Seven stones, and his thumb found each one twice before he trusted the count.
Garnet first, rough as a molar.
Two rubies, no bigger than orzo.
Citrine, cool and square-cut.
A sapphire chip.
An opal that held warmth even through the leather.
Last, the emerald uncut, pale as a gooseberry, smaller than the rest.
Walter closed his fist around the purse and let a breath go slow through his nose, the kind he used to save for a call that had already gone bad by the time the truck stopped moving.
It steadied him anyway.
Old habits didn’t ask what century they were in.
He was crouched at the eastern foot of the rise, heather soaking his stockings to the knee, and forty feet above him the stones stood in their ring like a jury that hadn’t reached a verdict yet.
Grey.
Wet-shouldered.
Taller than any man he knew.
His mother had kept a coffee-table book of places like this on a shelf in Boise that nobody ever opened, and the photographs in it had lied they made the stones look small enough to lean against for a picture.
Up close they looked like something that had been waiting a long while for somebody rude enough to disturb it.
His right forearm hummed.
Not pain.
A low current under the skin, patient, like a phone left on vibrate in another room.
He pushed his sleeve back and watched a pattern surface along the inside of his arm pale blue, fine as thread, tracing a shape he couldn’t hold steady in his eye before it dimmed and went the color of ordinary skin again.
He waited for it to come back.
It didn’t.
All right, he thought.
Noted.
Filed for later.
Then he caught himself the word felt too neat, too much like paperwork for what had just happened to his own arm and let it go instead of chasing it.
The coat itched.
Brown wool, decent weight, scratchy in a way nothing he’d owned had ever been, and under it a linen shirt that smelled of nothing he recognized not his own laundry soap, not the lab, not the apartment he’d left behind an unmeasured number of hours ago.
He patted the coat’s inner pocket and felt paper crackle there: a letter, folded in thirds, sealed.
He didn’t open it.
Whatever name was signed to it, it wasn’t going to explain anything his own memory couldn’t already confirm.
He’d woken lying in this heather sometime before first light, no gasp, no wrenching, nothing that felt like the inside of an alarm going off.
Just here, and aware of being here, the way you’re aware of a room the second time you enter it rather than the first.
Twenty-seven years of Idaho and Oregon sat in his skull exactly where he’d left them.
He knew what a call sheet looked like.
He knew the salicylate pathway in willow bark well enough to draw it from memory.
None of that had prepared him for standing at the foot of a Neolithic monument in what his own gut told him, with total and unhelpful confidence, was the eighteenth century.
He tried the purse strings again.
His fingers had gone stiff enough with cold that the knot fought him twice before it gave, which struck him even now, even here as faintly ridiculous.
Four years running assays with a steady hand and he couldn’t manage a shoelace bow because the Highlands were cold in May.
He almost laughed.
Didn’t, quite.
Let the corner of his mouth do it instead, alone, where it cost nothing.
A dog barked.
East, past the hill’s shoulder, three sharp notes and then a fourth dragged out longer, the sound a farm dog makes at something it’s decided is worth mentioning to its owner but not worth actual alarm over.
Walter went still and listened past it cattle-lowing somewhere behind the bark, faint, and under that nothing.
No engine.
No plane line scratched across the sky.
Just wind moving through grass that had never heard of him.
He thought, with a clarity that surprised him, of his sister.
Emma would be making coffee right now, three years and two hundred and eighty years away, in a kitchen he could draw from memory down to the crack in the tile by the stove, and she would have absolutely no way of knowing that the last conversation they’d had a phone call about a birthday gift, nothing, ten minutes, love you, talk soon was the last one there was going to be.
The thought sat in his chest only until he stood, and then he set it down the way he’d learned to set down worse things than this, on longer nights than this one, and got moving.
The dog barked again, closer to insistent this time.
That decided it.
East meant a farmhouse, a yard, somebody’s early chores and somebody’s early eyes a man in a strange coat, alone at the stones on Beltane morning, was not a story he wanted told at anyone’s breakfast table before he’d worked out how to be a person here.
He turned south instead, toward where the ground rolled down and away into a fold of birch and grey stone that hadn’t produced a single bark yet.
He checked the coat pocket once more.
Letter, present.
Checked the purse at his belt.
Seven stones, present, count held.
He looked back up at the ring one more time didn’t touch it, didn’t feel any pull to and started walking, boots already stiff enough at the heel that he knew there’d be a blister there by noon whether he liked it or not.
The track picked up half a mile on, worn into the hillside by feet and hooves that had been using it a long time before he had any right to.
Walter kept to the edge of it out of some instinct he couldn’t name city habit, maybe, staying off the crown of the road and let the rhythm of walking do what it always did, which was quiet him down whether he asked it to or not.
The forearm hum came back once, brief, while he was crossing a burn on a line of flat stones somebody had set there generations ago.
He stopped mid-stream, one boot on a stone slick with moss, and waited for the blue thread to surface again.
It did clearer this time, close enough to a shape that he thought, for half a second, he could almost read it, the way you can almost read a word upside-down across a table.
Then it faded, and the water kept moving under him, cold enough to feel through the leather, and he crossed the rest of the way without incident.
He didn’t know who or what was on the other end of that hum.
He knew, in the specific and useless way a man knows a fact without any evidence for it, that something was.
Not a machine.
Not code.
Something that had chosen, so far, to stay quiet.
Fine, he thought.
Take your time.
He had, by his own count, absolutely nowhere else to be.
The land opened out ahead into low hills going soft-edged with distance, peat smoke somewhere beyond them, too far off yet to smell, and Walter Bryce the name felt strange in his own head, a coat he hadn’t broken in walked south with the stones behind him and did not look back.