When Michael surfaced from sleep, it wasn't pain that greeted him.
It was absence.
No fire in his bones. No ripping pressure in his skull. No copper taste. None of the blunt, clinical aftermath his mind expected when it replayed the explosion at CERN.
Instead there was warmth—thick, humid warmth—and a soft cradle beneath his back.
And the smell.
Herbs, faint and clean. Lavender, maybe. Something like dried grass warmed by sun.
His awareness drifted in and out through a heavy fog. He knew he was awake, but the world came in muted, as though someone had wrapped his senses in wool.
I fell asleep.
The thought arrived with the memory of the last thing he'd felt: cold air tearing into too-small lungs, a raw involuntary wail, hands lifting him, a voice he couldn't understand.
So this wasn't an operating theater. Not a hospital recovery.
It was the after of… whatever that had been.
His mind tried to do what it always did: inventory, model, hypothesize.
But even that felt wrong, because his thoughts came clear while his body remained… distant.
He tried to move.
His intention fired—left hand, lift—and the result was pathetic.
Something twitched. Not nothing, not paralysis. More like a sluggish misfire: a limb that answered half a second late and with none of the fine control he was used to.
He tried again, harder.
A small jerk. A faint scrape of skin against cloth.
His chest tightened.
I can feel the bed. I can feel heat. So I'm not numb.
But he couldn't coordinate the simple act of turning his head. His neck felt weak, as if it had never been asked to do anything before.
A cold spike of panic cut through the fog.
Not paralysis.
Something worse.
I'm not in my body.
His breath hitched—thin, shallow—and the sound that escaped him wasn't a curse or a demand.
It was a high, thin wail.
For a second he didn't even recognize it as his. It startled him, raw and animal, a noise that belonged to someone very small and very helpless.
Footsteps—light, quick—approached from his right. A shape moved into the edge of his blurred vision.
A woman leaned over him.
Blonde hair fell forward in a soft wave, catching the strange ambient light and turning almost honey-bright. She was slim, delicate in the face with gentle features—fine nose, full lips, eyes the color of clear sky.
Her expression was immediate concern, almost tender.
She spoke.
Michael's mind latched onto the sounds, hungry for meaning.
He understood nothing.
It wasn't English. It wasn't French. Not German, not Italian, not anything he'd ever heard in conference corridors or airport terminals. The cadence sounded familiar in its bones—something Germanic, something Latin, braided together—but the words themselves slid past comprehension.
He tried to answer.
He could feel his jaw move. He could sense lips shaping something.
But no language formed. No sentence. No anything.
Another thin wail came out instead.
The woman smiled as if to soothe him, and kept talking, her voice soft and melodic.
Michael stared up.
A ceiling filled his vision, pale and smooth, but not like drywall or acoustic panels. It had a faint, pearly sheen, almost like polished stone dusted with milk-glass. The light in the room didn't come from any fixtures he could see.
It was simply there—an even, gentle glow—as if the air itself luminesced.
Where am I?
CERN? Switzerland?
He tried to pull the last coherent moment into focus: the controlled access doors, the hum of machinery, sterile angles. Medical facilities on-site were first class; if there had been an accident—
—and he'd never thought "star-in-a-room" would be on that list—
—he'd be in a bed with monitors, with disinfectant, with people speaking German.
This wasn't that.
The woman brushed fingers lightly over his forehead, as if checking for fever.
Her touch was warm.
Real.
His gaze—traitorous, automatic—dropped.
Her chest was… conspicuous.
Large, out of proportion with her slender frame. The kind of exaggerated curve that seemed almost unreal, like someone had sculpted her from an idealized painting.
He tried to look away immediately, mortified, but his eyes snagged on a detail that made his mind stutter.
Moisture darkened the fabric at her breasts.
She was lactating.
A thin line of wetness clung where cloth met skin, as if her body had leaked in the rush to come to him.
What the hell…?
Her clothing didn't resemble a nurse's uniform, either. No scrubs. No name tag. No sensible shoes. She wore something like a robe-dress—layered fabric, fitted at the waist, sleeves that flared slightly at the wrists.
Old-fashioned. Almost Renaissance.
And yet the cloth itself shimmered.
Not with sequins. Not with glitter.
This was subtler, like the fabric caught light from a source he couldn't locate.
More than that, it looked as if light clung to her. A faint aura—radiance that didn't cast harsh shadows, just made her edges seem cleaner, more defined.
