Theron woke to gray light and the smell of smoke.

  For one disoriented second, he thought he was home. That smell—woodsmoke—meant the fireplace in the living room, meant winter mornings when Claire would make coffee and he'd stoke the fire before the kids woke up.

  Then he opened his eyes and saw the rock overhang above him, felt the hard ground beneath his back, and remembered.

  Not home. Not ever home again.

  He sat up slowly. His body ached in ways it hadn't ached since his residency days when he'd worked thirty-six hour shifts and slept on hospital couches. His back screamed. His hands hurt—he looked at them and saw cuts on his palms, dirt caked under his nails, a deep gash on his right palm from climbing out of the grave.

  The fire he'd built last night had burned down to embers. He added small sticks, blew gently, watched flames catch again. The warmth was immediate and welcome. The morning air held a chill despite the late summer season.

  Priorities. Food first. Then better shelter. Then figure out where I am and how to—

  How to what? Go home? There was no home. Not anymore.

  He pushed the thought away. Priorities meant food. Food meant finding something edible.

  He stood carefully, testing his legs. They held. He looked around. The rock face was part of a small ridge overlooking a valley. Below, he could see the stream where he'd drunk yesterday, winding through grass and scattered trees. Beyond that, the battlefield. He looked away quickly.

  Don't think about it. Find food.

  He had no tools. No weapons. Just his hands and the clothes on his back and a half-eaten granola bar in his pocket.

  He pulled it out. Examined it. Still edible. He ate it in three bites, barely chewing, and felt marginally better.

  Okay. That's not enough. Need real food.

  He remembered fishing with his grandfather. The old man had taught him everything: how to read water, how to stand still for hours, how to make a spear from a straight branch and catch your dinner.

  Grandpa. What I wouldn't give for one of your stories right now.

  He started walking toward the stream.

  ---

  The walk took twenty minutes. He moved carefully, watching the ground for anything useful. Stones with sharp edges. Straight branches. He found a fallen limb about as thick as his thumb and as long as his arm—straight enough, green enough not to snap. He carried it with him.

  At the stream, he knelt and drank first. The water was cold and clean. Then he sat on a flat rock and examined his spear-to-be.

  He needed a point. Stone, sharpened. He searched along the bank and found a chunk of chert—he recognized it from a geology elective in college, a rock that fractured conchoidally, meaning it could be flaked into sharp edges. He'd never knapped stone in his life. But he'd watched YouTube videos once, out of idle curiosity, when someone at the hospital had been really into primitive skills.

  YouTube. God, I miss the internet.

  He sat with the rock and the branch and tried to remember. You struck it with another rock to flake off pieces. You worked slowly, carefully, building an edge. You didn't rush.

  He found a hammer stone—smooth, heavy, fit in his palm. He placed the chert on his thigh and struck it gently.

  A flake came off. The edge underneath was sharper.

  He kept going. It took an hour. Maybe two. He lost track of time completely, absorbed in the rhythm of striking, flaking, checking the edge. By the end, he had a crude but functional blade—not beautiful, not efficient, but sharp enough to cut.

  He lashed it to the branch with strips torn from the hem of his shirt. The binding was clumsy, but it held.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Spear. I made a spear.

  He stood at the water's edge, spear in hand, and waited.

  His grandfather's voice echoed in memory: "Fish are stupid, boy, but they ain't blind. You gotta be still. Still as stone. Still as death. They'll come to you if you're still enough."

  He stood still.

  The stream flowed past. Insects buzzed. A bird called somewhere behind him. He ignored it all, focusing on the water, watching for movement.

  Ten minutes. Twenty. His legs ached. He didn't move.

  A shadow in the water. Slow. Circling.

  He waited.

  The fish—a foot long, silver, unknown species—swam closer. Nosed at a rock. Turned.

  Theron struck.

  The spear entered the water, aimed at the fish's body. He'd never done this before, not really, not with a homemade spear and hungry desperation. But his grandfather's voice was in his head: "Aim where it's going, not where it is."

  He aimed ahead of the fish.

  The spear point hit. Not perfect—he'd caught it in the tail, not the body. But the fish thrashed, and he grabbed it, pulled it from the water, held it as it flopped against his hands.

  I caught a fish. With a spear I made. From a rock and a stick.

  He stood there, holding the fish, and laughed. It wasn't a happy laugh. It was the laugh of a man who'd climbed out of a mass grave and made fire and caught a fish with his bare hands and had no idea what came next. But it was a laugh, and it felt good.

  ---

  Cleaning the fish was harder.

  He'd done it before, camping with his grandfather. But that was decades ago, and his grandfather had done most of the work while eight-year-old Theron watched and asked questions.

  He remembered the basics: scale it, gut it, remove the gills. He had no knife, only his chert blade. It worked, barely. The scales came off in messy strips. The belly opened raggedly. He pulled out entrails with his fingers, trying not to think about what he was touching, and rinsed the cavity in the stream.

  By the time he was done, the fish looked nothing like the neat fillets from the grocery store. It looked like something a desperate man had butchered with rocks.

  That's exactly what it is.

  He carried it back to his camp. The fire had burned low again. He rebuilt it carefully, feeding it small sticks until it blazed. Then he found a green branch, sharpened one end, and ran it through the fish from mouth to tail.

