To Aien’s eyes, the rolling hills of farming fields looked like gentle waves frozen in time. He had never seen the sea.

  Wrapped in a bnket in his grandfather’s cart, he kept his eyes on the scenery, wondering and confused. He had the memory of sights he had never seen — dark alleys and buildings too tall to be any of the ones around the farm — and the feeling that they weren’t simply things he had imagined. There was another, a nagging sensation that he had lost something, that the previous years shouldn’t have been so hazy and that somehow, he knew this, and somehow, he knew he shouldn’t know this or any of the words now circling around inside his mind.

  He couldn’t tell when it had started, but when it ended, he was left feeling awkward in his too-small body.

  Then there was the worst of all of them: in his visions he was in the wrong body and that hurt in a way that made him want to sink inside himself until he disappeared. The feeling brought with it other half-memories. He had felt this in the past. There had been fights about this. He didn’t know how, when or with whom, but the hurt was too real for it to have been a nightmare.

  The cart slowed down, then stopped.

  “Aien?” his grandfather asked, voice gentle, seemingly to not scare him in case he had been sleeping.

  Aien turned. His grandfather had a very round face, a long gray beard and moustache and half-closed eyes.

  This man is dangerous. The thought invaded Aien’s mind, followed by another one. No, not this man, another one that I’ve met before… before…

  Something had happened before.

  “What happened? Are you hurt? Hungry?” his grandfather asked, climbing onto the cart and approaching.

  “I… had a nightmare.”

  A gentle hand in one of his shoulders, grandfather spoke, “Dreams are only dreams. They’re scary or they’re good, but when they end they’re gone. They can’t follow you into this side unless you let them. If you want, you can tell me what you dreamed about, if that helps.”

  If I do you’re going to know there’s something wrong, Aien thought.

  His grandfather started repeating himself, making the words simpler and dragging each one, but Aien had understood them and wasn’t paying attention, thinking about his dreams, the words he wasn’t supposed to know and the things he couldn’t describe.

  Am I the only one? Has this ever happened with someone else?

  Grandfather stopped speaking and Aien shook his head.

  “Come, your father and mother are waiting.”

  The way he reached for Aien told him that he was going to be carried, but Aien shook his head again.

  “I want to walk.”

  A look of surprise on his face, followed by a smile, then grandfather gave Aien room to climb out of the cart. As soon as his feet touched the ground there was another feeling, one that told him that his vision should be higher. That the added height of the cart was closer to how he was used to seeing the world.

  Aien walked by his grandfather’s side. They were following a trail between bushes and sparse trees. Ahead, he could see that the trail led into a garden of small sunflowers, yellow over green.

  His grandfather took his hand. Nothing had ever felt more uncomfortable. This time, when he remembered that the dangerous man had been someone else and that his grandfather couldn’t be bmed, Aien finally understood that he was now smarter than he had been yesterday. His mind was sharper, he knew more things, and he was fairly certain it had happened over the course of a single day.

  This is going to continue happening. I feel it.

  “Was it the words?” grandfather asked.

  Aien stared up, seeing his grandfather from below, the sun above his head.

  “What words?” Aien asked, confused.

  “Before you went to sleep, I told you about the Nagra words, about how you were born.”

  Grandfather was right, he had told Aien, but he had been too distracted to remember at first. Grandfather was from far away; his people were different from his parents, and as he repeated the words there on the trail by Aien’s side, in his mind he was in the bed again, fmes dancing in the hearth — his bow he hadn’t used in a long time hanging above it — as his grandfather spoke.

  “The day I was born, a star fell.

  And so too does one fall now.

  From me into you.

  And from me into you.”

  Aien looked farther up at the sky, imagined it dark and speckled by stars, and saw one of them falling, fring white.

  “…there was another,” his grandfather was talking, “a green star, but you should only cim one. Keep these words close to your heart, boy. They served me well. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them. If you ever need help, seek the Nagra hunters and tell them the words.”

  Boy. Hearing the word made him happy.

  As they approached the small wooden house beyond the garden, Aien knew that his parents were waiting. The new memories in his mind weren’t enough for him to forget that.

  When his grandfather opened the door, Aien saw his mother first. Until yesterday, every adult was too tall for Aien, but now he could tell that his mother was taller than most women. Her long blonde hair was the most beautiful of braids and she smiled widely.

