The first thing was silence.

  Not the absence of sound but its opposite. A silence so total it had texture, weight, presence. It pressed against his eardrums like deep water. Ethan was lying on his side with his cheek against earth. Not mud, not the rain-soaked forest floor he'd been standing on, but dry, crumbled earth that smelled of clay and grass.

  He opened his eyes.

  The sky was blue. Not the heavy grey of the storm. Blue, pale, stretched tight over hills that were green in a way Kyoto's cedar-dark mountains were not. The green of new rice. The green of early spring in a landscape that had never seen concrete.

  Ethan sat up slowly. His body reported no injuries, but a pervasive wrongness, a cellular-level disorientation, as if every nerve had been briefly disconnected and reconnected in slightly different order. His mouth tasted of copper. His hands were shaking.

  He was on a hillside. Below him, a valley opened in a patchwork of flooded paddies and dry fields, bisected by a narrow river that caught the afternoon sun (*afternoon, it had been evening*) in bright, broken fragments. Scattered farmhouses trailed smoke from cooking fires. To the north, mountains. To the east, more mountains. The air was warm and smelled of water and green things growing and the faintest thread of woodsmoke.

  No roads. No power lines. No contrails in that empty blue sky.

  The torii gate stood behind him.

  He turned to look at it and found it exactly as it had been, grey stone and carved pillars and indecipherable patterns, except that the glow was gone, the seam in the air was closed, and the gate stood not in a cedar forest on the outskirts of Kyoto but in a clearing on this hillside, surrounded by wildflowers and tall grass that bent in a breeze that smelled nothing like the twenty-first century.

  The carvings were the same. He checked. He took out his notebook, still in his left pocket, graphite-smudged and slightly damp, and compared his half-finished sketches to the patterns on the pillar. Identical.

  His phone was dead weight in his jacket. Nothing in his pockets meant anything here.

  *Here.*

  He stood and looked at the valley again, more carefully this time. The paddy fields were small and irregular, shaped to the land rather than imposed on it. The farmhouses were wood and thatch, clustered in groups of four or five that formed a small village at the valley floor. The river had no bridges that he could see, only what appeared to be a shallow ford marked by stones. In the nearest field, two figures moved with the bent-backed rhythm of planting.

  Ethan's hands had stopped shaking. In their place, the cold, clarifying focus that came when the analytical mind encountered data that didn't fit any existing model and was forced to build a new one from scratch.

  He knew what he was looking at.

  He knew because he'd spent twelve years studying it, writing about it, teaching it to undergraduates who took his course to fulfill a distribution requirement and left, occasionally, caring about something they hadn't cared about before. He knew the field patterns, the housing construction, the agricultural rhythm. He knew what that style of thatching meant about the region. He knew, from the particular shade of green in the paddies, approximately what time of year it was.

  Early spring. Rice planting season. The Third or Fourth Month by the old calendar.

  The mountains to the north were the right shape. The valley floor, the river's course, the angle of the afternoon light. All of it aligned with a geography he'd studied on topographic maps and reconstructed in academic papers and argued about at conferences in rooms with lukewarm coffee and fluorescent lighting.

  ōmi Province. Or something close to it. The mountain profiles matched, the valley shape was right, and if this was the mid-sixteenth century, that made this one of the most contested regions in Japan. Exactly the kind of place where a stranger with no lord and no explanation would have a very short life expectancy.

  He caught himself thinking of it in the past tense. The grammar of time had just become a practical problem rather than a theoretical one.

  "This isn't possible," he said, and his voice was thin and foreign in the open air, the words in English, useless, belonging to a language that wouldn't exist in this place for three hundred years.

  A bird called from somewhere in the tall grass. Small, sharp, repetitive. A bush warbler, if he remembered his field guides. They sang in early spring, too.

  Ethan sat down on the ground beside the torii gate, took out his notebook, and began to write.

  *March 15 — or not. Arrived approximately 7:02 p.m. JST via* — he paused, pen hovering — *unknown means. Location appears to be ōmi Province, likely Genki era based on settlement patterns and agricultural indicators. Electrical storm triggered event at shrine site. Phone dead. No visible way back. Gate inactive.*

  He stopped writing and stared at the words. They were precise and orderly and completely inadequate. He was a man who processed the world through language, and language had just failed him.

  The sun was perhaps two hours from setting. He needed water, shelter, and information, in that order. The farmhouses in the valley were the obvious choice, but obvious choices in Sengoku-era Japan tended to get strangers killed. This was not a period known for its hospitality toward outsiders. And he was the most outside outsider imaginable, a tall, green-eyed foreigner with no sword, no travel papers, no lord, and no explanation that anyone would believe.