His brain, still half-sunk in fog, tried to rationalize.
Experimental gear? Optical effect? Hallucination?
But it didn't fit. Nothing about this fit.
He darted his eyes around the room.
Small. Quiet. Pale walls smooth and faintly luminous like the ceiling. A bedside table—wooden, carved with delicate patterns that would have looked at home in a museum. No monitors. No IV stand. No tubes. No cables. No LED readouts.
Only the soft glow in the air, and the smell of herbs.
His pulse beat harder.
Was I in a coma? How long was I out?
He tried to count backward, to reconstruct the timeline.
Explosion. Weightlessness. Roar.
Then black.
Then light.
Then—
Cold air.
Crying.
Hands.
He swallowed, or tried to. Even that reflex felt clumsy.
The woman kept speaking, her tone calm.
Michael forced himself to focus on her mouth, on the shapes her lips made.
The language rolled with strange consonants and open vowels. Germanic-Latin, he thought again, because it carried the hardness of one and the rhythm of the other. But the vocabulary was alien.
He attempted a simple word, the easiest anchor he had.
"Help," he tried to say.
What came out was another high, thin sound, less controlled than before.
His breath hitched.
The woman's brows knit for the first time. She leaned closer, listening. Her eyes flicked over his face, studying, as if gauging awareness.
Then, as if making a decision, she turned her head and called out toward someone beyond his line of sight.
The words came out sharper, more clipped. A summons.
A moment later, another set of footsteps answered.
A man entered the edge of Michael's vision, and the room seemed to shift around him—like the atmosphere acknowledged his presence.
He was handsome, slim but well built, with the posture of someone used to being obeyed. He wore his confidence like armor, but there was a roughness to him too—an ease that suggested he could brawl as readily as he could hold court.
His hair was darker than the woman's, but far from dull. It was a deep, impossible red, shimmering with the intensity of molten copper.
He smiled broadly as he looked down at Michael.
He laughed.
Not quietly.
The sound was thunderous in the small room, a booming, delighted laugh that would have felt obscene in a hospital but seemed, somehow, natural here.
He said something—still in that incomprehensible tongue—and the woman replied, rolling her eyes in a way that was unmistakably human.
He muttered something that sounded like a half-hearted defense.
The woman cut him off.
They bickered.
It was absurdly domestic. A couple's argument, played out over Michael's body like he wasn't there at all.
The woman gestured sharply—toward Michael, toward the man, toward the room—her brows drawn down. The man made a placating motion, palms up, expression wounded and meek.
Michael stared, caught between disbelief and mounting dread.
Why were they fighting?
Why had the man tried to touch him?
If these were attendants—nurses, doctors—why did they behave like this? Why did they wear what looked like Renaissance clothing? Why did they glow? Why did none of their words connect to anything he knew?
He tried to speak again, to force the question out.
"What—where—"
Another high wail.
The woman turned her attention back to him at last. Her expression softened again, like she'd remembered he was frightened.
She touched his cheek.
He flinched.
She said something in a gentler tone, then looked over her shoulder and added a sentence to the man that sounded like a warning.
The man lifted both hands in surrender.
He took a step farther back, still watching Michael with open curiosity—amusement even—as though Michael were a novelty, a miracle, a problem solved.
After a moment more of murmured argument, the man eased out of the room. The woman lingered, eyes on Michael, then followed him.
The door closed.
Silence returned in a soft, humming blanket.
Michael lay still, breathing in short, unfamiliar pulls.
Okay. Think.
The drowsiness pressed at his mind, thick as syrup, trying to drag him under.
He fought it.
But the body wanted to sleep. It wanted to cry. It wanted to stop computing.
The room blurred.
Darkness lapped at the edges of his awareness.
And then it took him.
**
He woke again with his cheek damp and his mouth tasting faintly of milk.
Time was a guess without clocks, but his mind insisted on ordering it: a stretch of darkness, a brief flare of waking, then darkness again.
This time, the fog was thinner.
He could move.
Not well, not gracefully, but with intent.
As he grew accustomed to the room, something else surfaced—something that didn't fit any of the explanations he kept reaching for.
His senses… sharpened.
Not just awake sharpened. Not adrenaline. Not that brittle clarity you got after a nightmare.
It was as if the world had stopped being a picture and become a volume.
He could hear the faintest shifts of fabric in the next room, the soft creak of wood settling under its own weight. He could smell the herbs layered in the air—not a single note, but a whole chord: lavender, something resinous, something green and dry like sun-warmed grass. Even the light felt textured, thick in the air rather than coming from any lamp.
