The first thing Ren Vale noticed when he opened his eyes was that the ceiling didn’t have numbers on it.
Across twenty burned lives, waking had been an audit. The moment his eyelids parted, the painful cold of the Speculum would flare against his breastbone: the searing phantom covenants of dead timelines, the cold dread of divergence tolls, and the choking weight of Mira’s encroaching turning to stone. His skull would throb with the phantom memories of nineteen different lives—the reek of coal-smoke from Unit Ren’s foundries, the taste of salt-water from the Deep-Diver’s drowning, the icy panic of Ren-the-Cinder bolting down a back alley.
This morning, there was only whitewashed lime plaster.
A slanted beam of pale winter sunlight cut through the four-pane glass window, lighting up dust motes dancing lazily in the air. Across the rough cedar laths of the ceiling, a spider was patiently spinning a web between two floor beams, unrushed, careful. Then it entirely uninterested in the fate of the cosmos.
Ren lay still on his straw-stuffed tick.
He listened.
There was no bronze bell tolling from the depths of the earth. There was no piercing silver hum shaking through his dental enamel. There was no sound of seven conflicting skies grinding against each other like millstones in the clouds.
