The glow was fading.

  He could feel it the way you feel a battery dying in your hand. Not pain. Just less. Less light, less warmth, less of whatever held him together in this formless, weightless, horrible existence between the golden sphere and the ground below.

  The forest canopy rushed upward. Trees with trunks wider than houses, their bark split by veins of crystallized energy that pulsed faintly gold. The qi in the air was so thick it tasted like metal against whatever he was using for a tongue.

  He didn't have a tongue.

  He didn't have anything. No body, no weight, no edges. Just a fading blue-white smear drifting through air that was trying to dissolve him from the outside in.

  The pull came again. Stronger.

  Down. Through the canopy, between branches heavy with leaves that glowed faintly at their edges, past a vine that existed in two places simultaneously, its upper half solid green and its lower half a translucent echo of itself three feet to the left.

  Damn it. Damn it, damn it. How long had he been falling? Minutes? Hours? The golden sphere was gone. The voices, the arguing, the warmth, the thread that had wrapped around him and squeezed. All gone. Just this. Just air and trees and a body that was running out.

  The pull sharpened. Close now. Very close.

  Something dead lay at the base of a rock formation where two boulders leaned against each other like drunks holding each other up. Small. Scaled. Six legs, the front four splayed at wrong angles, the back two compressed into something that wasn't legs anymore.

  He drifted lower.

  The creature was the size of a large lizard. Brown scales, dull and scratched. Oversized front teeth, brown at the tips, jutting past a jaw that had gone slack. Its front half was intact. Its back half was crushed flat, scales cracked, innards pressed into a two-inch layer of biological paste between the stones.

  Something had folded the space here. He could see it, even with his fading perception. A crease in reality, hairline thin, running between the two boulders at waist height on the dead animal. Above the crease normal space. Below slightly offset, slightly wrong, the faint overlay of the second split layer of the space called Echo layer bleeding through. The creature had been caught in the fold when the space compressed. Top half stayed in one layer. The bottom half got pressed into the seam.

  Dead. Minutes ago, maybe less. The spiritual residue, what little a creature this small could produce, was already dissolving. A faint warmth where something like a soul had been. Already gone.

  Get in.

  The imperative came from deeper than thought. From the instinct he hadn't known he had until this moment, the worm form that had been dormant through the fall and was now screaming with the urgency of lungs demanding air.

  GET IN.

  He didn't know how.

  Instinct. Pure, wordless, animal instinct. His fading body oriented toward the dead creature's spiritual channels, found the crude qi pathways that ran along its spine, and pressed against them.

  Resistance. Faint. Like pushing through a membrane of cold water. The creature's spiritual architecture was nearly empty, barely there, the equivalent of pushing through a wet paper bag. But even wet paper takes effort when you're the size of a silkworm and your light is going out.

  He pushed harder.

  Something gave. The membrane parted. His awareness flooded into the dead creature's body through channels so crude they were barely more than gaps in the flesh where qi had once trickled.

  Then the body hit him.

  Weight.

  It landed on his consciousness like a building falling. Not pain. PRESENCE. The sudden, total, overwhelming fact of HAVING MASS. Of existing in a direction. Of gravity pulling at organs and fluid and bone with a force that said DOWN with absolute conviction.

  He had a body.

  The thought shorted out everything else. For three seconds, maybe five, maybe thirty, there was nothing in his awareness except the sensation of occupying space. Of having boundaries. Of ending where the scales ended and beginning where the spine began. An inside and an outside. A here and a not-here.

  Air moved through nostrils that weren't his.

  The smell hit him and something cracked open behind whatever passed for his eyes. Pine. Thick, resinous, so real it burned. And underneath it, ozone. Clean and sharp, the smell of lightning caught in amber. And beneath that something mineral, something old, the base note of a world that had been broken for sixty thousand years and had learned to smell like its own wounds.

