My head felt like it had been split open with an axe.
I gasped for air, but the air was wrong. It didn't taste like the stale dorm room I had fallen asleep in. It tasted like old pennies, rust, and thick, choking smoke.
I opened my eyes and immediately gagged. A pale green fog was rolling over my face. I was lying on my back on freezing, wet cobblestones.
Where am I? I thought, my mind racing. Did I pass out outside the science building?
I tried to sit up, but my body felt incredibly weak. My hands were entirely too thin, covered in dirt and wrapped in cheap, ragged cloth instead of my winter jacket. When I coughed, spotting the ground, the liquid wasn't red.
It was a dark, metallic purple.
Violet blood? The biology student in me panicked. That's impossible. Human blood is iron-based. This... this looks like it's reacting to a different gas. Like copper or cobalt.
"Get up, rat," a harsh voice hissed.
I flinched. Walking past the alleyway were two men dressed in heavy black trench coats and tall leather boots. They carried thick wooden canes and lanterns that burned with a strange, cold blue fire. They didn't look like modern people. They looked like they had stepped out of an old London history book.
I dragged myself backward into the shadows of the alley, hiding behind a pile of wooden crates. My heart hammered against my ribs. The architecture around me was a nightmare of sharp gothic roofs, smoking chimneys, and rusty iron pipes.
Once the men were gone, I leaned back against the cold brick wall and finally looked up at the sky.
I stopped breathing.
There was no moon. There were no stars.
Taking up almost half the sky was a giant, perfect circle of absolute, pitch-black nothingness. Around this sphere of nothing was a swirling, violent ring of blinding purple light. It looked exactly like a giant, angry eye staring down at the city.
I had seen pictures of this in my astronomy electives. It wasn't an eye. It wasn't a god.
It was an accretion disk. I was looking directly at a supermassive black hole.
"Oh my god," I whispered, my voice trembling.
A memory suddenly pierced my brain. It wasn't mine. It belonged to the boy whose body I was now living in. His name was Arthur. He lived in the Umbra—the dark half of a world that never rotated. The people here worshipped that thing in the sky. They believed it gave them magic. They believed it punished sinners.
But looking at the swirling ring of superheated gas, my modern brain realized the terrifying truth.
This wasn't a fantasy world of gods and magic. This was a planet trapped on the edge of a dying solar system. And whatever "magic" these people were using to fight the monsters in the dark... it was just physics they didn't understand.
I wrapped my thin arms around myself to fight off the freezing cold. I was just a bioscience student. But if I wanted to survive this Victorian hell, I was going to have to figure out the science of this world before the cold—or the monsters—killed me.