– – – – – – – – – –

  Stanstead St Margarets (England)

  21 October 20XX

  – – – – – – – – – –

  “I saw Mrs Lonsdale. She sends her regards.”

  I’m sitting at the table with my family when I say this.

  “She’s always so kind!” my mother comments.

  “And nutty…” my father adds, indifferent. “I bet she kept you stuck for quite a while.”

  “Well… a little, yes…”

  There are five of us sitting down to dinner: the two spouses and their three children. At seventeen years old, I’m the eldest of the siblings. Because of that, like my father, I occupy one of the seats at the head of the table. It would be a good thing, if not for the fact that in this position I have my back to the TV.

  “You’re still wearing the watch she gave you years ago,” my mother remarks, while her husband turns on the television. “What do you think, Ethan? Isn’t it a bit old?”

  Indeed, the one on my wrist is an old-fashioned analogue watch that Mrs Lonsdale gave me for one of my birthdays. The leather strap is a little worn, but the watch still works perfectly, despite lacking the usual features of modern digital ones.

  “Yes,” I nod. “But despite everything, it still hasn’t run out of battery. I like it!”

  From the television comes the sound of a fierce wind, overlaid by several voices. I turn my head to see, from my awkward position, what’s on. On the screen, a reporter is talking to a man in an icy wasteland. Both are bundled up in heavy coats, with only their faces exposed to the elements. Behind them, several other people are working around a metal structure of the sort used for scientific research in remote locations.

  “During our research on the local microfauna, we discovered a new species of bacterium,” says the man being interviewed, who must be a biologist.

  “This isn’t the first discovery of its kind,” the reporter observes, holding out the microphone.

  “It’s true that many bacteria have already been found beneath the polar ice,” the scientist admits. “However, this one has an interesting characteristic.”

  “Could you explain it to us?”

  I listen to the report with vague interest, but most of my attention is taken up by the book I’m eagerly waiting for. It’s not as though the dinner table is calm enough to let me catch every single word of the news broadcast.

  Next to me, my mother is addressing Miley, my little sister, who is glaring at her meat-based meal with a sullen expression.

  “What’s up with you?” the woman asks.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” the girl replies.

  “Since when?”

  “Since today!”

  The scientist on TV continues explaining, his eyes almost closed because of the freezing wind:

  “It maintains a temperature much higher than that of the surrounding waters. Curiously, this can’t be explained by the chemical reactions it performs. What’s more, the water it’s immersed in tends to coo—”

  Interference disrupts the transmission, and suddenly the news studio reappears. Caught off guard by the unexpected interruption, the anchor presenting the segments is shown in the act of devouring a large sandwich. He realises almost immediately what has happened, and, speaking around his mouthful, asks:

  “Are we… munch… on air?”

  Yup, you are…

  Showing an undeniable presence of mind, the anchor composes himself. As though nothing had happened, he clears his throat and says:

  “Apologies… it seems we’ve lost the connection, so let’s move on to the next feature in our ‘Science and Technology’ segment. Today we interviewed the director of the recently opened research centre in Hoddesdon.”

  “Oh!” my mother says. “That’s close by!”

  Yes… that’s where we’re going tomorrow with the school.

  “It’s Nathan Yates,” the anchor goes on, “a young and brilliant astrophysicist who studies electromagnetic waves in space.”

  Jason, the second-born, distracts me again.

  “Ethan, can you help me with my homework later?” the boy asks.

  “Which subject?”

  “Maths. Do you know how to do parametric inequalities?”

  “Mmh… remind me how they work.”

  “Then why’d I ask you for help?”

  “I’m not that great at maths…”

  Meanwhile, the broadcast moves on to a journalist interviewing another researcher. Asked about his current line of study, the scientist dives right in:

  “Recently, we’ve noticed abnormal distortions of the light coming from other celestial bodies. They appear to be alterations caused by gravitational fields, yet there aren’t any significant masses in the locations where such fields should originate.”

  “Do you think dark matter has something to do with it?”

  “Our studies are still in the preliminary phase, but yes, dark matter is among our hypotheses…”

  – – – – – – – – – –

  Hoddesdon (England)

  23 October 20XX

  – – – – – – – – – –

  From the darkness comes a voice:

  “Switch on the emergency generator.”

  The hum of the generator starting up fills the room, and the lights on the ceiling come back on. Able to see again, the staff at the Hoddesdon research centre look at one another—some perplexed, others concerned.

  “You can come out now, Peter,” says Nathan.

  He’s addressing a burly colleague who, until that moment, had been hiding under the desk in the room: the same man who, together with Susan, had rushed out into the storm to get the director off the terrace. The scientist stares back at his superior, uneasy but not overly embarrassed despite being in his boss’s office.

  “Are we sure it’s over?” he asks.

  No one answers him.

  “End of the lightning storm: 3:35 a.m. on 23 October,” Susan announces, holding a tablet PC in her arms. “Total duration: about eight hours and forty-five minutes.”

  Naturally, she’s speaking to Nathan. Without commenting, he strides away from the office packed with people, his white lab coat billowing behind him. As he goes, the researcher points a finger at a colleague.

  “Get the equipment running again,” he orders. “I want every bit of data on the lightning storm and the light distortions.”

  “Right away!” replies the young man he’s addressing.

  Susan hurries after Nathan, and together they leave the room. The corridor is deserted: all the scientists had gathered around the director when the lightning storm was at its worst. Eventually, a blackout struck the centre, and even now that the worst of it has passed, external power still hasn’t come back.

  “That was quite a storm,” the researcher remarks, tapping on her tablet PC.

