The world assembled itself around her one piece at a time.
First the cold air — clean, carrying the faint sweetness of night-blooming flowers and damp grass. Then the sound of distant footsteps on stone paths, the muffled laughter of students somewhere past a hedge row. Then light — not amber lamplight but the open, indifferent blue-white of a campus evening, the kind that didn't care what kind of night you'd just survived.
Marla blinked.
She was standing in the academy's eastern garden.
The main building sat two hundred meters behind her — she could see its lit windows through the tree line, the copper-green roof catching the last pale residue of dusk. Students and evening walkers moved along the garden paths, unhurried, oblivious. A couple shared a bench near the fountain. A group of undergraduates cut across the far grass, backpacks bouncing.
She looked down at her own shoulders.
