Chapter 2: Day One Survival

Here is a list of the things I learned in the first ninety seconds of being at the bottom of a pit.

One: a pit smells different from the way you think. You'd assume dirt and damp. It is not dirt and damp. It is dirt and damp and old meat and something faintly chemical, like a swimming pool in which someone has been keeping a sick animal. The smell wrapped around my face like a hand.

Two: a ten-foot-long lizard is much bigger than a ten-foot-long anything else. Length isn't the issue. It's the mass. It's the way something that big takes up the air.

Three: the five of them could scream in harmony.

I'd landed on a heap of old bones, flat on my back, with something sharp in my kidney. A dead branch had come down with me from the lip of the hole, thick as my thigh and as long as my arm, and it had landed across my shins, which I would have called bad luck if I'd been in a mood to be fair to it. A faint light fell from the ragged blue circle thirty feet above us. The walls of the pit were sheer, slick, and glistening with something I did not want to identify.

The five of them had come down more gently. They drifted into the pit like slow, luminous snow and settled around me, glowing, not touching the bones, and every one of them, as far as I could tell, began screaming at the same time.

At the far side of the pit, curled around its own bulk in a nest of bones, something woke up.

It was a boggart. I know that now. I didn't then. All I knew was that the shape in the dark unfolded, one limb at a time, and kept unfolding. It had the long, loose, muscular body of a komodo dragon crossed with something designed by a committee of angry grandmothers, with a gray mottled hide, small dull eyes the color of old teeth, and a jaw that hung open, dribbling, to show about six rows of teeth, none of which matched.

It was ten feet long and it was drooling on my sneakers.

"WE'RE GONNA DIE," Tim screamed.

"We're gonna die," I agreed, quietly, and found I was oddly calm about it.

"WE'RE GONNA DIE, WE'RE GONNA DIE, WE'RE—"

"Weapons!" Rex roared. He was already in front of me, cape snapping out behind him, a veteran of a war that had begun forty seconds earlier. "Get your weapons!"

"We don't have any weapons," said Newt, who was hovering with his glasses on the wrong ear, trying and failing to hold on to a stack of books that kept sinking through his arms.

"Then punch it!"

"I really don't think—" I began.

Rex punched it.

I'd like to say it was a heroic punch. That it landed with a thunderclap and a crunch of armor and the boggart flew back, stunned. In truth, it was a very good punch. It was well formed, hip turned, shoulder behind it. It sailed straight into the boggart's snout, through the snout, through the skull, and out the other side, and Rex followed it, because a man cannot stop a punch that good, and he ended up standing with his whole head and one shoulder buried in the monster's neck like a very angry hat.

The boggart didn't notice. It didn't flinch. It sneezed, a huge, wet, rattling sneeze, and Rex's head came out of the other side of it and lingered there, thoughtful, for a moment.

"...Motherfucker," said Rex, in a perfectly level voice.

"Oh, honey," said Fab. "It can't see you."

"I'm aware," said Rex, with enormous dignity, and pulled himself out of the beast's throat.

That was the first thing I understood about the new arrangement. The five of them could scream at the monster all they liked, and the monster couldn't hear it. They could stand in its mouth. (Tim did, a moment later, when the jaw swung open to snap at me and he fled in the wrong direction. The jaw closed. Tim stood inside it, perfectly intact, shrieking: "I'M IN IT. I'M IN ITS MOUTH. AM I DEAD? I FEEL DEAD." "You are not dead," said Newt. "You were never alive. It's a different thing.") They were safe from everything.

I was the only body in the pit.

---

The Thing About My Brain

I've been asked, a couple of times, what it feels like in a crisis. Mostly by people who assume that someone with my wiring would panic. The truth is that I usually do the opposite.

It's a quiet thing. All the noise goes out. The spare channels shut down, and I'm left with one, a narrow, cold, bright beam. When the world has too much going on, I stop trying to take in all of it, and I take in the parts that matter. I see edges. I see weights and distances. I see which things are loose.

