Leah is hanging around at the cafe with Mary before the barista’s shift starts. It is a sun-drenched day, and the both of them sit at a table near the large front-facing windows, laughing.

“He spent a full ten minutes arguing with the bartender that vodka comes in cans normally,” Leah says, through her giggles. “I had to bring him six different bottles of vodka, trying to prove that he was wrong, and Michel was pointing to where it says the percentage, and to the ingredients list, to prove that it wasn’t a beer, but – ”

“Oh what the fuck,” Mary says, breathlessly, covering her mouth with a hand, eyes tearing up.

“Right? But he just wouldn’t believe us. He kept saying that he just wanted a vodka beer, and no matter how often we told him that didn’t exist, or that maybe he meant a spritzer or a cooler, he kept insisting. Finally the boss comes up with this great idea; he fills a glass a third of the way with vodka, and fills it the rest of the way with sparkling water. Then he takes an old soda can, and fills it up with the water-vodka. He hands the can to the guy and say ‘here’s your vodka beer,’ and the guy starts yelling about ‘was that so hard?’”

“He never looked at the can?”

“The guy took the can and poured it into his glass, tossed the empty can back at us, put a ten dollar bill down on the counter, and walked off.”

Mary giggles, eyes bright. “Oh god, I had so many moments like that back when I worked in fast-food. There was this one woman, kept asking us if we served lactose-free fries.”

Leah listens to Mary’s story, trying to follow along through the references to some strange practice called “drive-through.”

As the morning progresses, Mary keeps an eye on the clock. When it gets to five minutes before the hour she finishes the last bite of her muffin and gets up to go get changed into her work uniform, giving a warm goodbye to Leah. The manager of the cafe, Leah realises, has been watching them disapprovingly from across the counter, but Leah doesn’t much care. She waves goodbye to him; he seems a little confused by the friendly gesture, then belatedly returns it.

She walks over to the gym, the grey streets starting to feel familiar the longer she spends in this city. Weaving through the other customers in the lobby and fitness area, she ducks into the changing room and switches over to her chosen workout clothes – a choice based both on her own comfort, and the sort of thing she has seen women wearing in the gym other times. Her day-clothes she stuffs into a cubby in a less-popular corner of the changing room, further from the showers but closest to the door leading back to the gym proper.

It’s her sixth class, and she’s starting to feel at-home in the sport. Most of her classmates change day-by-day, so she hasn’t gotten to know any of them very well, but the teacher is always the same.

Leah rehearses the short French phrase she’d had Mary teach her, whispering it over and over in the changing room and as she walks out to the training area.

The class starts with the usual exercises, including Leah’s favourite, one she calls “the drunk ant:” having to crouch-walk a full circle with one’s head and hands on the ground, facing the same direction the whole way through. It was never the sort of thing she’d have thought to practice, but she can acknowledge how, looking at the teacher’s back, it would certainly strengthen up one’s neck.

That was another thing she had to acknowledge: that the teacher, a friendly middle-aged woman with short-cut dark hair, dense back muscles, and obscenely strong triceps, was an absolute beauty to behold.

That was a third thing to acknowledge: that apparently no-one else in this world thought so.

Reaching the end of her third week in this strange world, Leah had managed to pick up on some of the subtler details of gender roles and standards. Including, to her bafflement, a distinction between “femininely physical” and “masculinely physical.”

Muscular men, in her home world a somewhat mocked group, were instead here the height of masculinity, though bookish or philosophical types were apparently still considered in-line with gender expectations. Women, meanwhile, needed to have a very particular sort of physical style to be considered beautiful, and their bookishness was irrelevant – or even a bonus, if it was paired with exceptional thinness or curves. The distinctions seem flimsy to Leah, but they appear to be rigidly enforced in everything she’s seen so far.

All this to say, Leah had once complimented a woman at the gym on her thick calves, and was told by Jen that it came across as an insult.

The teacher starts running through the moves of the day, picking students at random to help her demonstrate, then letting everyone pair up on their own to practice. Even paired with the bulkiest man of the class, the teacher holds her own without seeming to exert any real effort. Leah bites back any comments she feels tempted to make; instead, she watches the muscles ripple under the tight t-shirt, and focuses on learning the moves and developing some muscles of her own.

During clean-up at the end, Jen approaches her from the fitness half of the gym and starts talking about an event the girls from work are planning. “Just a little thing, you know, not many people, but I wanted to extend an invitation in case you wanted something to do this weekend. Jennifer’s Body, cleansing face masks, wine, that sort of stuff.”

Leah looks at her, confused. “Jennifer’s body?”

“The movie? Have you seen it?”

Leah hesitates, then shakes her head.

