"Every material has a breaking point, past which it doesn't spring back. People are no different." — Ethan Cole, unfinished thesis notes
---
Kael had died before, which you'd think would put things in perspective. It hadn't.
The first death was an aneurysm. Twenty-seven, hunched over a mass spectrometer at Portland State. He'd been Ethan Cole then. He remembered the wet pop behind his eye and thinking *I left the kettle on* and then nothing, and then he was a baby screaming in somebody's arms in a world that smelled like woodsmoke and didn't have electricity. Fourteen years ago now. He'd adjusted — learned to live as Kael, the cottage and Aldric and the snares and the mornings — and had mostly stopped thinking of it as a problem and started thinking of it as, well, his life.
*Mostly* stopped.
"You're fidgeting," Aldric said from across the room.
"I'm not fidgeting," Kael said.
"Your left thumb has been tapping your knee for the past forty seconds. That's fidgeting."
Kael made himself stop. *Forty seconds.* The old man counted everything. "Better?" he said.
"Breathe."
Right. He was supposed to be meditating. Sitting cross-legged on the stone floor, palms resting on his knees, the oak table to his left and the dead hearth behind him. Four in, hold seven, out eight — the same breathing pattern Aldric had drilled into him for three years running. It was, Kael had once pointed out, basically a textbook anxiety-reduction protocol — the kind of thing they'd taught people in his first life, in another world. Aldric had told him he didn't know what a therapist was and to shut up and breathe.
So he breathed.
It was cold. The fire had burned down to coals overnight and there was frost on the window — feather patterns, deep ones, a hard night. He wanted to say it was maybe forty degrees but Fahrenheit wasn't a thing here, thermometers weren't a thing here, and after fourteen years he should've stopped reaching for numbers that didn't exist in this world. *Cold.* It was cold. Leave it. The stone floor under him was colder. He'd been sitting for twenty minutes. Aldric had said nothing. Just watched. The way he did when he was measuring something.
And then his chest got warm.
It started below the sternum. Like he'd swallowed hot tea except he hadn't swallowed anything. The warmth spread down both arms, and it *branched* at the elbows in a way that felt biological and specific — not like general warmth but like something moving through channels. Tubes he hadn't known were there. He could feel each one. *Branching at the elbows. Does the channel geometry follow the nervous system? The lymphatic system?*
Unsettling didn't cover it. He'd once woken up in an infant body with no idea where he was. The bar was high.
His fingers started glowing.
Blue-white. Bright. The light threw his shadow on the far wall and pulsed with his heartbeat — sixty-two bpm, faster than resting, *obviously faster than resting, his hands were glowing.*
"Aldric," he said.
"Don't move. I see it," Aldric said.
The glow was getting brighter and he could feel it building, pressure with nowhere to go, and then the table split.
Not violently. No fireworks. A sharp cracking sound — lake-ice — and a fissure ran the whole length of the oak top and sawdust poofed up into the blue light. The crack followed the wood grain — the weak direction, the way wood always splits. Like firewood. Like a tree in a storm. And Kael watched himself have a small, quiet panic about the fact that he'd just had that thought while also doing something impossible with his hands.
*You're fourteen. Farm boys don't think about grain and fracture points.* But he wasn't just a farm boy — he had a head full of another life's training. He pushed the thought aside and focused on the crack in the table.
The smell of split oak filled the room — sharp, resinous, nothing like the usual morning smells of coals and porridge. Kael's hands had stopped glowing but his palms were warm, and the crack in the table ran from one end to the other like a split in the earth. He didn't trust himself to stand yet. His legs felt like they'd run a mile.
"Hands back," Aldric said, and he was already there — which was impressive for a man who needed thirty seconds to get up the stairs most days. He had Kael's wrists and was checking his fingertips, pressing the skin, bending the joints. Clinical. He wasn't being a grandfather about it. He was checking him over. "Good," he said. "Good."
"You keep saying good. I broke the table," Kael said.
"How did it feel?" Aldric said.
The channels, whatever they were, still hummed. Fading, but there. Like a tuning fork you've already grabbed but you can still feel the vibration in the metal. "You know when you shuffle across carpet and touch a doorknob? Like that, but turned up to eleven and running through my entire body." He'd gotten used to reaching for comparisons from his first life — the one that had ended in a lab — and then swapping them for words that meant something here. Aldric had never seen carpet or a doorknob with electrical grounding. "Like a river. Under my skin. It had current. Direction."
Aldric looked at him for a long time. His jaw tightened — not surprise. Kael had gotten good enough at reading faces to see that much. Aldric had been expecting this. Maybe hoping for it, maybe dreading it.
