Something massive leaned on him before he had a body to lean on.

  Weight came first. Not gravity. Gravity he understood, had worked inside it his whole life, knew its math the way he knew load tables and pitch angles. This was different. This was a pressure that had opinions. It pressed against the shape of him. Not his ribs, not his spine, but the idea of his ribs and spine, as if someone had taken the blueprint of Matas and set a boot on it to see if the paper would hold.

  Beyond the pressure, scale. Plates the size of his van's hood slid past each other in a darkness that had depth and color and movement. A shadow crossed a jagged ridgeline the way a hand crosses a desk, and in the wake of it, mountains looked like pencil marks.

  Small, something decided. Not worth noticing.

  The boot lifted. The blueprint crumpled back into a person.

  Stone hit him in the face.

  ~

  He came to with grit in his teeth and rock under his cheek. Not asphalt. Not the gravel shoulder of any road he'd ever driven. Actual stone, cold and pitted, pressing into his jaw hard enough to leave a mark.

  His lungs pulled in shallow, gritty breaths that tasted like dust and wet leaves. His ribs told him something had happened to them. His right wrist told him something worse.

  He opened his eyes.

  Sparks drifted at the edge of his vision. He blinked. They didn't fade. They linked, tiny blue-green filaments connecting into the outline of a shape he recognized from a life that already felt distant. A mailbox. Small, persistent, its red flag lifting and dropping with the patient rhythm of a metronome.

  "No," he said to it. His voice came out scraped. "Absolutely not. No HUDs. No AR. I did not sign for this update."

  The mailbox ignored him.

  He tried reading it the way he read exit signs while pretending to watch the road—peripheral, casual, as if looking directly at it might make it real. His left eye spasmed. The rest of the world dimmed a shade, and text snapped into focus beside the icon.

  Integration complete.

  Subject: Matas.

  Environment: Talmehl.Local frame stabilized.

  Status: Displaced.

  Cold. Ledger-like. The tone of a system that had finished processing him and moved on to the next line item.

  "Displaced," he read. "Yeah. No shit."

  The text held for a few seconds, then thinned to ghost-lines. The flag kept pulsing. Whatever this was, it wasn't going away because he didn't like it.

  ~

  His body reported in pieces. Everything hurt. Nothing was broken in a way that meant he couldn't move, which was the only assessment that mattered right now. The wrist was the worst of it—something grated deep when he flexed, a sound he could feel more than hear. He'd worked through worse on job sites. Not happily, but he'd worked.

  The stone under his palm was warm. Not sun-warm — the sky was grey and the light was wrong for direct heat. Warm the way a slab gets when something underneath has been running hot for a long time. He'd felt it before on flat roofs over server rooms, on concrete pads above steam tunnels. Heat that didn't belong to the surface. Heat that came from below.

  His hand noticed before his brain did. His brain was still catching up.

  He pushed up on one elbow and looked.

  No dashboard. No windshield. No van. Just low grey sky broken by a canopy so dense it smeared the light into something directionless. The trees were wrong. Pale trunks. Bark that had never seen McHenry County. Branches angled wrong, grown under different gravity or no gravity at all.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  He was on a broad slab of stone that sloped one way and dropped hard the other. Lichen traced pale maps across the surface. A few yards off, the rock ended in a blunt lip, and beyond it the mountainside fell away in broken shelves and scrub. Patches of low brush clung to ledges. Isolated trees twisted by wind into bad geometry.

  Farther out, jagged ridges stepped away in layers. One spine of rock knifed higher than the rest, its top sheared flat in a way that made his contractor brain itch. Somebody had worked up there once. Or something had.

  The air was thin. Clean in a way that felt aggressive, and his lungs weren't on the guest list.

  "That is not Illinois," he said.

  The mailbox sat quiet in his periphery. No comment.

  ~

  Memory came back in pieces he didn't want. Van. Wheel. Phone. That wrong sound cutting through the music, not a notification but more like a checkmark placed somewhere he couldn't see. Wind that hit hard enough to rock the van. Silence that weighed more than noise.

  Then the pressure. The thing with the plates and the mountains and the boot on the blueprint.

