The air smelled of salt, wet wood, and something Simon couldn't place — a sweet, almost floral note that made no sense mixed with the smell of a harbor. He stood still where he was, his feet sunk into sand coarser and darker than anything he remembered from some half-forgotten vacation, and for a stretch of time he couldn't measure he did nothing but breathe, as if breathing were the only thing his body still trusted itself to do.
Then, slowly, he forced himself to look.
There was no hospital. No parking lot, no ER sign flickering weakly every night like a heart that refuses to stop. There was an old wooden pier, built from planks of mismatched sizes, as if twenty different people had repaired it twenty different times without ever consulting each other. There were boats — not dinghies, not yachts, nothing made of plastic or fiberglass, but dark wooden hulls with furled sails, moored to crooked posts that looked like they'd been planted there more out of habit than by design.
And there were people.
Simon ran a hand over his face, still damp, and looked harder, hoping the image would settle into something that made sense. It didn't settle.
A woman passed a few feet away carrying two baskets full of what looked like fish — and she had pointed ears, tilted slightly backward, almost feline. A man further off, stocky, with enormous arms, had skin that seemed to have small scales right along his neck, barely visible when he turned to speak to someone. A boy ran laughing between an adult's legs, and Simon was almost certain — almost, because his mind was actively refusing to accept anything it saw — that he'd noticed a tail, thin, poking out from under the boy's tunic.
"Okay," he said quietly, to himself. "Okay, fine. I'm dreaming. Or I'm dead too, and this is some weird way to find out. Or—"
Or nothing. There wasn't a third option that made sense, and his mind — the same mind that back at the office could keep contracts and deadlines in order even when his desk was a disaster of scattered papers — grabbed onto that thought like an anchor: analyze. Don't try to understand it all at once, take it one piece at a time.
Fact one: he wasn't in Italy. Fact two: the people around him didn't seem at all surprised to be what they were — nobody looked twice at the woman's pointed ears, nobody looked at the man's scales, as if it were all perfectly normal, as if he were the one out of place. Fact three: he still had his shoes, his clothes, his dead phone in his pocket, so whatever had happened to him hadn't taken anything physical away.
Fact four, the most irritating of all: he understood every single word he heard around him.
He didn't dwell on it for more than a second — he didn't have the clarity of mind to, not right then, with everything else collapsing on top of him — but some part of him registered that the woman with the pointed ears had said to someone, "take him to the Root House before he rots," and he had understood her perfectly, in fluent Italian that had absolutely no reason to be there. He filed it away with everything else, in that part of his brain that had by now exceeded its capacity for astonishment and had settled for simply recording.
He took one step forward on the sand, then another, moving toward the pier because it was the only spot that seemed to have some kind of organization, some kind of sense, amid everything that had none. And it was there, among the crates piled up next to a boat larger than the others, that he saw something his brain could finally classify without straining.
Normal people. Humans, dressed the way anyone would dress for dirty work — practical tunics, sturdy boots, no pointed ears, no scales, no tails. A small group, maybe five or six, moving among the crates with the ease of people who did this every day.
Leading them, a young man a little older than himself — an eclectic style, an odd-shaped earring Simon didn't recognize, the quick manner of someone in a hurry to close a deal before anyone asked too many questions.
Simon approached without even consciously deciding to. He no longer cared what was "right" to do in that moment — he just wanted someone he could ask something without risking a growl or a twitching tail in response, someone who at least looked, visually, like the world he'd just lost.
"Hey," he said, his voice harsher than he meant it to be. "You. Where the hell am I?"
The young man — Renn, he would have been called, if Simon had had any way of knowing that, but in that moment he was just the only human within a hundred yards — turned sharply, more startled by the tone than by the question itself. He studied him for a second, head to toe, with the quick eye of someone used to appraising goods or people for a living.
"Never seen you before," Renn said, without answering the question. "Where are you from? There wasn't a single ship in port tonight."
"I don't know," Simon said, and felt his voice crack in a way he immediately hated. He cleared his throat, tried to recover something resembling control. "I don't know, okay? I was somewhere else, I closed my eyes, and now I'm here, surrounded by people with pointed ears and feet that look like gills, so if you've got a better answer than 'I don't know' I'm all ears, otherwise just tell me where the hell this place is."
One of the men in Renn's crew paused mid-motion, a crate in his hands, and traded a quick glance with another. Renn himself narrowed his eyes slightly — not hostile, but calculating, as if he were recalculating something that had seemed simple a moment ago.
"You're on the Isle," he said slowly, as if every word were a small investment he didn't want to waste. "The City. You really have no idea where you are, do you."
"I just said that," Simon shot back, sharper than he meant to. He knew he sounded aggressive, knew there was no reason to be with the first person who'd spoken to him without demanding anything, but he couldn't stop himself — there was too much, too much all at once, and the only way his body knew how to keep from falling apart entirely was to bite before being bitten. "I have no idea about anything. I don't know where I am, I don't know how I got here, and honestly right now I don't even know who the hell I am, so if you could spare me the guessing games and just tell me what's going on—"
"Easy," Renn said, raising a hand, but there was no fear in his voice, only the caution of someone who doesn't yet know if he's dealing with a madman, someone in shock, or something more interesting. "Nobody wants to hurt you. Sounds like you've had a worse night than me, and trust me, mine wasn't great to begin with."
He gestured toward the crates behind him, as if to underscore how much he already had to deal with without needing a confused human dropped out of nowhere on top of it. One of his men muttered something under his breath, something Simon didn't quite catch but that sounded like a warning — let's hurry, before someone notices — and Renn answered with a sharp nod, without taking his eyes off Simon.
"Listen," Renn went on, faster now, the tone of someone who wants to wrap up a conversation quickly to get back to more urgent things. "I don't have time to play tour guide right now, but I also can't just leave you here yelling at random passersby. If you really don't know anything, this pier isn't the right place. There's someone who handles people who show up like this, without—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
One of the larger crates, the one the man who'd just spoken was leaning against, moved.
It wasn't a small movement, wasn't something you could ignore or blame on the wind — the whole crate jerked with a sharp thud from the inside, then another, harder, and a sound Simon couldn't classify as any animal he'd ever heard before — something between a growl and a shriek, deep and wrong in a way that made his spine go cold — filled the salty harbor air.
"Shit," Renn said, and for the first time since Simon had met him, his voice lost every trace of professional control. "Shit, shit, it was supposed to stay quiet for another hour—"
From the far end of the pier, a stranger's voice shouted something that froze the entire delegation in place — a tone of authority, sharp, that sent every one of Renn's men lunging toward their crates as if they'd just been caught with their hands in a pocket that wasn't theirs.
"Undeclared goods on pier three!" the voice shouted. "Everybody freeze where you are!"
Renn swore again, quieter, and made a quick gesture to his crew — a silent order Simon didn't understand but that triggered immediate motion, crates shoved aside, frames lifted, someone running toward the water. Chaos materialized within two seconds, as if it had been there the whole time, just waiting for the right excuse to explode.
Simon stood frozen in the middle of it all, too disoriented to run, too exhausted to figure out which direction would even be safer to move in. The crate kept shaking, more and more violently, and one of the lid's nails popped loose with a sharp crack.
It was in that moment — with the voice still barking orders from the end of the pier, with Renn cursing and his men scattering, with the thing in the crate seeming about to break free — that a hand closed around his arm from behind, with a strength he wasn't expecting.
"Don't make a sound," a voice said, low, right at his ear, in a tone that left no room for argument. "And come with me. Now, if you want to stay in one piece."
Simon didn't even manage to turn around to see who it was.