A few days later...
The truck hits a rut and my ribs remind me they haven't forgiven me for existing.
Roman's vehicle—some kind of modified cargo truck that probably has a criminal history longer than my current arm span—bounces over the forest road with all the grace of controlled demolition. I brace my too-small hand against the dashboard, feeling the vibration travel up through bones that don't fit right, through joints that bend at angles I haven't inhabited since my first growth spurt. The seat belt crosses my chest at the wrong height. Everything is at the wrong height now.
"You know," Roman says, navigating around a fallen branch with the casual expertise of someone who's made this drive before, "when I agreed to this little field trip, I didn't expect you to be quite so eager to revisit your near-death experience."
"I need to see it."
"Yes, you've mentioned. Several times." He adjusts his bowler hat with one hand, somehow making the gesture look both affected and irritated. "What exactly do you expect to find? A welcome mat? Perhaps a gift basket from the interdimensional travel bureau?"
I don't answer. Outside the window, the trees of Forever Forest slide past in shades of green I still can't quite name. The colors are wrong here. Everything is wrong here—the light filtering through the canopy, the smell of the air, the way the shadows fall. Two days ago—or was it three now?—I crashed through this forest bleeding and broken and calling for someone who couldn't hear me.
My hand finds the photo in my breast pocket. Still there. Still real.
The road narrows until it's barely a path, and then Roman stops the truck with a jolt that makes my ribs scream again. "This is as far as we drive," he says, killing the engine. "The clearing's about fifty meters north. Try not to die while I'm responsible for you."
I'm out of the truck before he finishes speaking.
The forest floor is soft with accumulated years of leaf litter, dampening my footsteps as I move between the trees. My body wants to move faster than it can—muscle memory from a frame that no longer exists, reflexes calibrated for limbs I've lost. I stumble twice before I reach the clearing, catching myself on bark that scrapes my palms raw.
And then I'm there.
The clearing opens up before me like a wound in the forest, a rough circle of trampled undergrowth and disturbed earth where something obviously happened. Sunlight—actual sunlight, not filtered through canopy—falls across the space in broken patterns. I can see where I fell. Where I bled. The indentations in the soil where my body lay unconscious for two days.
But there's nothing else.
I start searching immediately, grid pattern, the way they taught us in survival training. Systematic. Methodical. One section at a time, looking for metal fragments, for burn marks, for any evidence that an F-4 Phantom came screaming through whatever impossible hole the Cordium bomb tore in reality.
Nothing.
I expand the search. Widen the grid. Check under fallen branches, behind rocks, in the spaces between tree roots where debris might have scattered. My ribs protest every time I bend, every time I kneel, but I ignore them because pain is just information and I don't have time for information that isn't 'where is the wreckage'?
Nothing.
The panic starts as a flutter in my chest, a familiar sensation I've felt in cockpits when the instruments lie and the ground rushes up too fast. I push it down. Focus. There has to be something. A scrap of metal. A piece of the canopy. Monarch's seat—his seat should be here, should have ejected after mine, should have—
I'm on my knees now, digging into the charred soil with my bare hands. The dirt is dark and gloomy and unremarkable outside of the crater with no traces of even molten slag, just dirt... he has to be here.
"Come on," I hear myself gasping. "Come on, come on, *come on*—"
My fingers hit roots. I pull at them anyway. My lungs are burning and my ribs are screaming and my hands are filthy and there's nothing here. There is nothing here. The impact swallowed everything—the aircraft, the wreckage, *him*—and left nothing behind except a traumatized teenager with the wrong body and absolutely no evidence that any of it was real.
I sit back on my heels, breathing hard, staring at the empty clearing like it personally betrayed me.
Roman stands at the edge of the trees, his white coat a stark contrast against the forest shadows. He hasn't approached. Hasn't offered commentary or assistance. Just watches, hands in his pockets, giving me space to fall apart in whatever way I need to.
I look down at my hands. Small. Dirty. Shaking. "Nice soil," I say, and my voice comes out wrong—too high, too young, cracking on the consonants. "Great place to crash. Ten out of ten, would recommend."
The last word breaks in half somewhere between my throat and the air. Roman doesn't respond. Doesn't laugh or offer false comfort. He just stands there, a circus-colored sentinel at the edge of my grief, and waits.
I look at the clearing again. At the nothing. At the complete and total absence of proof that Monarch ever flew through this sky, ever existed in this world, ever breathed the same air I'm breathing now.