It's the best thing about my brain, and I only get it when I'm about to die.

(There is a second thing my brain does, which is the opposite, and which I'll get to in a minute. I'd like to say it never happens at the same time. It does.)

I stood very still, in the stink and the dark, and I looked at the boggart, and I let it come into focus.

"Its skin is thin," said Newt.

He had stopped panicking. He'd pushed his glasses up, and he was looking at the creature with exactly the expression he got in a lecture hall when the professor said something interesting.

"Right at the jaw hinge. See where the hide goes translucent? It's old. It's been stretched too far, too many times. A hard impact there would stun the whole mandible."

"Water," I said, under my breath.

"Yes! Water. There's seepage." He pointed up. "The ceiling. See where it's dark? Moisture pooling in a fault, directly above the left side of the pit. It's been dripping for years. A good strike to the roof—"

"And the stalactites. They're loose."

"Very loose," Newt agreed, delighted. "Structurally, the rock is held by capillary tension and about fifty years of luck. It wants to fall."

I looked at the ceiling. At the long, sharp, hanging fingers of limestone, dripping slowly into the dark. I looked at the boggart, which was now nosing at my sneaker and making a deep, interested, rumbling noise. And I looked at the thing I'd been trying not to think about, which was that to do any of it, I needed the boggart to move four meters to the left, and I needed to be standing up there on the rubble with something in my hands that was long enough to hit the roof.

It needed to be distracted.

It needed, specifically, to be pleased.

"Fab," I said.

"Me?"

"Flirt."

There was a very long, very silent pause. Fab's face rose slowly, like a sunrise. His hand drifted up to his chest as though to hold in his heart.

"Oh, honey," said Fab. "Finally."

He straightened his shoulders. He flicked his cape back with a sweep that caught the light from above, tilted his head half an inch, and walked. He walked like the pit was a runway and the boggart was the only person in the audience who mattered. He put a hand on his hip.

"Hey, big boy," said Fab. "Come here often?"

The boggart's gaze slid straight through him, onto my face.

Fab waited. He tried the eyelashes. He tried the hip. He stepped in front of the great drooling snout and struck a pose with both arms over his head, a pose that would have stopped traffic in three countries, and the boggart walked through him on its way toward me, and Fab turned in place, in the middle of its chest, with his hand still raised, like a man in the middle of a toast.

"...Oh," said Fab, quietly. "It's not working."

"It can't see you," said Newt, not unkindly.

"I know it can't see me." Fab dropped his arms. For a second he looked about nine years old. "I just wanted to try. In case."

"It's okay," I said, as the boggart's breath hit my face. "It was a good idea."

"It was a great idea," said Fab, steadying himself. "It was just badly cast."

It was the first time that day I understood what I'd actually done to them. They weren't going to save me. They could tell me what to do, and they could be, I suppose, a really good audience. But they could not move so much as a pebble.

So I did the rest myself.

---

The Branch

I got the branch off my shins. It was heavy and rough and wet, and I lifted it the way I'd lift anything, badly, in the wrong place, with both hands too close together. I backed up the slope of rubble with it, with the boggart following, not hurrying. It knew it had me.

"Left," said Tim. His voice was thin and flat. When the fear peaks, it comes out the other side, and what's left is a kind of radar. "Left. Not that left. The tail. Watch the tail. It's going to swing. Jaw's about to open. It's loading. Kaito, it's loading."

I ducked. The tail went over my head. I felt the wind of it. I got four more steps up the rubble, and the ceiling was above me now, loose rock, dark and dripping, and I lifted the branch as high as it would go.

It was about a foot too short.

"Higher," said Newt.

"I'm trying—"

"Behind you," said Tim, and his voice jumped an octave. "It's right— it's right BEHIND— RUN."

"RUN," Tim screamed.

"RUN! RUN! RUN!"

And I stopped.

