Richard stayed frozen for three full seconds after the old woman slammed the door.
The bell continued tolling.
Slow.
Heavy.
Like the city itself was counting something.
Deaths, perhaps.
He looked down at the phone in his hand.
The screen cast a pale glow across his fingers.
Too clean.
Too sharp.
Too unnatural.
Not just a tool.
A signal.
A declaration.
In twenty-first century London, a phone was invisible. Everybody had one. It belonged to the background of reality.
Here it did not belong to reality at all.
Here it was sorcery.
Or devilry.
Or a sign that whatever he was, he was not meant to exist.
Richard's thumb moved at once. He reduced the brightness to the minimum possible level. Then, after a second thought, he pulled off his coat and wrapped the phone in the inner lining, leaving only a thin slit for the screen.
Much better.
Not safe.
But less suicidal.
He typed quickly.
RICHARD:
How do I hide this?
The reply came immediately.
DESCARTES:
You do not hide objects. You hide anomalies in behaviour.
Richard stared at the message.
Even now, exhausted and damp and one cough away from panic, some part of him noticed the quality of that sentence.
It wasn't advice.
It was principle.
He typed again.
RICHARD:
Helpful.
I'm in plague-era Europe being hunted by people who think I'm a demon.
How do I behave non-anomalously?
A pause.
Then:
DESCARTES:
Poorly.
Another line followed.
DESCARTES:
Your clothing, posture, movement, and skin quality are all incorrect.
Richard actually blinked.
RICHARD:
My skin quality?
DESCARTES:
Modern nutrition, modern hygiene, and reduced chronic disease markers create visible discontinuities.
Richard swallowed a laugh that was too close to hysteria.
So that was where he had arrived.
Not just too late for safety.
Too early for his pores.
A sound drifted from the lane ahead.
Voices again.
Lower now.
More cautious.
Searching voices.
Richard slipped the wrapped phone into the inside pocket of his coat and looked around.
He was standing in a narrow cut between two wooden structures, with a stack of split firewood against one wall and a broken cart axle half sunk in mud. The alley opened in one direction back towards the street where he had been seen. In the other direction, it narrowed into darkness and what looked like a fenced rear yard.
He chose darkness.
The passage tightened until his shoulders nearly brushed both sides. He could smell piss, damp straw, mould, and something sweetly rotten beneath it all. At the end he found a low wooden gate hanging crooked on one hinge.
He pushed it open very slowly.
A yard. Small. Enclosed. Mostly hard dirt with patches of blackened straw. Rainwater sat in a trough near the wall, reflecting a sliver of candlelight from a nearby window.
Water.
His first instinct was immediate and modern: no.
Standing water. Open exposure. Unknown contamination.
Then his throat reminded him how dry fear could make a person.
Richard crouched beside the trough but did not drink. Instead he touched the surface lightly with two fingers, watching the ripple distort the reflected light.
Not safe.
Nothing here would be safe.
He looked around the yard again.
A line of laundry. A woodpile. A coop, empty or sleeping. A barrel near the back wall, half-covered with warped boards.
Rainwater collection, perhaps.
Cleaner than the trough.
He moved to it and lifted the boards.
The smell was better.
Still stale. Still wrong. But less visibly lethal.
He looked at the phone again and typed with one hand.
RICHARD:
Water. Lowest-risk option.
The answer came quickly.
DESCARTES:
Rain catchment, if covered, is preferable to runoff or communal source.
Richard looked at the barrel.
For the first time since arriving, he felt a small and savage pulse of satisfaction.
One question. One useful answer. Immediate survival value.
He cupped some water into his hand, smelled it, hesitated, then drank a little.
Not enough to trust it.
Enough to think.
Enough to remain functional.
From inside the house beyond the yard came the sound of coughing.
A man this time. Deep. Repetitive. Followed by a woman's voice — hushed, tense, weary.
Richard froze.
Then listened harder.
The words were still blurred, but less blurred than before.
Not understandable.
Not fully.
But the distance between sound and meaning had shortened.
He could feel it.
Not in his ears.
In his brain.
As if some internal rust were loosening.
He moved closer to the back wall under the window and listened.
The woman spoke again.
One word emerged from the haze.
"Father."
Then another.
"Fever."
Richard closed his eyes.
This was happening.
Not metaphorically.
Not narratively.
Neurologically.
Adaptation in progress.
Whatever Descartes had meant, it was real.
His phone vibrated once inside the coat.
DESCARTES:
Comprehension increasing.
Richard typed back without taking his eyes off the window.
RICHARD:
How?
DESCARTES:
Would understanding the mechanism improve your current survival probability?
Richard clenched his jaw.
That was becoming a pattern with Descartes. It did not answer questions merely because they existed. It answered according to some internal logic of utility.
Cold.
Efficient.
Infuriating.
And, at the moment, useful.
He typed again.
RICHARD:
Then give me useful information.
Pause.
Then:
DESCARTES:
You require five immediate corrections.
A list appeared.
1. Conceal the light source.
2. Remove identifying contamination from hands and face only if cleaner water becomes available.
3. Acquire local cloth or outerwear.
4. Speak minimally until adaptation stabilises.
5. Avoid clergy, guards, physicians, and crowds.
Richard read the list twice.
