Chapter 1: Seventy-Two Hours

Felix woke up in a body he had buried.

He knew it before he opened his eyes. The mattress was too thin under his hip, the way cheap foam went after a couple of years of one man sleeping in one spot, and the pillow smelled of a detergent he had stopped buying. His right shoulder did not hurt. That was the first wrong thing. His right shoulder had hurt for the last eighteen months of his life, a dull grinding that he had learned to breathe around, and now there was only a twenty-two-year-old joint, loose and painless and entirely not his.

He lay still and took inventory without moving. Soft middle. Thin forearms. The ribs rose and fell too fast, the way they did when a person was out of condition. He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth and found no missing molar on the left. He ran his thumb across the inside of his right wrist. No white line where a shard of something had gone through him.

The light on the ceiling was a bar of orange-cream, sharp at one edge and going vague at the other, the particular morning color this apartment made when the sun hit the neighbor's white brick and bounced back in. Somewhere below the window the maglev hummed, a note two blocks off that he had once been able to set a clock by. Under that, the fan in the wallscreen turned itself on, ran for a few seconds, and stopped.

He counted to ninety before he let himself turn his head.

The wallscreen was doing what it always did in the mornings. The time floated in the upper right in pale numerals, 7:14, and beneath it, in a cleaner font than the rest, a line he had not expected to read again.

T-72:00:00 — AETHERFALL ONLINE GLOBAL LAUNCH.

Under the countdown, a ticker crawled in a muted gray. Maglev delays on the east line. A vote in a legislature somewhere. A short Zenith PR line, the kind that had been drifting across feeds for weeks: *We are proud to welcome the first generation of players as stewards of a new medium.*

Felix snorted once, a short dry sound in the quiet of the room, and looked away.

That was the confirmation. He did not need another. Three days before launch. He was here.

He sat up slowly, pushed the thin blanket off his legs, and swung his feet to the floor. The floorboards were cold in the familiar places. He sat on the edge of the bed for a long breath, hands on his knees, eyes on the wall opposite. Then he pulled his legs up underneath him, crossed them on the mattress, and straightened his spine the way he had taught himself, a long time from now, by imitating a woman who had learned it from a woman who had learned it from someone whose name he would not remember for another year.

He closed his eyes.

The first minute was only breath. He did not reach. He made his diaphragm wide and let the inhale come from the bottom, and he counted four in, four hold, four out, four hold, the way he had done every morning in a different apartment in a different country at a different age. The mattress was too soft under him. His knees complained. He ignored both.

The second minute was attention. He found the current of his breath and followed it down, and down, and in. He let the noise in the room become part of the room. The maglev hum and the wallscreen fan and the neighbor's pipes knocking once against the wall — he did not push them away. He put them in their places and sat among them.

By the fourth minute he had stopped feeling his hands.

By the sixth he had stopped feeling the mattress.

He had forgotten, a little, how patient this had to be. In his first life, after the world had changed, mana had come at him like a river broken open; sensing it had been the work of an afternoon. That was not what he was doing now. Now he was trying to taste salt through plastic.

He breathed. He did not reach.

Around the eighth minute, something moved.

It was less than a draft. It was the memory of a draft, a faint grain under his attention, the way a guitar string sometimes still hummed a little after you had damped it with the heel of your hand. He did not grab at it. He let it settle, and he listened, and slowly the grain took on a direction. Thin, sub-threshold, almost not there. The supply had not come back with him. But the instinct had.

He sat with it for another breath, because eight minutes of quiet deserved at least one good one. Then he noted, without weighting it, that the thread had a texture to it he did not quite remember from before. A small burr on the note, as if the string had been restrung on a slightly different wire. He filed the detail. Rebirth artifacts were the kind of thing you wrote down and ignored until they meant something.

He opened his eyes.

The relief in his chest was cold rather than warm, which was the correct shape for relief in his line of work. He let it sit there a moment, watched it, and then stood up on legs that had not been on a floor in eighteen hours of this life and a lot longer than that in his other one.

The kitchenette was two steps from the bed. The mug on the counter was the green one with the chip on the rim, and there was an inch of yesterday's instant coffee in the bottom of it, cold and tarry. He drank it in one swallow without looking at it, because looking at it would have been worse than the taste. The mug went back on the counter in the same ring it had left on the formica.

