Page 5 of Beds and Blades

Chapter two

Another World

Icame back to consciousness the way you surface from falling asleep in the library. That lurching, disoriented return of someone who had not meant to go under and had one very immediate concern about what was currently visible on their laptop screen to anyone walking past.

Not that this had ever happened to me.

Okay, maybe it did.

The browser tab in question had nothing to do with my doctoral thesis on Roman military strategy. It had a great deal to do with content I would describe as unsuitable for a university library. A passing stranger would have used simpler terms.

That was not always the point. I had found, over years of empirical observation, that viewing this category of content functioned as a reliable anxiety-management tool. It was a straightforward break from thinking about dead Romans.

I was aware that I did not look like someone who spent a significant amount of time on porn websites. I had been told, on more than one occasion, that I had a serious face. I wore oval wire-frame glasses and owned several cardigans. From the outside, I presented as a woman whose inner life consisted primarily of primary sources and grant applications.

This was not accurate.

My inner life was, in fact, extremely active in a direction unrelated to primary sources.

The ground beneath me was not the floor of a seminar room. I knew this because the floor of a seminar room at the University of Pennsylvania was linoleum, and what my hands were currently pressing into was grass. Actual grass. Damp, cool, with the give of soil underneath it that no synthetic surface had ever successfully replicated.

I opened my eyes.

The sky was wrong.

There was something in the quality of the light that wasn’t right. Too clear. The sharpness of air that had never, not once in its entire existence, shared space with a highway.

Data point one: Sky. Wrong.

I sat up slowly, which my caffeine-saturated cardiovascular system rewarded by immediately reminding me that I had consumed approximately nine hundred milligrams of stimulants in the last four hours, and my heart had not forgotten. I pressed my palm flat against the grass and breathed until the spinning stopped.

Data point two: Smell. This was the thing that kept snagging my attention even as I was trying to establish more strategically important facts. The air smelled extraordinary. Deep and fresh, almost impossibly clean. It was like someone had taken the concept of outside and removed every compromise civilization had made with it. No exhaust. No particulates. No ambient industrial process layering itself over everything. In 21st-century cities, the contamination becomes invisible because it is always there. You stop noticing it until you breathe air without it.

Data point three: My hands. Still holding the presentation notes I had printed at eleven the previous night. All forty-three pages, somewhat crumpled at the edges. The notes were here. I was here. These facts were, in a narrow and technically accurate sense, consistent with each other.

Data point four: Stars.

I looked up again. The sky was unmistakably day, the sun present and accounted for, hanging at an angle that suggested early morning, perhaps an hour past dawn. And yet, there, between two clouds, was a star. Then another. Then a small cluster, faint but definite, visible against the full blue as though they had not received the memo about how skies were supposed to behave.

I looked at this for several seconds.

What exactly was in that energy drink?

I stood slowly, taking inventory as I went. Jeans: present. Red sweater: present. Glasses: slightly skewed but present. White Adidas sneakers with pink stripes: present. iPhone 16e: present, but dark.

I pressed the power button. Nothing.

I pressed it again. Still nothing.

I checked my watch, the steel digital Casio A158W I had bought in my second year of grad school because it was reliable, inexpensive, paired well with most outfits, and supposedly equipped with a battery that would last at least seven years. Dead. Absolutely dead, for no reason I could identify.

I put the iPhone back in my pocket and looked at my surroundings properly for the first time.

Behind me: mountains. They were not mountains in any sense I had a reference for. They rose from the valley floor in shades of black and charcoal. The stone was dark enough to look wrong. The mountains seemed to drink the light.

At the peak of the tallest mountain, just visible through a layer of low cloud, stood a dark castle.

I used the word castle loosely because what I was looking at bore the same relationship to a castle that an aircraft carrier bears to a fishing boat. Technically similar category. Emphatically different purpose. It was enormous and angular, and it sat on that mountain patiently, permanently, as if it had been there for millennia.