The next morning found us in the same sitting room. Someone had laid out breakfast on the side tables—fruit, warm bread, a pot of tea going cold under its cosy—and none of us had touched much of it. Last night had been the easy half. Everyone in the room knew it.
Rachel didn't bother with small talk. She set her cup down and folded her hands in her lap.
"You said there were forces at work that the story didn't cover," she said. "Tell us."
I turned my own cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "The novel I read in my old life ended in disaster. Not a dramatic last stand—a slow collapse, one continent after another. That's why I trained the way I did from the first week I woke up here. I was trying to get ahead of an ending I already knew." I looked up. "But the further I got, the more I kept tripping over things the novel never explained."
"Such as?" Cecilia said.
"Such as why this world regresses."
Nobody moved.