This is the second thing my brain does. It's not a decision, and I would like that on the record. It's a shutdown. The beam goes out. The world gets too big to carry at once, a wall of noise with edges, and every system I have decides, in the same instant, to wait for instructions. I've frozen on the stairs of a bus. I've frozen in the middle of a pedestrian crossing. I once froze for eleven minutes in a grocery store with a basket in my hand because someone had rearranged the cereal.

I stood with a stick in my hand and a lizard's breath on the back of my neck, and I could not move a muscle.

"RUN!" screamed Tim.

"He can't!" shouted Newt. "He's frozen! It's a freeze response, it's neurological, he literally— Rex, do something!"

"I'm a PROJECTION!" Rex yelled. "WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? I CAN'T EVEN HIT IT!"

Behind me, I heard the jaw open.

"TAKE OVER!" Rex shouted. "SOMEBODY! ANYBODY! TAKE OVER!"

And something answered.

---

What I Remember

I want to tell you what it felt like, and I can't, because I wasn't entirely there. This is what I have.

Red. That's the first thing. A color behind my eyes, like a sunrise coming up through the back of my skull. Then heat, from the sternum outward, and a feeling like a door being kicked open somewhere inside me, and a flood of something enormous and furious and absolutely sure of itself pouring into my arms.

The freeze broke. It didn't thaw. It shattered.

And I had never in my life been so certain of anything.

I knew exactly how to hold the branch. I'd never held a sword in my life. My hands moved up and apart on the wood, left over right, the grip a swordsman learns in a decade, and it felt not like learning but like remembering. My feet went wide. My shoulders dropped. I turned, and I looked at a ten-foot monster with a jaw the width of a door, and I felt something that I had not felt since I was eleven years old behind a gym.

I was not afraid.

That's all I have, clean. The rest comes in pieces, like a dream on a bad morning. A voice that was mine and was not mine, the voice of a man who orders coffee and tells the barista your name. The branch, two-handed, swinging. A word I had never said, shouted so loud it hurt the rock. A wet, thick impact, and a spray of something cold across my face.

And then I woke up.

---

Aftermath

I was standing on the rubble slope with my feet planted wide.

My arms were shaking. My throat was raw, as if I'd screamed myself hoarse. My hands hurt. I looked down at them and found that I was holding two halves of a branch, one in each fist, snapped clean across the middle, and that both my palms had broken into blisters.

Water was pouring down the wall of the pit in a long, thin, steady sheet. A chunk of the ceiling the size of a dinner table was lying on the floor, in two pieces. And across the pit, wedged up to the shoulders in a narrow crevice in the far wall, jaw first, with its legs scrabbling at nothing, was the boggart.

It had stopped struggling. It had managed, somehow, to turn its great gray head, as far as the crevice would allow, and it was looking at me.

I'd like to describe the look. I've seen it on dogs. It's the look a dog gives you when someone has said its name, in a voice it didn't know, and it has done what the voice said, and now it's trying to work out why. The small dull eyes were wide. Its tongue was hanging out. It looked, I have to say, deeply confused.

"...What," I said, in a voice that came out of me like gravel, "did I do?"

Nobody answered. The five of them were hovering in a close cluster over the rubble, absolutely silent, staring at me. Fab had a hand over his mouth. Tim had both of his over his eyes, and was peeking through the fingers.

Then Rex said, in a voice I'd never heard from him, a small, careful, awed voice:

"I was magnificent."

"You told it to sit," said Tim.

"I did tell it to sit."

"It sat," said Fab. "You said 'SIT, MAGGOT,' in this voice, and it sat. It sat down. A ten-foot lizard. Like a Labrador."

"And then I said BACK," said Rex, rapidly warming up, "and it backed, four whole meters, right under the fault line—"

"—and then you said 'STAY,'" said Newt, "and it stayed. It stayed while you took a swing at the ceiling."

"With a branch," said Rex. "Two-handed. Did you see the form? Did you see the follow-through?"

"You also called its mother a number of things," said Tim, "which I'm fairly sure it did not like."

"It didn't hear that part," said Rex. "It was already under the water."

