One heartbeat, a broken heaven. The next, a wet footpath outside my university library.
A hundred years between the two beats. All of them mine.
I didn't move.
When the enemy figures out they can't kill you, they start trying to trick you instead. I'd been home before. Four times. A dream trap on the fifth world. A mirror realm on the seventh.
None of them were real, and all of them had felt exactly like this.
So I stayed where I was and ran the checks.
The moon. One. Correct number of moons.
It was full tonight and sitting low, just above the library roof like it had parked there. The building was lit up from inside, warm amber through the glass atrium, all three floors of it. The moon and the windows were almost the same color.
The stars were faint and orange, mostly drowned in city glow. Enough to know a city was still there.
My hands were shaking and I couldn't stop them yet.
The dream version of home always smelled like fresh bread and my mother's kitchen. So I went looking for the ugly parts.
The trash can by the path was overfull, with a pizza box balanced on top. The bike rack was half rust. A sprinkler was running even though it had rained, slapping water onto the sidewalk, because nobody at any university has ever turned off a sprinkler.
I'd forgotten the sprinklers. A hundred years, and I forgot that sound existed.
The concrete smelled of rain, something clean under the mud and the exhaust.
No fake would have bothered with the sprinkler.
"Okay," I said out loud, to nobody. My voice came out rough. "Okay. Okay."
A car door slammed two lots away.
I was ten feet from where I'd been standing, low, hand on a knife that hadn't existed half a second ago. Shadow-craft. Old reflex. A kid in a hoodie was locking his car across the lot. He hadn't seen anything.
I put the knife away and stood up and breathed.
"Home," I told my hands. "We're home. Stand down."
I wasn't fully sold either.
I checked my bag, because it was easier than checking anything else. Same canvas strap, same water stain. A notebook. Twenty-three dollars. My phone.
The phone was at forty percent.
I laughed once, and stopped before it could turn into crying. A hundred years gone, and the battery hadn't noticed, because on this world I'd been gone zero minutes.
The city noise came in all at once: thousands of sleeping heartbeats, a microwave running somewhere above me, a train far off, all of it pressing in at the same time. I turned it down before I'd decided to. Dialed everything back, made myself small and ignorable. The old reflex.
Which was wrong.
The knife was shadow-craft from my fifth world. On every world after that, it hadn't come through at all. None of them had. One system per world. The others locked out until you left.
I tested it. Pressed two fingers together and pulled up a thread of Oathfire. It came. Full, hot, the same blue-white it had always been. I let it go before it could do anything.
Chi next. I drew a breath and settled it the way I'd learned on the second world, under a sky-piercing master who'd thought I was a joke until I wasn't. The chi moved, clean and fully formed.
Ten classes. Ten locked doors. And on Earth, every single one of them was open.
I filed it with the things to be afraid of tomorrow.
Then I walked, because I didn't want to keep standing on the spot where it took me.
The campus hadn't changed at all. That hit harder than if it had.
The path stretched out ahead, wide, pale concrete, still damp from the rain. Somewhere across the quad, music from an open window, bass and indistinct, and then just the lamps humming and my own footsteps.
The street lamps ran the length of it on both sides, amber-warm, and the light pooled in the wet surface so each lamp had a twin shimmering underneath it. Tall trees lined the right side, dark against the sky, and through the gaps I could see the moon tracking along above the roofline.
An emergency call box glowing blue, a club fair flyer stapled over an older one, and a vending machine humming at the end of it.
I stopped in front of the vending machine.
The middle slot had peanut butter cups. They still made peanut butter cups. I could smell the chocolate through the wrapper before it dropped.
I fed the machine two of my twenty-three dollars, and the buttons confused me for a second. A hundred years since I'd pressed one. My fingers had to work it out on their own.
The machine thought about it. Then it dropped two packs instead of one.
My luck stat stopped being fair around year sixty.
"Thank you," I told it.
The first bite tasted like being nineteen. I stood there a little longer than I needed to, then kept walking.
At the bus shelter by the science quad, a shampoo ad glowed in the dark. The text was in Portuguese.
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Reveal your hair's inner strength, I read. Fluently. I've never studied Portuguese. I speak everything now. Came with the abduction. Ten worlds of language sitting in my head, and the first thing any of it did on home soil was translate shampoo marketing.
"Inner strength," I said. "Sure."
My status screen chimed.
I hadn't heard that sound in over a year. The last time, it was telling me my tenth class had hit its ceiling, in a trench, under a hostile sky. I pulled the screen up on reflex.
[ NEW CLASS UNLOCKED ]
THE DIVINE PATH. Level 1.
Skill acquired. Hearthlight.
I read it four times.
The screen gave me one class per world. Ten worlds, ten classes, and when the last war ended, the voice said it was finished. I'd been glad. Done was supposed to mean home.
Except there was no eleventh world.
So what was this one for?
That you were never only a sword.