  He held it over the flames.

  The fish sizzled. The smell made his mouth water so intensely it hurt. He hadn't realized how hungry he was. The granola bar was hours ago, and before that—when had he last eaten? Breakfast yesterday? Lunch? He couldn't remember.

  He cooked it slowly, the way his grandfather had taught him. Not too close to the flames. Let the heat do the work. Turn it regularly. Wait until the flesh flakes easily.

  Waiting was hard. His stomach cramped with hunger. But he waited.

  When it was done, he pulled it from the fire and ate it with his hands. Burned his fingers. Didn't care. The fish was hot and flaky and slightly smoky and absolutely the best thing he'd ever tasted.

  He ate every bite. Sucked the bones clean. Licked his fingers.

  Then he sat back, full for the first time in—however long it had been—and looked at his camp.

  Rock overhang. Fire. A pile of firewood he'd gathered. The remains of his fish. His spear leaning against the rock.

  Shelter. Fire. Food. I have the basics.

  His grandfather would be proud.

  The thought brought tears, sudden and unwelcome. He blinked them back.

  Not now. Not yet. Keep moving.

  But he couldn't keep moving forever. Eventually he'd have to stop and feel all of it—Claire, Emma, Ben, his whole life gone, this strange world with its impossible frozen bodies and crushed chests. Eventually he'd have to grieve.

  But not today. Today he had fire and food and a spear he'd made with his own hands. Today he was alive.

  ---

  That afternoon, he explored.

  He followed the ridge north, staying close to the trees, watching for anything useful or dangerous. He found berry bushes—small red ones he didn't recognize. He tested one carefully, chewing slowly, waiting. It tasted sweet and slightly tart. He ate a handful, waited an hour, felt fine. Good. Another food source.

  He found animal tracks. Deer, maybe, or something like deer. Bigger? The prints were wrong—too many toes. He filed it under "investigate later" and kept moving.

  He found a stream feeding into the larger one, this one smaller and faster. He followed it uphill and found its source: a spring bubbling from between rocks, clear and cold. He drank, refilled his mental map, and headed back.

  By late afternoon, he'd mapped maybe two square miles of his immediate area. Not bad for a first day. He knew where water was. He knew where berries grew. He knew the ridge line and the valley and the forest edge.

  He also knew, with growing certainty, that he was not on Earth anymore.

  The plants were wrong. Not completely—some looked familiar, like the berries, like the ferns near the stream. But others were strange: a tree with purple bark, grass that grew in spiral patterns, flowers that moved slightly even when no wind blew. And the animals—he hadn't seen any yet, but he'd heard them. Calls that weren't bird calls. Rustlings that sounded too large for squirrels.

  And the sky. Even in daylight, it looked wrong. The sun was the same—same color, same warmth—but the blue was slightly off. A shade deeper. A hint of green at the horizon that shouldn't be there.

  Definitely not Kansas, Toto.

  He made his way back to camp as the sun dropped toward the ridge. The fire had burned low but not out. He added wood, watched flames rise, and settled in for his second night.

  ---

  That night, he saw the storm.

  It appeared in the distance as he was finishing his dinner—more berries, no fish today, he'd try again tomorrow. At first he thought it was just weather. Clouds gathering. Lightning flickering.

  Then he noticed how it moved.

  The clouds rolled sideways. Not with the wind—he could feel the wind blowing from the west, steady and cool. But the clouds moved north. Fast. Against the wind.

  Lightning struck upward from the ground to the sky, not down. Multiple strikes, one after another, like the earth was throwing sparks at the heavens.

  And the smell. When the wind shifted briefly, he caught it: copper. Strong, like blood but sharper. The same smell he'd noticed at the grave, coming from the frozen body and the crushed woman.

  Magic.

  The word came unbidden. He didn't believe in magic. He was a surgeon, a man of science, a man who'd spent twenty years trusting evidence and data and reproducible results.

  But he'd climbed out of a mass grave in a world that wasn't his. He'd seen a frozen body in summer heat. He'd watched lightning strike upward.

  Maybe science doesn't explain everything here.

  He watched the storm for an hour. It moved across the distant plains, doing whatever impossible thing it was doing, and eventually faded. The copper smell dissipated. The wind returned to normal.

  Theron sat by his fire, thinking.

  Rule one: don't die from magic lightning. Avoid weird weather. Avoid anything that smells like copper. Avoid anything that moves wrong.

  He added wood to the fire and stared into the flames.

  Rule two: stay alive. Everything else comes after.

  He thought of Claire again. Of her face when she laughed. Of the way she'd hold his hand during movies, even after eighteen years, even when they'd seen the movie before. Small touches. Ordinary touches. The kind you don't notice until they're gone.

  I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to leave you.

  But he hadn't meant to. And she was gone, and he was here, and here had impossible storms and frozen bodies and berries that tasted like home but weren't.

  He lay down by the fire, close enough to feel its warmth, and stared at the strange stars overhead.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll find more food. Tomorrow I'll explore further. Tomorrow I'll figure out what comes next.

  He closed his eyes.

  Tonight, I'm alive. Tonight, I have fire. Tonight is enough.

  He slept.