The first thing John felt was wrong.
Not pain—though that came screaming after—but wrongness. The kind that settles in your gut when you wake during surgery, when the anesthesia fails and your body knows it's being opened even if your mind can't process why.
His skull throbbed. Pressure built behind his eyes, hot and liquid, like something had punched through bone and kept going.
Gunshot wound, the clinical part of his brain supplied. Entry point, close range. Temporal region. Fatal in—
He opened his eyes.
Stone ceiling. Baroque molding, water-stained and cracked. A chandelier hung crooked above him, three of its crystals missing, the rest catching light that came from... where? The window showed only grey. Not clouds. Not fog. Just grey, like someone had painted over the glass.
John tried to sit up. His hand slipped.
Red smeared across floorboards. His red. Too much of it.
The gun lay three inches from his fingers. Single-shot percussion pistol, the kind you'd see in a museum. Brass fittings tarnished green. The hammer still cocked.
I didn't—
But his hand moved to his temple anyway, fingers finding the wound before his mind caught up. Wet. Warm. The hole in his skull should have been—
He pulled his hand away.
The blood on his fingers was already darkening, drying faster than it should. He touched his temple again, probing the way he'd probed a hundred wounds in the ER. The edges of torn skin felt... wrong. Not bleeding. Not even weeping. Just—
He pressed harder.
Solid. Smooth. Skin where there should have been shattered bone and brain matter leaking between his fingers.
John's stomach turned. He rolled onto his side and retched, but nothing came up. Just bile and the taste of copper.
The room swam back into focus. Hardwood floors. A writing desk by the window, papers scattered like someone had swept them aside in a hurry. A wardrobe with one door hanging open, revealing clothes that belonged in a period drama. The mirror—
He saw the stranger first.
Black hair, longer than his—than John's—had ever been, fell past his collar. Sharp features. Pale skin that looked like it hadn't seen sun in months. Blood matted one side of his head, but the face underneath was... whole. Handsome, even, in a way that made John's chest tighten with something he couldn't name.
That's not my face.
He touched his cheek. The stranger in the mirror did the same.
John's breathing quickened. He ran his hands over his face, his jaw, his hair. Every movement the mirror confirmed. The stranger's hands. The stranger's face.
His clothes were wrong too. Waistcoat. Cravat at his throat, loosened and stained red. Trousers with buttons instead of a zipper. The fabric felt expensive under his fingers—wool, maybe, or something heavier.
This isn't—I was—
What had he been doing? John tried to remember. The hospital. His shift had just ended. He'd been walking to his car, and then—
Nothing.
Just this room. This body. This impossible wound that had already stopped bleeding.
He looked at the gun again.
Someone had tried to die here. The trajectory was right—temple, angled upward, the kind of shot you take when you're sure. When you've thought about it long enough to know exactly where to aim.
But I didn't pull the trigger.
So who had?
John's gaze drifted to the desk. Papers everywhere, but one stack sat apart from the rest. Leather-bound. A diary, maybe, or a journal.
He crossed the room on unsteady legs. Everything felt wrong—his balance off, his center of gravity shifted. This body was taller than his had been. Broader in the shoulders. He caught his reflection again in the window and stopped.
The grey outside wasn't fog.
It moved. Writhed. Like smoke trapped behind glass, or something alive trying to push through. And beyond it—
John squinted.
Was that a building? No. Buildings didn't float. Buildings didn't hang upside down in the sky like bats, their foundations reaching toward clouds that spiraled the wrong direction.
He stepped closer to the window.
The grey parted for just a moment, revealing a city below. Streets that curved at impossible angles. Bridges that connected to nothing. And in the distance, something massive turned in the sky—a tower, maybe, or a mountain, spinning slowly like a child's top winding down.
John's hand found the window frame. The wood felt real. Solid. But everything outside—
Where the hell am I?
He tore his eyes away from the window and grabbed the diary. The leather was worn smooth, the kind of wear that comes from years of handling. He flipped it open.
The first page stopped him cold.
This world is fucked up and someone is watching.
Same words. Next page, same words. He flipped faster. Every page, the same sentence, written over and over in handwriting that grew more frantic toward the end. The letters shook. Ink blotted where the pen had pressed too hard.
This world is fucked up and someone is watching.This world is fucked up and someone is watching.This world is fucked up and someone is watching.
The last page was different. The words were there, but underneath, scratched so hard the pen had torn through the paper:
THEY'RE ALWAYS WATCHING
John closed the diary. His hands were shaking.
A knock at the door made him drop it.
"Master Lucian?" A woman's voice, muffled through wood. "Master Lucian, I heard something fall. Are you alright?"
John—no, Lucian, apparently—opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
"Master Lucian?"
He looked at the gun. At the blood on the floor. At his reflection in the window, still wearing a dead man's face.
"I'm fine," he heard himself say. The voice was wrong too. Deeper. An accent he didn't recognize. "Just... dropped something."
Silence. Then: "Will you be taking breakfast, sir?"
Breakfast. The word felt absurd. He'd just woken up in someone else's body with a bullet wound that shouldn't have healed, in a world where physics had apparently given up, and someone wanted to know about breakfast.
"Yes," Lucian said. "Give me... give me a moment."
Footsteps retreated down what sounded like a hallway.
Lucian—I'm Lucian now, aren't I?—looked at his hands again. At the blood drying under his fingernails. At the diary on the floor, its pages splayed open to that repeated warning.
Someone is watching.
He walked back to the mirror. Touched his temple one more time. The skin was smooth. Unbroken. Like the wound had never existed.
But the blood on his clothes said otherwise.
Outside, something groaned—a sound like metal bending, or stone cracking under pressure. The grey outside the window pulsed once, twice, and Lucian saw it again: that impossible city, suspended in ways that made his medical training scream that gravity didn't work like this, that nothing worked like this.
He was in Hell. Or somewhere worse.