Hands. That was the first thing. Hands under his arms, hands gripping his legs, the rough scrape of wool against his neck. Cold air on his face, then not cold, then cold again, the temperature swinging with each lurch of movement.

  He was being carried.

  Marcus tried to open his eyes. The lids felt sealed, gummed shut with something crusted and dry. He got one halfway and the world came in sideways: firelight, orange and jumping, somewhere to his left. Dark shapes moving against it. The ground was wrong. Tilted. No. He was tilted. Someone had him under the shoulders and was hauling him over uneven ground, and the jolting sent a sick pulse through his skull each time his body dipped.

  Voices. Close. Speaking words he almost recognized. The cadence was right, the shape of the consonants familiar, but the vowels were broader, rounder, as if someone had taken his language and stretched it at the seams. A man's voice, low and quick, tossing words over Marcus's body to someone gripping his ankles. A reply from further back. Laughter. Not cruel. Nervous. The sound people make when they've found something they don't understand and need to fill the silence.

  More hands joined. The carry steadied.

  Marcus's head lolled to the side and he caught a flash of landscape through his half-open eye — dark hillside, frost-white grass, a sky with more stars than he had ever seen. No stab-light to wash them out. No city glow. Just the raw scatter of them, dense and close, as if the sky had dropped lower while he wasn't looking.

  The wool against his face smelled of animal fat and woodsmoke. Underneath it, something sharper. Herbs. Crushed, green, pungent. And below that, the animal itself, the skin-and-sweat smell of leather cured in haste, of clothing worn hard and not washed often. His nose registered what his mind could not hold.

  He tried to listen. The man carrying his shoulders spoke again, and Marcus caught a word. Water, maybe. Or winter. The vowel was wrong for either. Someone else said something that might have been his weight, or his condition, or nothing at all. The language was his and it was not. Like hearing a song he knew performed by someone who'd learned it from a different teacher.

  The ground smoothed. The jolting eased. Warmth hit him from the right side. A fire, close, big enough that the heat reached him in a wave. Then the hands shifted, tilted him, lowered him onto something flat. A hide, stretched over packed earth. The wool pulled away from his face and the cold air found the sweat on his neck.

  His mouth opened. What came out was air. No consonants. Just his jaw opening and closing, and nothing happening except a sound like cloth tearing.

  A hand on his shoulder. Firm. Reassuring. The man who owned the hand leaned close. Young voice, younger than the others. He said something to Marcus that might have been a question. Marcus couldn't answer. The hand squeezed once, then withdrew.

  Footsteps, moving fast. A voice calling from somewhere ahead. The crackle of the fire was louder now, and beneath it, the murmur of other fires, other voices. A camp. Small, from the sound of it. Just people in the dark, clustered around whatever warmth they could build.

  The firelight dimmed. A shape leaned over him, blocking the glow. He could smell breath. Close, warm, carrying the same herb-sharpness as the wool. A woman's voice, pitched to calm. She pressed the back of her hand against his forehead, turned his face left, then right. Professional. Assessing.

  Then the darkness swallowed the rest.

  ---

  Heat. Close, still, heavy with smoke. The orange glow of a fire filtered through something above him. Stretched hide. A low ceiling, close enough to touch if he raised his arm, which he could not.

  Marcus opened his eyes.

  He was inside. A tent, small, the walls made of hides stitched together and pulled taut over wooden poles. The fire sat in a shallow pit near the center, the smoke curling up through a gap where the hides didn't quite meet at the peak. Everything smelled of herbs and woodsmoke and the warm, close scent of bodies in a small space.

  A woman knelt beside him. Her face was weathered brown, deep lines around her mouth and eyes, but the eyes themselves were steady, unhurried. Dark, almost black in the firelight. Her hair was pulled back and tied with a strip of leather, a few strands loose and hanging near her jaw. She was pressing her hands against his chest, palms flat over his sternum, fingers spread. Her lips moved without sound.

  Not quite without. A low hum. Below speech, below singing. A vibration that he felt more than heard, passing from her palms into his ribs, into the hollow space behind them.

  The space where his magic should have been.

