Chapter 1: Wrong Guy

The morning after the roof, I walked to school.

I want to be clear that it was a perfectly normal walk, because I've gone over it a hundred times since, looking for the thing I should have noticed, and the answer is that there wasn't anything. It was the same route. The same gray concrete, the same bus stop with the same cracked bench, the same convenience store with the same sad plastic sushi in the window. I had a presentation at ten. I had a backpack with a laptop in it. I had five voices in my head, bickering at low volume, like an old married couple in the next room.

"Left turn," Rex said. "Eyes forward. Don't look at the pigeons."

"There's a blue jacket at the bus stop," said Fab, in the reverent hush of a man at an art gallery. "Same one as yesterday. I'm not complaining. Look at the shoulders."

"Same girl," said Romeo, a beat later. "Different sandals. Respect."

"It's fascinating, really," said Newt, "how the whole sidewalk is ninety-nine percent void—"

"You said that yesterday," I muttered.

"It was true yesterday," said Newt, with dignity.

I'd barely slept again. I'd lain there until four in the morning trying to figure out whether the thing Tim had said on the roof was a real warning or just his regular noise. The trouble with Tim is that his regular noise sounds exactly like a real warning, and the only way to tell them apart is to wait and see whether you die.

I'd decided it was noise. It was the only conclusion that let me sleep, and then I hadn't slept anyway.

Mio came the other way, in a different raincoat. Yellow, this time, with little ducks on it. She had her hand up already, not really waving, just lifting it, the way people do when they're going to say hi and haven't decided yet whether to use their voice.

"Hey," she said.

I'd like to describe what happened next in the same detail I'd use for a car crash, because that's how it felt from the inside. Four voices began talking at once. Rex wanted me to say something clipped and cool. Fab wanted me to say something warm. Tim wanted me to run. And Romeo, for the record, had stopped speaking entirely, in the way that a man who has been told he is on thin ice stops moving his feet.

I stood there for exactly one second longer than is socially acceptable.

And then I nodded.

That's it. That's the whole thing. I tipped my chin down about two centimeters and back up, and I kept walking, and I did not say sandals, and I did not say feet, and I did not run into a lamp post.

"He NODDED," Fab shrieked, in the privacy of my skull.

"Good work, soldier," said Rex, and I swear, if a voice can salute, he did.

"A forty-percent improvement," said Newt, who is physically incapable of giving a compliment without a statistic.

Even Romeo, bless him, whispered: "I'm so proud of you." In a little broken voice, like a man watching his kid get on a school bus for the first time.

I felt it, right then, a small bright thing in my chest like a coin I'd found in a pocket. It wasn't happiness. It was the shape of happiness, one size too small, and I was holding it, and I was twenty years old and I had just successfully nodded at a girl, and I thought, maybe things are going to be okay.

"...Something's wrong," Tim said.

"Tim," I said, out loud, to the empty street. "I just made progress."

"The air's humming," he said. "Kaito. The air's humming. It's the thing from last night."

I stopped walking.

There was no sound. That was the first thing. I'd been listening to the city my whole life: not liking it, but listening, the way you listen to a refrigerator. Cars on the wet road. A far-off siren. Crows. The thin electric buzz of the street lights. All of it went out like a hand had come down over the world and pressed the mute button.

There was a crack on the sidewalk, one I didn't remember, that ran from the curb to my left shoe. And in the crack, something white and thin and bright was opening up, like a zipper on a bag full of sun.

"I TOLD YOU," Tim screamed.

A ring of white fire spread out under my feet.

"Oh," I said, with enormous clarity, "you've got to be fucking kidding me."

And I fell.

---

The Hall

I'll say this for being summoned to another world: it's the only time in my life that I've fallen through the earth and not worried about hitting the ground. I fell for what felt like an hour, through light and wind and a roaring sound that was either the sky or my own pulse, and the whole time Newt narrated: "This is not gravity, this is something like acceleration without a frame, which is, technically, impossible, which means—" and Tim was screaming and Rex was shouting at nobody to stay calm, stay calm, STAY CALM and Fab was saying "If I die I want it noted that I looked amazing" and Romeo was just whimpering, "I never got to tell her about the sandals."

Then I hit something.

It was white. Hard but not cold, with a faint give to it, like falling onto a mattress made of marble. I landed flat on my back, on my ass first and then everything else, and every voice in my head went oof at the same moment. I lay there blinking up at nothing. White nothing. No ceiling. No horizon. No up or down.

A very long way off, somebody coughed.

I sat up.

