Celeste is in bed. Her breathing is even, her body loose, face slack with sleep. The covers have slipped to her waist. One handcurled near her face. The other stretched across the empty side of the bed toward where I would be.
I undress. Lie down beside her. Gather her into my arms, careful not to wake her.
I close my eyes.
Her hand rises and falls on my chest with each breath. I listen to the compound settle around us. Distant footsteps. The hum of wards through stone.
My shoulders are locked. I make them release.
Then drowsiness rolls through me, and that itself is wrong. Dawn is hours away. The compound's hum is steady through the wall. Celeste's breath is even against my chest. None of the conditions for dormancy are present, and yet my body has already begun to cross the line it has obeyed for centuries.
The dark behind my eyelids softens. Lightens.
Then the bond goes wide. Wider than I have ever felt it. As if a door I did not know existed has come unlatched on its own and the air on the other side is rushing through.
The mattress under me. The weight of Celeste's hand on my chest. The hum of the wards through the stone. All of it pulling away at once, receding the way a tide goes out and takes the room with it.
When I open my eyes, I am standing.
Grass under my bare feet. The individual blades press between my toes. Open ground in every direction. Sky overhead.
Pale blue. Cloudless. Midmorning.
The warmth hits my face before my mind catches up to what it is. Light on my skin. On the backs of my hands when I lift them. Falling across my forearms with no pain, no smoke, no instinctive flinch from a body that has obeyed the sun's rules for centuries. The same warmth I felt the last morning I walked as a human soldier on a road in Tuscany, and didn't know that by nightfall I'd never see daylight again.
Sunlight.
The angle of midmorning light. How it makes colors sharper.
This is wrong. Every part of this is wrong. I closed my eyes in a dark room beside Celeste thirty seconds ago and now I’m standing in a field in the sun and my skin isn’t burning and the bond is fully open.
I turn.
She’s ten feet away. Standing in the grass, barefoot, wearing the shirt she fell asleep in. Her hair is down. The light catches it. She’s looking at me. Confused first. Then recognition. Then something I can’t read.
“How are you here?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“I fell asleep. I know I fell asleep.” She looks at the grass, the sky, her own bare feet. “This doesn’t feel like a dream.”
It doesn’t. This has resolution. The weave of her shirt is sharp. The individual strands of her hair moving in a breeze that is real.
“It must be the bond,” I say.
“You think the bond built this?”
“I think we fell asleep with the bond open and it pulled us somewhere.”
She looks around the field. Just grass and light and the two of us.
“Is any of it real?” she asks.
“The grass is real to my feet. The light is real to my skin. The bond seems to have built it out of what we know.”
She considers that.
“Is it safe?”
