The seal should have been the easy part.
Xu Hao had spent twenty minutes examining it beneath his desk lamp, turning the old book a fraction at a time so that the light caught the impression in the wax. Fine lines crossed and curved around one another in a pattern that was almost familiar.
Almost was the troublesome part.
He knew the seals of merchants and monasteries, noble households and dead kings. He had spent more years than he cared to count in archives where nobody opened the windows and every document smelled faintly of dust. A man ought to get something for that amount of time. Recognition, for instance.
But this symbol gave him nothing.
He leaned closer to the magnifying lamp and turned the manuscript again. The leather binding was cracked, the corners softened with age. The pages within had settled into an uneven block, though he couldn't see enough of their edges to guess what was written on them. Whoever had sealed the cover had pressed the wax deep into the join.
The client who had brought it to his office insisted nobody had ever opened it. For once, the claim seemed plausible.
Xu Hao had asked where it came from. He had received a long explanation that answered several questions he hadn't asked and avoided the one he had.
He had dealt with collectors before. Some were honest. Some were imaginative. Most became considerably less forthcoming when asked to provide documents proving an object's history.
Still, an unusual book was an unusual book.
He pulled on his cotton gloves, adjusted the padded rest beneath the binding, and selected his thinnest blade.
"Let's see what you've been hiding," he murmured.
He slid the point beneath one edge of the wax. A little pressure, no more. The seal resisted, then lifted cleanly from the leather.
He set the broken piece beside his hand.
That was the last thing he remembered.
* * *
A bird was making a noise like a rusty door hinge.
Xu Hao lay on his back and listened to it for several seconds, trying to decide which colleague had left a window open in his office. The noise came again, followed by crickets and the soft movement of leaves.
Leaves?
He opened his eyes.
There was no ceiling. Above him, branches spread across a bright patch of sky. Sunlight slipped through the canopy in thin, shifting strips, and something with wings moved from one tree to another far overhead.
Xu Hao stared at it.
"Well," he said, "that's new."
He sat up too quickly. The ground tilted for a moment, and he put a hand into the damp soil to steady himself. Moss covered the roots around him. Ferns rose almost to his waist. There were trees in every direction, trunks so broad that some would have taken three men to encircle them.
There was no road, fence or building in sight.
And, unless his university had recently made some astonishing improvements to the grounds, definitely no office.
He looked down at himself. His white lab coat was still buttoned over the clothes he'd worn that morning. There was a smear of dirt near one pocket. His shoes were damp with dew.
He checked his pockets.
No telephone. No wallet. No keys. Even the little pen he always carried was gone.
"Wonderful."
He stood, brushing leaves from his coat. He tried to remember leaving the office, getting into a car, walking through a door. Anything that might bridge the distance between his desk and this forest.
The memory stopped at the wax seal.
He could see it clearly: the dark red fragment lying beside the manuscript, his gloved fingers moving away from it. After that, nothing. Not darkness, exactly. An absence. Like a page torn neatly out of a book.
He had spent his career working around missing pages. He disliked finding one in his own head.
Perhaps he'd been drugged. Perhaps the manuscript had contained something toxic, though he couldn't imagine how a substance trapped behind a cover would have done this without leaving any warning. Perhaps he was still unconscious in his office, dreaming something elaborate and unpleasant.
A beetle crawled over the toe of his shoe, paused as though assessing him, then continued on its way.
Xu Hao crouched and touched the ground. Cold soil, gritty between his fingers. The smell of wet bark. A mosquito settled on his wrist, and when he slapped it, the sting remained.
If it was a dream, it was taking its responsibilities seriously.
He straightened, and nearly lost his balance again.
Not because he was dizzy. Because his knees worked.
He bent them cautiously, then straightened. No familiar stiffness. His lower back, which usually protested whenever he stood after a long day at his desk, offered no complaint at all. The faint ache in his right shoulder had vanished too.
Xu Hao rolled the shoulder once.
"Now that," he said softly, "is suspicious."
The coat hung differently on him. He could feel it pulling from the shoulders, dragging around his knees. When he lifted his arms, the sleeves slipped down over his hands.
He had worn that coat for years. It hadn't shrunk in the wash overnight. Quite the opposite.
He pushed one sleeve back.
The hand beneath it was small and smooth, the fingers slimmer than they should have been. The faint age spots across his knuckles were gone.
He turned his left palm upward.
There should have been a scar at the base of his thumb.
At sixteen, a history teacher had brought an old sword into class and, in a lapse of judgment that must have delighted the school's insurers, allowed the students to handle it. Xu Hao had tested the edge with his thumb. The blade had been sharper than it looked, and the lesson had ended with blood on the desk and a memorable lecture from his mother.
He'd carried a pale white line there for twenty-six years.
Now the skin was unbroken.
He turned the hand over, examined the other, and reached up to touch his face. His jaw felt narrower. His chin was smoother. He couldn't feel the small rough patch near his ear where he'd nicked himself shaving that morning.
"That's not possible."
The voice that came out of his mouth was wrong.
Younger. Higher. Nothing like the voice he'd used to lecture rooms full of tired students for years.
His heart began to race.
He closed his eyes. Four counts in, four counts out. He had learned the exercise from his mother when he was a child. She used it with frightened patients before surgery, guiding them through the rhythm until they could hear something other than their own fear.
By the fifth breath, he could think.
He still had two hands, two feet, and an apparently functioning head. Whatever had happened to him, standing in the middle of an unknown forest and shouting at it would not help.
He needed water. Then a road. Then someone who could tell him where he was.
An explanation could wait until he had somewhere safe to demand one.