I was in a hall that wasn't a hall: a white space that went on in every direction, with no walls, no floor that I could see, and no source for the light. Seven enormous thrones floated in the air in a half circle, each one a different shape and a different color, like a set of mismatched furniture arranged by someone who'd never heard of a theme. Six of them had people sitting in them. Or something sitting in them. It was hard to say. The light kept bending around them.

The seventh throne was empty. In front of it, hovering in the air as though he'd just been dropped there, was a man.

I say a man. He had the shape of a man. He was tall and thin and sort of silvery, with a soft, anxious face, a long robe with half the buttons done up wrong, and a clipboard clutched to his chest in both hands like it was a life jacket. His hair stuck up on one side. He looked like an assistant manager who had just realized the district supervisor was early.

"Ah!" he said, brightly, and gave me a smile with at least forty percent too many teeth. "Hero! Welcome! Welcome, welcome. You have been chosen, by the will of the Pantheon, to save this world from—"

He stopped. He looked down at the clipboard.

He looked at me.

He looked at the clipboard.

"...Oh, no," he said.

---

The Clipboard

I want you to picture it. I was twenty. I was still in my hoodie and my wet sneakers, with a backpack on my shoulders, sitting on a floor that didn't exist, in front of six gods who all appeared to be waiting for something to go wrong, and the seventh god was flipping the pages of his clipboard with a speed that a man only uses when he already knows the answer and is hoping, desperately, that it will change.

"You're not on the list," he said.

"What list?" I said.

"The Hero Summoning List. It's... there's a list. We have a list. You were supposed to be, ah." He found a line. He read it, carefully, with his finger. "Kaito Utsumi. A very strong, very tall, very athletic young man. Varsity-level. Quite a jaw."

"I'm Kaito Utsumuki."

"I know," Orven said, in the voice of a man being slowly lowered into a vat of lava. "That's... the thing. I misread it."

I looked at him. For a second I honestly thought I'd heard him wrong. My ear does that sometimes; it'll swap a word for another one and then the sentence will make sense in a way that isn't what was said.

"Those," I said, carefully, "are two different names."

"I know."

"It's one syllable. They're not even close. One's a u-t-s-u-m-i and one's a u-t-s-u-m-u-k-i—"

"I know."

"You can't confuse—"

"It was," said the god, in a small, trembling whisper, "a really small font."

Somewhere behind him, a throne creaked. Someone had leaned forward.

"He misread a name," said Newt. For once he sounded genuinely stunned. "Statistically, that's an absurd failure rate. That's a rounding error on the scale of the universe. That's like launching a rocket to the moon and landing in a hot tub."

"Tell him to fix it," said Rex. "Now."

"I'm going to be sick," said Tim.

"He's kind of cute," said Fab, and then, as if hearing the room, "...is that bad? It feels bad. Okay. I'll shut up."

"This is a nightmare," said Romeo, "and nobody here has any shoes on."

He was right. None of the gods wore shoes, or if they did, the long robes hid them. I decided not to think about it.

"Then send me back," I said.

Orven didn't answer. He was looking very hard at a point just to the left of my head.

"Orven."

"So, here's the thing," said the god.

I'd like to explain something about my kind of brain: when I'm hit with a really big emotion, I don't feel it right away. It's like being handed a package that's too heavy to catch. I get that frozen, stretched moment of nothing, where I notice a lot of small things, because the big thing hasn't landed yet. I noticed that the floor hummed at a very low frequency, around the pitch of a refrigerator. I noticed that one of the gods in the back was eating something out of a bowl. I noticed that the clipboard had a coffee ring on it.

"Every god," Orven said, "gets exactly one summon per world."

I waited.

"One. A single, ah, summoning. It's a... budgeting thing. Divine resources. It's a whole system. We don't do it lightly. There's a form." He lifted the clipboard a few inches, for emphasis. It had, in fact, a form on it. "I used mine on you."

"So send me back," I said again.

"That's... not how it works."

"Why not?"

"There's no return," said Orven.

He said it fast, the way you rip a bandage. And then, because he apparently couldn't help himself, he said it again, slower. "Once a person crosses over, the door seals. It's the, it's an ontological thing. It closes behind you, and then there's no door. For good. It's not that I won't. I can't. No god can. It's not a... It's a physical law. A universal one. I'm very, very sorry."

Nobody spoke.

I stared at the floor. It had a very faint pattern in it, like the grain on frosted glass. I traced a line of it with my eyes, out to the edge of my reach, and back.

I thought: I had an exam.

That was it. That was the first thought, and I still think it's the funniest and the saddest thing my brain has ever produced. Out of everything, out of my whole life, the thing that rose to the surface was: I had an exam. I had a presentation at ten. I was going to be on time.

And then the rest came.