He pulled the drawer below the sink open. Takeout chopsticks. A pair of scissors with one loose handle. A packet of soy sauce that had gone past crystallizing and was on its way to being something else. Under the packet, the paper notebook, flat and cheap, with a wire spiral and a faded blue cover he had bought in a stationery shop five minutes from this apartment on a day he did not remember.

He patted his hip for a pen. What came out of his pocket instead was a coin, small and thin, of the kind that tip jars accumulated and nobody carried on purpose. He looked at it in his palm for a second. Then he flipped it once, caught it, and set it on the nightstand without looking at which side had landed up.

His grandfather had kept a penny in his wallet for most of Felix's childhood. Felix had not thought about that in years. He did not think about it long now.

He found a pen on the windowsill, tested it against his thumbnail, and sat on the edge of the bed with the notebook open on his knee.

At the top of the page he wrote the date. Under the date he wrote a single line, underlined it once, and moved on. The words came out fast. He did not pause to make them pretty. He numbered them as he went, one through a number he would not let himself look at yet, and the items were the short kind of items that only meant anything to the person who had written them. A row about mana, three days of it, hours blocked out to the quarter. A shorter row about the body — sleep, food, water, a specific protein target, a specific walk. A row about money, only a handful of tickers, and next to each a single word that meant something to him about conviction. A line about a piece of land two hundred kilometers from here that nobody was going to want for another year. A name with a phone number beside it. A line about launch night and what he was going to do in the first ten minutes after he opened his eyes inside the capsule.

He did not read any of it back to himself. He wrote the next line. Then the next.

The item near the top of the page, the one under the underlined heading, said: *make it read me different.*

He put the pen down when the writing stopped feeling useful and looked at the page for a long breath. Then he closed the notebook, set it on the nightstand next to the coin, and pushed himself up.

The laptop was on the kitchen counter where he had left it the night before, which was also where he had left it in the morning of a life that was no longer his. It was three years old and heavier than it needed to be. He opened it, and the screen was too bright for the room, and he dimmed it by muscle memory before the brightness could settle in his eyes.

He logged into the brokerage. The password came out of his fingers before he had to think about it. The two-factor ping went to a phone on the nightstand that he had not looked at yet, and he reached for it without turning his head, because he knew where it was. The phone's lock screen had a date on it that he had already confirmed, so he did not look at the date. He took the code, entered it, and the platform opened.

The interface was the old one, the one before the redesign that had annoyed him for a month and then stopped mattering because the world had ended. He navigated it without reading anything. Options chain. Expiry far enough out that he would not get squeezed on theta but close enough that the move he remembered would have time to show up. Strike a hair out of the money, because he did not need a tenbagger on this one, he needed a clean conviction entry that would close before anyone else noticed the trend. Size conservative. He was not trying to die rich in three days. He was trying to have something in the account at the end of the week.

He typed the order. He read the confirmation screen without moving his lips. He clicked.

The fill came back in under a second. He closed the tab, and then he closed the laptop, and then he sat there with his palm flat on the lid for a breath, because that had been easier than he had let himself expect and he wanted to make sure he did not do a second one on momentum.

One was the plan. One was what he had written down.

He got up and walked to the sink and ran the tap until the water was cold, and he drank two glasses of it standing. His body felt light in a way that was partly dehydration and partly the fact that it had not been this body in a long time. He let it feel light. He did not look at the window with the orange-cream light on it. The light was the kind that made his chest do a thing he did not have time for, and he had negotiated with himself, in the first minute of sitting up, not to look at it for long.

He picked up the phone.

The contacts list was short. He scrolled to the M's, because he remembered where the number had been the last time he had looked at it, which had been three years ago in this timeline and a lifetime in the other. Marchetti, Eliane. Under the name, a mobile number with a country code he had dialed twice, a long time ago, and never since.

He held the phone in his right hand. His thumb was a quarter-inch above the call button.

He stood there for a second longer than he had meant to.

In the other life, he had not called her for another eleven months after this morning, and by then it had been too late in ways that were not her fault and were entirely his. He had spent the last year of that life making a small private list of the things he would have done differently if anyone gave him the chance. This number had been near the top of the list. He had written it again ten minutes ago without looking at the old one.

He pressed call.

The line took a beat to connect, because the number was international and the handshake was older than the fiber it was moving across. Then the ringtone came through, a clean steady European tone, once, twice. His shoulder was very still. His breath was a shade too shallow. He corrected it without thinking.

A third ring. A fourth.

The line clicked.

"Pron—"