I sat down on the rubble. It seemed like the thing to do. My legs weren't going to hold me anyway, and the blisters on my hands were beginning to tell me what they thought.

"I don't remember," I said. "I remember red."

"Because it was me," said Rex.

"It was..." I looked at the splintered halves of the branch. "I took over?"

"No," said Newt. He had come forward. His glasses had slid down his nose and he was pushing them up, and his face had the thin, dazed brightness it got on the rare occasions that he was about to be right about something large. "No. Listen. This is important. Rex shouted 'take over.' He meant it as a plea. A general cry to the universe. But you're the only thing in this world that can take anything. And you did. You took him. Or he took you. I'm not sure the grammar works."

"He gave you his hands. His grip. His voice. His, ah, tone. It's a sync. A full one. For about forty seconds, you were him."

"I was him," said Rex, happily, to everyone.

"That's the missing mechanism," said Newt. He was walking in a small, tight circle now, which, for someone who couldn't leave a footprint, was a lot of effort. "We can do our small things. I can explain. Tim can warn. Fab can... coach. Rex can bark. Those are basic. Those are the things we always did. Those are free. But we can't act. Rex can't swing a sword. I can't, I couldn't turn a page of my own book. We have no hands. We have no mass. There's no hook for us to hang anything on. Except you."

"Me."

"You're the only hook. If you let one of us in, all the way, then the one who's in gets a body to work with. And you get what he's got. Everything he knows how to do. It's... a loan. A very enthusiastic, very noisy loan."

I looked at my blistered hands.

"And the cost?"

"You tell me," said Newt.

I thought about it. My arms felt like they'd been taken out, wrung, and put back in the wrong holes. I'd just done the work of ten minutes of sword drill in forty seconds, with muscles that had never done any of it. My throat was shredded. And in the last few seconds I'd been standing there I'd felt something else, a small, low thrum of restlessness, a feeling that I'd just been told to do something and hadn't yet decided whether I wanted to.

"Also," I said slowly, "I want to tell Tim to stop slouching."

"I'm hiding behind Fab," said Tim.

"Yes. Stop it. Stand up straight, soldier."

"Oh, no," said Fab, delighted. "It's in him."

"That's—" I closed my mouth. I could feel my own voice. It didn't sound like mine. It was lower, and flatter, and a little pleased with itself. "That's the thing. When it comes, it brings him. The bossiness. The... Jesus. It's not even gone yet. It's just leaving."

"The flaw," said Newt softly. "That makes sense. A power and the person it comes from. You can't borrow one without the other."

"I object to the word flaw," said Rex.

"You made a lizard sit and then you insulted its mother," said Fab. "For a lizard that wasn't going to understand."

"It understood the tone."

"We're doing it again," I said.

They all stopped.

"Not now," I said. "I can't lift my arms. But we're doing it again. That's... that's something. That's what we have. I can't fight. You can't fight. But if I let one of you in—"

"I'd like to point out," said Tim, in his smallest voice, "that I'm not sure I want to be in a lizard fight."

"Nobody is going to ask you to," said Rex.

"You said that about the pit."

"Do it again," I said, to Rex. "Now. Show me how."

Rex squared his shoulders. He closed his eyes. For about twenty seconds he stood there, glowing, scowling with effort, with his hands in fists.

Nothing happened.

"...I don't know how I did it," he said, eventually, and his voice cracked, in a way that was nothing like the voice I'd borrowed. "I was scared. I wanted somebody to... I didn't mean to... I don't know how I did it, Kaito."

"Okay," I said, and I meant it. "We'll work it out."

"We'll need data," said Newt, who had already started taking notes in the air.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I sat on a rubble heap, with ruined hands and a ruined voice, in a stinking pit in another world, while a lizard with its head in a crack looked at me like a dog that had been given an order it wished it hadn't been, and I laughed until the blisters hurt.

The boggart, bless it, let out a long, low, soft whine.