“Oh my god, no way. Okay you’re definitely invited. White or red? Or, mead, I guess?”

Leah shrugs. “I’ll bring a bottle if I can find a place that sells it.”

“Check the sack, you never know.”

Leah wonders what this means, but does not ask.

The cleaning up finishes, and Leah falls in with the small herd of students heading to the changing rooms. She finds her things in the same cubby she’d left them in, thankfully; she isn’t entirely sure what she would do if someone stole her clothing, though judging by the fashion standards of this world she’d be perfectly unremarkable walking home in sweaty gym clothing. Some of the nearby lockers have strange little devices on the front, with dials and numbers, that seem to Leah’s eyes to be locks. She makes a mental note to look for a store where she can buy one.

Leaving the gym, she waves goodbye to Jen and to the receptionist, and to the teacher standing by the door.

“À la semaine prochaine,” she says, and the teacher looks up with a broad smile.

“Yeah! You’re doing so good, keep coming!”

Leah feels a deep pride that she managed not to mangle the pronunciation.

“Why not hello?” Mary had asked.

“Because saying hello might prompt the teacher to try and have a whole conversation in French with me, while goodbye is equally polite but also precludes any possibility of conversation,” Leah had explained, rather proud of her logic.

Mary had laughed at that, too.

Leah walks back to the apartment, still comparatively early in the morning for her though it’s shortly after noon, when suddenly she feels her head go light. She takes another step up the front stairs but then can’t lift her feet. The light is searing, yet also somehow dim. The sound of wind fades away, though she can still feel it over her skin. Fearing for her balance, she takes a knee, leaving one hand on the railing leading up to the apartment building, and waits for the feeling to pass. The sun-baked cement of the stairs scalds her skin, but she can barely feel it through the haze in her head.

For a second, she thinks she hears horses whickering, and smells candle smoke and dust.

Just as suddenly, it passes.

Leah stands up again hesitantly, her hand in a death-grip on the railing. A few deep breaths later, and she decides that she isn’t about to suddenly disappear or drop dead or fade to ash and cinders. Looking around to ground herself in the present, reassuring herself that nothing has changed in her surroundings, she slowly feels her heart rate even out. Street. Sidewalk. Cars. Trees. Sun. No candles, maybe some dust, but no horses. This is still Joinsburg. Even so, she can’t quite shake the oddly disjointed, doubled-up feeling from a moment ago. She resumes her path up the stairs with a casual self-assuredness she in no way feels.

Once inside her apartment, she sits on the couch and reflects on what she heard and smelled. There was nothing specific to the flash, and nothing to pinpoint the location she temporarily found herself alongside. It was most similar, in her experience, to sounds from the waking-world intruding upon dreams.

Maybe I’ve been falling for the illusion of this world, Leah speculates. Maybe it is in fact all a dream, and I’m still in Seffon’s castle. The thought makes her shiver and cling to the fabric of the couch.

She fetches the pendulum and kneels over the carpet, holding her hand steady. Never having been instructed in its use, and having found no clear rules in the library’s magic books, she makes it up as she goes.

“Okay, we’re gonna say lines for yes, circles for no, and in-between for maybes. Is that good?”

The pendulum shivers at the end of the cord. The air conditioner hums. A car passing outside blares its music, the bass and drum all that is audible from within the apartment.

Leah asks a sequence of questions: am I currently awake – am I dead – do I need to get back to my world – is it possible to get back? The pendulum answers each: yes – yes, but at a different angle – maybe – yes, then no.

Dropping the little purple crystal on the carpet with a sigh, Leah curses it as an inaccurate and highly fallible form of divination. She tries to remember what the old hedge-wizard had suggested, that one time at the debriefings – Gods, the endless debriefings, what were they even for?

Wallace? Something like that. He said…opals for clairvoyance, and pearls for…pearls for girls? No, that’s a rude Volsti saying, keep on track. Pearls for…oh it doesn’t matter, all I need is the clairvoyance.

She goes to examine the jewellery box that this world’s Leah had accumulated – a rather impressive if erratic mix of styles and quality, but she remembers noticing an opal once. Finally she pulls out the ring with a triumphant hum, and returns to the pendulum.

She puts the ring on, takes the pendulum cord, and tries again.

“Am I currently awake?”

The pendulum swings in straight lines: yes.      

“Am I dead?”

Wonky, then straight lines, then wonky: yes?

“Do I need to get back to my world?”

Very wonky: ???

“Is it possible to get back?”

The metal link holding the stone to the cord has twisted open, and the amethyst falls to the carpet. Leah stares at it for a few moments. “I’ll take that as a bad sign.”

