The last ember of the hearth smoked like a tired breath. Naisha woke to that smell first: wet ash, old smoke, and something fouler beneath — the copper tang of fear that had soaked into the walls. The ceiling above her stitched a web of charred rafters; slats of light, surprised and thin, wrote themselves along the floorboards. When she tried to shift, the ache that laced her limbs made her small and careful. Everything around her tasted like someone else's story.
She sat up. A ringed tail — her tail — flicked in the half-dark, more foreign and honest than her hands. It felt real in the strange way that showed you what you'd been missing: heavy with fur, balanced, useful. She ran a cautious palm down the masked pattern that streaked across her face — a living raccoon's broad, dark bars framing eyes that weren't entirely her own.
Her breathing counted each new disbelief. She was fifteen in more ways that mattered; the language on her tongue was still fresh with Earth; a syllabus of math and comic panels sat like a useless coin behind her eyes. Transmigrated, the word folded into her memory like a bruise anyone could name. But the body was the thing the world kept insisting on. It moved without permission: the light pressed coolly against whiskers that did not exist yesterday.
The village around her was quiet in the way old things are quiet — not sleeping but only pretending to rest. A child's toy, a crude wooden bird, slumped under a table leg. A braid of dried herbs hung like a medal from a low beam. Footprints in the dirt of the yard were muddled and small; a boot track led away and did not return.
She tested a few steps. Her feet found themself lighter than she expected; silent, as though the world had agreed to soften for her. Outside, the sky was a washed pewter, and the ash-taste of burned offerings made the air heavy. Smoke lowly eddied from the inn's chimney. Someone had tried to keep flames going. Someone had tried and failed.
"Maru?" she called, because the voice of the world always needed a name. Her own voice surprised her: less sharp than she remembered; it carried a small rustle at the edges, like leaves startled by wind.
She found Maru on the floor of the council house, slumped against a pile of furs. The old man's eyes were closed; the lines at his mouth were a neat geography of kindnesses given and received. When she knelt, she saw the small puncture in his palm where something had been pried free — a ritual bead socketed into his skin, smashed away.
"No," she breathed. Not then, not him.
Her fingers brushed a scrap of paper — a page with a careful hand, a list of names. Children. Names with crosses beside some of them. Three of them circled in shaky charcoal: Kepo, Sera, Hiko. Her throat closed. The village had already begun keeping accounts; a ledger meant the enemy had rules.
She was about to turn away when shadow moved and something in the dark answered her — not with speech but with a listen, like a knife learning wood.
He stood by the rafters with the look of a man who slept in the places where secrets grew. He did not belong to the village in the way others did; his clothes were not patched with the care of one who stayed. He had a collar pulled high and a hood that smelled of river cold. When he stepped forward, a stripe of sun—thin and purposeful—caught the edge of a scar along his cheek. His eyes were watchful, and when they found hers it was without heat, only calculation. He could have been a tree for all the warmth he offered.
"Don't come any closer," he said. His voice came low and used the smallest words like tools.
Naisha's hands tightened around Maru's cloak. She could have been scared. She could have suited the word matched to her limbs — a child alone in a strange body — and yet that old survival part of her, the part that had kept her awake reading civil defense PDFs at two in the morning on Earth, had a list of things to do: check, stabilize, listen. She set Maru's head against her knees. His breath fluttered like a trapped moth.
"Who are you?" she asked. Her tone scrubbed itself of an old Earth swagger. She had learned on screens how to talk to adults who did not know she knew anything. Honesty felt like the better gamble.
He considered her the way a man considers a riddle. "Rook," he answered at last. "I was passing through."
"You're not passing through," she told him. She did not know why she spoke like that; the words came from bones and the quiet grown between people who had somehow noticed each other. "You were following them."
The name shifted on his face. "Maybe." He knelt then, deliberate. The village, the way he measured its emptiness with his hands, made him a map. "You should move. The Harvester takes returners. It leaves shells."