  She was checking his reservoir. He knew it the way he knew the sun was warm, without thought, the recognition surfacing from somewhere beneath the wreckage of his consciousness. But it was wrong. The sensation was wrong. When the Drawstone pulled at his reservoir, the draw came precise and efficient, channeled through bronze, conducted by infrastructure older than anyone alive. This was nothing like that. This was direct. Skin to skin. Her energy brushing against the edges of his reservoir like fingers probing the walls of an empty jar.

  Warm. Rough. Organic in a way he couldn't name. As if magic itself had a texture here, and the texture was different. No Lattice between them. No instrument. Just her hands and whatever she carried in her own body, reaching into his to find what was left.

  What was left was nothing. He knew that already. He'd felt the emptiness open beneath him in the lab, the floor dropping out of his reservoir. But he hadn't known how it would feel when someone else reached in and reminded him. Seventy percent came back in a day. He didn't know if this came back at all. He didn't know where he was.

  The hum stopped. Her hands stayed where they were, but her fingers curled slightly, pressing harder, as if she thought she might have missed something. She hadn't.

  The steadiness in her eyes shifted. Not fear. Something more professional than fear. The careful blankness of someone who has found what she did not expect to find.

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  She leaned back on her heels and studied him. Her gaze moved from his face to his chest to his hands and back. He recognized the process even through the fog. She looked at his clothes (what was left of them, his robe torn, the fabric unlike anything she wore) and at his skin (unmarked, unscarred, the skin of someone who had never worked outside) and at his hands (ink-stained fingers, soft palms, a scholar's hands).

  "Still," she said. The word was clear. Recognizable. The accent broader than any he'd heard, the vowel sitting differently in her mouth, but the meaning landed clean.

  Marcus tried to respond. His lips worked. Sound came, but wrong. Words tumbled out in fragments he could not control, his tongue firing on its own, bypassing whatever part of him should have been choosing what to say. He heard himself speak and understood nothing. Syllables from lectures, from late nights in the archive, from conversations with Kaeso about resonance calibration and spectral field stability. Academic jargon. Loanwords from territories that, somewhere in the back of his fractured awareness, he understood did not exist yet.

  The woman's brow creased. She understood him. Mostly. He could see it in the way she tracked his mouth, following the shape of words she recognized, losing the thread where the vocabulary turned foreign. He sounded wrong to her. Not foreign, exactly. Educated in a way that didn't fit anything she knew. A stranger who spoke her language but filled it with words she had never heard, as if he'd learned it somewhere that didn't exist.

  And a name. Surfacing through the rest like a stone breaking water.

  "Cassius."

  He said it again. And again. Not because he chose to but because it was the thing lodged deepest, the word branded into the folds of his brain by two years of obsessive research, the name he had been reaching for when the field ripped him through. His scholarly fixation, still firing when everything else had gone dark. Cassius. The founder. The figure Marcus had dedicated his academic life to understanding, to pinning down in time, to finding through a window that had turned into a door.

  "Cassius."

  The woman listened. She did not interrupt. When his voice finally guttered out, she reached forward and pressed two fingers against his forehead. Cool now. Checking for fever, maybe. Or something else, some diagnostic her tradition taught that his did not.

  Over her shoulder, rapid and low, she spoke. To someone he could not see, near the entrance of the tent. A child, perhaps, or a guard, someone small and quiet enough that Marcus hadn't noticed them. He caught fragments of what she said: stranger, empty, a word he thought meant "never seen," and the name, repeated back. She said it simply. The stranger's name. As if it were a fact no more complicated than his temperature or the color of his skin.

  A rustling near the tent flap. Footsteps outside, moving fast. Then quiet.

  Her fingers lifted from his forehead. Her palm pressed flat against his chest again. The hum resumed, lower this time, slower. Not examining now. Working. He felt it push against the walls of his reservoir, the faintest warmth spreading into the cavernous emptiness inside him. Like breathing on an ember. Not enough to light anything. Just enough to keep it from going cold.

