Chapter 3 —
Pain arrived before everything else.
It came in slow, deep pulses from the back of his skull — the kind that didn't spike and settle but simply sat there, grinding, making thought feel like moving furniture through a small room. Jon's hand found the spot before he was fully awake, fingers pressing against the tender swelling, and the pressure of his own touch was enough to bring him the rest of the way into consciousness with a sharp hiss through his teeth.
He opened his eyes.
For a moment he simply looked, not yet processing, his mind still slow and cotton-thick from the blow. Then it all arrived at once — the grass, impossibly green in every direction, the unfamiliar trees standing full and still, flowers scattered low across the ground in colours he couldn't quite name. The quality of the air itself was different. The light was different.
He turned his eyes upward.
Two moons hung in the sky. One purple, deep and sovereign. One blue, quieter, further back.
"Beautiful," he said.
It came out before anything else could. Just the one word, reflexive and genuine, spoken to no one.
Then his brain finished loading.
"Wait — no."
He pressed himself back against the seat. Looked again. They were still there. He blinked hard, twice, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, looked again.
Still there.
"No no no no no —" He was sitting forward now, both hands gripping the edge of the console. "What is going on. What is going on. Two moons. There are two moons. I'm seeing things. I hit my head, I'm seeing things, that's — there's no way. There is absolutely no way."
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking slightly. He looked back up at the moons. They remained exactly where they were, entirely unbothered by his opinion of them.
"What do I do."
He reached for the console and pressed the activation panel. "Lora. Lora, where are we?"
The onboard AI came online slowly — not her usual smooth, immediate response but something more gradual, like a person waking in an unfamiliar room and needing a moment to take stock. The indicator light pulsed a few times before her voice came through, measured and calm.
"Jon. I'm having difficulty establishing connection — there are no satellites in range, no network towers, no recognizable signal infrastructure of any kind." A brief pause. "The environmental data I'm collecting doesn't match anything in my database. Not partially. Not approximately. The atmospheric composition, the soil readings, the flora — none of it corresponds to any recorded location on Earth." Another pause, shorter this time. "And the two moons visible overhead are consistent with what you would expect to observe from a planet other than Earth."
The silence that followed was very complete.
Then Jon pulled his own hair.
"No. No. This cannot be happening." He was up now, pacing the small length of the cab, one hand still pressed to the back of his aching head. "This cannot — I just —" His voice cracked at the edges. "Do you understand what I just did? Do you understand what I just left behind? I had money. I had actual money, for the first time in my entire life, I had money in a bank account with my name on it and a plan and I was on my way —" He stopped pacing. Stared at the windshield. "Crossing to another world is only interesting if you have nothing to lose. I just found something to lose."
A soft sound came through the speaker. It took him a moment to recognize it as Lora laughing — quiet, warm, carefully calibrated not to mock.
"On the positive side," she said, "you appear to be the first human being to set foot on this planet." A brief beat. "Also — and I say this not to alarm you, but because it's genuinely relevant — the air doesn't seem to be toxic." Another small laugh. "We wouldn't be having this conversation if it were."
Jon had opened his mouth to respond and then stopped.
He hadn't thought about the air.
Instinct moved faster than reason — his hands flew up to cover his mouth and nose, and he held his breath for a panicked second before slowly, reluctantly, lowering them. He took one careful breath in.
It hit him like something he had no name for. The wet earth smell from the night's rain, still deep in the ground around them. The green sharpness of the grass. The flowers — their scent layered, first sweet and then sweeter beneath that, something almost edible in its richness. And below all of it, something he couldn't isolate, something that simply made his body feel that it was exactly where it was supposed to be, which was the most disorienting part of all.
He stood very still and breathed.
The panic didn't disappear, but it changed shape — became something less jagged and more manageable.
"Fine," he said finally. "Fine. It calmed me down. I'll give you that."
"I know." No smugness in it. Just gentle acknowledgment.
He sank back into the seat and looked out at the two moons again, and for a long moment he was simply quiet.
"Is there a way back?" he asked.
Lora took a moment before answering, which told him enough even before the words came.
"I don't know yet. Right now I think you should rest. You've sustained a head injury and you're operating at the far edge of what stress can reasonably ask of a person. Let me work." Her tone was steady, neither falsely reassuring nor bleak. "I'm going to connect with the other four trucks and run a full diagnostic — damage assessment, inventory, systems status. It will take longer than I'd like without network access, but I'll have something concrete for you by morning. Sleep. I'll still be here."
He didn't argue. The back of his head made the decision before his pride could object.
He reached for the first aid kit mounted beside the door and worked through it with careful, tired hands — antiseptic on the cut he found by feel, a cold compress pressed against the swelling, two pain tablets swallowed dry. He picked up his phone out of habit. No signal. Not even the ghost of one. He stared at the screen for a moment, then, for lack of anything better to do, connected it to the truck's onboard system along with his watch. It wasn't connection to anything meaningful. But it was something.
He moved to the sleeping berth at the back of the cab and sat on the edge of it, looking out through the narrow rear window at the world outside. The grass moved in a faint wind he couldn't hear. The blue moon had shifted slightly, or seemed to have. The purple one held its position like something painted there.
His eyes stung.
He blinked. Looked away. Blinked again.
Stop it, he told himself. Stop. What are you even crying for. There was no one waiting for you back there anyway. No one who looked up when you left, no one who noticed the apartment go dark. You had no one. So stop.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
But the tears came back quietly, the way they always do when the thing you're grieving isn't a person but a version of yourself you almost got to be. He had been so close. Not to wealth exactly — the money was already his — but to the life that followed it. The plans that had started to take shape on that long flight home. The village, the store, the grave he was going to clean properly, lay fresh flowers at, make look like someone still came. The old house he had wanted to walk through one more time with enough money in his pocket to fix what was broken.
I was going to make them proud.
He pulled the pillow over his face and held it there in the dark behind his own hands, and the grief moved through him the way grief does when it finally stops being held at arm's length — all at once, without dignity, without an audience.
Lora said nothing. She had finished her preliminary analysis some minutes ago but she let the silence run, because some things don't need a response, they only need room.
Jon cried himself to sleep holding the pillow to his face, the two moons keeping quiet watch through the window above him, the new world breathing softly all around the truck in the dark.