She spends the next little while reattaching the pendant, then goes to make a late lunch, dissatisfied. Sitting at the small kitchen table, a pair of tomato-cheese-spinach sandwiches on her plate, she dwells on her options.

Whether or not this world is real, I’m pretty clearly stuck here for now. Which means, I suppose, that I have to start planning further ahead than just taking things day-by-day.

I have to learn more about the long-term patterns of this world, if I’m going to live here for any significant length of time. What are my prospects? What are the housing options? Can I earn my keep at a manor or estate? Reflecting on it, she realises that she hasn’t found any sort of local estates, or any sign of gentry or nobility. Considering the strange political system, that checks out.

She ends up lounging on the couch and running the cord of the pendulum through her fingers over and over, letting the stone catch the light, and dawdling the afternoon away until it is time to go to work. Part of her brain screams at her that she is wasting time, but she shuts it down with a reminder that her time here is being spent quite profitably, in carefully-outlined little chunks. This is resting time, not working time. I’m on nobody’s payroll right now, and I don’t need to be. When was the last time I could say that, hmm?

*

The club is brightly-lit and the atmosphere is jovial and casual while the staff work to get things ready for the night. Jen and Amber are at their usual banter, and Jen calls out to Leah that the plans are confirmed for next Saturday night.

“Who else is coming?” Leah asks.

“Amber, Bri, and Annabelle,” Jen says – Annabelle is a girl Leah only knows from the beginning of the week, moderately well – “And my friend Soph, from outside of work. Do you know if you’ll be free?”

I’m on nobody’s payroll. My time is mine to spend however I see fit. Leah smothers a sort of power-drunk giddiness. “Sure, yeah, my schedule’s open. Looking forward to it.”

“Hell yeah.”

Briefly, as Jen turns to go, Leah wonders about the etiquette of inviting friends to another person’s event, but then decides it’s best to go through one before inviting Mary to anything. This might end up being too small-scale, too friends-only, and I don’t want to step on the toes of anyone I have to work with by bringing along an outsider. Also, frankly, I’m not sure if it’ll be to Mary’s tastes…she seems pretty timid, from what I’ve seen so far.

Bri arrives late, stretching her arms out and smiling broadly as she walks through the club towards the back changing room. “Nice ring,” she says to Leah; only then does Leah realise she’s still wearing it. “You going to the girls’ night?”

“Thanks, and yes”

Bri smiles widely and high-fives her. Leah has seen the gesture enough to recognise it, but still finds it odd.

Michel arrives a short bit after, and rushes to get his pre-open tasks done. He gives her a quick smile and a hello.

The night gets under way. The girls go up one at a time to the raised platform dividing the club, doing their dances, and when they aren’t centre-stage they wander the crowd, chatting, laughing, flirting, and accepting money. Leah ferries bottles as needed, and listens to the strange music playing over the “speakers,” trying to catch the words. The ebb and flow of people and tasks is never-ending, but soothing in its growing familiarity. Contrasted with her previous work experiences, the fast pace is not all that different from most of Leah’s past employment, though there are still details that will catch her off guard – languages, technology, and clothing styles, for starters.

The boss calls her over shortly after midnight and instructs her to go to one of the champagne booths with cleaning supplies, and to do a “quick job.” When she arrives, she finds that a champagne glass has shattered, and flecks of glass litter the cushions and the floor, glinting beautifully in the low blue light like discarded constellations. Leah starts scooping the big pieces into a bucket, and sweeping up the smaller ones.

A man knocks on the doorframe when she is about finished, and talks at her in French. She blinks uncomprehendingly, then when he doesn’t seem to catch on that she does not speak his language she shrugs her shoulders and apologises, gesturing to the remaining crumbs of glass.

Amber, her hair recently let down for the night, appears at the man’s side and whispers to him in French. The man says something else, with a smile, and laughter lines crinkle around his eyes. Amber’s lips purse ever-so-slightly, and she says something else. Her words don’t seem to change the man’s mind, but he accepts to wait outside the door until Leah is done.

When she gets back to the “backstage” to dump the broken glass, Leah realises she is carrying a deal of tension, and that its source was the encounter with the man. For some reason, she felt as though she’d come close to some sort of aggression or insinuation on his part, though he’d given no indication of being a poor-tempered person. Most of them are decent folks, she tells herself strictly. I shouldn’t be so uptight. He might have been perfectly polite, for all I know. Her gut nonetheless insists on believing he was not.

Once a chunk of time has passed and Amber and the man leave the champagne room, Leah pulls her aside to ask for a translation of the man’s comment. Amber seems uncomfortable for a second, and prefaces her translation by saying that the man is a regular, and is always very gentlemanly in his payments.

“But…?” Leah prompts.