A smaller sound, a child-sized sob, crept from the corner. Kepo stumbled forward wrapped too thin in old coats. His eyes were too large for the brave face he tried. He looked at Naisha like a question that might accept an answer.
"Find Tira," Naisha said, because Tira's hands had saved many small things before. "She'll know what to do."
Kepo's nod was a little too eager; he ran for the healer's nest of herbs and bandages like a man trying to outrun a memory. Rook watched him go and then looked back at Naisha. The village seemed to breathe in that small exchange.
"You're not from here," Rook said.
"No." The answer fit like a small stone. "I remember rain on an old roof. My name was —" she stopped. Names on Earth felt heavy and false now when they were spoken in a mouth that made different sounds. "Naisha," she said instead. The word felt like a leaf letting go.
Rook's eyes shifted as if the sound of her name ran along a string only he could see. He did not ask how she had come; good riddles often went unanswered. He folded his hands against his knees and watched the ash drift outside.
"Why stay?" he asked in a voice little harsher than the wind.
Naisha thought about all the small debts she held: the toy bird under the table, the list with names circled, Maru's slow humility. "Because no one else is here to," she said. It was the truest answer she had.
Rook's mouth made something like approval, though the corners did not shift. "Then you should not be alone," he said. "You are small. The Harvester takes small people first."
Her tail twitched — a nervous answer. "I can hide," she said, and there was no bravado in it, only the kind of plainness that felt like a bandage.
"That's not hiding," he replied. He rose, moved like a shadow that understood the village's bones. "Listen."
He placed two fingers on the floor. The board under them vibrated faintly — not sound but memory. He closed his eyes and let his hands speak to the grain as if it were a map. Naisha watched because she had to learn. He tapped the rafters, the post near the door, tracing a line only he and the house could see. He whispered something like a prayer and then a name.
"Velkh," he said. The syllable settled like a stone. "Syndicate. They're not farmers. They come to take life and call it progress."
Maru's fingers twitched. The old man's eyes opened to small slits. His voice climbed the staircase of broken breaths. "They took my name bead," he croaked. "They said it would be a loan."
Naisha's chest tightened at the image: someone prying the mark of a life from a palm like a coin. On Earth she'd read histories of emperors and disaster, of shepherds sold out by accountants; the same logic cut here but smelled worse, industrial and dry. She felt a heat of fury come up like something bright and dangerous.
Rook glanced at her. "You will be useful," he said. "But not here."
She should have argued. She had a dozen reasons to stay — the ledger, Kepo's face, Maru's shallow breath. Yet something else had shifted under her skin, a new pattern weaving with the old. Outsiders might make a harvest of what this place had left. She had a tail and quick hands and a stubbornness she did not entirely trust. She had also, oddly, a memory of iron ladders and glowing screens that could sometimes be given to wrong uses.
"Where will we go?" she asked.
"Oldwood Hollow," Rook said. "If the heart is wounded, it is there you might hear it. If you want to live, learn to listen."
Naisha looked at Maru. He slept with a sigh that was both a surrender and a plea. She would not abandon him. But being kind was not always the same as being useful. The world had taught her that lesson hard and clean.
She rose then, small and steady. Her tail swished once, a sign that her anchor had shifted. When Rook offered her a cloak — one too big by his measure but perfect for wrapping small things — she took it with the sort of gratitude that smells like relief.
As she stepped toward the doorway, the village seemed to put its hand on her head and hope would have made her smile if the sky had not been so grey.
"Before we leave," she said, turning to Rook as Kepo returned with a bundle of herbs, "teach me how to listen."
Rook's jaw tightened, and for the first time the faint line at his mouth softened. "If you must," he said. "But you will not be a child for long."
Naisha looked at the road ahead. Ash clung to the soles of her feet like a promise: that the world was messy and wrong, and that she — weird, clever, stubborn — was oddly built for it.
Outside, the wind moved through the broken village like a rumor. Somewhere past the first bend, something in the dark shifted, then lay still as if waiting for them to make the next move.