Sebastian had four cigarettes left and no reason to ration them.
He lit one off the electric ring on the stove because the lighter had died in June and he'd never replaced it. Outside, something came apart over the east end of the city — a flat, enormous sound with no echo, the kind you felt in your teeth before you heard it. The window flexed. Two of the dishes in the sink shifted and resettled.
He sat down on the carpet with his back against the couch.
The apartment had been getting worse for a year and he'd stopped noticing the individual steps. Mold behind the stain above the radiator, which he'd once meant to look into. Dishes crusted from meals eaten three days ago, four days, he'd lost the thread. Bills on the floor near the door where they'd landed, still sealed, arranged by nothing. He'd developed a habit of stepping over them without looking down, and the habit had outlasted his interest in the outcome.
The TV had gone to static an hour ago, mid-sentence. A woman had been telling people to move west.
His phone buzzed against the carpet. He turned it over.
NATIONAL EMERGENCY ALERTEVACUATE IMMEDIATELYIMPACT IMMINENT
Underneath it, sixteen unread messages, all from the same automated number.
He scrolled past to his contacts and looked at the list, which took very little time. Two former COs, both of whom would be dead or in a bunker. A landlord. A pizza place. A number saved as Reyes that had belonged to a man who'd been in the ground for six years, and which Sebastian had never been able to make himself delete.
He put the phone face down.
Above the bed there was a photograph, sun-bleached to the color of weak tea, four men in a doorway somewhere hot. He was on the left. His uniform was clean because the picture had been taken on the second day, before anyone knew anything. He'd been twenty-two and he'd had opinions about the mission.
The building shook again, nearer. Plaster came down off the ceiling in a thin grit and settled on his shoulders like the world's cheapest snow.
He took a drag and held it.
Twenty-nine years old. Discharged eighteen months. He had a folder somewhere with a list of things he was supposed to do about the sleeping and hadn't done. He had a savings account with four hundred dollars in it and a plan to look for work in the spring.
"Well," he said, to the room, which was not listening.
The light came through the window before the sound did. It came through the wall, actually, which he registered as strange in the fraction of a second he had left for registering things — white and total, no shape to it, filling the apartment the way water fills a glass.
It didn't hurt. He'd expected it to hurt.
He woke up warm, which was wrong.
That was the first thing, before his eyes opened: his apartment ran cold from October to May and he slept in a hoodie. This was warm. This was the specific enveloping warmth of good heating and heavy blankets, and his brain, still half offline, produced the word hospital and then discarded it, because hospitals smell like hospitals and this smelled like beeswax.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was a long way up and it had carvings in it.
Sebastian lay still and did an inventory, because that was what you did. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Legs worked. Head hurt — a deep, dull, dehydrated ache low at the back of the skull, the kind that came after a fever broke. No pain anywhere else. No smoke. No sirens. Birds, actually, from somewhere outside.
He was in a bed roughly the size of his old kitchen.
He got up too fast and had to stop halfway, one hand on the bedpost, waiting for the room to finish moving. The floor under his bare feet was cold stone, polished, and he was wearing a nightshirt, an actual nightshirt, which he had never worn in his life.
There was a mirror across the room. He went to it the way you approach a dog you don't know.
The face in it was not his.
It was younger by five or six years, and it had never been broken across the nose. Black hair, gray eyes, a jaw that had been fed properly its entire life. He raised his right hand. The reflection raised its right hand. He turned his forearm over and the scar he'd carried since Kandahar — four inches, white, badly stitched by a man in a hurry — was simply not there.
Sebastian stood in front of the mirror for a while and did not think anything useful.
Then he looked past his own shoulder at the wall behind him, and that was when the room stopped being a mystery and started being information.
The wall was hung with dark green silk, and along it, at even intervals, were four pale rectangles where the silk hadn't faded. Picture hooks still in the plaster. No pictures.
He turned around and looked properly. The chandelier was missing about a third of its crystals and the gaps weren't random — they'd been taken from the back, where you'd notice last. Two of the four lamps had no bulbs. The fireplace was swept and laid and cold, in a room this size, in what the window said was early morning in autumn.
Rich house. No money in it.
He'd been in places like this before, in other countries, after the family had left and before the looting started. He knew what a stripped room looked like from the inside, and this one was being stripped slowly, by people who lived in it and were trying to keep it quiet.
A word arrived, unprompted, with the headache: Jules.
He waited to see if anything followed it. Nothing did. Not a face, not a house, not a mother. Just the name, sitting there like a coat someone had left on a chair.
Two knocks at the door. Not loud.
Sebastian did not answer, because he had no idea what he was supposed to sound like, and the door opened anyway.
The man who came in was around sixty, in a black suit that had been very good about a decade ago and was now merely well maintained. Gray at the temples, white gloves, and a tray balanced on one hand with a glass of water and two tablets on it.
He stopped three steps into the room. His eyes went down to Sebastian's bare feet on the cold floor, and stayed there a beat longer than they should have.
"You're up," he said.
"Seems that way."
"How is the head?"
"Bad."
"Yes." He set the tray on the writing desk and did not look up from it. "You were unwell for eleven days. Doctor Weiss expects some confusion. He was quite firm that you should expect it too, and not be alarmed."
Eleven days. Sebastian took the water and drank all of it, because his throat felt like a chimney and because it bought him ten seconds.
"Thanks, uh —"
The man waited. He waited with an absolutely straight face and enormous patience, and Sebastian understood, with real clarity, that he was being given a chance to fail.
"— thanks," he finished.
"Aldric, sir."
"I know your name."
"Of course you do." Aldric picked up the empty glass. "Your clothes are laid out. Your father has asked for you at breakfast. The family is already down."
"The family."
"Yes, sir."
Sebastian looked at the pale rectangles on the wall. "How many of us are there?"
Aldric's hands went still on the tray. It lasted less than a second, and then he was folding a towel over his arm and moving toward the door.
"Six at table, sir," he said. "Though Miss Lucia will have eaten standing up in the study, as she does, and will pretend otherwise. I would come down. Your father's been asking since Tuesday, and he does not ask twice."
He paused at the threshold.
"You walked across the room," he said.
"Was I not supposed to?"
"Not on that knee." Aldric adjusted the towel that did not need adjusting. "I've taken the liberty of not mentioning it."
The door shut behind him with a click that sounded expensive.
Sebastian sat down on the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands.
He was not a man who spent much time on questions with no answers; the military had trained that out of him and the eighteen months after had finished the job. So he laid out what he had, the way you laid out kit on a bunk. He was in someone else's body, in a house that was selling its own paintings, in a family he was expected at breakfast with, and the butler had already caught him.
That was the situation. The situation was the situation.
He reached for the clothes on the chair.
Something blinked in the upper left of his vision.
He flinched hard enough to knock the chair, and put his back to the wall on instinct, scanning the room — corners, windows, door — before it registered that the thing wasn't in the room. It moved when his eyes moved. It sat over the world like a smear on a lens, and it was made of small, clean, patient letters.
[Cashback System — Activated] Expenditure returns tenfold at Settlement. Daily Spending Limit: $1,000 Settlement: 00:00 Primary Objective: Net worth of $1,000,000 Time remaining: 29d 16h 12m
Sebastian read it twice.
"No," he said.
The letters did not care. Downstairs, faintly, someone dropped something on a stone floor and a woman's voice said a word he couldn't make out, and the clock in the hall began to strike eight.
He got dressed.