Blood dripped from the man's split lip, pooling dark and slow on the grimy floorboards.
Vortigen's eyes bulged wild, wet with terror, as the rope bit into his wrists and bound him to the rickety chair. The air hung thick with salty spray from the nearby docks, iron from fresh blood, and something sourer underneath. Fear, maybe. Or the rot that lived in the walls of this shack no matter how hard someone scrubbed.
Orin circled him. The kitchen knife caught the lantern light for just a moment, a thin silver glint, before he let it hang loose at his side.
He spoke.
"Are the internal organs of the people in this world similar to Earth humans?" Not really to Vortigen. More to himself. His voice was flat and precise. "What about the skeletal structure? Is the muscle tissue more compact?" He tilted his head. "I suppose we'll find out."
—
Three hours earlier, Orin had been dying.
He hadn't known it at the time. The ten-year-old body he inhabited had simply stopped. Collapsed mid-afternoon onto the crude wooden bed, folding like a machine that had finally run out of fuel. The head wound had done most of the work, a birch stick swung hard by a man who'd stopped pretending he had limits two Purple Glaze doses ago.
Dying, it turned out, had side effects.
When Orin opened his eyes, the moldy ceiling beams overhead were exactly where they'd always been. The curtain was still thick with grime. The room still smelled like sea rot and stale salt.
Everything was precisely the same. Except for him.
He pressed his palm against the bandaged wound. "It feels like it's been fed through a hydraulic press."
His pupils, a deep vivid sapphire that had always looked wrong on a Veyari child, too bright, too sharp, focused slowly. Pain came in pulses. Rhythmic. The damp stench of the room reached him in full, and his stomach lurched at the nothing inside it.
He ran a quiet diagnostic.
Severe dehydration. Malnourishment, chronic rather than acute. External cranial trauma with moderate concussion. Muscle deterioration consistent with years of overwork and insufficient caloric intake. Likely internal bruising in the lower abdomen.
"Critical. Functional. Survivable."
He'd run assessments like this his entire previous life. A bio-mechanical systems engineer. He had understood the human body the way other men understood machines: a system, a chassis, something that could be optimized or could fail.
Then he had died.
Only to wake here, in a grey-skinned child's body, in a rotting shack at the edge of the Euletra Continent, with a head wound and no food.
"No." He pressed down on the memory carefully, the way a technician sorts corrupted data. "I've been here ten years." The child's brain had been running on fragments, half-formed instincts, flashes of past-life intuition surfacing like static in a broken receiver. It had taken blunt force trauma to the skull to finally crash the system hard enough to reboot it properly.
"A physical catalyst."
He sat up. The world tilted, then steadied.
'Water first. Then assessment. Then action.'
The water barrel sat beside the window. He drank with methodical focus, not greedily. Greed could cause vomiting on an empty stomach. He drank in consistent pulls until the worst of the fog lifted from behind his eyes.
Then he pulled back the curtain.
SoulTide Reach stretched out below in the sharp July light. Off-white stone buildings, rugged and salt-worn, their walls draped in climbing vines of grey-green and yellowish-brown. Below the leaves, cracks ran through the rock like old scars, years of sea-breeze erosion, the kind that got into everything here and slowly unmade it. Past the rooftops, past the market stalls and the smell of gutted fish, a strip of blue water glittered. Fishing boats cut clean lines across its surface.
"A beautiful sight."
His reflection caught in the surface of the barrel. He looked at it without expression.
The boy staring back was striking in the way that only hunger sometimes makes people striking, sharp features at every angle. Ash-colored skin, the storm-cloud grey of the Veyari, which in his current state of malnourishment had gone slightly wrong, too pale at the edges, almost translucent near the wrists. His hair was stark white. His eyes were that too-vivid blue.
He rolled up his sleeve.
Bruises. Layered like geological strata, old ones yellow-green, newer ones a deep violet-black. He pulled his collar aside and saw the handprint on his neck, swollen and precise. Vortigen's grip. The memory came with it cleanly: being slammed into the floor because the house hadn't been cleaned to an impossible standard. A standard no one could meet. A standard that wasn't the point.
He had a habit of humming while he worked the worst of it, a low tuneless sound that meant he'd found a rhythm he intended to keep.
"Lethal intent," Orin observed, pressing two fingers against the bruised tissue.
He checked every injury. Each one opened a corresponding record. Beaten for returning late from an errand. Beaten for using the wrong hand. Not random. Routine. Systemic.
When he pressed his palm against his lower abdomen, he went still.
The pain that answered was deep and tearing, the kind that lived underneath normal sensation until something pressed directly on it. Internal damage. Old enough to have been there weeks, maybe longer.
"This is bad." He almost smiled at the understatement.
Without his past-life memories surfacing, the child he had been would have declined quietly. Another casualty in the arithmetic of SoulTide Reach's slums, where ten-year-old Veyari children in the care of a stepfather who'd rather they didn't exist didn't factor into anyone's calculations.
The bio-mechanical engineer was in control now.
The problem with Vortigen was not that he was violent. Violent men were common. The problem was that he was useful to people who were worse.
His mother's second choice. Her worst one.
The Zoraths, the dark-green-skinned tribes of the Thunderpeak Spires, needed things the Veyari districts wouldn't provide openly. Informants. Access. And occasionally, for their Appeasement Rituals, something smaller. Something that wouldn't be missed.
Orin's gaze moved to the door on the other side of the shack.
Behind it, his two-year-old sister Remi was sleeping.
He stood still for a moment. The fragments of memory assembled themselves. Late-night whispers. Vortigen's posture changing when Zorath scouts came to the door. Numbers exchanged in the particular tone of men pricing livestock.
Orin's hands went still at his sides. Not calculation. Something that arrived before calculation.
Something shifted in his chest. Not panic. Not quite rage. Something colder and more purposeful than either.
"He deserves to die," Orin thought, with the same quiet certainty he had once used to decommission failed components. "Painfully."
He moved toward the kitchen to check his emergency funds: three silver coins buried under a pile of sawdust in a loose board near the wall. His escape money. His insurance.
His hand found the loose board. He pried it up.
Empty.
Orin stared at the hollow space for a long moment. Then he straightened, closed his eyes, and began to think.
He had no money. He had a malnourished child's body against a full-grown Veyari male, even one with a physical deformity like Vortigen. He had no weapons except what the house contained. He had no allies.
What he had was the entire body of engineering knowledge from a previous lifetime, applied to a very small building, and approximately four hours before Vortigen came home.
"Physics," Orin thought, opening his eyes. "I need a plan."
He moved through the house the way a technician strips a derelict ship for parts: methodical, quiet, leaving nothing out of place that wasn't meant to be. A rope. The pitchfork behind the shed door, crude but with penetration potential. A vessel of lye, the acidic solution dock men used to remove barnacles from fishing hulls. A bag of moldy flour.
He picked up a rough sharp stone. Set it with the others.
Then his hands closed around a birch stick leaning against the wall near the bed. He recognized it. The tip was still stained with his own dried blood.
He gave it a light swing. Felt the weight.
"Good."
He turned.
A faint shimmer clung to the gap beneath Remi's door. Something that didn't belong to the lamplight or the salt-grey afternoon pressing through the window. He stood looking at it for a breath, two breaths, three, his hand still holding the birch stick.
Wrong.