Waking up hurt in all the familiar ways and three new ones.

  The cot under his back was too narrow and too hard to be his bed at home. The air tasted like old coins again—cold, flat, the kind that had been sitting in stone for a long time and only moved when somebody opened doors and dragged trouble through. His left eye ached like someone had tried to pry it out with a screwdriver and then gotten bored halfway.

  For a second, Matas just watched the dim gray bar of light cutting across the ceiling from the slit window. The last clear thing he remembered was Merrik’s bad-wolf joke landing, his own laugh answering it, and then the mailbox in the corner of his sightline snapping upright like it had just punched in for a shift.

  Text. Clean as a tax notice.

  Behavioral data sufficient: Integrated participant.

  Level Index: 3.

  Resources partially restored.

  Linguistic channel—stabilized.

  Then the pressure had hit, hard and bright behind his eye and down his spine, and everything folded up.

  So. Blackout, not nap.

  He rolled onto his side. Every sore spot weighed in at once—ribs humming, shoulder tight, legs heavy—like his body had been waiting for a chance to file complaints. When he tried to swallow, his throat scraped like he’d been gargling dust.

  He flexed his fingers.

  Right hand: stiff, but serviceable. Left wrist: a different story.

  The instant he tried to bend it past a shallow angle, a bolt of grinding pain shot up his forearm. Not the sharp, electric wrong from when it first broke on the road. This was deeper, the gummy resistance of something half-fixed and then ignored for too long. He brought the wrist up where he could see it. The bruising had gone from angry purple to ugly yellow, the kind that said the system had done its part and then clocked out. It looked almost normal. It just didn’t move that way.

  He eased it side to side, small arcs. Tendons in the back of his hand pulled like over-tight wires. Bones clicked in ways that did not inspire confidence.

  Joints hate being babied. Any roofer over forty could tell you that. Stop using something after an injury, and it freezes for good. He didn’t know if that rule held in whatever nightmare OS he was running now, but he wasn’t betting on the mailbox sending a friendly patch.

  “Okay,” he breathed. “Physical therapy it is.”

  He braced his left forearm with his right hand and rotated the wrist another notch. Pain flared, bright enough to blur his vision. He rode it out, counted three slow breaths, then tried again. Small circles. Flex, extend. Something deep in the meat complained.

  The mailbox in his peripheral vision pulsed its lazy four-count. Watching. Logging.

  “Write this down,” he told it. “Patient extremely unhappy with customer service.”

  A low sound answered him from the doorway. Not words. A questioning grunt.

  He turned his head too fast, and the room slid sideways before it snapped back into place. Merrik stood in the frame, shoulder against stone, spear upright by his side. The lantern on the little table burned lower than he remembered, wick turned down to a tired ember.

  “How long?” he asked.

  The words came out in English. They landed in his head in Merrik’s language, smooth as a second thought.

  Merrik’s brows drew together. “Half a watch,” he said slowly. “Maybe a little more. You dropped like a sack of stones. I thought you were dead until you started snoring.”

  “Good to know I still impress.” Matas winced as the next rotation of his wrist sent a new spike through the joint. “Snoring, huh? That’s the dangerous part.”

  Merrik’s gaze dropped to his hand. “You hurt it again?”

  “Still hurt it.” He forced another small circle. “Apparently, if you let something sit through three mystery upgrades, it complains.”

  Merrik didn’t catch every word; Matas could feel the spots where the understanding slid, little gaps his brain papered over. When he said “upgrades,” though, Merrik flinched as if he’d made a comment about his mother.

  “Whatever that was,” Merrik said, sidestepping the word but clearly with venom, “do not do it again in here. You went stiff, then slack. Your eyes…” He hesitated, then made a quick vertical gesture with two fingers in front of his own face, cutting through his iris like a slit.

  Matas’s stomach turned. So the eye show hadn’t just been his imagination.

  “Not part of the plan,” he said. “Trust me.”

  Merrik snorted softly, halfway between belief and annoyance, and went back to leaning on the frame, eyes on the corridor beyond.

  Matas kept moving the wrist until the pain flattened into something he could file under tolerable. The range of motion was still garbage, but at least his fingers would close around the cot’s edge. Tiny, important victories.

  If this was his new normal—half-healed bones, blackout skills, and a language slot someone had jammed into his head with a crowbar—he needed every piece of his body that would still cooperate.

