He did not hesitate.
That was the thing that surprised him slightly — the absence of hesitation he might have expected. The cotton-fabric creature had arrived with ingredients, a namaste, and a warning. None of those were the gestures of something that meant immediate harm. He had read the letter. He had understood it.
He moved the ingredients one by one into his inventory with the efficient calm of someone completing a task.
He surveyed the room when he was done.
Walls. Floor. Ceiling. Window. The greyish dark of the night outside — not fully black, not yet morning, the specific colour of hours that belonged to neither. His eyes moved to the corner.
Empty knife packets. The shape of them — the specific emptiness of packaging that had once held a blade — sat in the corner like a fact he hadn't asked for. He exhaled slowly.
*Someone has been in this room.*
He crossed to the door. Put his hand on the handle. Opened it.
The corridor was dim, gas lamps burned low. Empty.
But the door —
The chalk words that had been there since he arrived — the verdict of people who had decided what he was — were gone.
In their place, written in something darker than chalk, something that had not dried the way chalk dries:
*WELCOME SHIVANI*
*IN NIGHTMARE*
He looked at it for a long moment.
*Shivani.*
Not Steven. Not the name this world knew him by. His name — the one he had been born with, in a different body, in a different world entirely. A name that no one here should have known. A name that existed in no record, no memory, no conversation he had ever had in this place.
His portal opened. He reached in, found the knife, gripped it through the portal. Ready.
The corridor remained empty.
Nothing moved.
He stood there — knife ready, portal open, the words drying on his door — and after a long moment, made a decision.
He closed the door.
Locked it.
Put the knife back.
*I am tired,* he thought. *Whatever this is, it has had many chances tonight and has not used them. The nightmare isn't over — the letter said so. It did not say tonight.*
He lay down. Closed his eyes.
---
Sleep did not hold.
It wasn't a gradual return to waking — it was a sudden, total wrongness that brought him upright before he had consciously decided to move. The room had a pressure to it. A quality in the air that sat wrong, the specific atmosphere of a space being occupied by something that did not breathe.
*Out,* his mind said. *Balcony. Open air. Go.*
He crossed to the balcony door and pushed it open.
The night air hit him first — cool, carrying the smell of the garden below, the distant quiet of a city at its lowest register. For exactly one second it felt like relief.
Then he saw it.
His hands found the railing.
Hanging in the greyish dark of the night sky — suspended from nothing visible, from the air itself, from whatever the nightmare had decided was sufficient — was a complete naked body.
A girl's body.
He knew it the way you know your own reflection — not because you have to think about it, but because the recognition is immediate and total and does not ask permission before it arrives. The face. The hair. The specific proportions of a form he had lived inside for his entire life before waking up in Steven Green's room two days ago.
His own body. His old body. Shivani's body.
It hung upside down in the grey air — hair falling loose below the head, arms hanging, the greyish dark making the cuts visible in the way that darkness sometimes makes things more visible rather than less. Covered in blood that had not finished falling. Still.
Steven's hands trembled on the railing.
He had not expected this.
He had expected many things — the Unknown Pathway had made clear that expectation was insufficient protection. He had expected the nightmare to continue. He had expected the thing that came next to be something he didn't have a name for.
But not this.
Not her.
Not the body he had left behind — the body that was supposed to be somewhere else, in another world, in another life that he had been pulled out of without warning or preparation — hanging in the night sky of a Beyonder university in the Geysec Empire, cut and still and wrong in every direction.
*That's me,* Shivani thought, from somewhere very quiet behind Steven's eyes.
*That was me.*
Steven's grip on the railing was the only thing that felt real.
His hands would not stop shaking.
---
*End of Chapter Eighteen*