  Tears didn't come because this body didn't produce tears. But the response was there. The pressure behind the eyes, the tightness in the throat, the full-body clench of a reaction so disproportionate to its trigger that it could only be coming from somewhere else. From the residue. From the man who had smelled things before, in another body, in another world. Pine meant something. Rain on warm concrete meant something. The specific temperature of air conditioning hitting sweaty skin after a long day outside meant something.

  None of it had names. All of it was there.

  Okay. He tried to think it. Couldn't form the word. Tried again. Okay. There it was. One word, dredged from the static.

  Okay. I have a body.

  He tried to stand.

  Six legs.

  Six legs that expected six different signals in a pattern his brain couldn't produce. The front two tried to push up. The middle two locked. The back two were crushed paste and did nothing at all. The body lurched sideways, rolled off the rock it had been resting against, and hit the dirt in a graceless tangle of scaled limbs and brown teeth.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The mouth opened. Not because he told it to. Because the body's dying reflex was still running on autopilot, and the jaw muscles had one last instruction queued to bite whatever's close when scared.

  The teeth clicked shut on empty air with a sound like two stones hitting.

  Click-click-click-click-click.

  Every identical creature within fifty feet of him vanished. The clicking was a threat call. Predator above. The creature's final courtesy to its species was a warning broadcast with the last electricity in its nervous system, triggered by the new tenant who didn't know the language.

  He lay in the dirt, half a dead lizard, four legs tangled under a body he didn't know how to operate, watching a dozen identical creatures bolt into cracks and burrows with an efficiency that suggested this particular emergency drill was well-practiced.

  Great. Fantastic. He'd been alive in this body for approximately ten seconds and he'd already caused a mass evacuation.

  Something surfaced from the static. Not a word. A feeling. The specific, grinding absurdity of a first day on a job site where nothing worked, the equipment was wrong, the crew hadn't shown up, and the client was calling every twenty minutes to ask about the timeline.

  He'd had first days like this. He was sure of it. The memory had no images, no location, no name. Just the bone-deep familiarity of everything going wrong at once and the equally bone-deep reflex that said stop. Breathe. What do you have? What can you use from this Brown-Tooth creature?

  What he had were four working legs. Two of six. The front pair were functional, strong enough to push the body's front half upward into something approximating a standing position if "standing" meant "listing violently to the left with the back end dragging."

  A head. Intact. The skull was solid, the jaw worked, the teeth were the creature's only notable feature and they were built for chewing through things harder than his current problems.

  Eyes. Two of them, mounted on the sides of the head, gave him a field of vision that wrapped nearly 300 degrees around his body. His brain expected forward-facing binocular vision. What it got was panoramic.

  The world lurched. Two images, overlapping, one from each eye, refusing to merge into a single coherent picture. He tried to focus on a tree directly ahead and got a tree from the left and a tree from the right and something in between that was neither.

  He closed one eye.

  Better. One flat image. No depth perception, but at least the world stopped doubling. He'd work with one eye until the brain figured out the other.

  Nose. The smell was still there. Pine and ozone and broken space. But layered underneath it now, filtering through the dead creature's olfactory system, among other things. Rot from his own back half, sweet and thick. Water somewhere nearby, the particular mineral tang of a stream running over stone. And something else, something faint and warm, that pulled at the instinct the way the smell of food pulls at a stomach.

  Qi. Ambient spiritual energy, dense enough to have a scent. The creature's nose could smell it. Not well. Not precisely. But the sensation was there, a warmth in the nostrils that said energy, close, dense, too much.

  He tried to absorb it.

  Nothing happened.

  The body had no mechanism for absorption. No spiritual roots. No dantian. No meridian system worth the name. A few crude qi channels ran along the spine and through the major organs, carrying just enough ambient energy to keep the flesh from dissolving in the Basin's dense qi environment. But actively pulling qi? Processing it? Cultivating?

  Not possible. Not in this body.

  Like trying to charge a phone with a potato. The port existed. The electricity didn't.

