Chapter 1: The Wrong Sky
Dirt in my mouth. Wet, loamy, tasting of copper and something green I couldn't name.
I pushed up on arms that shook like they belonged to someone recovering from the flu. My palms pressed into moss — thick, spongy, the kind that takes decades to grow this deep. The nausea hit second. Not stomach-flu nausea. The kind that rolls through your whole body, starting behind the eyes and ending in the soles of your feet, like every cell disagreed about which direction was down.
Clinical self-assessment. Start there.
Pulse — fast, but steady. Pupils — I couldn't check my own, but both eyes tracked when I shifted my gaze left, then right. Motor function — fingers flexed, wrists rotated, ankles rolled without pain. No numbness, no tingling, no signs of stroke. Heart rate elevated but not dangerous. Breathing shallow. I forced a deep inhale through the nose, held for four, released for six.
The body wasn't mine.
That thought arrived without drama. Not panic, not horror — just a clean observation from somewhere behind my sternum. The hands pressing into the moss were younger than mine. Leaner, with calluses I'd never earned. A thin scar ran along the left forearm — white, healed years ago, from something sharp dragged in a single clean line. My hands in Portland had been soft. Therapist hands. These had done work I didn't know.
I sat back on my heels and looked up.
Two moons.
One hung low and amber, fat as a harvest moon, close enough that the craters were visible. The other sat higher, smaller, bone-white and hard-edged against a sky full of stars that formed no constellation I recognized. No Orion. No Big Dipper. No Polaris to point north.
My breath caught. Not from panic — six years of crisis work had trained that reflex down to a manageable stutter — but from the sheer weight of the information gap. I catalogued what I knew: I was conscious, in a body that wasn't mine, under a sky that wasn't Earth's. What I didn't know could fill libraries.
You've had patients who woke up in hospitals after accidents and didn't know where they were. Same protocol. Stabilize. Orient. Gather data. Act.
The difference being my patients eventually got to go home.
I stood. The legs held. Younger than thirty-one — mid-twenties, maybe. The body was lean, not muscular but functional. No shoes. Whatever clothes I wore — a rough linen shirt, trousers that ended above the ankle, a belt with no pouches — belonged to the body's previous owner. No wallet. No phone. No ID.
The forest pressed in from all sides.
Not a forest I recognized. The trees were massive — three hundred feet, maybe more, with trunks wider than cars. The canopy filtered the moonlight into something greenish-gold that pooled on the forest floor like water. The underbrush was thick with ferns that reached my waist, and the air tasted of sap and ozone and something faintly electric, like the charge before a thunderstorm that never comes.
Something moved in the underbrush to my left.
I didn't freeze. Freezing is a panic response, and panic was a luxury I couldn't afford. Instead, I went still — deliberate stillness, the kind I used when a patient in crisis mode entered my office and I needed to signal I am not a threat. My breathing slowed. My eyes tracked the movement without turning my head.
A shape. Low, dark, roughly the size of a large dog. It moved through the ferns in a sinuous lateral pattern — not walking, flowing. Two points of dull amber light blinked where eyes should be. It paused. The amber lights fixed on me.
My heartbeat stayed steady. My palms sweated.
The thing — animal, I hoped — held my gaze for four seconds. Then the amber lights blinked out, and the ferns rustled in a retreating line. Gone.
I exhaled through my teeth and started moving.
The forest was too dense to push through blind, so I angled toward what looked like a thinning in the canopy — a gap where more light fell through the leaves. My feet — bare, tender, unused to roots and stones — found every sharp edge the ground had to offer. I walked on the balls of my feet, testing each step, cataloguing the pain as data rather than complaint.
Lena would have laughed at this.
The thought surfaced unbidden and I pushed it down with the efficiency of long practice. Not now. Not ever, if I could manage it, but especially not now.
The treeline came faster than I expected. The massive trunks thinned, the underbrush dropped, and the world opened.
Rolling hills spread to the horizon under the double-mooned sky. Grassland, or something like it — the growth was knee-high and shifted in waves under a breeze that carried a sound like distant windchimes, though nothing in the landscape could produce it. The grass shimmered. Not reflected light — the blades themselves gave off a faint luminescence, pale gold, as if each stalk was a candle burning at the lowest possible setting.
Bioluminescent vegetation. On a massive scale.
I filed the observation and kept moving. A dirt road wound along the base of the hills, roughly maintained, with cart tracks pressed into the soil. In two directions it disappeared into the dark. To the west — if I could call it west, with no recognizable sky — smoke rose from what looked like a cluster of buildings. Orange light flickered. Hearths. People.
People meant information. Information meant survival. Everything else was secondary.
I touched the scar on the borrowed forearm. Smooth under my fingertip. Whoever had lived in this body before me had a story I'd never know. Whatever happened to them — whether they died and left the body empty, whether I'd pushed them out, whether this was some mechanism I couldn't begin to understand — was a question for a time when I wasn't barefoot and lost under unfamiliar stars.
The road curved downhill through the luminous fields. The breeze picked up, and the chime-sound grew louder — not wind through grass, not insects, something fundamental in the air itself, like the landscape was humming at a frequency just below hearing.
The settlement was closer than I'd thought. Half a mile, maybe less. The buildings resolved into timber-and-stone structures clustered around a central square, with a mill visible against the sky — a waterwheel, or something like one, turning slowly in a stream that caught the moonlight.
A figure stood on the road ahead. Backlit by the glow from the settlement, too far to make out features, but facing my direction.
They'd already seen me.
I straightened my posture. Relaxed my shoulders. Arranged my face into the neutral, open expression I'd worn for six years in a community mental health center — the one that said I am approachable, I am not a threat, I am listening before you've started talking.
The figure didn't move.
I kept walking.
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