---

The Bone Ramp

It turned out the boggart's own nest was the way out. The creature had spent the last decade piling the bones of its victims against the far wall, a huge, ghoulish ramp of ribs and femurs and, to Romeo's eternal dismay, a number of shoes. I climbed it. It took twenty minutes, because my hands didn't work and I had to do most of it with my forearms. The boggart watched me go the entire time with a kind of gloomy interest.

The voices floated up behind me, in a loose stream. They couldn't go far from me. I'd found that out in the first ten minutes, by accident: about four meters, five at the very most, and then something pulled them back like a rubber band. Tim insisted on going last, so nobody could grab his ankle.

"Nobody can touch you," said Newt.

"Not the point."

"It's a very good ramp," said Newt, to himself. "Structurally."

"Don't talk about it," said Tim.

"I'm complimenting the engineering."

"I will cry."

"Good," said Rex. "Cry. Just do it while you float."

When I finally dragged myself up and out into the sun, I lay on my back at the edge of the hole and watched the clouds go past. It was late afternoon. The smell of grass had never been so wonderful.

---

Five Ghosts

I'd like to tell you about the hunger, because nobody ever does.

When you read about isekai, when a hero crosses over, nobody tells you that the first night in a new world is mostly about your feet. They hurt. Your back hurts. Your hands hurt, in a new and creative way. You have to pee. You discover, in a way that is both biological and humiliating, that you didn't bring enough food, that you don't know where to get more, and that you don't know the local word for toilet.

I got hungry first. I'd had half a sandwich on the roof the evening before, and that was my entire intake. I'd been awake for a day and a half. My stomach was making a noise like a distant truck.

The others, I noticed, were not.

"I'm not hungry," said Romeo. He sounded betrayed. "Why am I not hungry? I'd like to be hungry. At least that would be something."

"You have no stomach," said Newt.

"I'd like one!"

"It's so strange," said Fab, staring at his own hand, at the faint, shimmering outline of it. "I can see things. Properly. The colors, the, oh, look, that flower, it's orange, it's so orange, I never knew. But I can't smell it. I used to smell things, through you. Did you know I used to smell things through you?"

"I didn't," I said.

"It was lovely," said Fab. "Cheap coffee. Rain. That awful smell in the library. And now there's a flower, and a beetle, and a faint note of a bog, I think, and there's nothing. It's all just a painting of a smell."

"It's a lot," said Tim, in a very small voice. He had curled up against a tree trunk, and the tree trunk was partly inside him. His hood was pulled over his eyes. "It's all so loud. And I can't feel any of it. It's like being behind a window."

I sat down beside him. I didn't say anything for a while, and then I said, "It gets better if you pick one thing."

"What?"

"One thing to listen to. Everything else is just noise. If you pick one thing, and you hold on to it."

Tim peeked out from under his hood. His eyes were red. "What did you pick?"

"The sound of my own breathing," I said. "It's always there."

He thought about it. Then he nodded, tucked his head back under the hood, and a few seconds later I heard, very softly, a shaky in-two-three, out-two-three. He'd never had lungs. He did it anyway, in time with mine, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't known was tight.

Nobody had ever told me before that I was good at that.

---

The Fire

I pulled the half sandwich out of my bag at dusk.

It was a sorry thing. It had been squashed in the pit and then damp from the boggart's pool, and it had a little streak of mud on one corner. But it was food. I tore it into six pieces, as evenly as I could, because I'd been raised to share, and I had my hand out with five of them before I remembered.

Nobody said anything.

I set the five pieces in a row on a flat rock, in a patch of the last light. I don't know why. It seemed wrong to leave it out, and it seemed worse to put it away.

"You saved us some," said Romeo, and his voice had gone strange.

"Eat it," said Rex, from the other side of the rock. "That's an order. It's the only one I'm going to give tonight."

I ate my piece. It took about four seconds. Then I ate the other five, one at a time, slowly, for them, while they watched. The sixth I held in my mouth a little longer.

"That," said Rex, "was the best thing I've ever seen anyone eat."

