After a quiet breakfast, during which Jeno only gradually calmed down from the vivid magic session, Leah goes up to the hospital. She finds Vivitha out cold, again.

“Ua uas hẽ story?” Sewheil asks, gesturing to the sleeping archer, and Leah quietly goes over the situation.

“She should eat, but should we wake her?”

Sewheil considers, then goes to a servant by the fire and gives quick, quiet instructions. The servant nods and leaves, and a few minutes later returns with a bowl of soup that he leaves on the floor beside Vivitha’s cot. The boy seems nervous about shaking her awake to eat it, and Leah spares him by gesturing him away and doing it herself.

Vivitha stirs slowly, then all at once, sitting up and scanning the room, twisting her wrists and flexing her fingers.

“Breakfast,” Leah says in a soft, friendly tone. Vivitha takes the proffered bowl.

“How’s Rip?” she asks, taking small but frequent sips.

“I’m going down to see him after I make sure you’re okay. Also…” Vivitha tenses a bit, listening. “I wanted to offer to answer any questions you had.”

“About?” Vivitha continues to drink, then stops. “Oh. Right.”

Leah waits for her to think it over. Vivitha goes back to drinking the soup, more slowly.

“What happened?”

Leah snickers a bit and asks that she be more specific. Vivitha gives the tiniest smile.

“Well…Kain said she found a missive in your rooms.”

Oh geez, early days. Ummm…

Leah tells the story the best she can; finding the missive on the attackers, deciding to keep it and read it herself before handing it in, realising there were inconsistencies but not knowing how to bring them up. “Especially since everyone thought I was supposed to be dumb.”

Vivitha smiles a bit. “Well, I mean, Leah…”

“No. Let me finish.”

Vivitha looks upset and curious at that. Leah describes the arrest, the spell they put her under, and how frustrated they were that her answers didn’t make sense.

“It’s one of the things Seffon and I have been researching here…not with much luck.” Leah stalls out. “Remember how when I woke up, I didn’t remember anything?”

“Mhmm?”

“That wasn’t quite true. I had memories. Full, complicated memories, of a life in a different world.”

Vivitha snickers and takes another sip.

“Vivitha, I’m not Leah.”

She stops, and lowers the bowl slowly.

“We think a sort of switch happened, at some point during my time unconscious. Leah Talesh’s mind left, and mine arrived. It wasn’t by choice, and we’re still not sure how it happened, or why.”

Vivitha sets the bowl down and stares Leah in the face. Leah continues, though with mounting nerves.

“I’m from…a different sort of world, with different technologies and different cultures. I woke up about a month ago in this world, being rescued in the middle of a bloody battle. I’m not supposed to be here, but I’m trying to make the best of it until I can go home.”

Vivitha remains silent, staring.

Leah takes a steadying breath. “If there was something I could do to convince you I would, but please just believe for now. When they questioned me about the missive, they realised something was wrong, my mind wasn’t Leah’s, and they assumed it meant that I was ensorcelled. They threw me in jail, and a bard the next cell over helped me escape. I came here to make Seffon send me back, if he knew how, or to help me figure out how.”

Seffon walks in then, and Leah breaks from looking at Vivitha to watch him. He hesitates at the door, sensing the tension.

Vivitha turns to follow Leah’s eyes, and her posture stiffens.

“I’ve been trying to explain…” Leah gestures to her head, and Seffon gives a small nod, though he looks surprised. Vivitha turns back to Leah. “Do you understand a bit? The reason I was so confused back then, and why I kept asking odd questions? I’m trying to fit in here, but I’m not really from here.”

Vivitha turns back to Seffon. Sewheil watches from the far end of the hospital.

“What did you do to her?” Vivitha asks, her eyes sharp.

Seffon straightens. “We have been trying to discern – ”

“Where is Leah, and what did you do to her?” Her voice is even, but her muscles are tense.

“We do not know where she is. This is not like anything I’ve seen or read about before, and trying to determine the cause without knowing the first thing about it – ”

Vivitha stands up. The guard at the door shifts to an active stance, and Sewheil reaches a hand out towards the fire, which begins to writhe oddly. Seffon is still.

“Vivi, please, listen to me if you won’t listen to him: there’s so much more going on here, and I – ”

Vivitha turns back to Leah and grabs her shoulders. “I came here looking for Leah! What the fuck is all this about other worlds? I was here for my friend! My people are the ones under siege, and I came here for help. How the fuck is some stranger in my friend’s body, and you tell me this and expect me to be okay with it?”

“Vivi, I’ve known you for a month, and I care about you! I want to help, and I’m sorry that I’m not who you thought I was, but if I’d told you all this the day you rescued me you’d have killed me as a spy. I’m here now, and I’m as pissed off about that as you are.”

“My friend is gone!” Vivitha tries to shake her, but cannot physically move her. “And you’ve been…wearing her body?”

Leah pales a bit, but takes Vivitha by the shoulders and tries to hold her steady. “Nobody knows what happened. We’re trying to fix it. I swear, I’m not here as an invader, or as a replacement, or anything like that.”

Vivitha shakes off her grip, and Leah lets her hands fall away.

Seffon watches, and gently speaks up, walking forward. “There are other pressing matters, but before we can make any progress towards them, we need to help you accept the situation. Believe me, we know it is not optimal.”

Though his tone is carefully controlled, Vivitha’s face darkens with every word, distaste and distrust clear on her features. Once he is clear of the doorway, Vivitha whips around and sprints past him out the open door; the guard tries to catch her but she ducks and punches low, not with much force but with precision. Seffon grabs one of the charms at his wrist, and Leah sees the red rope coil into being. It lashes out and wraps around Vivitha’s legs, tripping her and leaving her lying in the hall.

