Something was biting Rama’s ankle before he was fully conscious of having a body at all.
He came back into himself in stages — first the itch, sharp and specific, then the smell, wet earth and crushed leaves and something green and bitter underneath it, then the sound of a thousand insects going at once, a wall of noise he hadn’t heard anywhere in Singapore in seven years. His eyes opened onto dark. Not the managed dark of a facility with its power grid down. Actual dark, the kind with texture to it, broken only by a canopy so dense the stars came through in fragments.
His daughter’s weight was still against his chest.
He sat up too fast, one hand already checking the back of her skull, her breathing, the pulse at her throat, before his mind caught up to what his hands were doing. She stirred, made a small sound, and pressed her face harder into his shirt rather than waking.
"Sekar."
Nothing.
"Sekar."
A rustle of leaf litter, close, and then her voice, low and controlled in a way he recognized — the specific flatness she used when panic was a decision she hadn’t made yet. "Here. I’m here."
He found her by touch before his eyes adjusted enough to find her by sight, her hand closing hard around his wrist. For a long moment neither of them said anything else. The insects kept going. Somewhere off to the left, something considerably larger than an insect moved through underbrush and then stopped, as if it had heard them too.
"Where’s Singapore," Sekar said. It wasn’t quite a question.
"I don’t know."
[Status Check Available]
The notification sat at the corner of his vision, patient, ordinary, the exact shape it had held for seven years. Rama almost laughed at it — the sheer domestic normalcy of a System prompt in the middle of whatever this was.
He pulled it up anyway. Health, full. Stamina, full. Stats, quest log, inventory — all of it present, unbothered, as if the last hour hadn’t happened. He scrolled through habit more than need, and everything answered exactly the way it always had.
"System’s up," he said. "Everything’s reading normal on my end."
"Define normal." Sekar’s voice had moved a few feet away; he heard fabric against bark, her shifting to get her back against a tree trunk, putting solid wood behind her while she worked. "Because nothing else is."
He reached for the other thing before she’d finished the sentence — the reflex too old to stop now, seven years of habit faster than thought. He reached for Timeline.
Nothing came back.
Not silence in the way a held breath is silence, something waiting to resume. Silence in the way an unplugged line is silence. He pushed harder, the specific effort that had once, years ago, felt like shouting into a canyon and getting an echo back within a second — and got no echo at all. No ambient warmth at the edge of his mind. No sense of six billion lives being quietly, continuously attended somewhere he couldn’t see.
"Nothing," he said. His own voice sounded strange to him, too thin for what he meant by the word. "I’ve got nothing."
"Try again."
"Sekar, I know what nothing feels like."
"Try again anyway." Not unkind. Just exact.
He tried again anyway, and got the same nothing, and didn’t say so a third time, because saying it once had already cost him something he didn’t want to keep paying for.
Their daughter woke properly a few minutes later, the way small children wake from something frightening — not gradually, but all at once, eyes open and body rigid before she’d even worked out where she was. She didn’t cry. She looked at the dark, and the shapes of trees against it, and then up at her father’s face, checking his expression the way she’d apparently learned to do sometime in the last year without either parent noticing they’d taught her.
"Are we lost?" she asked.
"We’re figuring it out," Rama said, which was true, and easier than anything else he might have said.
She accepted this with the particular gravity of a child who had already survived stranger things than getting lost, and put her thumb in her mouth for the first time in months, and didn’t take it out.
Sekar worked while there was still nothing better to do than wait for morning — running her hands over the bark of the nearest tree, testing the soil with her fingers, listening to the insects with the specific attention of someone cataloging rather than merely enduring. Rama recognized the process. It was the same thing she did to every crisis: convert fear into data, one observation at a time, until there was enough of it to reason from.
"The air’s too clean," she said, at one point, mostly to herself.
"Clean how?"
"No exhaust. No smoke haze, no aircraft noise, nothing artificial in it at all. Singapore hasn’t had air like this in — I don’t know how long. Decades, maybe longer."
He didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer that helped.
It was another hour before the canopy thinned enough, at the edge of what might have been a natural clearing or might have been the result of some old fallen tree, to give her a real look at the sky. She went still the moment it opened up above them, head tipped back, and stayed that way long enough that Rama came and stood beside her, following her gaze up into a spread of stars considerably denser than anything visible over the light-polluted city they’d left.
"Recognize anything?" he asked.
"That’s the problem." Her voice had changed — the flatness gone, replaced by something more careful, more precise, the tone she used when she was building toward a conclusion she didn’t want to have to say out loud. "I recognize almost everything. The constellations are there. Orion’s belt, the Southern Cross, all of it roughly where it should be for our latitude."
"Then we’re still in Singapore. Just—"
"Just somewhere without cities for two hundred kilometers, sure, that would explain the sky being this clear." She pointed, tracing a line he couldn’t follow with his own untrained eye. "But look at Polaris. Look at where true north actually sits relative to it."
He looked. It meant nothing to him.
"It’s off," Sekar said. "Not by much. A few degrees. If we’d simply been thrown somewhere else on the planet, the stars would look different because we’d be seeing a different slice of sky — but the constellations themselves wouldn’t shift shape. They’d be the same shapes, same relative distances, just rotated for latitude and season." She lowered her hand slowly, and Rama heard something in her breathing change, the sound of someone arriving somewhere they’d been trying not to go. "These aren’t rotated. They’re drifted. Individual stars sitting slightly off from where their own constellation puts them, the way they would if enough time had passed for their actual positions in space to have moved."
"How much time."
"I don’t know exactly. I’d need instruments I don’t have." She turned to look at him, and even in the dark he could see the shape of what she was about to say settling into her face before the words caught up to it. "But stars don’t drift like this over centuries, Rama. They drift like this over thousands of years."
Behind her, their daughter had gone very still, thumb finally out of her mouth, listening.
"We’re not lost in space," Sekar said. "We’re lost in time."
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