"It's a day-old egg sandwich," said Newt.

"It's the best thing," said Rex, fiercely, and for once nobody argued.

We were in a clearing at the edge of a wood, under a tree whose bark was the color of caramel. It was cold, and getting colder. Newt, remembering a book that didn't exist in this world, talked me through a bow drill, made of a bent branch and a shoelace and about twenty minutes of lecture on friction, while I did the work with the heels of my ruined hands and swore at every turn. Fab suggested "something with a little more ambience." It was Tim, in the end, who got the ember to catch, and he did it by telling me how: "Gentler. Gentler than that. Like you're breathing on a sleeping bird." I breathed on it, gently, in the dark, and the orange speck swelled, and a flame the color of a peach stood up out of the grass.

It was small and thin, and it did the most important thing a fire can do: it made a circle.

We sat in it.

Or, to be precise, I sat in it, and the rest of them sat around me, which is a different thing. They didn't need the warmth. The light went through them. They had no shadows on the grass, and the flames didn't flicker on their faces, and Tim sat as close to the fire as it was possible to sit without actually being in it, and then, after a minute, as close as it was possible to sit while completely being in it, with the fire coming up through his hood like a halo. "It's nice," he said. "I can't feel it. But it's nice."

Rex sat with his arms crossed. He was very quiet. His fist was clenched, flexing and unflexing, and he kept looking at it, the one that had passed straight through a lizard's skull. Newt had found a book somewhere in the pile (he claimed it was a treatise on the migratory patterns of swamp birds, which he'd never seen in his life) and was reading it, motionless, because he couldn't turn the page. Fab lay on his back in the grass, which did not bend under him, looking up at the stars. Romeo sat with his chin on his knees, staring into the dark, with an expression like a man who had lost a letter.

"I miss the old setup," he said, at last.

"You mean when you were only voices."

"It was easier. I could just lie there. I could think about whatever I wanted. I didn't have to look at anything and not be able to... to..." He turned his hand over, as if to see through it. "I can see women. In this world. There are going to be women. And I can't even hold a door."

"And now we have to survive," said Newt.

"I'll protect the group," said Rex.

"You couldn't protect yourself from a lizard," said Tim, very quietly. "Your fist went through its head."

Rex went very still. A long, slow, dangerous quiet spread over the fire. "Say that again," he said.

"I'm sorry," said Tim. "I'm so sorry. Forget it. I'm sorry."

"He's right, though," said Fab, lazily.

"I'll kill you," said Rex.

"With what? Your feelings?"

I raised a hand. They all looked at me.

I wasn't sure what I was going to say. In a crisis, I'm sharp. In a quiet moment, I'm not. The words don't come in a clean line. They come from the wrong direction, from a long way off, and half the time they're not the ones you want. But I could see the five of them in the firelight, glowing faintly, and I could feel it, finally, the thing that had been waiting for me at the bottom of the whole day, the way it waits at the bottom of every day.

I knew they were afraid. I knew I was too.

"...Thanks," I said. "For today."

The fire popped.

"I know it was a mess," I said. "I know none of this is what you signed up for. You didn't sign up for any of it. I made you up. You didn't get to say no. And now you're, I don't know. Ghosts. In a world full of lizards. And you can't hold a book, or smell a flower, or eat a sandwich, and it's because of me. You could be mad. You could blame me. But you all just... did it. You did the thing. One of you let me borrow his hands. And I'm still alive."

Nobody said anything.

"Aw," said Fab, softly.

"Don't make it weird," I said.

"I'm making it weird," said Fab, wiping his eye with the back of one rainbow glove.

I smiled.

It's hard to describe a smile when it's the first real one in two days. It's not a big one. It cracks. It feels like cold machinery turning over. But it was small and tired and real, and it was the first of this whole strange story, and I think they all saw it, and I think they all agreed, without a word, never to mention it.

---

What Tim Heard

"...Something's coming," Tim whispered.

I looked up.