I'm not going to describe it all. I don't want to. But I'll say it came in the order that things matter, which is not the order you'd think. First the small things: the sad convenience store sushi, my bed, the dorm window with its stupid straight lines of rain. Then the middle things: my laptop, the library, the girl in the duck raincoat. And then the large things, the ones that sit at the bottom of the pile and have been there so long you forgot to look at them.

My mother, who called me every Sunday at seven, even when I didn't pick up, and left voice messages that began with "It's just me," as if there were anyone else. My father, who didn't know how to talk to me and had decided that the best way to love me was to leave a strip of tape on the thermostat so I'd know which temperature I liked. The dorm room. The apartment where I'd learned thunder. The ceiling I'd spent half my life staring at.

All of it, closed. Behind a door that wasn't there.

"Kaito," said Tim, in a very small voice.

"We're here," said Rex, and for the first time in my life he didn't give an order. "We're right here."

"Honey," said Fab, hushed, "breathe."

"Everything that has ever existed is still, in some sense, in the same universe," Newt said, with great gentleness. "The door sealing doesn't mean the past is unmade. It means we go forward, instead of back. That's... that's all it means. It's not nothing. But it isn't everything, either."

"I'm sorry," said Romeo, thickly. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Kaito."

I put my hand over my mouth. It's a thing I do. It's how I keep the sound in.

"I had an exam," I said, very softly. It didn't sound like my voice. It sounded like something small being read off a card.

Orven winced. It was a tiny wince, a flicker, like a candle in a draft. For the first time since I'd arrived, he didn't look like an assistant manager. He looked like a person who had made a mistake that couldn't be fixed.

"I'm... genuinely sorry," he said. "I mean that."

I think he did.

It didn't help.

---

The Bet

"Let's keep him," said a voice from the back.

I looked up.

The goddess who had spoken was leaning on the arm of her throne, chin in her hand, in a posture of immense, practiced idleness. She was beautiful in the way a cat is beautiful when it's about to knock a glass off a table. Her hair was a lazy cascade of silver and violet, and she was smiling at me with an expression I recognized from every bully, every audience, and every well-meaning teacher I'd ever met: the face of someone who has just found something interesting.

"What?" said Orven.

"He's hilarious," said the goddess. "Look at his face. Look at the way he's holding it in. It's like watching a tiny little dam. I haven't been this entertained in a thousand years."

"Vashka," said Orven. "That's not—"

"I'll bet you," she said, "he doesn't last a week."

The whole hall went quiet.

Then, from the other thrones, a rustle. A cough. The clink of something small and metal, and then another, and then a dozen, like a chorus of coins being thrown onto a floating table that hadn't existed a second ago and now very much did.

"Two weeks," said a huge, rumbling voice from a throne of black iron.

"Three days," said a bright one.

"A hundred gold says he gets eaten by something dumb," said a third.

"You're betting on him," said Orven, in horror. "He's a person. He's just a... a person who has been, I need to stress, wronged by the administration—"

"It's fine," said Vashka. "He'll be fine. He's the hero." She turned her head and looked at me. She winked. "Aren't you, hero?"

I opened my mouth.

"Do not," said Newt, "give her anything."

"Do not," said Tim.

"Don't speak," said Rex, "until you know what you're saying."

I closed it.

Orven looked at me. At the six thrones. At the coins. At the clipboard in his hands. He looked, for a moment, like he might try to say something brave. I saw it flicker across his face, a very small movement of the jaw. And then I watched it go out, like a pilot light.

"...Fine," he said. "Fine. Hero! Congratulations! You're... still the hero. Technically. Good luck!"

He snapped his fingers.

The floor vanished.

---

The World

I landed in grass.

It's a stupid thing to be grateful for, but I was, deeply. After the white and the humming and the long falling, to land on something soft and green and smelling of wet earth was almost unbearable. I lay on my stomach with my face in it, one cheek pressed into the dirt, and breathed.

Grass. Dirt. A faint smell of something sweet, like crushed fruit. Wind.

I lifted my head.

The sky had two moons.

They sat side by side, one big and pale and one small and orange, like a mother and a child, in an afternoon sky so blue it hurt. A long way off, on a plain rolling away to the edge of the world, there was a mountain shaped exactly like a sleeping dragon, with a curl of smoke coming from one nostril. Past that, high above a line of cloud, a castle floated. An entire castle. Towers and all. It turned slowly in the wind like a leaf.

I stood up.

Nothing happened. I stood wider. Still nothing. I wasn't sure what I expected: lightning, a flood of power, a booming voice from the heavens. Something. But I was just a guy in a hoodie, in a field, and the field didn't care.