“Don’t,” Leah says: loud, even, and final. Seffon immediately lets the spell fade. Leah rushes past to Vivitha’s side. The archer is crying wordlessly, hunched against the wall.

“Vivitha, when you tried to rescue me, when you all tried to take me back, I’d already been swapped. I didn’t know what was happening, I thought it was a dream – a disgusting, terrifying dream. I had to trust the first people I met, and that was you. It meant so much to have you all protecting me, and I feel filthy to have betrayed that trust. Can you imagine, though? How I felt, having to lie to survive in a world that made no sense?”

Vivitha is pressed against the stone, looking at the floor, shaking her head slightly and crying a bit. A few people have stopped to watch from a distance.

“Vivi, please.” Leah shuffles closer on her knees.

“Where is she?” Vivitha sniffles a bit, but without true feeling, just empty.

“We don’t know. We really don’t know, and we’re trying so hard to find her. We both want to set this right.”

Vivitha continues shaking her head – not forcefully, just a small repeated movement of denial, of denying the whole thing. “How?”

Leah sits down in the hall across from her. “With magic, Vivi. We’ve found that my old body – in my world – it sort of went into a coma, just for a split second, while I was asleep. And in this world, Leah Talesh’s body was unconscious for days from a trap spell. Somehow, those two things overlapped and made my mind appear in this body.”

“And her mind?”

Leah’s mouth hangs open a second. “It’s not anywhere in this world. I suppose, if it were anywhere, it would be in my world, in my body. I don’t know for sure, but we suspect.”

“And is she safe there?”

Leah has to think. Vivitha watches critically, waiting for the answer. “I suppose so. She might have gotten into all sorts of trouble by not following the rules, but if she has an ounce of common sense, she’s probably alright.” Leah pushes back thoughts about paying rent and bills, and homelessness in a francophone city as an anglophone.

Vivitha nods slightly. She gives a side-glance to the crowd gathered to watch. Leah turns to them fully and glares. Most drop their eyes and continue their business, but some remain – just for a second more, before turning and leaving. Leah looks up to see that Seffon has stepped into the hall and joined in on the glaring.

“Let’s go back inside, okay?” Leah holds out a hand, and Vivitha accepts it. Leah walks her back inside and to the cot. Vivitha’s eyes have heavy bags, and her hands shake.

Leah gets her settled back in bed. Vivitha finishes her soup with a sullen face, yet numb to her surroundings.

Once certain that the worst has blown over, Leah joins Seffon at the door. “Why by the Gods did you tell her?” he asks quietly.

“She’d have found out soon enough. She knew Leah too well.”

“You could have just maintained that your memories were still gone.”

Leah watches Vivitha, and her heart sinks. “We need to talk to Adan. I understand that the war is important, but I can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

Leah brushes dust off her knees. “This,” she gestures to herself, and turns to leave, bound for the library.

*

Mainly, she just sits in the chair, staring at a wall. Trying to decide her next move feels impossible, and painful. She’s not sure why.

What could the guards even have seen that would be important? Surely they would have reported anything…but then again, we’ve found out some things from the spells that might turn an insignificant, unreported detail into something major.

Pfft, right, ‘we’ve found things out.’ We’ve got fucking nothing! I’m no closer to getting home now than I was when I woke up; we just know that I’m definitely not Leah Talesh, and while that’s reassuring, it also means that my real life is probably moving on without me somewhere, being steered by a semi-literate medieval warrior.

Home. My life. She shakes her head and squeezes her eyes closed. Fuck. How long has it been now? Almost a full month. What happens in a month?

Rent. Phone bill. Family obligations. Internet payments. Insurance payments – no, those are automated, so as long as there’s money in the account…money. A job. Taxes…nah, many months left before we have to worry about that.

Leah leans forward in the chair, head in her hands.

She can’t possibly be there. She’d be ruining everything. Not that there’s much there to ruin…just my credit score, I guess. And I quite like that apartment, it’d be a shame to get evicted and not even be there to argue my case. I guess I could plead insanity.

She gets up and paces, but only goes a few steps before sighing and sitting back down again.

And I can’t even judge, because I’ve screwed up too. She’d probably find this whole situation horrifying. Does she even realise…is there a precedent in this world, of parallel universes? Different dimensions? Timelines? Time-travel? Nah, this can’t be time travel, they’re speaking modern English. Alternate reality?

What the fuck happens now…

She tries to remember the sounds of her apartment; the buzzing air conditioner, the beeping of the oven timer, the cars passing on the street, the footsteps down the halls. She tries to remember her old coworkers at the coffee shop, but their names feel unimportant. None of it feels as real as the room around her, and she is shaken by the realisation.

She gets out of the chair and sets off with purpose through the halls, over to the west wing and the tower. The guard at the door blocks her way at first, but she insists on being allowed in.

After a short argument with the woman, who clearly does not speak Volsti – English, she angrily corrects herself – the door opens from the inside and Seffon looks out in disapproval, then confusion.

“The rings,” Leah says.

“What?”

Leah pushes in and goes to the set of drawers she remembers them being kept in. “The rings, the anchors, the lead.”

Seffon hurries after her but does not intervene. “The ones attuned to the other Leah? Why?”

“Long distance call.” Leah grabs the bowl, sets it on the stone table, seats herself cross-legged in the centre of the table, and picks up the rings.

Immediately her head pounds. She takes the rings and presses them against her forehead. The metal sears in, as though melting through her skin and into her bone. She gasps, and Seffon tries to pull her arms away.

Leah tears up, as for a very brief moment she can hear traffic on the street outside her bedroom window.