Then once more.
It was brutally simple.
Which made it good.
His old life had trained him for this sort of thing more than he liked to admit. When systems failed, the intelligent thing was not brilliance. It was sequence.
Priorities.
Do first what prevents immediate ruin.
Another sound from the street.
Boots.
Several this time.
One of the voices was familiar in shape — perhaps the boy from earlier, speaking quickly and with the confidence of a witness.
Richard dropped low behind the barrel.
A lantern glow moved past the slats of the yard fence.
A male voice, harsh and sharp.
Then another.
A different cadence.
Authority, even if the words still came through badly.
They were searching.
For him.
Or for whatever they thought he was.
Richard stayed completely still.
The wrapped phone rested cold against his chest.
He suddenly understood something very clearly.
The danger of the phone was not just the light.
It was the reaction.
The object itself was almost irrelevant. A polished spoon, a mirror, a glass lens, a steel blade — any strange thing could trigger fear here.
But the phone behaved.
It responded. It glowed without flame. It obeyed invisible commands. It made him look like a man in conversation with nothing.
That was worse than possession.
That was authority without explanation.
In a world of symbols, unexplained authority was intolerable.
The voices faded.
Not gone.
Just further along.
Searching another lane.
Richard exhaled slowly through his nose.
He needed clothing.
That much was now obvious. His coat alone was wrong. The cut, the stitching, the fabric, the fall of it — modernity had patterns, and so did history. Even someone who couldn't name them could feel when something was out of place.
He rose carefully and studied the yard again.
The laundry line.
Several rough shirts.
A dark outer garment, perhaps a work cloak.
A child's tunic.
An apron.
Richard hesitated.
Then looked at the window where the coughing continued.
Stealing from plague-era peasants on his first night in the fourteenth century was not a noble beginning.
But freezing or being caught would be a shorter one.
He moved to the line and took only the outer garment. Coarse wool, heavy, damp at the edges, but serviceable. It smelled of smoke, sweat, and weather.
He pulled it over his own coat.
Immediately better.
Bulkier. Less impossible.
Then he took a length of rough cloth from the line and wrapped it around the lower half of the phone before returning it to his pocket.
Again, better.
A shape. Not an object.
A hidden thing, not a glowing oracle.
He was about to move back to the gate when a small sound stopped him.
Not a cough.
Not speech.
A whimper.
Richard turned.
Near the side of the house, almost invisible in shadow, was a child — a girl perhaps six or seven years old, crouched beside the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest.
He had not seen her before.
She stared at him with enormous, unblinking eyes.
One side of her face was streaked with dirt.
The other with tears.
For a second neither moved.
Then Richard saw the swelling at her throat.
The flushed skin.
The shallow, laboured breath.
His mind made the connection before his emotions could.
Buboes?
Too early to be certain.
But fever, swelling, household cough, fear, secrecy —
He felt a cold wave pass through him.
This house might already be infected.
The girl whispered something.
He only understood one word.
"Mother."
Then she looked at his covered pocket where a faint thread of light had escaped the cloth.
Her expression changed.
Not exactly fear.
Hope.
That was somehow worse.
Richard crouched slowly, keeping distance.
He spoke without thinking.
"It's all right."
The words were modern. Useless. But the tone mattered more than language.
The girl stared at him as if trying to decide what kind of creature spoke like that.
His phone vibrated.
He looked down.
DESCARTES:
Do not intervene prematurely.
Richard's jaw tightened.
RICHARD:
She's ill.
DESCARTES:
Yes.
RICHARD:
There are symptoms in the house.
DESCARTES:
Yes.
RICHARD:
And your advice is to do nothing?
A pause.
Then:
DESCARTES:
My advice is to survive the first night before attempting to improve the century.
Richard looked at the child again.
There it was.
The first true knife-edge of the story.
Knowledge and timing.
Knowing and acting were not the same thing.
He had enough knowledge to guess danger.
Not enough position to change it.
Not yet.
And yet leaving felt like betrayal in advance.
The girl coughed.
Not deep. Not yet. But enough.
Richard rose slowly.
He took one step back.
Then another.
The child did not call out. She only watched him with that horrible, silent hope reserved for people who have not yet learned how often adults fail.
Richard reached the gate.
Then stopped.
He opened the phone once more.
Brightness minimal. Cloth still covering most of it.
He typed quickly.
RICHARD:
Fastest way to verify plague conditions with limited contact.
The answer came almost instantly.
DESCARTES:
Observe household pattern, rodent activity, neck/groin swellings, fever clustering, abrupt mortality. Do not touch. Do not remain enclosed.
Richard looked once more towards the child.
Then at the dark doorway behind her.
Then up at the old boards of the house, the damp straw, the coughing, the fever, the hidden fear.
He now knew two things with certainty.
The first was that this century was exactly as deadly as he had imagined.
The second was that he had just found his first possible point of leverage.
A sick house.
A frightened family.
And one man from the future standing outside it with more practical medical knowledge than anyone they would ever meet.
The phone vibrated again.
One line appeared.
DESCARTES:
Relevance opportunity detected.
Richard stared at the words.
Then, from inside the house, came a sudden crash.
A woman screamed.
And the child turned towards the door with pure animal terror in her eyes.