I was about to sit back down, honestly, and maybe have a quiet little breakdown, when something moved in my chest.

It wasn't pain. It was more like a swallow that's gone the wrong way: a bright tickle, a pulse, right behind the sternum. It came again, and again, faster. Then a warmth spread across my ribs, and a light broke out through my hoodie, white and gold and tinged with five different colors, and there was a sound like a handful of glass beads being poured onto a drum.

Five sparks leaped out of my chest.

They arced away from me through the air like fireflies, red and pink and blue and green and yellow, and each one came to rest in the long grass around me in a soft puff of colored smoke. I stumbled back. And in the smoke, shapes began to rise.

I don't think I'll ever forget it. For nine years they'd been voices. Warm, familiar, impossible to pin down: a presence behind my eyes, a weight at the back of my skull. And now, in the afternoon sun, in the grass of a world I'd never seen, they stood up in front of me.

I want to be precise here, because Newt has already corrected my first draft of this paragraph twice. They weren't solid. The first thing I noticed was the light. Each of them glowed faintly at the edges, the way a pane of glass glows when the sun comes through it at the wrong angle, and I could see the grass through their legs. The second thing I noticed was that the grass didn't bend. Five people were standing in a meadow and not one blade moved. The third thing was that none of them cast a shadow, which, in a world with two moons and a very bright sun, looked like a mistake.

They were projections. Ghosts, if you want the unfashionable word. Very good-looking ghosts.

Rex came first. He was tall, taller than me by a head and a half, with shoulders you could hang a door on and a jaw so square you could've used it to check the corners of a bookshelf. His armor was mostly a chest plate, polished to a mirror shine, strapped over a bare and enormous torso, with a pair of red-trimmed gauntlets and a cape that billowed dramatically in a wind that didn't seem to be blowing for anyone else. (It wasn't. The cape was just doing it. I never got an explanation.) His hair was cropped to military regulation. He had the face of a man who'd never once been wrong, and had never once been checked on it.

Fab was second, and was, in every sense, a vision. He was lean, immaculately styled, with an impossible quiff, a glittering cape that caught the light, rainbow gloves, and a shirt unbuttoned to the exact point of art. His eyes were a warm, sparkling brown. His smile arrived half a second before he did.

Newt was small. Barely up to my shoulder. Round glasses, a lab coat, ink on his fingers, a face that looked permanently on the verge of correcting someone. In a heap that nearly reached his chin, he was holding a stack of books that hadn't been there a second ago and weren't from any world I'd ever seen. I found out later that the books were projections too. He could read them. He could not turn the pages. He found this unacceptable.

Tim was smaller still. A tiny figure in an enormous gray hoodie with the hood pulled up over a mop of dark hair, trembling like a leaf in a storm. He was already hiding behind somebody else's leg.

And Romeo. Handsome, in the helpless, sweet, slightly glazed way of a man who has just woken up. Hair too perfect, a soft face, a rumpled shirt, and eyes that, even now, were drifting hopefully over the horizon like a dog watching for a car.

They looked at each other. They looked at themselves. They looked at their hands, as if hands had been explained to them in a rumor.

"I have a face," said Fab.

He touched his own cheek with both hands. He stroked his jaw, turning his head slowly from side to side, in the manner of a man discovering a really good lighting setup. "Oh my god. I have such a good face. Look at this. Look at the bones."

"This is physically impossible," said Newt. He sounded winded. He was staring down at his arms, and at the grass showing through his elbow. "We shouldn't exist outside a neural construct. There's no substrate. There isn't a mechanism. We're, we're not even there. We're an image of something being somewhere."

"Who cares," said Rex. He flexed one arm and inspected his own bicep. "We're out. We're visible. I'm in charge."

"We're going to die," said a muffled voice, from behind Rex's leg.

"We're already dead," said Newt. "Technically. In the sense that we were never alive. I'd call it a grey area."

Romeo had been turning slowly in a circle, as if drawn on a string. He stopped. He looked at me. For the first time, I think, he actually looked at me, instead of at the world through my eyes.

"...Wait," he said. "You're short."

"Romeo," I said, "shut the fuck up."

I meant it as a joke. It came out as a whisper. Because the thing is, I wasn't looking at his face, I was looking at all of them: five people, standing in the grass in the sun, all talking at once. Five people I'd spent nine years with, in the dark.

And something in my chest, something I'd been clenching since the white hall, since the clipboard, since the door, cracked down the middle.

"I can see you," I said.

They went quiet.

Tim peered around Rex's leg. His eyes were huge and wet and a very particular shade of green. "We've always been real," he said.

