The first thing he understood was that the hands weren't his.
Not the wrongness of a dream — something more specific than that. The fingers were longer than they should be, calloused in patterns that his fingers didn't have, the nails cut short and practical in a way he had never bothered with. He flexed them against something cold and solid beneath him — stone, or ice, or both — and the motion arrived with a slight delay, like a signal traveling a distance it hadn't been designed to travel.
He lay still and took inventory.
Body: present, borrowed, male, running on reserves that had been depleted before he arrived. The specific exhaustion of muscles that have been working without adequate fuel — not the clean tired of exertion but the grey tired of someone who had stopped sleeping properly a long time ago. Armour: lightweight lacquered leather, cheap, maintained by someone who understood economy and had no interest in quality. Weapons: one katana, chipped, the edge notched in three places, the kind issued to someone the organization had already written off.
Organization.
He filed the word under things to examine later and sat up.
The world came in through the senses in the wrong order — smell first, iron and something burnt and the particular animal smell of large numbers of bodies in motion, then sound, and the sound was the sound of a war that had been going on for some time and had no particular interest in his arrival. When his eyes opened, the valley below was white and red and vast, armies across a frozen plain in the ongoing negotiation of forces that had forgotten what they were negotiating about.
He was on a mountainside. The path behind him was empty. The path below curved toward the valley floor through a landscape of black rock and ice formations that arched overhead like the ribs of something enormous and long dead.
His hands went to the pouches at his belt before his brain had finished deciding to search them. The body knew this routine — the systematic check of what was available, what was damaged, what was gone. Bandages. Throwing stars. A vial of something medicinal that smelled faintly wrong. A coil of rope.
And in the smallest pouch, separate from everything else, something that didn't belong to a soldier's kit.
A piece of cloth, folded into a tight square, worn the way things get worn from being handled rather than used. He unfolded it.
A child's drawing. Charcoal on cloth — two figures, one tall, one small, standing beside something that might have been a tree or might have been fire. The small one held the tall one's hand. Beneath them, in careful unpracticed characters he couldn't read but felt the weight of: a name.
He looked at it for a moment longer than inventory required.
Not mine.
The second half of that thought didn't come. He folded the cloth exactly as he'd found it, returned it to the small pouch, and stood up.
The borrowed body found its balance with the ease of long habit. His center of gravity was wrong — too low, redistributed around a frame built differently than the one he was used to — but the body compensated without being asked, shifting weight in small adjustments that spoke of years of practice. Someone had spent a long time learning to inhabit this body efficiently.
He was now the beneficiary of that work.
Survive first. Philosophy later.
Below, the war continued without him.
He smelled the old man before he saw him.
Ash — but settled ash, the kind that means something burned completely and what remained was only the record of having existed. The smell moved through the battlefield stench of blood and horse and cold with the quiet authority of something that had been part of a person for a very long time.
The path deposited him at the valley's edge through a narrow gorge. He moved along the treeline, letting the body's instincts navigate — the shinobi training embedded in the muscle memory supplying decisions he didn't make, placing his feet where shadow was deepest, slowing his breath when the wind shifted. He catalogued while the body moved.
The valley floor was worse than the mountainside. Up there, the war had been scenery. Down here it was architecture, and the architecture was collapsing.
Three soldiers in sakura-pink armour were regrouping behind a shattered siege engine, one of them wounded, the other two scanning the treeline with the focused attention of people who expected threats from every direction.
They saw him.
The recognition was instantaneous — not of him specifically, but of what the armour meant. My profile. My silhouette. The unmistakable shape of something their training had given a category for, and the category was enemy.
My body settled into a guard position before I finished deciding to fight.
Anko's muscle memory, I noted. Taking over in the space between thought and action. This body has done this before. Many times. Against better opponents than three exhausted soldiers behind a broken siege engine.
The first spear thrust came fast. My body moved without the instruction — a sidestep, a half-rotation, placing me off the line and inside the soldier's reach. The motion was clean in a way I hadn't authorized.
That wasn't me.
I occupied the space the body had moved into, held the guard it had selected, understood with cold clarity that I was observing a fight from the inside. The distinction was small and catastrophic. Anko's instincts were calibrated for a world I hadn't been briefed on. I was reading a manual in a language I recognized but hadn't spoken in a long time.
The second soldier committed to a flanking arc — spear aimed low, trying to disable rather than kill. Someone wanted to know what Anko knew.
I let the body handle it. I catalogued.
Economy of motion, something said, from somewhere that wasn't the marketing brain. Every movement deliberate. Waste nothing.
A practice room. Afternoon light through tall windows. A voice patient and precise, demonstrating something with a wooden blade while I — while someone — watched from a distance that felt both close and very far away.
The memory dissolved before I could hold it.
The third soldier circled — patient, building a file on my movements with the clinical attention of someone who understood that patience was the most efficient form of violence. She was the dangerous one. The other two were angry. She was studying.
I stopped letting Anko make the decisions.
The wounded soldier was calling for reinforcements. Distant voices answered. The arithmetic updated.
I ran — not heroically, the way you run when the numbers stop working and winning was never the actual objective. A spear grazed my shoulder, sharp and honest. Blood warm against cold skin, mine now, this body's and mine, in the specific way that shared pain makes things feel owned.
I ran into the fog of war. The pink soldiers gave chase for sixty metres.
Then stopped.
The battle demanded more from them than I did.
I found a rock wide enough to lean against and a moment long enough to count my remaining damage.
The old man appeared from the treeline two minutes later. Unhurried. He'd known where I would end up.
He was properly old — the kind of age that stops being a number and becomes a texture, skin like parchment folded and unfolded too many times. He carried an odachi too large for his body with the casual authority of someone who had stopped thinking about the weapon decades ago. His eyes ran a rapid assessment when he found me — not of me as a person, but of me as a variable in a situation that required updated calculations.
"Not bad," he said, his voice carrying the specific texture of someone who reserves judgment until the evidence is conclusive. "For someone who fights like they've forgotten how."
"I've held worse swords."
He studied me the way people study things they've seen before in a different configuration. "Your posture is wrong. Your footwork is someone else's." A pause that lasted slightly longer than assessment required. "Your eyes are too old for that face."
I didn't answer.
He didn't press.
In the valley below, the impossible continued. At the valley's centre — visible only as a disturbance in the air, a physical pressure against my chest that had nothing to do with altitude — something conducted its business at a scale that turned the armies into background.
I reached into the small pouch at my belt without deciding to.
The folded cloth. The specific shape of it through the leather — two figures, one tall, one small. A name I couldn't read.
The old man was watching the valley. Not me.
Make money, something said, from a very far distance. Retire early. Get out.
The old lie. It had always been a placeholder for a plan that assumed the person making it would still exist when it came time to execute. The person who had made that plan had walked out of an apartment building some number of days ago, or some number of lifetimes ago, and had not arrived anywhere yet.
What was left was this: borrowed hands, a bad sword, a child's drawing in a pouch that wasn't mine.
And the persistent, structurally unsound conviction that being alive was worth the administrative complexity it involved.
Habits are the last thing to die.
Even after the person carrying them already has.