Darkness.

  Not the soft darkness of a bedroom at night, the kind your eyes adjust to eventually. This was pressure. Weight. The darkness of being underground, of having earth and something else pressed against every part of you.

  Theron tried to move his arms. They wouldn't budge. His legs neither. Something lay across his chest—heavy, solid—and something else rested against his face. Cold. Waxy.

  Am I paralyzed? The thought came calm and clinical, the way it always did in trauma bays when patients arrived with spinal injuries. Check distal extremities.

  He wiggled his fingers. They moved—barely, compressed, but he felt them. He wiggled his toes. Same. Not paralyzed. Just pinned.

  Airway.

  He could breathe. Shallow breaths, but enough. The air tasted like damp earth and something else. Something metallic and old, the smell of the morgue after a bad night.

  Okay. Assess systematically.

  He remembered driving. Black ice on the overpass. The car spinning, slow and graceful, the way it always looked in movies but felt nothing like that in real life. A tree rushing toward the driver's side window. Then nothing.

  Car accident. Hospital? No. This isn't a hospital.

  He pushed against whatever was on his chest. It shifted slightly, grudgingly. Heavy. Not a blanket. Not a restraint.

  He got his right arm free first—the left was pinned at an awkward angle—and reached up to touch what lay against his face.

  Cold skin. Stiff. Unyielding.

  An arm. A dead person's arm.

  Theron's heart slammed against his ribs. His breath came fast and shallow. Panic. Good. Normal response. Now control it.

  He forced himself to breathe slowly. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four. The way he'd coached a thousand terrified patients before procedures.

  You're in a grave. A mass grave. You're alive under a pile of dead people. This is bad. But you're alive. Dead people don't panic. So keep panicking—it means you're still here.

  He pushed again, harder this time, using his free right arm to shove the body above him. It shifted, rolled slightly. He gained an inch of space. Then another.

  He worked methodically, the way he'd worked through sixteen-hour surgeries when his back screamed and his feet went numb. One movement at a time. One inch at a time. Don't think about the whole. Just the next push. The next breath.

  The body above him slid away. He could move his left arm now. He used both hands to push upward, and his fingers met more bodies, more cold skin, more stiffness.

  He climbed.

  That's what it became: climbing. Using the dead as handholds and footholds. Their shoulders. Their rib cages. Their faces. He tried not to think about that part. Tried not to think about who they'd been, what they'd looked like alive, whether they'd had families who'd never know what happened to them.

  Don't think. Move.

  He talked to himself the whole time. An old habit from med school, from his first solo surgeries when his hands shook and his attending had told him to narrate until he believed he knew what he was doing. He'd kept doing it ever since.

  "Okay. Left hand on—that's a shoulder, sorry—right foot on—pelvis, probably. Push up. Good. Now reach for—something solid. There's a rib cage. Sorry about that too. Keep going. Almost there. You don't know that, you can't see anything, but keep saying it anyway. Almost there."

  Something sharp cut his palm. A bone fragment, maybe. He ignored it. Kept climbing.

  The air changed. Slightly fresher. Less of the heavy, metallic smell. He reached up and felt—dirt. Loose dirt. The top of the grave.

  He dug.

  Not climbing anymore. Digging with both hands, frantic now, dirt falling into his eyes and mouth. He found a bone—a femur, based on the length and angle—and used it as a tool, scraping at the dirt above him, creating space, creating air.

  His hand broke through first.

  He felt it: moving air. Wind on his fingers. Real wind, not the dead stillness of the grave.

  He dug faster. Wilder. Pulled himself up through the opening like a man being born backward, gasping, choking, clawing at the earth until he rolled onto grass and lay there, chest heaving, staring at the sky.

  Gray sky. Flat light. Late afternoon.

  He lay there for a long time, just breathing. The air smelled like grass and water and something floral. Not like the grave. Not like death.

  He sat up slowly.

  The grave stretched before him. A trench maybe fifty feet long, twenty wide, piled with bodies. Two hundred, maybe more. They lay in layers, some on top of others, the way mass graves always looked in photographs he'd seen but never in person. Stone weapons scattered among them. Spears with bone tips stained dark. Axes with crude stone heads. Leather clothing. Furs.

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  This wasn't a battle with guns. This wasn't any kind of battle I know.

  He stood on shaky legs and walked closer. His medical eye took over automatically, cataloging, assessing, trying to understand.

  Puncture wounds from spears, mostly. Some to chests, some to abdomens, some to throats. Whoever these people were, they'd fought close and personal. Crushing blows to skulls—stone axes, probably. Defensive wounds on forearms, the kind you got when you raised your hands to block.

  Then he saw the first one that didn't fit.

  A man, middle-aged, with a beard streaked gray. He lay on his back, eyes closed, face peaceful. And frozen. Not dead-cold, but frozen solid. Ice crystals still clung to his beard and eyelashes, glinting in the afternoon light. The ground around him was warm, the grass green. But he was frozen.

  That's not possible.

  Theron knelt beside him, touched his face. Cold. So cold it burned. He pulled his hand back quickly.

  That is also not possible.

  He moved to the next body. A woman, young, with long dark hair. Her chest was crushed inward. Not like something had hit her. Like something had pressed down evenly, perfectly, until her ribs collapsed in a concave pattern. No weapon marks. No blood. Just... crushed.

  He looked at the sky. At the mountains in the distance, one peak shaped like a broken tooth. At the grass fields stretching east. At the river glinting west.

  Not Connecticut. Not anywhere near Connecticut.