A simulation—if that's what this was—would have to decide what to render. It would have to approximate.
This didn't feel approximated.
He closed his eyes, and the heightened awareness didn't vanish. If anything, it intensified. He could feel his own body as though he were holding it in his hands—every tiny tremor, every weak pull of muscle, every uneven rhythm of his breathing.
Small.
Wrongly small.
He drew a careful breath and tried to map it the way he would map a machine: joints, leverage, center of mass.
Infant.
The word landed with a sick, absolute certainty.
His eyes snapped open.
He didn't want to test it. He didn't want to know.
But his body—this body—responded to intention in a way that made his skin prickle. It wasn't graceful, but it was direct, as if the fog between thought and motion had thinned.
He braced both hands on the crib rail.
Wood. Smooth from use. Too tall to be comforting at his height.
He pulled.
His arms shook immediately, burning with a strain that should have ended the attempt right there. His head wobbled on his neck, heavy and unstable.
He tried again.
His knees tucked under him by instinct or accident or something else entirely, and for a heartbeat he felt the impossible alignment of balance—spine over hips, feet planted, weight distributed.
He stood.
Barely.
His whole body trembled, but he was upright.
A short, disbelieving sound caught in his throat.
An infant shouldn't be able to do this.
He let go of the rail to prove it to himself, and immediately his balance failed. His arms flailed out in a wild pinwheel and he caught himself against the slats with a soft thump—clumsy, ridiculous.
But real.
His heart hammered like it was trying to escape.
He swung one leg over the rail. Not with the careful deliberation of an adult climbing out of something, but with the messy confidence of a body that didn't yet understand fear. He lowered himself inch by inch, fingers white, and dropped the last few centimeters.
His feet hit the floor.
He didn't fall.
He stood there for a second, stunned by the simple fact of it.
The room was pale, sparsely furnished—carved wood, clean lines, a few small trinkets placed with care. Everything looked old and strange and yet uncannily intentional, as if someone had designed "comfort" without ever seeing a hospital.
On the far wall, a reflective surface caught the glow.
A mirror.
His throat tightened.
It was too high for him. He padded over in short, careful steps—still unstable, still learning—grabbed the frame, and pulled himself up until his face rose into view.
A baby stared back.
Round cheeks. A shock of dark hair that refused to lie flat. Eyes too large for the face, too dark to be comforting.
He lifted a hand.
The baby lifted its hand.
He opened his mouth.
The baby opened its mouth—no words, only the shape of wanting words.
For a moment his mind went empty.
Then it flooded back, frantic, reaching for anything that could make the image not real.
Hallucination.
Drugs.
Coma.
VR.
But the wood under his fingers was rough where the carving dipped. The air was heavy and warm against his skin. He could smell his own sour breath.
If this was virtual, it was beyond civilian technology. Beyond anything he'd ever even seen proposed outside classified circles.
The thought that followed was colder than the mirror.
They think I'm dead.
His gaze locked on the baby's face as if staring hard enough could force it to resolve into his own.
It didn't.
Another thought tried to surface, half-mocking, half-pleading.
Were the Buddhists right?
He rejected it on reflex—then had nothing better to put in its place.
He let go of the mirror and nearly toppled, catching himself with a palm against the wall.
Okay. Think.
The couple from earlier—the woman and the red-haired man—had to be his parents. Or caretakers. Or… something close enough that the distinction didn't matter yet.
Act like an infant.
The orphanage had taught him that much. Be small. Be ordinary. Be overlooked.
He forced his shoulders to slump. Let his hands wobble. Let his stance become uncertain.
He turned back toward the crib, practicing clumsiness with every step.
Halfway there, the door opened.
A sharp, startled sound cut the air—female, high and breathless.
He froze.
The woman stood in the doorway with a cup in her hand.
Her eyes weren't on the crib.
They were on him*.
On the fact that he had been walking.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Then her fingers loosened.
The cup tipped.
Water arced out—clear, catching the room's gentle light as it fell.
And then it didn't fall.
The spill flash-froze in midair. Not gradually—instantly—each droplet arrested as if time itself had thickened.
But the freezing didn't stop at making it solid.
Ice surged up and over the rim, the escaping sheet hardening into a jagged, tapering brace as if the spill had decided to become structure. Rime raced along the cup's lip. White mist curled around her fingers.