  Tharel arrived with the sound of his boots before the shape of him filled the doorway.

  The rhythm of his stride—measured, not rushed—hit first. Merrik straightened before Tharel turned the corner. The new language kept up whether Matas wanted it to or not; even the scrape of leather on stone landed as familiar sound instead of noise.

  Serh came with him, a half-pace behind, shoulders squared. Her expression when she saw Matas awake matched the way she’d checked the room the first time: assess, catalogue, move on.

  Tharel stopped just inside the threshold. Lantern light picked out the lines around his mouth, deeper than before. He looked like a man who hadn’t liked any of the thoughts he’d had since the wolves.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Matas,” he said.

  His name landed clean. No lag, no echo. Just a word, in Tharel’s language, that his brain slotted into place like it had been waiting.

  “Yes?” he managed.

  Tharel’s eyes narrowed at the sound. Yesterday, Matas had been fumbling his way through “water.” Now full sentences came without him chasing them. If he were Tharel, he’d be suspicious too.

  “Speak again,” Tharel said. Not a request.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Anything.”

  “I would like,” Matas said, “to not be killed in your basement? Please?”

  Merrik made a faint choking noise that might have been a swallowed laugh. Serh’s mouth twitched, then flattened. Tharel’s face stayed carved from the same stone as the walls.

  “The words are right,” he said after a moment. “The sound is wrong.”

  “Story of my life.”

  Tharel’s gaze cut to Merrik. “You saw his eyes.”

  “Yes.” Merrik’s spine snapped a little straighter. “They changed when the…” He fumbled for a term and chose none. “When it lit. Slit, like a cold-blood’s. Red around the edge. Then he fell.”

  “Not helping my case,” Matas said.

  Tharel ignored him. “And now he speaks like he has lived in Samhal his whole life.”

  “Does he?” Serh asked quietly. Her stare stayed on Matas, steady and unnervingly direct. “The words are right. The weight on them is not.”

  Matas cupped his chin. “I think my… whatever this is… is good with the pieces. Not so much with the music. Literal stuff, I’m fine. You ask me for water, tell me to sit, I get it. You start talking fast, or making jokes, or using… sayings? Old phrases? It feels like tripping over loose scrap. My brain catches, then I understand, but late.” He tapped his temple. “Back home I did construction. Balance kept you alive. This has me walking like the roof just shifted under me.”

  Serh traded a quick look with Tharel. There was an entire argument in that glance.

  “Sayings,” she repeated. “Old phrases.”

  She turned to Merrik and fired a line at him at full speed, words strung tight as a bowstring. The cadence screamed proverb—something you taught kids so they wouldn’t die doing something stupid.

  For a heartbeat, all Matas heard was sound. Familiar vowels, familiar consonants, but too fast, too bound up in each other for the new channel in his head to grab.

  Then it slammed in.

  Drop the stone before the ice sings.

  The words arrived all at once, like someone had shoved a sentence card into a slot.

  He blinked. “Drop the stone before the ice sings,” he echoed, a half-beat behind. “What does that even—”

  Serh’s eyes sharpened. “You understood.”

  “Eventually,” he said. “Felt it chase me down.”

  “That is an old warning,” Tharel said. “Children learn it before they can walk on the ponds. There is no other place to hear it.” He studied Matas’s face as if the words might leave fingerprints. “Yet you take it as if you have heard it all your life.”

  “Trust me,” Matas said. “Nothing about this feels like all my life.”

  “And your own sayings?” Merrik leaned his spear a little closer to the wall, more curious than tense now. “Your… old words. Can you still use them?”

  “Sure. I could tell you not to count your chickens before they hatch, but I’m guessing—”

  “Chickens?” Merrik repeated carefully.

  “Egg-birds,” Matas said. “Feather meat. You eat them?”

  “We eat many things,” Serh said dryly. “Few of them come with your metaphors.”

  The sound that left him was more exhale than laugh, but it was something. The rhythm of her line lagged for him a half-second—his brain taking the scenic route—but when it landed, it landed sharp.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s kind of my point.”

  Tharel let it run just long enough to see how the edges fit, then cut across with a small motion of his hand.

  “Enough,” he said. “I have heard enough.”

  He stepped farther into the room. The stone seemed to make space for him instead of the other way around.

  “You stand on our wall in the storm,” he said, voice flat. “You fight wolves as if you have done it before. The air goes wrong around you. Now you speak like one of us, but not.” His eyes held Matas’s. “You are not a simple traveler.”