  He looked down at himself. Jeans. Button-down shirt, now filthy. Comfortable shoes he'd worn to work a thousand times. He patted his pockets. Keys. Wallet. A half-eaten granola bar he'd grabbed on his way out the door that morning. That morning. Same day? Different day? Different year?

  I was driving to work. Black ice. Tree. I should be dead.

  He should be in a hospital, or a morgue, or— He looked back at the grave. At the bodies. At the impossible frozen man and the crushed woman and all the others who'd died in ways he couldn't explain.

  Maybe I am dead. Maybe this is—

  No. Dead people didn't stand in fields with granola bars in their pockets. Dead people didn't have heartbeats and hungry stomachs and aching backs from climbing out of graves.

  He turned away from the bodies and started walking toward the trees. Water first. Water always first.

  ---

  The stream was maybe half a mile from the grave. Small, clear, running over stones. He knelt and drank directly from it, not caring about parasites or bacteria or anything except the desperate need for water. It was cold and clean and tasted like nothing, and it was the best thing he'd ever drunk.

  He drank until his stomach hurt. Then he sat back on his heels and looked at his reflection in the moving water.

  Same face. Brown eyes with crinkles at the corners from years of smiling at patients and his wife's jokes. Brown hair with gray at the temples. He'd been forty-two. He looked forty-two.

  But where is "here"?

  He sat by the stream for an hour. Maybe longer. Time moved strangely when you had no watch, no phone, no way to measure it except the sun's slow crawl across the sky.

  He listened. No cars. No planes. No distant hum of civilization. Just birds calling, wind moving through grass, water flowing over rocks. And once, far away, a sound like an animal screaming. Not a scream of pain. A scream of something else, something that made the hair on his arms stand up. He filed it under "things to investigate later" and immediately moved it to "things to avoid forever."

  His family.

  The thought hit him like a physical blow, doubling him over, forcing a sound from his throat that wasn't quite a sob.

  Claire. His wife. Eighteen years of marriage. Her laugh, the way it started quiet and built until it filled whatever room they were in. The way she'd kissed him goodbye that morning, distracted, looking for her car keys, saying "love you" automatically the way married people do after eighteen years. He'd said it back automatically too. Then he'd walked out the door and—

  Emma. His daughter. A junior in college, studying something she changed every semester. She'd called last night to complain about her roommate leaving dirty dishes in the sink. He'd teased her about being dramatic, the way fathers do. She'd laughed and called him old. Normal. Ordinary. Last conversation.

  Ben. His son. Sixteen. Learning guitar. Terrible at it. Played loud and proud anyway, filling the house with mangled chords and off-key singing. Theron had told him to keep practicing, that everyone sucked at first. Ben had rolled his eyes but smiled. That was three days ago? A week? He couldn't remember.

  They were gone. He was gone to them. They'd get a call. A policeman at the door. Claire would fall. Emma would fly home. Ben would—

  He stopped the thought. Took a breath. Then another.

  Crying doesn't help. Find shelter. Make fire. Survive. Then you can fall apart.

  He stood. His legs shook. He walked toward the trees.

  ---

  The rock face was maybe another mile. He found it by following the tree line, looking for anything that offered protection. The overhang wasn't a cave—just a ledge of rock that stuck out far enough to create a dry space beneath. Three sides open, one side rock. Better than nothing.

  He gathered dry grass first, pulling handfuls from the edge of the trees where the sun had baked it pale and brittle. Then small sticks, then larger ones. He worked methodically, the way he'd learned from his grandfather on camping trips in the Connecticut woods when he was eight years old.

  "Fire first, boy." His grandfather's voice, thick with an Irish accent he'd never lost. "Fire is life. You got fire, you got warmth. You got light. You got something that keeps the dark away. Everything else comes after."

  He found two rocks that might work—one with a sharp edge, one smooth and heavy. He arranged his tinder, knelt, and started striking.

  Nothing.

  He adjusted his grip, struck harder.

  Nothing.

  His hands were shaking. From cold? From shock? From the image of Claire's face when the policeman knocked? He didn't know.

  He kept striking.

  On the twentieth try, a spark. Small. It landed on the dry grass, glowed for a second, died.

  He adjusted again. Used the sharpest edge of the first rock. Struck at a different angle.

  Another spark. It caught. The grass smoldered, a tiny orange glow. He blew gently, the way his grandfather had shown him. The glow brightened. A tiny flame appeared.

  He fed it slowly. More grass. Smallest sticks. The flame grew.

  Larger sticks. It caught.

  Fire.

  He sat there, staring at it, and for the first time since waking in the grave, he felt something like safety. Fire meant warmth. Fire meant protection. Fire meant he could survive another night.

  He almost cried then. Tears pricked at his eyes. But he was too tired. Too empty. The tears wouldn't come.

  He added more wood to the fire and sat close to it, letting the heat soak into his cold skin. His hands stopped shaking.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll find food. Tomorrow I'll explore. Tomorrow I'll try to understand.

  Tonight, he had fire. Tonight, he was alive.

  He watched the sky darken. The stars came out, one by one, and they were wrong. Constellations he didn't recognize. A sky that had never been his sky.

  He thought of Claire again. Of Emma's laugh. Of Ben's terrible guitar playing. Of his grandfather's voice saying "fire is life."

  "Okay," he said to the darkness. His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. "I'm alive. I'll figure this out."

  He didn't know if he believed it. But saying it helped.

  The fire crackled. The strange stars wheeled overhead. And Theron sat alone in a world that wasn't his, holding onto the heat of a fire he'd made with his own hands, and waited for morning, and whatever morning would bring.