  He inventoried his assets. Rain jacket: anachronistic but functional. Hiking boots: durable, conspicuous. Notebook and two pens. A wallet with two credit cards, an Oregon driver's license, forty-three dollars, and a photograph of Lily at her college graduation that he kept because throwing it away felt like something his father would do. The clothes on his back, dark jeans and a grey henley and the jacket. Nothing useful as a weapon. Nothing useful as a gift. Nothing that wouldn't mark him as something inexplicable.

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  He thought about the village. About walking down there, knocking on a door, and trying to explain himself in Japanese that was four hundred years too modern, too polite in the wrong ways, too casual in others. He thought about how that conversation would go.

  *Hello. I'm from the future. I come in peace.*

  No.

  *I'm a traveler. I've lost my way.*

  That was closer. But his accent would be wrong, his vocabulary alien, his clothing impossible. In a region at war, strangers were spies until proven otherwise, and the burden of proof fell on the stranger.

  He needed to observe first. Learn the local rhythms, the speech patterns, the social cues that would keep him alive long enough to form a plan. He needed —

  Below him, to the left, where the hillside folded into a shallow ravine choked with brush, a branch snapped. Then another. Someone was moving through the undergrowth without particular concern for silence.

  Ethan dropped flat behind the torii gate's base. The stone was sun-warm against his chest. He controlled his breathing, in through the nose, slow exhale, and watched.

  A man emerged from the ravine. Short by Ethan's standards, perhaps five-foot-three, but broad across the shoulders and thick through the arms in the way of someone who carried heavy things for a living. His clothing was rough-woven and earth-colored, a short jacket over loose trousers, straw sandals, a wide hat pushed back on his head. He carried a bundle of branches on his back, secured with a rope sling, and a hand axe tucked into his belt.

  The man was perhaps thirty meters away, following a path Ethan hadn't noticed, a faint track through the grass that led from the ravine up toward the clearing where the gate stood, and toward Ethan.

  He was gathering firewood. The path led past the gate, probably connecting the ravine's timber to the village below. Ethan was lying directly in the man's line of approach.

  Three options. Run, downhill, away from the path, into terrain he didn't know, making noise that would attract attention. Hide behind the gate's base, and hope the man's path diverged before he got close enough to see. Or stand up, step into the open, and make first contact with the past.

  None of these were good options. Ethan chose the one that gave him the most information.

  He stood.

  The woodcutter saw him immediately. The man's body went rigid, not the startled flinch of surprise but the full-body stillness of someone who had learned, in a landscape of war, that unexpected things were usually dangerous things. His right hand settled on the axe at his belt.

  Twenty meters between them.

  Ethan raised both hands, palms forward, fingers spread — a gesture older than language.

  "I mean no harm," he said in Japanese.

  The words came out wrong and he knew it instantly. His Japanese was textbook Tōkyō standard, polished by years of academic reading and conference conversation, and in this place, in this century, it sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard. The grammar was close but the pronunciation was alien, vowels too flat, consonants too crisp, pitch accent patterns that wouldn't standardize for hundreds of years.

  The woodcutter's eyes widened. His grip tightened on the axe.

  Ethan tried again, slower, reaching for older constructions he'd encountered in primary sources. "I am a traveler. I have lost my way." He softened the consonants, let the vowels open, dropped the modern polite endings and reached for something more formal, more archaic. It was like trying to speak Shakespeare's English after a lifetime of CNN.

  The man stared at him. At his face, his clothing, his boots. At the rain jacket with its synthetic fabric and aluminum zipper. At his hands, still raised, pale and unscarred except for the ridge on his left forearm.

  Then the woodcutter did something Ethan did not expect. He looked past Ethan, at the torii gate, and his expression changed. The wariness didn't leave, but something else entered it — something that looked, impossibly, like recognition. Not of Ethan. Of the situation.

  The man spoke. His dialect was thick, the words running together in ways Ethan's trained ear struggled to parse, but he caught the shape of it: *You came from there? From the gate?*

  Ethan lowered his hands slowly. "Yes."

  The woodcutter looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the sky, as if checking the position of the sun, calculating how much daylight remained and how much trouble this was going to be.

  He said something too fast for Ethan to catch, then repeated it more slowly when he saw the confusion on Ethan's face.

  *Come. Before dark. Before the others see you.*

  The man turned and started down the hill, not toward the village but along a side path that angled into the tree line. He did not check to see if Ethan was following. He walked like a man who had made a decision and was already calculating its costs.

  Ethan looked back at the torii gate. Grey stone, silent carvings, empty air between the pillars. The hillside was quiet. The bush warbler had stopped singing.

  He followed the woodcutter into the trees.

  Behind him, the gate stood in its clearing of wildflowers and tall grass. The carvings that had blazed with light an hour ago were dark now, inert, the stone as silent as if nothing had ever passed through it. As if nothing ever would again.