Chapter 7: ECHOES OF HOME
The phone wasn't there.
My hand slapped the bedside table in the dark — carved wood, not particleboard — and found the vault key, a ceramic water cup, and nothing else. The gesture was so automatic, so deeply encoded in Ethan Mercer's motor cortex, that three days in a new body hadn't touched it. The arm extended, the fingers spread, the thumb searched for the familiar rectangle of glass and plastic, and the absence hit like a physical blow.
Three a.m. by the angle of moonlight through the leaded glass. The estate was silent. Stone walls held the cold with the indifference of objects that would outlast every person inside them.
I sat up. The borrowed body protested — the lower back stiffness was chronic now, a product of too many hours in the vault hunched over crystals and too few hours doing anything that resembled exercise. The combat footwork crystal tugged at my calves, a dead soldier's muscle memory asking to be used, but the room was too small and the hour was too wrong.
Three seventeen a.m. On Earth, this would be when I checked my email. Lab results from the sleep study. Messages from my advisor about the dissertation timeline. A text from Mom sent at eleven p.m. because she never remembered time zones — "Called your number but went straight to voicemail. Call me back. Mrs. Rodriguez's dog got into the garden again."
I never called back fast enough. I always meant to call back faster.
The thought arrived without warning and detonated behind my sternum.
Not grief, exactly. Grief implied a specific loss — a person, a place, a relationship. This was wider. An absence so total it didn't have edges. Every Sunday morning phone call. Every coffee-stained desk at the lab. Every pointless argument about methodology with fellow PhD candidates who cared too much about p-values and not enough about what the numbers meant. The weight of a phone in a pocket. The sound of a laptop fan whirring in a quiet apartment. The certainty — absolute, never questioned, so foundational it was invisible — that the world operated on principles that could be observed, measured, replicated, and published.
Peer-reviewed reality. That's what I've lost. Not just the specific things — Mom's voice, Dr. Hendricks's disappointed frown, the fifth-floor view of the campus green — but the entire framework. The epistemological scaffolding. The ability to check your work against a thousand other minds who are checking theirs.
Here, I am the only empiricist in a world of practitioners. No one to review my methods. No one to replicate my results. No one to tell me when I'm wrong.
My hands were shaking. The Ethan tremor — fine motor, adrenaline-mediated, the specific vibration of a nervous system processing something it couldn't categorize as either threat or opportunity.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs. The wool of the trousers was rough, real, belonging to this world and this body. The legs beneath were thinner than Ethan's legs. The knees bonier. The skin cooler.
Anchoring. Ground the identity in the body. I am here. I am now. The past is—
The past was a planet I could never return to, full of people who would never know what happened to me. Ethan Mercer's apartment in Ithaca would still have his books on the shelves, his notes on the desk, his half-written dissertation open on the laptop. Eventually someone would clear it out. His mother would call and call and the voicemail would fill up and she would stop calling and the silence that followed would be the worst sound in two worlds.
I pressed my fists into my eye sockets until colors bloomed in the dark.
Stop. This is a cortisol cascade — the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis flooding the system with stress hormones. The amygdala is processing emotional memories that have no contextual resolution because the context doesn't exist anymore. The hippocampus is searching for retrieval cues and finding nothing because every cue belongs to a reality that—
Stop analyzing. Just feel it. Just for a minute.
I let the wave pass through. Sat on the edge of the bed in a dead stranger's bedroom and let the homesickness take its full measure. The cold stone. The distant creak of old wood settling. The mineral smell of crystal dust that permeated everything in Ashveil, even the air in a nobleman's bedroom, even the sheets of a bed that belonged to a boy who had died or departed or been displaced by a man from another world who was now sitting in the dark trying not to cry.
The wave peaked. Crested. Began to ebb.
And in the withdrawal, something surfaced. Not an Ethan memory. A Dante memory. Faint, fragmentary — the original's emotional residue, stored in the body's limbic system below the threshold of conscious recall.
A garden. Small, walled, overgrown. Not the Ashford estate's formal grounds — somewhere simpler. Warm stone beneath bare legs. Looking up through the gap between a hedge and a wall at clouds moving across a blue sky. A child's perspective — the world large and slow and perfectly sufficient.
Content. That was the word. Not happy — happiness implied awareness of alternatives. Content. The absence of wanting anything other than what was already present.
The memory wasn't mine. It belonged to a boy who had grown into a disappointing heir and died in a vault accident. But the emotion was universal — the bone-deep calm of a child who hasn't yet learned that the world will ask things of him he cannot give.
I held it. Turned it over the way I'd turned crystals in the vault. Not analyzing — preserving. Filing it alongside Ethan's Sunday mornings and lab coffee and the view from the fifth floor. Two lives' worth of anchoring material. Two identities' worth of this is who I am stored in a brain that the Archive classified as one person.
The anchoring protocol. Build it from both lives. Ethan's analytical precision. Dante's childhood garden. Memories the Archive can't see and can't erode, because they exist outside the system's taxonomy. Personal, specific, emotionally rich — exactly the kind of recall that resists degradation because it's encoded across multiple memory systems simultaneously.
The neuroscientist in me is taking notes on his own emotional crisis. That's either profoundly adaptive or profoundly broken. Possibly both.
I hummed. Low, quiet, barely a vibration in the throat. The melody — Hozier, something about church and worship, the specific chord progression that had played on repeat during the encoding experiments — hung in the dark room in a voice that wasn't mine. Dante's tenor carrying Ethan's song. The loneliest sound I'd ever produced, and somehow the most honest.
I am Ethan Mercer. I am Dante Ashford. I am twenty-nine and I am nineteen and I am five days old in a world that runs on the crystallized dead. My mother doesn't know I'm gone. My sister doesn't know I'm not her brother.
And tomorrow, I walk into an Academy where a woman with pale green eyes is going to try to figure out what I am.
Dawn crept across the ceiling beams — pale, thin, apologetic. The mineral light of crystal-lamp residue mixed with genuine sunrise in a color that existed on no Earth palette.
I washed my face in the copper basin. The water was cold enough to shock the remnants of self-pity out of my limbic system. I dried off with a rough towel, straightened the borrowed body's borrowed clothes, and looked at the face in the water.
Gray eyes. Alert, sharp, carrying the weight of two lifetimes in a skull that was only nineteen years into its first.
Get dressed. Eat something. Go to class. Be the person who can survive this.
The vault key sat on the bedside table next to the water cup. I picked it up, held it for a moment, then put it in my pocket.
Tomorrow. First full day of Academy classes. Lyra Voss observing from the instructor's gallery. A cohort full of students who had absorbed dead people's skills and wore their habits like hand-me-down clothes.
My fingers found the guard stance without thinking — Marcus Thale's footwork, three days integrated, almost natural now. Weight on the balls of the feet. Center low. Ready.
Ready as I'll get.
I left the room before the homesickness could circle back.
Get Early Access to New Chapters
Thank you for reading. For those who want to skip the wait, my Patreon is currently 21 chapters ahead of the public sites.
Schedule: 7 new chapters released every 10 days.
Benefit: Gain a significant lead of 7 to 21 chapters depending on your tier.
Support the project and start reading the next arc now: Patreon.com/IsekaiStories