. This thing was tiny and the wrong color. His mind went straight to the worst places it knew. A kidnapping. A clandestine lab, some doctor without a license or a conscience running tests on whoever he could drag off the street. A virus. Hypothermia. Poison. Every horror movie he'd ever half-watched on a Sunday night lined up to offer an explanation, none of them helped, and the panic finally found enough room to grow.
He forced his eyes to work. Little by little, the blur above him became a low ceiling of rough stone, uneven, as if someone had cut it by hand. Somewhere out of sight, water dripped at a steady interval. Behind the drip ran a deeper sound, a constant wet murmur he couldn't place. There were no machines beeping, no smell of disinfectant, no fluorescent light buzzing overhead. Whoever built this place had never seen a hospital. The air was heavy with salt and clung to his skin. A bunker? A cellar? Somebody's basement?
Something moved close by.
A shape leaned over him, so large it blotted out half the light. Its skin had the same gray-blue tone as his hand. As it came nearer, the air filled with the smell of salt and rust, like iron left out in the rain. Enormous fingers pressed against his belly and his ribs. There was nothing gentle in them. They checked him the way a man checks a used tire, quick and firm and thorough, and the calluses scraped. He wanted to twist away. He wanted to shout get your hands off me. What came out of his throat was a thin, wavering wail, a sound he would have recognized anywhere as a newborn's cry if it had come from anyone else.
A second figure came closer, smaller than the first and less certain in the way it moved. Its head was framed in red, a vivid red that stood out against all that gray. This one smelled different: sweat, salt, and something wet that might have been tears. It made a sound like a sob caught halfway and swallowed. Small hands slid under him and lifted, and they were trembling. The room tipped and spun. Then he was pressed against something warm and soft, a heartbeat was pounding right next to his ear, and the smell of warm milk flooded his head along with everything else. It was too much at once. He couldn't sort any of it.
Voices passed back and forth above him. One was deep and rough, almost a growl, chopping its words short. The language was nothing he knew. It wasn't English, and it wasn't the Spanish he'd picked up in school. It was all hard consonants and long vowels, rising and falling in unexpected places. The rhythm almost reminded him of something, of late nights with subtitles on, but he couldn't pin it down. He tried to catch a repeated sound, a pattern, anything at all, and his brain was too slow to hold on. It was like listening through a wall. The words meant nothing, but the tone came through. The deep voice was weighing something. The higher one shook as it answered, worn out and raw, the voice of someone who had been through hell in the last few hours.
They're talking about me.
He knew it without knowing how, and the knowledge sat cold in his stomach. What am I to them? He tried to demand answers, to ask who they were and what they'd done to him. His mouth produced another feeble cry with no words in it. A grown man's mind, shut inside something that couldn't manage a syllable. He blinked hard, again and again, and the two figures sharpened a little. The big one was a man, broad and heavily muscled, with a hard, angular face and narrow eyes that went straight through him. A scar ran down through his left eye. His skin was that same gray-blue. A mutation? Makeup? The other was a woman. Her face was swollen from crying and her eyes were rimmed in red, and her red hair hung loose and tangled around it. She held him tight, almost fiercely, though her arms could barely stay steady.
Then he changed hands again, from the woman's warm, damp hold to the man's dry and impersonal grip. The man turned him over and around as if looking for defects. Propped against the wall behind him stood a blade so big it hardly looked like a weapon, broad and flat, nearly as tall as a man, with a round hole punched through it near the tip. The torchlight caught its polished face, and for a moment the steel became a mirror.
Something looked back at him from the metal. A puffy red face. Dark eyes that couldn't agree on where to look. Gray skin blotched with blue, a few wisps of reddish hair on an otherwise bare scalp, and a tiny mouth hanging open, gulping at the air like a fish on a dock.
That's me?
He refused it at first. His face was long and narrow, with brown eyes and a nose that had been broken once in a pickup soccer game. This face was soft and round and unfinished. A baby's face. The idea sank in slowly, the way cold water seeps through a boot. He hadn't been kidnapped. Nobody had drugged him. That left one word, so ridiculous that he would have laughed if his body had known how. Reincarnation. The stuff of light novels and anime he used to binge at two in the morning. Except the pain was real, and so was the weakness, and his head was too heavy for his own neck. He tried to turn away from the reflection, and the whole world lurched to one side. Above him, the man said something short and flat. The woman answered quietly, and she sounded like someone agreeing to a thing she didn't want to agree to.
