He had known, in a way, since the first night.
Not known the way he knew his own name, solid and load-bearing. Known the way you know a face in a crowd half a second before you can put a name to it — a wrongness in the sky that hadn't just been *wrong*, it had been *familiar*-wrong, and he had shoved the recognition down hard at the time because a half-dead man dying of thirst in unfamiliar bush had no use for a thought that big. It was easier, that first day, to be a man who had fallen through a gap in the world than to be a man who suspected he recognized the world on the other side of it.
He let himself stop shoving it down on the third night after the boy's fever broke, lying on his back with his hand on his sternum the way he'd taken to doing, the coal of his own n/um banked low and patient beneath his palm. He made himself sit with it properly this time, the way you'd finally open a letter you'd been carrying unopened in a pocket for weeks.
*Blue Star.* He had read that name before. Not heard it — read it, on a phone screen, in a novel he'd picked up during some bout of insomnia, the kind of trashy, compulsively readable thing you plow through in a weekend and then mostly forget except for the shape of the feeling it left behind. A transmigrated man. A television program. A system that paid out in some kind of popularity currency for saying outrageous things about ancient history, and turned out, in the fiction, to be not so outrageous after all — every myth real, every ancient legend a half-buried fact, the whole invented past of the world sliding into place behind whatever the host said next, chapter after chapter, like a lock finding a key that had been cut specifically for it.
He remembered a name. Ye Zhen. He was nearly sure of it, the way you're nearly sure of a word you haven't used in years — confident enough to bet on, not confident enough to swear an oath by. He remembered the shape of the premise more than its furniture: a man on a program, becoming powerful, becoming enormous, by convincing the entire structure of reality to agree with him about the past. And underneath that, riding along with it the whole time in a way that had actually bothered him enough at the time to remember bothering him — he remembered a particular flavor to *whose* past kept turning out to be the real one, and whose didn't. He remembered rolling his eyes at a chapter, at some point in that half-forgotten weekend, hard enough that the eye-roll itself was one of the few things about the whole book that had survived intact in his memory, when the specific words and page numbers had not.
That was the trouble with what he had. It was recall the way silt is water — mixed in, unavoidably present, and almost useless for drinking. He could not have told you, lying there in the dark, what chapter anything happened in, or in what order, or whether the man's name was actually Ye Zhen or something close to it that he was misremembering with false confidence. He knew the destination the story had been heading toward, in the broadest strokes, better than he knew the road there. He knew — was fairly sure he knew — that it ended big, and cosmic, and strange, in a way that had made him blink at his phone at two in the morning and think *huh* before closing the app and going to sleep and, as far as he could remember, never opening it again.
He lay there turning the fact over for a long time. It was, on reflection, a genuinely disorienting thing to know: that somewhere on this Blue Star, right now, in some studio he had never seen, a man was reading lines off a script that Ayaan had once skimmed for entertainment on a bad night, and that the man had no idea a stranger from another sky already had opinions about where his life was going to go. It was one thing to fall into an unfamiliar world. It was another thing entirely to fall into one you'd already, however lazily, already had a verdict on.
He did not, lying there, decide to do anything about it. There was nothing yet to do anything about — a program he half-remembered, on a television he'd never watched, being hosted by a man he'd never met, in a country he hadn't yet set foot in. Whatever this loose, silty knowledge turned out to be worth, it wasn't worth much yet, and he was suspicious, in the specific way a cautious man is suspicious of his own convenient memories, of trusting it any further than it had earned.
What he did instead, before sleep finally took him, was resolve to stop flinching away from the thought every time it surfaced. He had spent three nights treating this like something to be managed instead of something to be known. That struck him now as exactly the wrong instinct for a man who was, by every indication his own body kept giving him, in the business of finding out what he could actually become. If this !kia and this n/um were real — and his own scorched palms said they were — then there was no particular reason to assume his memory couldn't be developed the same patient way, given time and the right kind of attention. He filed that thought next to the others he was collecting these days, in the growing private ledger of *things I suspect but cannot yet prove about what I am becoming*, and let it sit there to ripen.
For now, there was a fire burning down to coals, and a full day's walk ahead of him tomorrow to fetch salt and thread and whatever else Naledi's list demanded, and a world outside this camp that he understood, suddenly, a little better and a little worse than he had that morning — better, because he had a rough map now, however smudged, of where some of its roads led; worse, because he now knew that at least one of those roads had a man standing on it already, walking toward a version of greatness that Ayaan, half-remembering a bad night with a phone screen, was almost certain he was going to have to disagree with.
He slept on it. There would be time, he told himself, to be right or wrong about the details. There was no hurry in a certainty that had waited this many weeks to be looked at directly. It would keep.