  Herbs. She had a clay bowl beside her knee, the contents dark and wet and sharp-smelling. She dipped a cloth and pressed it to his neck, his temples, the inside of his wrists. Wherever the skin was thinnest, wherever the blood ran close to the surface. The liquid stung and then turned warm, and something in his body eased. Not his reservoir. That was still gutted, and her magic could not fill them, only coax the walls to hold. But the muscles in his shoulders loosened. The pulse behind his eyes softened from hammering to merely loud.

  The work was unhurried. Her hands moved between the bowl and his body, between the humming and the herbs, patient and practiced, the same motions repeated in the same order. She'd done this before. Not this, exactly. Not a stranger with demolished reservoir who appeared from nowhere. But the hands knew their work, and the work was the same whether the patient was a refugee with a broken arm or a man from twenty-three centuries in the future.

  He lay there and watched the hide ceiling swim above him and could not form a single coherent thought. His mind kept reaching for purchase and finding nothing. No framework. Nothing to build on. The part of him that connected ideas, that built arguments, that traced cause and effect through centuries of history, had gone quiet. Stripped out. The displacement had reduced him to a nervous system, and the nervous system could only report: heat, cloth, herb-sting, the low vibration of a magic he did not recognize.

  Somewhere beyond the tent wall, the crack of a fire. Voices speaking words that were almost, almost his. And the silence underneath it all. The vast, humming silence of a world without the Lattice, without the stabs, without the infrastructure that Marcus had spent his entire life inside and never once had to think about, the way he had never thought about the hum of the Veins until the hum was gone.

  ---

  The tent flap opened. Cold air knifed in and the fire sputtered. The woman turned.

  A man filled the entrance. Tall, broad across the shoulders from years of use. His arms were bare below the elbow despite the cold, the skin dark and scarred, the forearms of someone who had carried weapons and firewood and other people for a long time. His face was compressed, like someone who had learned to make decisions fast and had stopped bothering to show his work.

  He stepped in and the tent shrank.

  He glanced once around the interior. Took in the fire, the clay bowl, the woman's position beside the stranger. His eyes moved to Marcus and stayed there. He did not approach immediately. He stood near the entrance and studied him from that distance.

  The woman spoke first. Low, urgent, her hands still resting on Marcus's chest. She talked fast, the words tumbling in a controlled rush, the briefing of a professional who knows her audience doesn't have patience for details that don't matter. Marcus caught pieces: appeared, nowhere, the valley. Nerva found him. Reservoir gone. She used a word he didn't know, paired it with a gesture, hand flat, then flipped palm-up. Empty. Gone in a way she did not have vocabulary for. She pressed both palms together and then opened them, spreading her fingers wide. Nothing inside. And then a word he caught whole, or thought he did: never. She said it twice, her hands still open.

  And she said the name.

  The man listened. He did not interrupt, did not ask her to slow down, did not ask her to repeat herself. He took the information the way he'd taken the cold air: without visible reaction. His jaw tightened once. His body didn't move.

  When she finished, he crossed to where Marcus lay and crouched. One knee on the packed earth, one arm resting on the other knee. Close. The firelight caught the planes of his face. Hard jaw, deep-set eyes, a nose that had been broken at least once and set badly. Lines around the mouth that came from weather, not age. He looked down at Marcus.

  His eyes traced the same path the woman's had. The torn robe, the soft hands. Skin that had never seen weather. Nothing about Marcus that matched anyone in the settlement.

  Then he spoke.

  "Cassius."

  The syllables were foreign to him. He said them anyway, slowly, like he was learning the shape of something he'd never need to say before.

  Marcus heard it through the fog. Cassius. The name snagged somewhere deep, pulled at something. He's here. The thought surfaced like a gasp. He's here, I found him. Then the fog closed back over and the thought was gone.

  The fire crackled. The man said something to the woman. A question, short. She answered. The man nodded. Stood. Looked down at Marcus one more time. His expression did not change, but something in his posture settled.

  Then Marcus's body pulled him under.

  Not sleep. Not unconsciousness. Something deeper — the reservoir itself dragging him down, a body with nothing left to burn shutting off every system it could afford to lose. Thought went first. Then sight. Then the sound of the fire, and the voices, and the wind outside the tent wall.

  The last thing he felt was the woman's hand on his forehead. Pressing down. Warm, calloused, steady. Holding him to the earth while the rest of him fell away.