Her voice. Eight minutes before the end, her hands on my face. She'd known something. I stood in a bus shelter on Brazos Ridge and couldn't get past it.
The skill description was one line. A light by which the frightened know they are safe.
A candle.
"What are you?" I asked the screen.
It didn't answer.
I closed it and was still working out what to do with that when someone spoke behind me.
"Hey. Hey, man. You good?"
Maybe twenty. Swaying a little. Holding a burrito with both hands like it was load-bearing. Flip-flops in September.
Most people would have kept walking.
"I'm good," I said, and my voice worked properly this time. "Better than good. First night back in town after a long time away."
"Oh. Oh, that hits different." He nodded with his whole body. "How long were you gone?"
"Longer than I planned."
"Where?"
Ten worlds. A hundred years. I still can't always feel my hands.
"Abroad," I said.
"Nice." He considered his burrito, then me. "You see your family yet?"
"Heading there now."
"Good. Good." He pointed the burrito at me. "My brother came back from deployment last year. My mom cried on him for like an hour. So, listen. Let 'em cry on you, man. Don't do the thing where you're fine. That's my advice."
"That's good advice."
"I know. I'm very wise right now. It wears off." He shuffled a few steps, then turned around. "Hey. Welcome home, dude."
"Thanks," I said, and meant it, and he grinned and wandered off into the dark.
Two blocks later I finally took out my phone.
Forty-seven notifications.
Mom, 6:12 PM. A photo of a pot on the stove. Sunday. No excuses.
My advisor, 9:40 PM. Re. Re. Methodology section.
A furniture store having a sale it described, with no shame, as legendary.
And at the top. 11:04 PM. Eleven minutes ago. A hundred years ago.
Sienna.you just LEFT??
I scrolled up. The rest had stacked through the evening.
Sienna.ok third floor, usual table. I have exactly one hour between practice and dying of econ
Sienna.got here early. don't be weird about it
Sienna.I stole your seat. the good one. consequences of tardiness
Sienna.sol
Sienna.you just LEFT??
We were at the table. Third floor, the one with the wobbly leg we'd decided was ours without ever saying so. She was losing to her econ homework with style, and she looked up over her laptop and said, okay, so, honest question. The kind we'd been circling for a year.
I said, hang on, I'll grab us coffee first.
Because I was twenty-two and thought we had time.
The ground took me on the way to the coffee machine.
She walked out of eleven minutes ago. I walked out of ten worlds. I carried okay, so, honest question across all of them, and on the bad nights it was the only warm thing I had.
I started typing.
Hey, so, funny story. Deleted.
I'm so sorry, something came up. Deleted. A century came up.
I can explain. Deleted. I couldn't. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time. I'd stopped telling lies that mattered somewhere around the sixth world and I wasn't starting again here.
Did you finish the econ. Deleted. Coward.
I'm back. Deleted. Back from what. The coffee machine. Don't.
You have no idea how much. Deleted. Too much, Sol.
I stared at the empty field. Family first. I'd deal with the rest tomorrow.
I typed one more and saved it to drafts instead of sending it, because I'd need the nerve tomorrow and I was out of it tonight.
Library. Tomorrow. I owe you an ending.
Phone in pocket.
Alder Street hadn't moved. It smelled like cut grass and someone's dryer vent, the whole street quiet the way it gets after ten.
Every crack in the sidewalk was where I remembered it, and I checked every one. Even the crooked one by the fire hydrant that ate my front bike tire when I was nine.
No fake would have kept the crack.
The moon had tracked with me most of the way. It sat above the roofline at the end of the block, the same as it had above the library. I'd stood under seven different moons on seven different worlds. None of them had looked like this one.
I hadn't realized I'd missed it.
My phone buzzed. Mom.
Mom.You're out walking. Mrs. Alvarez saw you on Alder.
Eleven fifty at night and Mrs. Alvarez had already called my mom. I had no idea when that woman slept.
Me.Almost home.
Mom.Door's unlocked. There's rice.
I read it twice and had to stop for a second.
Me.Ok. Don't wait up.
Mom.I'm not waiting up. I'm awake anyway. Different thing.
She'd been saying that since I was fourteen. Still not true.
The house came into view at the end of the block, and I stopped walking. Just for a second.
It was the same pale stone it had always been, cream and grey, warm in the lamplight. The iron gate at the walk, the arched front door, the lanterns on either side of the steps still lit. Someone had planted roses along the front, spilling over the low stone border. The tower room on the right had its window lit too, which meant my mother had been up there recently and forgot to turn it off.
Kitchen light on. She's kept it that way since I was little.
Two heartbeats inside, both slow. Dad's, on the couch, TV still going. Hers, upstairs, not remotely asleep.
I stood on the porch with half a pack of peanut butter cups and a hundred years I hadn't figured out how to put down yet.
"Home," I said, one more time, until I believed it.
Then I opened the door.