  His stomach lurched. He swallowed hard, forced it down, and filed the whole memory in the place where he kept things he couldn't deal with yet. Afternoon slot. Right after the existential crisis.

  Alea's face surfaced through the noise. Her at the stove, hair tied back, steam fogging the kitchen window. Get home safe, idiot.

  He grabbed that and held it.

  "Shelter," he said. "Then figure out how not to die. Then call Alea."

  The last part felt about as realistic as flapping his arms home, but it gave him a direction, and direction was what kept you from sitting on a rock until exposure made the decision for you.

  ~

  He hauled himself upright in stages, left palm on cold stone that pitted under his fingers. Standing made the altitude real. The wind touched his face with the particular indifference of air that had traveled a long way without meeting anything warm.

  He took inventory. Adidas backpack, still slung over one shoulder by some miracle of physics or stubbornness. Pocketknife. Headphones. Vape. Phone.

  The phone was dead. He checked it the way you check a light switch during a power outage—knowing the answer, needing the gesture. Black screen. No pulse, no glow. Whatever the mailbox in his vision was running on, it wasn't the phone's battery.

  He pocketed it anyway. Habit.

  The slab offered nothing. Open rock, open sky, open to anything that flew, climbed, or decided to take an interest. If he stayed here, the question wasn't whether something would find him but when.

  He turned a slow circle, reading the terrain the way he'd read a job site—where the weight sat, where it wanted to move, where the lines of stress met the lines of weakness. Behind his landing spot, the rock ran toward the higher slope, buckled and cracked. He stepped wide around a gap that could swallow a leg. Bad lines were bad lines, no matter what Talmehl was.

  The grade kicked up where slab met raw mountainside. He tested each foothold before committing weight, same habit that had kept him on roofs for three years. The ground was thin-skinned over something very hard, and it didn't forgive mistakes the way soil did.

  Halfway up, his hand found a ledge and his fingers stopped. The surface was too flat. He looked closer. Tool marks. Old ones, almost weathered to nothing, but three years of reading surfaces had trained his eye and these edges were cut, not broken. Someone had dressed this stone. Squared it off. A long time ago, with tools he didn't recognize the bite pattern of, but the intent was unmistakable. You didn't get a surface this regular from erosion.

  Above, the slope broke again. The rock darkened into a vertical cut—a seam of shadow that didn't sit right with the natural lines around it. Too straight. Too deliberate.

  His brain said human hands before he could stop it. Then amended: hands that knew tools. Not necessarily human.

  He stopped climbing and stared.

  A wall. Worked stone, rising out of the mountainside where raw rock had no business turning into architecture. And set into that wall, visible now that the angle resolved: a gate. Big enough to make his van look small. Even from here he could see the rust, long orange-brown streaks bleeding down from iron fittings, staining the stone in uneven lines.

  The tang hit the back of his throat before he placed it. Metal. Old iron breaking down in open air. He knew that taste from demo work on steel-frame buildings, the afternoons spent cutting through corroded I-beams with a reciprocating saw, rust dust coating his tongue no matter how tight the mask sat. This was the same taste. Just older. Much older.

  Something about it said old. Not abandoned-barn old. Not forgotten-church old. Old in a way that made the mountains behind it look recent.

  The mailbox pulsed once. Then went still in a way it hadn't before. It had been passive until now, just logging, just noting. Something about the gate had made it sit up and pay attention.

  New text, faint and brief:

  Proximity noted.

  Structure class: threshold (sealed).

  Node status: suppressed.

  Relevance to subject: pending.

  The text faded. The System had noted the gate the way it noted everything else — without telling him what to do about it.

  Something moved in the trees below him. Not wind. Wind didn't stop and start. Wind didn't have weight.

  He shifted his grip on the dead phone, the only hard object in his hand that wasn't a pocketknife he'd rather not open yet, and started climbing toward the gate. Not because it was safe. Because everything behind him was worse.

  The mailbox watched. The flag lifted, dropped, lifted.

  Whatever had decided he wasn't worth noticing hadn't bothered to check if he agreed.