  He filed the problem under "revisit later" with the efficiency of a man who had run projects for a living. Can't cultivate. Noted. Move on. What's next?

  Next was the back half.

  He craned the Brown-Tooth's neck around, one eye open, and looked at himself.

  The front half ended at what would have been the creature's midsection. Scales, intact. Flesh, cooling but functional. Two pairs of legs, operational. Behind that a compressed mess of bone and scale and organ tissue pressed to a two-inch thickness between the spatial fold. The crease in reality was still there, a faint shimmer between the two boulders, the place where Layer One and the Echo layer had pinched together like pages in a book.

  His back half was in the Echo layer. His front half was on the surface.

  The creature had been caught in the fold. The space had compressed, then re-expanded, but the body had been in the seam when it closed. The organs behind the diaphragm were gone. Stomach. Intestines. Half the liver. Whatever else a creature this size used for digestion. All of it, compressed, dead, existing in a different spatial layer than the mouth that was supposed to feed it.

  He tried to process this.

  I have a body. The body has no stomach. The stomach is in a different dimension. I am a soul worm from a divine womb wearing a dead lizard with no digestive system in a world where the ground can eat you.

  Something happened that wasn't a laugh because the body couldn't produce laughs. But the impulse was there, the specific convulsion of a man who has reached the point where the situation is so far past acceptable that the only response is the sound you make when you're not crying.

  The Brown-Tooth's jaw clicked. Click-click-click.

  Somewhere in the burrows, the surviving Brown-Tooths pressed deeper into their holes and waited for the insane predator to leave.

  He dragged himself forward.

  Two working legs and a lot of stubbornness. The front pair pushed, the middle pair partially mobile, cramping every few steps assisted, and the ruined back half scraped along the ground leaving a trail of fluids that he chose not to think about.

  Ten feet. Twenty. The tree line was close. The massive trunks with their veins of crystallized energy offered shade and cover and something that wasn't an open clearing where anything with better eyes than his could spot a crippled lizard-thing dragging itself across the dirt.

  The qi in the air pressed against his scales. Heavy. Warm. Like walking through steam. The Brown-Tooth's crude channels absorbed a trickle of it, involuntary. Not enough to do anything useful. Enough to keep the front half alive for a while longer.

  How long? He didn't know. Days, maybe. The body's own qi was sustaining the intact organs, but decay was already starting in the back half. When the rot reached the front, the channels would fail, and whatever was holding him inside this thing would lose its grip.

  Days. He had days.

  To do what? Find another body? Where? He didn't know what he was, didn't know the rules of this place, didn't know if there were other bodies available or how to get to them or what would happen when this one gave out.

  One problem at a time. The man who didn't remember being a construction manager processed the situation with the flat pragmatism of someone reading a punch list.

  Item one shelter. Find somewhere the rot-smell won't attract predators.

  Item two food. Figure out the stomach problem. Or accept that food isn't happening and manage the decay timeline instead.

  Item three information. Learn where he is. Learn what he is. Learn what kills him and what doesn't.

  Item four a better body.

  He filed item four at the bottom of the list, where the long-term goals lived, the ones you didn't look at until the foundation was poured and the walls were up.

  Then he dragged himself into the forest, leaving a thin trail of fluid on the golden-lit ground, a thing too small and broken to matter in a world too vast and shattered to notice.

  The three suns, or the one sun seen through three layers of fractured reality, filtered through the canopy above him. The light fell in patches that shifted color depending on which spatial layer you were looking through. Gold. Amber. A green so deep it was almost black.

  Beautiful.

  The word arrived without permission. Inappropriate, given the circumstances. But accurate. The Shattered Basin was beautiful. Broken, lethal, wrong in ways he was only beginning to perceive, but beautiful the way a shattered window is beautiful when the light catches every fragment at once.

  He kept crawling. One eye open. Two legs pulling. The back half of a dead lizard dragging behind him through the most dangerous lower realm in the cosmos.

  Nobody noticed.