"Don't do it again," the old man said. "Not until I explain what it is."
"And when's that?" Kael's hands were still in his lap, palms up. *After dark* wasn't a time. It was whenever Aldric said it was.
"Tonight. After dark," Aldric said.
*Tonight.* Kael wanted to push but he knew better. He'd spent three years learning that Aldric gave up information exactly when Aldric wanted to give up information and not one second sooner, and that pushing just made him go quieter. Like trying to squeeze water from a rock. You'd break your hands before the rock would give. He had one thing he'd promised himself a long time ago, though: he would learn why his parents had really died. Whatever came tonight, that didn't change.
He ran a baseline. Aldric had taught him: notice everything, so you know when something changes. So he did. The crack in the table — along the grain, a clean split. The coals in the hearth. The boots with red clay from six miles east. The corner of wax seal in the fire. Aldric's pulse in his throat, too fast. A snapshot. Baseline one. Whatever came tonight, he'd know if tomorrow didn't match.
"Fine," Kael said. "Can we eat? I'm starving."
They ate. Aldric made porridge at the hearth — the same traveller's ash-bread paste he called breakfast every morning. The wooden bowls were warm from the pot. The frost on the window had begun to melt at the edges where the fire's heat reached. Outside, the sky was the same flat grey it had been at first light. No birds at the sill. The cottage felt sealed in, the two of them and the crack in the table and whatever was coming tonight.
The porridge was bad. This was not new or surprising; it was bad every morning, the same grey paste with the same slightly burnt bottom, and Kael had been eating it for three years because the alternative was making it himself and he hadn't yet been annoyed enough to do that. Almost, though. Almost every morning. He'd once helped a landlord regrout a bathroom, in another life — the grout had looked like this. Tasted better, probably.
"It's burnt," Kael said.
"So don't eat it," Aldric said, without looking up from his bowl.
"I'm eating it. I'm just registering a complaint."
"Noted," Aldric said dryly.
"I'm serious. One of these days I'm going to introduce you to the concept of seasoning. Wild idea, I know. Salt. Maybe an herb. Revolutionary stuff."
Something that was almost a smile flickered across Aldric's face. Then he glanced at the cracked table and the almost-smile died and didn't come back.
The old man coughed twice during breakfast. Kael tracked it without meaning to — an old habit from a life where observation had been his job. Wet coughs. Deep in the chest. Copper at the back of the throat, the taste Aldric tried to hide when he turned away. When he turned back his hand was clean but his trousers had a fresh dark smear at the thigh.
He caught Kael looking. Held his gaze. Dared him.
Kael looked away first.
*Six months.* He'd been watching this. The frequency was up — forty percent worse than autumn. The blood was new as of eight weeks ago. In his first life the answer would've been a CT scan, oncology referral, treatment plan. Here the answer was nothing, because this world didn't have imaging technology or chemotherapy or even a clear understanding of what cancer was. Just Aldric and his cough and the fact that they both knew and neither of them was allowed to say it.
He wanted to say something. He didn't. They'd done this dance before and it always ended the same way, with Aldric changing the subject and Kael sitting there with a chest full of words he wasn't allowed to say.
Instead he watched the old man's boots. Red clay in the seams. The specific red clay that only came from the riverbank six miles east — he'd checked, nowhere else within walking distance. And there were papers burning in the hearth. Not old papers. He'd caught the corner of a wax seal before the fire took it.
*Wax seals mean official correspondence. Someone with authority wrote to Aldric. He burned it the same morning my hands started glowing.*
"You were out last night," Kael said.
Aldric didn't look up from his bowl. "I'm out most nights."
"Not usually six miles east."
The spoon stopped. Aldric looked at the spoon, looked at Kael, looked back at the spoon. He set it down. It made a small sound. "There are things I check on," he said. His voice had dropped. "And things that check on me."
"That's not an answer," Kael said. He didn't look away. He'd got into the habit of watching Aldric's throat when the old man was holding something back. The pulse there was going too fast. Off.
"No. It isn't."
Kael waited. Nothing else came. He took his bowl to the basin and washed it, then Aldric's. The water was cold from the bucket. He set the spoons on the shelf where they always went. Normal. Ordinary. What you did when nothing else made sense. Through the window he could see the path that led to the eastern snare line — the path he'd walk in an hour, or not, depending on whether sitting still became unbearable. Aldric hadn't moved. Still at the table. Still with that look that said he was carrying something that had no name.
Kael had a list. He had a baseline. Whatever came tonight, that would have to be enough.