Two things became clear in the first thirty seconds of Bennett Vanes' new life.
One: he was no longer in Maryland.
Two: whoever owned this body before him had the bladder control of a newborn.
He lay on a bed that was less a bed and more a wooden plank with pretensions, staring at a ceiling made of rough-hewn stone. The air tasted like woodsmoke and something animal... wet dog, maybe, or wet horse. Hard to tell.
His head throbbed like someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to the inside of his skull and then, for good measure, hit the outside too. His arms were covered in bruises. His ribs ached when he breathed. His lower back felt like it had opinions about the mattress, and none of them were positive.
And he was, without question, seventeen years old.
This was a problem, because thirty seconds ago he'd been thirty-four, standing in a ballistics testing lab at Palintire in Elkridge, Maryland, watching a prototype barrel undergo a pressure cycle test that was absolutely, categorically, one hundred percent not supposed to catastrophically fail.
He remembered the crack. Not a gunshot crack, worse. The crack of metal giving up on its molecular bonds. A sound that every weapons engineer knew in their gut meant run.
He hadn't run fast enough.
The flash. A brief, peculiar sensation of his chest being somewhere his chest shouldn't be. The lab ceiling tiles, oddly beautiful when you were looking at them from the floor. A thought... half-formed, almost funny, that his 401k was going to go to his sister, and she was going to spend it on that ridiculous alpaca farm.
Then nothing.
Then this.
Memories that weren't his flooded in like dirty water through a cracked dam: fragmented, out of order, soaked in emotions that belonged to someone else. A cold castle. A family dinner where no one spoke to him. A sword training session where he'd been knocked flat by an instructor who looked bored doing it.
A sister who glared at him like he was a stain on the family name. A brother who was never around. A grandfather who looked at him the way you look at a cockroach; not with hatred, just with the weary acknowledgment that it existed and would continue to exist until someone did something about it.
Bennett Vanes. Youngest son of the Vanes family. Lord of nothing. Heir to less. No magical talent - which, in this world, apparently mattered the way oxygen mattered in his. Without it, you were dead. You just hadn't stopped moving yet.
"Okay," Bennett said out loud, to no one, in a voice that was higher than he was used to and rougher than it should have been. "Okay. So that happened."
He sat up. The room spun like a fairground ride operated by someone who hated him personally. He grabbed the edge of the bed... the wooden edge, because this bed didn't believe in comfort accessories like padding or sheets that didn't smell like a wet goat, and waited for his vision to settle.
The room was small, cold, and stone on all sides. A single window: no glass, just wooden shutters that didn't quite close, let in gray light and the sound of wind and something that might have been a bird or might have been a cat in distress.
There was a wooden chest at the foot of the bed, a washbasin on a wobbling stand, and a chamber pot that explained at least sixty percent of the smell.
No electricity. No plumbing. No phone, no computer, no internet. No thermostat, no light switch, no fire alarm, no emergency exit sign with its comforting green glow. Nothing.
Just stone, wood, cold air, and the growing certainty that the universe had a sense of humor and it was terrible.
A knock at the door. Before he could answer, before he could even formulate the word "come in" in a language his new mouth was still getting used to it swung open and a girl of maybe fourteen rushed in.
A servant, judging by the plain wool dress, the calloused hands, and the look of professional worry that suggested she'd been checking on him every twenty minutes and was running out of patience.
She carried a wooden tray with bread, cheese, and something in a bowl that might have been soup if you squinted and had very low standards.
"Young lord! You're awake!" She set the tray down with the practiced haste of someone who'd been told to check on him twelve times and was thoroughly sick of the stairs. "You collapsed at training again. Captain Thane carried you back himself. The lord patriarch says dinner is at the sixth bell and he expects you there."
Again. She said "again." As in this was a recurring event. As in the previous owner of this body had a habit of passing out during physical training, which... given the state of the muscles Bennett was currently inventorying, tracked completely.
The girl was already halfway to the door, mission accomplished, duty discharged, done with this.
"Wait," Bennett said.
She stopped. Half-turned. Her expression said she had places to be and this was not one of them.
"What's your name?"
Blink. Pause. The kind of pause that meant no one had asked her that question in this context before. The young lord didn't ask servants their names. The young lord barely acknowledged servants existed.
"Wren, my lord."
"Wren. How long was I out?"
"Since midday, my lord. It's near fourth bell now."
A few hours, then. "And the training. What exactly happened?"
Another blink. Longer this time. "You... fell over, my lord. During the second drill. Same as last time." A pause. "And the time before that."
Her tone was carefully, professionally, impressively neutral. The kind of neutral that took years of practice and was, in its own way, more devastating than open mockery.
"Right. Thank you, Wren."
She left. The door closed. Bennett was alone with a bowl of alleged soup and the ruins of a life that wasn't his.
In his old life... his real life, the one that had ended with a bang and a flash and a peculiar view of ceiling tiles, he'd had a corner office with a window overlooking the Patapsco River. He'd had an espresso machine that he'd calibrated personally.
A chair that cost nine hundred dollars and was worth every penny. A seventy-two-inch curved monitor displaying finite element analysis models of barrel stress distributions.
He'd had a gym membership he used three times a week, a therapist he saw twice a month, and a mild but persistent anxiety about whether designing weapons that killed people made him a bad person.
His therapist had said the anxiety was healthy. That it meant he cared. That the truly dangerous people were the ones who built killing machines without ever losing sleep.
Bennett had appreciated the sentiment. He'd also kept building the weapons.
And now here he was. Sitting in a room with no toilet, no electricity, and no internet, eating bread that could double as a building material, in a body that apparently couldn't survive thirty minutes of sword training without staging a shutdown.
He picked up the bread. Bit into it. It was... genuinely, impressively, almost admirably... terrible. Dense, gritty, with the texture and flavor profile of compressed sawdust that had given up on life.
"Could be worse," he muttered through a mouthful of what was technically food. "Could be dead."
Then he paused, because technically he was dead. The other him. The Maryland him. That guy was extremely dead. The barrel had failed and the shrapnel had done what shrapnel does, and thirty-four years of life had ended in a testing lab in Elkridge on a Tuesday afternoon.
He ate the bread anyway. Dead men couldn't be choosy.