Amber makes a face and shakes her head a bit. “But, like all men, he goes kinda caveman-brain at anything that suggests a threesome.”

“Threesome?” Caveman?

“Well, just the fact that you were there, I guess he thought it would be funny to suggest you stay? I don’t know, men are odd sometimes.”

“What did he say though?”

Amber sighs, clearly a little uncomfortable at having been cornered. “You were sorta under the table, so all he could see was your butt and your legs. He complimented them.”

Leah shrugs it off with a laugh. “Not as bad as it could have been, then.”

“If it had stopped there, no. He then went on to suggest our legs be wrapped around him in various configurations.”

Leah splutters and blushes and drops what she is holding. The sound of the spray bottle hitting the tile floor snaps her out of her shock, and she laughs a bit, Amber joining after a second.

“Ahh, men,” Leah says, picking up her supplies.

Amber laughs even harder than before. “Amen!”

Leah senses that her statement has a different connotation than “ah, men,” but does not question it.

The night finishes calmly and without incident. Leah and Michel joke as they clean up, and the girls tease each other and Leah as they change into street-clothes and leave.

“Have you got a bus pass yet?” Amber asks Leah.

“Not yet, and I don’t think I will. I prefer walking, and it’s not that far really.”

Amber pouts a little bit, tying her hair back up into a loose ponytail. “Not gonna lie, it makes me nervous to know you’re walking home every night. You get some real creeps sometimes, stalker-types, and they don’t just fixate on us.”

Leah is shaken by this, but insists that she’s alright. Amber nonetheless remains behind until Leah is ready to leave.

“I’m glad you’re coming to the party,” she says, watching Leah gather her things. “Have you had much of a chance to go out and meet people since you came here?”

“Not really. One girl who works at a cafe near my place, and the librarian at the Vieux-Allard is pretty friendly.” Leah pauses, listening to herself. “I guess that sounds pretty feeble.”

Amber brushes it off with a flick of her hand. “You’re fitting in really well, anyway. Just wanted to say.” With that she heads off, walking towards the bus stop around the corner.

Watching her go with an odd feeling not unlike having been gifted an expensive tool that she isn’t sure how to use, Leah tries to figure out how to feel about the statement. Mainly, she decides, she feels warmth at the inclusion, which seems oddly prescient considering her recent debates on whether and how to stay in this life. Do they all think I’m fitting in? Is my lie really fooling them? And if it isn’t, do they really not mind that I’m trying to lie?

How much of this is a lie?

Under a slowly lightening sky, Leah walks home, enjoying the heat and the sharp streetlight glow – so surreal and magical when combined with the smell of night-time flowers and cooling stone. The ridiculously tiny strips of garden along the fronts of the apartment complexes are welcome splashes of green, speckled with flowers both familiar and foreign to Leah’s eyes and nose.

She arrives to her apartment and finds an envelope tucked in the door. Leah opens the envelope as she enters her apartment and locks the door behind her. It is from a neighbour, the letter within alerting her that their dog has just had puppies and that the next few weeks are likely to be noisy and possibly a little smelly, and apologizing in advance for the possible unpleasantness. Enclosed is a cardboard card, like the bank card a bit, with the name of a store on it. The store is one Leah had noticed nearby, though never entered; all the shelves were lined with bottles of various shapes and sizes. The value seems to be rather minimal, but then again most of the relative prices for things here are radically different from what Leah is accustomed to. For all she knows, this might be enough for a bottle of fine wine, or perhaps even mead, if they offer it.

Heh. Nice.

She puts the card in her wallet and goes to bed, then hesitates.

A puppy is a huge responsibility, and a long-term commitment. I can’t imagine what sort of use people here have for dogs – surely hunting dogs are not suited to cities – but if it’s something small? Something manageable?

…Am I deciding to stay here?

She pulls the sheet up and curls onto her side, remembering the feeling of the old herding dog her family had owned when she was a child, a true monster of a canine with shaggy brown fur and a big wet nose and long claws that clacked on the wood floor. She remembers the teething marks on all the table and chair legs from when he was a puppy, and the way he shed everywhere, and how her mother’s red wool dress was always a little fuzzy from the picked-up hair when they went out to sermons.

She remembers the photo in the other room, of her not-parents.

She remembers the steam from the bathhouse off the side of the kitchen, and the birch twigs, and the smell of pine fires and hot stones and cedar-wood. The way the steam snuck through gaps in the wood walls, curling up like fingers.

She’s crying again.

From the other side of the wall she hears the tiny mewling yelps of very young pups, ever so faint, lungs still adapting to the air of the world. They won’t be ready to leave their mother for another few months at least.

She makes up her mind.