I laughed. It came out shaky, half a sob, and I couldn't stop it. I put my hands on my knees and laughed until my ribs hurt, and Fab walked over and tried to put an arm around my shoulders.

It went through me.

It wasn't painful. It felt like walking into a cold patch of mist, a faint chill from my collarbone to my hip, and then nothing. Fab's arm hung there inside my chest, glittering softly, and Fab looked down at it, and up at me, and his whole face crumpled with tenderness and indignation.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, no. I can't. I can't even hug you."

"It's fine," I said.

"It is not fine, I look incredible and I can't hug you—"

Rex clapped me on the back, the way he'd clearly been planning to for several minutes. His hand went through my hoodie. He followed through, staggered, lost his balance, and fell completely through me, and came out on the other side on his hands and knees in the grass, which did not notice.

"Don't," he said, to nobody, "anyone, say anything."

Newt gave me an awkward pat on the elbow, and I watched his hand go through it. He looked at his fingers for a second.

"It's funny," he said, quietly. "I've told you for ten years that nobody's ever really touched anything. That it's all fields pushing on fields. And now that it's literally true—" He stopped. He tried again. "I don't like it. I want it noted that I don't like it."

Romeo shuffled in and stood on my other side, close enough that the edge of his glow tickled my arm like static. Tim stayed behind where Rex had been. But he reached out a hand and tried to hold my sleeve, and his fingers went through the cloth, and he kept them there anyway, curled around nothing, an inch from my cuff.

"Okay," I said. My voice had gone thick. "Okay. I can work with this."

I decided it counted. If you spend ten years being told that nothing touches anything, you get to decide what counts.

---

The Sign

We stayed there for about five minutes. I want to say it was a profound moment. In truth, it mostly involved Fab examining his reflection in the polished chest plate of a man whose reflection, I noticed, wasn't showing up in it, and Newt trying to work out how he'd turn a page, and Tim whispering "this is fine, this is fine, this is fine" to a daisy that he could not smell.

I made another discovery in those five minutes. I could hear all of them. That was nothing new. But when I walked around, all five moved with me, drifting just above the ground in a loose, glowing cluster, like a school of fish that had picked me as the leader. When I stopped, they stopped. When I went left, they went left, with a small delay, as if someone were dragging them on a string.

"Does anyone know how this works?" I said.

"No," said everyone.

"Do any of you know anything?"

"I know that the sky has two moons and that fact makes me deeply upset," said Newt.

Then Rex pointed at something and said, "There."

Twenty paces off, planted in the grass, stood a wooden sign. It was hand-painted in cheerful curly letters, with little flowers around the edges, and it said:

WELCOME, HERO! DANGER AHEAD!

Under it, a big painted arrow pointed to a cave in the side of the nearest hill. Out of the dark of the cave, a pair of red eyes the size of dinner plates were looking at us.

I read the sign. I read it again. I had the clear and cold realization that somebody, somewhere, had put in the time to paint flowers on it.

"Don't," said Tim.

"Charge it," said Rex.

"Statistically, no," said Newt.

"Is it hot?" said Fab.

"Maybe it's a girl," said Romeo, a man who, one minute into existence, had learned nothing.

I looked at the five of them. I looked at the sign. I looked at the red eyes, which hadn't blinked.

"Rex," I said. "Can you do anything about that? With, I don't know, your hands?"

Rex squared his shoulders, marched up to the nearest daisy, and punched it. His fist passed through it. The daisy swayed in the breeze it had been swaying in anyway.

"...I can advise," he said.

"We're going the other way," I said, deadpan.

I turned around and started walking, and the five of them drifted in behind me in a ragged, glowing line. And behind us, with a soft creak, the sign turned itself around on its post to show the other side. It had been painted in the same loving, curly letters, with the same little flowers.

JUST KIDDING.

The ground opened under my feet.

I'd like to say I took it with dignity.

I took it, on the whole, with a single, high, sustained scream that I did not know I could make.

I fell. They didn't. For a moment, five faintly glowing ghosts hovered at the lip of the hole, in perfect weightless stillness, looking down at me like people watching a coin go into a well.

"I TOLD YOU," Tim shrieked, from above.

"You didn't say anything about a hole!" I screamed back.

"I said something was going to happen!"

"Why aren't we falling?" said Rex, outraged, a moment later, to the universe in general. "Why is nobody making us fall?"

Then, one by one, with enormous reluctance, they followed me down, drifting after me through the dark like dropped feathers.

And far above us, in a white hall that was not a hall, a goddess in a floating throne was laughing so hard she had to put her goblet down. She had no idea what a boy was shouting at when he screamed at the empty air. That, she told the others, was the best part.