The first thing I retained from the in-between was that it had recognized me.
Not in the way a person recognizes another person, with the small social mechanics of names and faces and shared history. More like the way a lock recognizes a key. Something fundamental. Something that had been waiting with a patience so complete it did not even feel like waiting.
I thought about that a lot in the hours after I arrived.
I had nothing else to do. My new body was approximately as cooperative as a bag of rice, and my new environment, which I was processing in fragments between intervals of unconsciousness that I suspected were called napping, consisted of a low wooden ceiling, the smell of something cooking, and the recurring experience of being picked up and put down by people who seemed very invested in my continued existence.
I was a baby.
This was not a metaphor.
I want to be precise about the specific quality of absurdity here. I had run a company with forty-three employees. I had sat across negotiating tables from people who had been in business longer than I had been alive. I had, at one point, made a decision in eleven minutes that restructured the financial standing of two separate organizations and resulted in a personal gain that paid for the apartment I had just died in.
And now I could not hold my own head up.
The indignity was extraordinary.
What kept me grounded, if that was even the right word for it, was the thinking. Nobody could take that away. So I thought carefully, the way I always had, starting from what I knew and building outward from there.
Fact one: I was dead. The memory of the window, the city, the folded blanket, was clear and uncontested.
Fact two: I was, nevertheless, alive. Different body. Different location. Impossible by every framework I had ever used to understand the world.
Fact three: the darkness between the two had not been empty. It had known me. Something in it had been familiar with exactly what I was, and had decided, apparently, that I should continue.
I did not have a framework for this. I built one anyway.
The working theory was simple. I had died. I had gone somewhere. That somewhere had sent me here. The mechanism was unclear and possibly unknowable, which was professionally frustrating but practically irrelevant. What mattered was the current situation. The current situation required adaptation.
I was good at adaptation.
The family around me came into better focus over the first several days as my vision improved from complete blur to something approaching functional. Three primary individuals. A woman who held me most often, warm and capable in the way of someone who had done physical work her whole life. A man with a careful face and patient hands who checked on me in the evenings and sometimes sat beside where I slept and said nothing in particular. A girl, older by what looked like eight or nine years, who approached me with the focused intensity of someone conducting very important research.
They spoke to each other constantly. I listened.
The language was not the one I had grown up with. This did not surprise me as much as it probably should have. Whatever had sent me here had apparently made accommodations. I understood every word. I simply could not produce any of them yet, which was its own frustration, but manageable.
The woman's name was Mara. The man was Aldus. The girl was Rynn.
My name, as far as they were concerned, was Kael.
I turned this over in my mind several times during the long, unstructured hours of early infancy. Kael. It was a short name. Simple. It sat differently than Nathan, which had always felt like a name chosen to sound trustworthy in a boardroom. Kael sounded like something you could put weight on.
I noticed, on the third or fourth day, that a pulling sensation had not stopped since I arrived.
It was subtle, and I might have mistaken it for some ordinary infant sensation if I had not been paying close attention. But I was paying close attention, because I had very little else to do. Something was orienting toward me from a direction that had nothing to do with physical space. Not threatening. Not communicative. Just aware.
I was being watched by something that had no eyes I could identify.
I filed this under: problems to investigate later. The list was getting long.
Mara was singing something while she worked near the window. It was an uncomplicated melody, the kind that exists to fill a room rather than to say anything in particular. She looked over at me every few measures, checking, the way she always did.
I looked back at her.
The ceiling above me was low and plain and entirely unlike any ceiling I had ever known. The room smelled like woodsmoke and something herbal and something I had no name for yet.
It was, improbably, not unpleasant.
Somewhere in the direction that had no direction, the thing that was watching me settled more comfortably into its attention. As if it had confirmed something. As if it had been right about me all along.