Exhaustion rolled over him all at once. This body hadn't been built to think this hard, and thinking was costing it more than it had to give. He fought to stay awake and take in a little more. Water ran down the stone walls in thin, shining threads. Torches burned somewhere he couldn't see, and their light made the shadows on the walls shift and shiver. The air smelled of the sea, but no breeze came with it. From far off came the crash of waves and, under that, voices raised in what might have been effort or pain. Nowhere was there an electric hum, a car horn, any of the noise of a city. Wherever this is, it isn't anywhere I've been.
The woman took him back and settled him against her chest. She began to hum, low and slow, a melody with an old shape to it that belonged to no music he knew. His crying stopped. His muscles loosened. He hadn't decided any of that, and he hated it; his body answered her the same way it answered hunger and cold, without consulting him. He reached for something of his own to hold on to. His family around the grill on a Sunday afternoon. His friends shouting at a TV during a match. All the ordinary problems of an ordinary life. They felt impossibly far away. What he had now was a body that wouldn't obey him and a world he couldn't name.
Time stopped behaving. He couldn't tell hours from minutes. He slept and woke in short bursts, and each time he surfaced he understood a little more and liked it a little less. During one of those waking spells his vision cleared enough to show him where they had put him: a crude crib, coarse cloth stretched over a frame of rough wood, smelling of damp and salt. He tried to roll over and only managed to slump sideways like a sack of rice. His hands floated up into view again, gray-blue, with their tiny soft nails. He touched his own cheek. The skin was so new and so tender that even the cool air stung it. A shiver went through him that had little to do with the cold. What did they do to me?
There was no one to ask, so the questions just kept circling. Other people came by now and then, tall men and women in dark, close-fitting clothes cut for movement. Each of them wore a band of cloth across the forehead with a metal plate stitched to the front, and on the plate was an engraving of a few short, wavy lines. The design nagged at him. He was sure he had seen it somewhere, and the harder he reached for it, the faster it slipped away. One of them bent over the crib and laid a cold, calloused fingertip against his forehead, holding it there for a moment as if taking his temperature. They traded a few words over him. Someone gave a short, low laugh. Approval, maybe. Or simple curiosity.
Hunger came out of nowhere. It began as an empty space in his belly and within seconds became a sharp, spreading ache, and his body started screaming before his mind had even worked out why. The woman was there almost at once. She picked him up with those unsteady hands, the smell of milk reached him, and instinct took over completely. He fed. He hated every second of it, the helplessness and the humiliation, and he couldn't have stopped if he'd tried. While his body ate, his mind went in circles. This isn't a dream. I died, and then I was born. Born where? Why me? And the skin. That gray-blue skin. A disease? A curse? Or something these people had done to him on purpose?
The days ran together, if they were days. A baby's life had no clock, only sleep and hunger and the stretches in between. Still, every time he woke he could see a bit better and hear a bit more. The language stayed closed to him, though certain sounds began to come back again and again, sounds that could have been names or orders. The woman had one she used only for him, something short and soft that she repeated while she rocked him. He tried to say it back in his head and couldn't make it stick. When he tried with his mouth, all he got was a wet babble.
His whole world was what he could reach: the rough cloth, the cold stone, the low ceiling that seemed to sit a little lower every time he looked at it. Moving became an obsession. He rolled toward one side and back again. He kicked his feeble legs. He tried to sit up and toppled over every time. Each attempt was a tiny victory and a reminder of how little he could do. Nights were the worst. The dark swallowed everything, and out of it came sounds that kept him awake: steel ringing against steel somewhere far off, grunts of effort, the dull thud of a body hitting the ground. Someone was training out there. Or fighting. He lay still and listened, frightened and unable to stop wanting to know more. Who are these people? Was I brought here, or was I born here?
The answer settled on him one quiet night, while a single torch guttered on the wall and threw its weak light across the crib. It came without any drama. It simply sat down on his chest and stayed. I was reincarnated. In this body, in this place, among these gray-skinned people who lived in stone and salt and woke him every night with the sound of steel. Holy shit. Bitterness followed, and after it a slow, useless anger. What had he done to earn a second life that began like this, trapped and helpless? Nothing answered him. There was only the damp silence and the water running somewhere beyond the walls. His small body kept breathing, waiting to grow, knowing nothing of what was waiting for it outside.
Sleep came for him again, and this time he went into it with something to hold on to. Survive. Learn to control this body. Find out where the hell I am. If this was a second chance, he was going to use it. If it was a curse, he would face it anyway, however much it hurt.
———
Author's Note
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