* * *
He found a branch that would serve as a walking stick and stripped off the smaller twigs. It was not much of a weapon, but it was better than meeting an unfamiliar animal armed with a lab coat and professional qualifications.
The slope fell away to his right. He chose the downhill route.
During archaeological expeditions, he'd learned that water often led to people, and people often led to food, shelter and someone willing to argue about directions. That last part varied according to the country, but the principle had served him well.
He tested the ground with the stick before putting his weight on it. Thick roots crossed the leaf litter, and the ferns concealed holes deep enough to turn an ankle. Twice he stopped to listen when something rustled in the undergrowth. Once he saw a movement between two trunks and froze until it resolved into a branch swaying in the breeze.
He would have liked to think he was taking sensible precautions.
He also knew that, had anything large and hungry decided to pursue him, his current preparations were unlikely to impress it.
After a while, he noticed that walking didn't tire him the way it should have. He could climb fallen trunks without needing to pause at the top. His breathing stayed steady on the steeper sections. It felt like finding an old machine unexpectedly restored to working order.
He was forty-two years old.
Or he'd been forty-two yesterday.
He thought of his parents, and the possibility struck him so suddenly that he stopped walking.
Would they be looking for him?
His mother would telephone first, probably twice, and leave a message telling him that he worked too hard. His father would wait a little longer before calling, pretending it was only to ask whether Xu Hao had eaten. If neither received an answer, they would worry. He could picture it too easily.
As a child, he had never been entirely sure what his parents expected of him, only that it involved medicine.
Both were surgeons. His mother could talk for an hour about the difference between a good surgical knot and a bad one. His father had once drawn the chambers of a human heart on a dinner napkin and become so absorbed in the explanation that his fish went cold.
Xu Hao had listened. He'd enjoyed listening. He could still remember his mother setting an orange peel on the kitchen table, putting a needle and thread into his hands, and teaching him how to pull a stitch without tearing what he meant to mend.
"Not harder, Hao," she'd said when he tugged the thread too tightly. "More carefully. The patient isn't a sack of potatoes."
"But it keeps coming loose."
"Then watch me again."
She had shown him until he got it right. When the knot finally held, she'd looked absurdly pleased with him.
They'd been just as pleased when he won a spelling medal at school. His father had clapped harder than anybody in the hall.
Perhaps that was why telling them he wanted to study history had been so difficult.
He remembered the evening clearly. His father had been cutting a piece of fish when Xu Hao announced his choice of university course.
The knife had stopped halfway through.
"History?" his father had said.
"I know it's not medicine."
"I had noticed."
His mother had hidden a smile behind her cup. His father hadn't.
"You're good at biology," he'd said. "You've always been interested in what we do. I thought—"
"I am interested," Xu Hao had interrupted, then regretted it. "I'm interested in lots of things. But when I think about spending the rest of my life in a hospital, I can't see myself happy there."
His father had set the knife down.
"And you can see yourself happy with history?"
"Yes." Xu Hao had looked from one parent to the other. "I want to study it properly. Research. Teach, eventually. I know it isn't a guaranteed career. I've looked at the courses."
For a long moment, nobody had touched their food.
Then his mother reached across the table and laid her hand over his.
"It's your life," she said. "Just promise you won't choose it because you think it'll be easy."
He'd almost laughed. Nobody who'd met a university history department would have made that mistake.
"I promise."
His father had needed longer. But he'd nodded, finally, and never tried to change Xu Hao's mind again.
Years later, after the degrees and the research expeditions and the publications, they said they were proud of him. He believed them. Mostly. His father still grew a little quiet when old colleagues asked whether his son had followed him into surgery.
Xu Hao had become a professor by forty-two. He'd travelled, taught, argued with other historians about the placement of commas in ancient texts, and spent more nights in archives than he'd care to confess. He had never married, which his mother considered an omission she might yet correct.
He loved the life he'd chosen.
And he had been meaning to visit his parents the following weekend.
He stood among the trees with the stick in his hand, looking at nothing.
He had been meaning to visit for months.
* * *
Running water reached him before he saw it.
He followed the sound through a stand of tall ferns and came to a stream winding over pale stones. It wasn't wide, but it was moving steadily downhill, and where the bank dipped there was a patch of open ground where he could kneel.
He was thirsty enough to consider drinking immediately. Then he remembered how many people on expeditions had become ill after trusting water merely because it looked clear.
No pot. No filter. No way to make a fire that he could see.
He crouched at the edge and cupped a little water in his palm, hesitating. If he stayed lost much longer, he'd have to decide which risk he preferred. For now he could rinse the dirt from his fingers and follow the stream until he found help.
He watched the ripples widen and settle. A face formed between the pale stones beneath the surface.
Xu Hao looked at it without understanding.
Black hair, untidy from sleep. A narrow face. A sharp young chin. Wide eyes studying him with an expression that looked, in a strange and deeply irritating way, exactly like his own.
He leaned closer.
The boy in the water leaned closer too.
Xu Hao lifted a hand to his cheek.
The boy copied him.
There was a photograph in his parents' house, taken outside their front gate on a morning when he was desperate to get to school. His father had insisted on taking it, and Xu Hao had scowled through the whole affair. His mother still kept it on a shelf and refused to replace it with anything more flattering.
The face in that photograph was the face in the stream.
Fifteen years old. Perhaps a little younger around the eyes, but unmistakably him.
For a long time, Xu Hao knelt there with the walking stick across his knees, watching a boy who had been gone for twenty-seven years stare back at him.
He had been prepared to accept that someone had taken him from his office and abandoned him in a forest.
He was going to need a little longer to accept what they'd done to the rest of him.