Somewhere that is not quite here. Three years ago.
The woman was dying and she knew it and she was not afraid.
That was the part Kael would remember years later when he could finally think about it without his hands shaking - not the blood, not the hospital smell that was not a hospital smell but something older and sharper underneath it, not even the way she held his hand in both of hers with a grip that should not have been possible given what she had lost. He would remember that she was not afraid. She was doing something much harder than being afraid. She was choosing her words.
"You're going to feel it soon," she said. Not soon like weeks. Soon like something already in motion.
"Feel what."
She looked at him with those eyes he had inherited, dark and level and infuriating in their patience. "Like the world is thinner than it should be. Like you can almost see through it." She paused. The monitor beside her made its small insistent sound. "When that starts, don't tell anyone. Don't try to understand it alone. Find someone who already knows."
"Knows what?"
"Kael." Her grip tightened. "I hid you. I hid you very well and for a very long time and I am so sorry that I ran out of time to explain it properly." Something crossed her face that he had never seen there before. Something that looked almost like grief turned outward, aimed not at herself but at the situation, at the clock, at the particular cruelty of having survived everything she had survived only to run out of minutes here, in a room with beige walls and a window that looked at a parking structure.
He had questions. He had dozens of them. He picked the wrong one, the small human one, the one that came out before he could stop it. "Why didn't you tell me before?"
Her expression did something complicated. "Because you would have gone looking. And you weren't ready."
"And now?"
"Now," she said, "it doesn't matter if you're ready."
She died four hours later. The official cause was cardiac arrest secondary to undiagnosed cardiomyopathy. Kael did not believe this. He had no evidence that it was wrong. He had the particular cold certainty of someone who has been lied to before by people who were very good at it, and who recognized the texture of the lie even when he could not name the liar.
He buried her. He dropped out of his program. He moved into a smaller apartment. He waited, without knowing he was waiting, for the world to get thinner.
It took three years.