  She picked Aien up in a hug — something they did often — and a giggle escaped his mouth, then confusion struck. Aien remembered more than one mother, more than two. People who called themselves his parents for a while.

  Then there was his father. Had Aien not been in his mother’s embrace, he would have trembled. Not because of who he saw, but because of the father he remembered.

  It arrived in his mind in a jumble of memories spread around years. Late in his life — not old, but te — he met the person who he found out to be his father and it made everything worse. It sickened him to know he had come from that. He hadn’t been a real father to Aien a day in his life, nor was he paying for everything he did to others.

  A gentle touch of the second father’s hands in his head and Aien crumbled, crying uncontrolbly. He went from feeling older than the four years of this body to feeling like something he couldn’t put into words.

  Father, mother and grandfather tried to console him and though Aien listened to all of it he couldn’t remember a word. They didn’t know what was happening. Grandfather expined that nothing had happened, that he wasn’t acting this way until now, that if something had happened then the boy hadn’t said a word about it, which was true but how could he say anything? Aien was feeling too much, more than he thought possible, more than he thought he could handle and somehow, he also knew this wouldn’t happen again, not like this. He wouldn’t show it.

  For the second time, he felt like an intruder in his own body.

  There was a lesson he had taught himself. To never show weakness. He only remembered it now after having failed to keep to it. He didn’t have to keep to it anymore, and that was scary.

  Eventually they soothed him to sleep, his father more than the others. He was a tall bck man with a smile so gentle it felt unfair. His hair was bck and divided into dreads. A memory told Aien he pyed with them when he was still a baby, even if he knew he shouldn’t remember that. Both his parents had blue eyes, but his grandfather’s were brown.

  To not overwhelm him, his mother and grandfather left the room, leaving Aien tucked beneath the sheets with his father sitting by his side. His father’s hands were covered in scars. He smelled of the fields.

  Aien closed his eyes.

  He felt when his father stood up from the bed. Aien could tell that some time had passed. That his father stood by his side for a while longer after he had fallen asleep.

  In that brief moment where Aien opened his eyes to see his father and mother meeting by the room’s door, a single thought passed through his mind. For the first time that day, there wasn’t anything else invading his mind.

  This time it’s going to be different.

  It was dark out when Aien woke up.

  A child wouldn’t feel ashamed for crying the way he had, but he wasn’t really a child. It took him a while to collect the courage necessary to stand up and meet his family.

  His family.

  Aien stood and walked up to the door. He could hear their voices coming from the other side. With a bnket still wrapped around him, he pushed the door open.

  Father and mother were sitting by the table, holding hands. Grandfather was on the other side of it, drinking.

  They turned to him not with the faces of annoyance he had become used to in his past life, but with caring, welcoming eyes.

  As Aien approached, his grandfather stood up and walked to the firepce in the back of the room.

  That was what saved him.

  Aien was the only one staring when a shape appeared beyond the half-open window a moment before it crashed into the house. The room shook and wood splintered, pots falling down from the walls. Shouts were interrupted when the mass trampled through the table, bringing father and mother along with it in a jumble of too many limbs and far too fast and horrifying and shapeless for Aien to make it out. It passed by inches away from him, close enough for Aien to smell the rot and for fingers to brush him; then it broke through the other wall, and left.

  “It just passed through, simple as that.”

  Thankfully, Aien managed to keep his voice under control as he finished the story.

  Igbol didn’t allow them a fire, so the three of them sat huddled close together, cloaks and a thin bnket wrapped around them, not so tight they couldn’t stand up in a moment, which made it even colder. Aien was in the middle and he could feel the spots of heat where he touched shoulders and hips with Ren and Igbol.

  Neither were looking at him, each staring into a different direction. He was gd for that. Even if it was deep into the night, standing this close one of them might have seen the tears in his eyes. The shame in his face.

  He had frozen.

  He had left out all the parts about his past life, but that didn’t stop him from remembering. He so wanted to tell them, even though he only knew Ren and Igbol for a couple of months, because if he told everything maybe they would understand.

  He had frozen.

  Aien couldn’t accept that. He was scared they wouldn’t understand and think him weak. Perhaps they’d think him insane if he told them. Both alternatives would lead to him being pushed away and he didn’t know which was worse.

  He felt Ren moving, turning to stare at him.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have spoken the way I did. Next time, I’m going to ask. I promise.”

  There in the dark, her face hidden by shadows, Aien saw his mother, and Kaye, and Gima.