  “No,” Matas said. “But I’m still a man who bleeds when something with teeth gets too close. That has to count for something.”

  “Perhaps.” Tharel’s tone didn’t change. “But I am not the one who decides how much.”

  He turned to Serh. “You will stay. Watch him.”

  She nodded once. “Yes.”

  “Merrik. With me.”

  Merrik grabbed his spear, movement automatic. His gaze brushed Matas’s for a heartbeat, apology and curiosity tangled together, then he followed Tharel out.

  Their footsteps faded down the corridor, swallowed by stone.

  The cell felt smaller without Merrik’s uneven humor parked in the doorway. The building creaked—little ticks and sighs in the walls and ceiling, like an old house settling under a load nobody had checked in too long. Somewhere below, that slow drip kept counting seconds.

  Serh shifted just inside the threshold, feet planted, hands loose near the knife at her belt. Her version of relaxed looked a lot like other people’s ready to kill.

  “You know where he’s going?” Matas asked, after a while.

  “Tharel?” She considered, then gave a tiny shrug. “He goes to speak with those who sit closest to the fire.” She searched for a phrase, then settled on, “Oldest bones. They decide what to do with things that do not fit.”

  “Like me.”

  “Like you. Like anything that howls near the old doors.”

  He let that sink in. “What are my options?”

  She watched him for a beat, as if weighing whether the answer counted as need-to-know.

  “They will decide,” she said at last, “if you walk under our roof, stay on our wall, or go back to the wolves.”

  “Real menu of choices.”

  “It is more than the wolves give,” she said.

  Fair point.

  He flexed his left wrist again. The grinding ache had settled into something dull and ugly. If he stopped pushing it now, it would seize; if he kept going, it might decide to snap on a delay.

  “You should not force that,” Serh said without looking away from the hall.

  “If I don’t, it locks up,” he said. “Bad joints get worse when you baby them.”

  “You are not old,” she said.

  “Tell that to my bones.”

  “I am telling it to your brain,” she said. “Your bones can complain to someone else when they fall apart because you would not rest.”

  That was the closest she’d come to a joke. The translation lagged by a blink, that little hitch where deadpan lived, and then the humor clicked into place.

  “Was that you caring?” he asked.

  “No.” Her eyes tracked something he couldn’t see down the corridor. “That was me avoiding extra work. If you break yourself again, Tharel will make me carry you down the path.”

  “Responsible motives. I respect that.”

  She said nothing, but the corner of her mouth almost, almost moved.

  They fell into a restless quiet.

  Every so often, voices leaked down the hall: short exchanges between guards, the scrape of boots, a muffled clatter of something being shifted farther inside the mountain. Most of it landed clearly. Orders, names, a complaint about the cold. When somebody got comfortable and let words run together—a thrown barb, a fast joke—the understanding stuttered. Sound first. Then meaning, a fraction late. Each time, a line of pain wrote itself behind his left eye, as if someone were dragging chalk across the inside of his skull.

  The system had given him a map. It was still drawing in the back alleys.

  He leaned his head back against the wall and stared at the bar of light from the window. It had slid a finger-width lower since he woke.

  Alea’s face surfaced—not in some cinematic memory, just in the small habits he knew. How she’d lick a spoon clean before setting it in the sink. The exact shape of her frown when his texts went unanswered too long. Right now, she’d have a pot on the stove and three dogs weaving between her ankles, wondering why the hell he wasn’t home.

  On Earth, the worst a group of strangers could do to his life from across town was kill a permit, deny a variance, make him start a roof over from scratch. Here, a handful of people by a fire—people he had never met—were deciding whether he counted as man, monster, or just extra weight on their wall.

  “Drop the stone before the ice sings,” he muttered, mostly to see if it still rolled off his tongue.

  Serh’s shoulders tightened a hair. “Do not drop anything from in here,” she said. “We are above hollow rooms. The stone does not like being disturbed.”

  Good to know. His roofer brain started mapping imaginary load paths under them whether he wanted it to or not.

  Roof. Wall. Wolves.

  Those were his options now. None of them were home. None of them had Alea at the end. But only one of them came with teeth he already knew.

  Somewhere above him, people he’d never seen were arguing about which box to shove him into. All he could do was sit on smooth stone, keep his wrist moving, and wait to find out if he was going to be a guest, a guard post, or bait.