He'd gone rigid. His whole body was drawn into a tight little knot, with his chin tucked and his eyes wide, fixed on the tree line, where the firelight ended and the dark began.

"Tim?"

"Someone," he said, in a hushed, strange voice. "Not a monster. A person."

I stood up.

The fire popped. A log shifted. The dark between the trees was deep, thick, and utterly still. And then, from somewhere to my left, from just beyond the reach of the light, I heard it.

A footstep. So soft that if I hadn't been listening with every nerve in my body I'd have missed it. And after it, so faint it was barely a sound at all, a thin, bright, metallic click.

Like a latch. Like a lock being turned.

"Who's there?" I said.

Nothing. The wind. The fire. The long, black, patient dark.

And then, a glint. Just for a heartbeat. A flash of firelight on something small and bright and sharp, low down, at about the height of a kneeling person's hand. It gleamed, and winked out.

Gone.

I stood there for a long time. Eventually I sat back down. My heart was going like a hammer.

"They're watching us," said Tim.

"Huh," said Fab.

It was a very small huh. I looked at him. He had sat up in the grass, and his head was tilted toward the dark, the way a man tilts his head when he thinks someone has said his name in a crowded room.

"What?"

"Nothing," said Fab, slowly. "It's silly. When I said 'honey' just now. Out loud, to the fire. Whoever's out there stopped breathing."

"You said 'honey' to nobody," I said. "Nobody can hear you."

"I know," said Fab. "That's the silly part."

Newt opened his mouth to say something about the impossibility of this. He looked at Fab's face. He closed it again, and wrote something in the air with his finger.

I filed it. There was nothing else to do with it.

---

One Last Thing

I didn't sleep.

It wasn't fear, exactly. It was that thing again, where the body won't stand down. I lay with my back to the tree, listening to the others breathe, which was absurd, because they didn't. They sat or floated or lay at the edge of the firelight, and the only breathing in the clearing was mine. Rex was awake, keeping watch, with his arms crossed. Newt was talking to himself about boron. Tim was curled up so tightly with his hood over his eyes that he looked like a fallen leaf.

Eventually I took out my phone.

I hadn't looked at it since the sidewalk. It was in my back pocket, and I'd forgotten it was there, and when I pulled it out, the screen lit up my hand. Nine percent. No signal, of course. No bars at all, just a small gray X in the corner, as though the phone had stopped believing in the outside.

The lock screen was a photo of my parents, taken at a lake two summers ago. They were squinting into the sun, and my mother had one hand up to shield her eyes, and my father was looking at the camera, not at us, with an expression I'd never worked out. He'd looked like that in every photo I could remember: a man in a hurry to say something, in a language he'd never learned.

I swiped. There was a notification.

3 new voicemails — Mom.

I'd never played them. Of course I hadn't. They'd come in the day before, while I'd been in a lecture hall, and I'd planned to check them that night, and then I hadn't, and now the phone could not, in a world without towers, play something that had never been downloaded.

I stared at them for a long time.

Then I held down the power button and turned the screen off, to save the battery. To save whatever I could. And I put the phone back in my pocket, against my leg, where it was warm.

Behind me, very quietly, Fab said: "Honey?"

I hadn't known he was awake.

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm here."

"I know."

"Just checking."

"I know," I said again. I could feel the place where his hand would have been, an inch from my shoulder. It was cold, a thin cool shimmer, the same as the mist from the meadow. I didn't mind it. After a minute, I closed my eyes.

Far above the clearing, in a white hall, a god drained the last of his cup and sat staring into a floating mirror, not entirely sure how he felt about having bet on a week. I found out later what he'd seen. A boy with an exhausted face had stood frozen in a pit, and then, suddenly, with no warning at all, moved like a man who had been swinging swords for twenty years. He had shouted sit at a lizard. The lizard had sat. Nobody in the Hall could say how.

I'll tell you what that god would have bet on, if he'd known. It wouldn't have been the boggart.

It would've been the sound in the dark.