The plane was falling.
I knew that much. Everything else came back in pieces.
The floor tilted beneath my feet. Someone screamed behind me. Yellow oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, swinging wildly as people reached for them with trembling hands. A man shoved past me. A woman was crying. Somewhere, a child kept asking if we were going to die.
I remember thinking that somebody would tell us what to do. The pilot, maybe. A flight attendant. Anyone who sounded like they knew what was happening.
Nobody did.
Then came the fire.
And after that, nothing.
I should be dead.
The thought arrives before I can make sense of anything else. I should be dead. I remember the plane falling. I remember the heat. I remember being certain that I was about to die.
So why can I hear explosions?
A cold, mechanical voice slips into my skull. It is so clear that, for one confused second, I wonder whether someone is speaking through a radio.
Resonance detected. Threshold / Survival alignment. Vessel assigned. Transfer commencing.
My eyes snap open.
The world is trying to kill me.
The ground bucks beneath me. Dust fills my mouth, and I cough until my chest aches. The air smells of smoke, scorched metal, and something sharp and coppery. Explosions thunder somewhere nearby, close enough to make my teeth knock together.
I try to sit up. My arms shake. For a moment, I can't understand why they feel so light.
Then I look at my hands.
They aren't mine.
They're small—thin fingers, scraped knuckles, dirt packed beneath the nails. My sleeves hang loosely around wrists that look as if they belong to a child. I stare at them, waiting for the world to correct itself.
It doesn't.
I grab my own face. My cheeks feel wrong. My jaw, my nose, the shape of my skull—everything is unfamiliar. Panic rises so quickly that I nearly forget to breathe.
"No. No, no, no. How is this possible?" I whispered.
I try to remember the plane. The seat beneath me. The person sitting nearby. The sound of people screaming. I reach for a face, any face, but my memory slips away whenever I get close to it. I can remember that there were people with me. I can remember being afraid for them.
I can't remember whether I ever got to say goodbye.
A bitter ache settles behind my ribs. If I really died, then everyone I knew is still back there—or they're gone too. I don't know which possibility is worse. I don't even know if anyone will ever find out what happened to us.
"I want to go home".
The thought is so ordinary that it hurts. I don't want a second life. I don't want a mysterious voice in my head or some grand destiny. I want the life I had before, with all its unfinished conversations and stupid little problems. I want one more chance to complain about things that suddenly seem impossibly small.
But the sky above me is split open.
Jagged black cracks spread across it like fractures in glass, leaking a sick purple light. From the largest tear, a monstrous ship descends. It looks less like a machine than something grown: a hull of spines, ridged plates, and pulsing flesh. Smaller shapes spill from its underside and slam into the ground like meteors.
I forget how to breathe.
"This isn't Earth".
I don't know how I know that. Maybe it's the sky. Maybe it's the ship. Maybe it's the fact that no part of this scene belongs in any world I've ever seen. Whatever the reason, the truth settles over me with a horrible, quiet certainty.
I'm somewhere else. In someone else's body. And whatever brought me here has dropped me into the middle of a war.
People are fighting the things falling from the sky.
Real people. A scarred man drives his fist into an invader twice his size. The impact blows a crater into the ground and throws the creature backward. A warrior farther away twists aside as a violet beam cuts through the air, leaving a glowing trench in the rock.
The ground glows molten for a heartbeat, then cools.
I stare. Part of me wants to believe I'm dreaming. The rest of me is too frightened to waste time arguing with what I can see.
A name surfaces in my mind.
"Jiro." The name sounds strangely familiar.
It doesn't feel like my name. It feels like a word I've found in a room that belongs to someone else. Along with it come scattered impressions: a narrow bed, a familiar doorway, a voice calling from somewhere nearby. They vanish before I can make sense of them.
The memories aren't mine. Or maybe they are now. I can't tell, and I don't have time to figure it out.
The original owner of this body died here minutes ago. I don't know how I know that, either. The knowledge is simply there, cold and unwelcome.
I push myself to my feet. My knees almost fold beneath me.
Think. Just think.
I need shelter. I need to know where I am. I need to understand what that voice meant. Most of all, I need to stay alive long enough to ask those questions.
Not dying again. Not like this.
A low growl comes from behind me.
I turn.
Something crouches among the broken stones. It's sleek and shadowy, its limbs bent at angles that make my eyes struggle to follow them. Its eyes burn white. Black-glass claws scrape against the ground.
A Phantom. From what I can recall from the memory of this body, a phantom, and a very strong one at that.
The name comes with a flicker of borrowed knowledge. Not enough to help me. Just enough to tell me that whatever it is, I should run.
It lunges.
I run.
My legs are too short. My lungs burn almost immediately. Debris whistles past my head, and an explosion sends a wave of heat across my back. I stumble, catch myself, and keep going because stopping would mean letting that thing reach me.
Something slams into the ground nearby. The shock throws me sideways. I hit the dirt hard and roll across jagged stone. Pain tears through my shoulder.
I look down. Blood is spreading across my shirt.
For one terrible second, I'm back on the plane. The heat. The noise. The helpless feeling of knowing something awful is happening and having no way to stop it.
I don't want this to be how it ends. Again.
The Phantom's shadow falls over me.
I try to move. My body refuses to cooperate.
Then steel flashes.
The creature splits in two with a single swing. Black fluid spatters across the stones before both halves twitch and dissolve into smoke.
A man stands between me and what remains of it. He's in his thirties, perhaps, with a face crossed by old scars. His sword hums faintly in his grip. There's something about him that makes the air feel heavier, as if the space around him has learned to stay out of his way.
He glances at the dissolving creature, then looks down at me.
"Kid. You got a death wish, or are you just stupid?"
I try to answer, but my throat feels packed with dust. I cough, and pain shoots through my shoulder. The words come out before I can think. They're all I can remember from the body's memories.
"Safe zone," I manage. "I was trying to reach the safe zone."
He looks at the blood soaking my shirt, then back at my face. His expression doesn't soften, exactly, but something in his eyes shifts.
"You picked a hell of a route."
He turns his head.
"Keaval!"
A taller man in armor appears through the smoke almost at once.
"Sir?"
"Get this brat to the zone before he bleeds out. Move."
Keaval drops to one knee and lifts me carefully. The movement sends pain through my shoulder, and I suck in a sharp breath.
"Easy," he says. "Try not to move that arm."
Questions crowd my mind. Where are they taking me? What is a Phantom? Why is the sky broken? And is there any way back?
But Keaval is already running.
The battlefield blurs past. Explosions fade behind us, replaced by the pounding of his boots and the uneven rhythm of my breathing. I press my face against his armor and try to hold on to one thought at a time.
My old life.
I picture it in fragments: familiar voices, ordinary rooms, the things I assumed I'd have time to do later. The memories feel farther away each time I reach for them. I try to hold them close, afraid that if I let go, this new world will swallow more than my body.
I don't want to forget who I was.
I don't want this place to become the only world I remember.
Something flickers deep inside me.
It's tiny and warm, like a spark catching in the dark. I feel it for only a moment, so faint that I wonder if I'm imagining it. It doesn't ease the pain in my shoulder. It doesn't explain the voice or make the terror disappear.
It's not power.
Not yet.
Just something I can't name.
I try to keep my eyes open. I try to remember one more detail from the life I lost, something small enough that it can't slip away.
But the darkness is already closing in.
And this time, I don't know if I'll wake up.