  “Yeah…”

  “I wonder how things are outside… I mean, with the blackout.”

  “Who knows…”

  Nathan wears an unusual expression. It’s as if his interest has suddenly been fired up. There’s no doubt about the cause: during the lightning storm, the light distortions reached astonishing levels—not to mention the appearance of the aurora borealis, which is fairly rare at those latitudes.

  “Listen, Sue… you can go home if you want,” the man says to the researcher, in a moment of kindness. “It’s quite late.”

  “I’m tempted,” she admits, “but I’m too curious to find out what happened.”

  Nathan smiles as they continue along the corridor, heading towards the centre’s instrumentation control room. Before long, though, the scientist’s expression darkens.

  “The emergency services… after you called them, have you heard back?” he asks.

  “No,” the woman replies. “Are you worried about that boy?”

  The astrophysicist doesn’t answer.

  “There was no way to go and help him,” she says. “Don’t dwell on it. The police will know what to do.”

  “… you’re right.”

  – – – – – – – – – –

  Stanstead St Margarets (England)

  Same day

  – – – – – – – – – –

  When Adam Knight returns home, his wife immediately meets him at the door. The sky behind him is dark, and a light rain has been falling for hours. Adam’s expression is serious, in a way that makes her uneasy.

  “Did you find him?” she asks anxiously, as he closes the front door.

  “No, but I found his bike,” he replies.

  “Just the bike?”

  “It was in bad shape, like it had been burned,” the man says, taking off his raincoat. “His backpack was there too. But there was no sign of Ethan.”

  “Oh God, what could have happened?” the woman asks, distressed. “With that storm we had…”

  “When I arrived… there was a police patrol,” her husband reveals hesitantly. “They said they’d received a phone call reporting…”

  He can’t finish.

  “… what?” she presses him. “What is it, Adam?”

  “… just give me a moment. I’ll explain.”

  Hidden behind a doorframe, Jason and Miley are eavesdropping on their parents’ conversation. Because of the blackout, the only sources of light in the house are a few old oil lamps. Most of the house is in darkness, which makes it easy for the two of them to remain concealed.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “They said on the radio that the storm knocked out power in loads of places and caused a lot of damage,” the boy whispers.

  “There were so many lightning strikes,” she frets. “What if one of them…?”

  Jason catches on immediately to what his little sister means, and quickly says:

  “The bike was burned, but Ethan wasn’t there! He’ll be fine!”

  “But… he’s not answering his mobile…” Miley adds, looking at her phone. “And it’s not even reachable.”

  “He’ll turn up,” her brother reassures her. “He can’t have got far.”

  Still, the message “unreachable” keeps appearing on the little girl’s phone.

  – – – – – – – – – –

  ???

  ?? ?? ????

  – – – – – – – – – –

  I stare grimly at my phone. The screen shows “no signal” in large letters. Not that it surprises me.

  I don’t understand… I think. Am I delirious? No, I don’t think so. And yet what I saw was absurd: huge rocks flying! Essentially islands!

  I’m sitting at a table in the home of the man who treated me. For a while, I tried to get my phone to connect to any network at all, but to no avail. It could be because it got soaked in the lake, but I doubt it: the phone’s advertised as water-resistant. More likely it’s the lightning strike’s fault, although I’m sceptical about that too. In truth, my suspicions lie elsewhere entirely.

  Where have I ended up? I wonder. Am I in the future? And how on earth could something like that happen? Was there some enormous cataclysm that mutilated the Earth the way it happens in that book I ordered…?

  “Well? Have you finished with those ‘tests’ you mentioned?”

  It’s Dawn speaking. She and her father are sitting at the table with me, waiting for me to finish fiddling with my phone. A few minutes ago, she took me back inside, and we agreed we need to talk calmly so we can clear things up.

  They don’t understand how alien this place feels to me, I think. Surely they must have found my behaviour very strange—running off like that… not to mention everything else.

  To save battery, I switch the phone off and put it away. This situation is making me feel nauseous: I sense I could start throwing up any moment now.

  “I think I need a few… erm… explanations,” I say.

  “What sort of explanations?” Dawn’s father asks.

  “To start with… what happened before I woke up?” I ask. “I can’t remember clearly…”

  “Well, we saw you plummet from the sky,” the man explains, “but the clouds kept us from figuring out where you came from. You ended up in a small lake nearby and got yourself out. Then you fainted.”

  “We brought you here to our house,” Dawn chimes in. “I dried you off with mayea, and we put you to bed. You slept for nearly twelve hours.”

  Mayea? I think in the meantime. Who knows what she really said… their accent makes it hard to recognise every word.

  “I see,” I then say with a nod. “I do recall a lot of that. Now I need to ask… erm… my questions might seem silly…”

  “We’ve noticed you’re feeling disoriented,” the man says, encouraging me. “Go on, we won’t laugh.”

  “Well, I…” I begin. “I don’t have a clue where I am. Those flying rocks… the rock we’re on now… as far as I’m concerned, they shouldn’t exist, yet you see them as normal. So what’s going on? Where am I?”

  “You’re in sublayer 7.6 of Tersain, at least according to the Pauters system,” the man replies. “You’re on a fragment belonging to the Maltian Republic.”

  “Hang on a second…” I interrupt. “First of all, what is Tersain?”

  Father and daughter look at each other, clearly surprised. Then the man turns back to me.

  “You’re asking what Tersain is…” he says. “Maybe you know it as Barghan? No?”

  My blank stare must be eloquent enough.

  “Hmm…” he murmurs, pursing his lips. “Tersain, or Barghan, is our world—the one all of us live on. Those fragments that amaze you so much are part of it: they’re where the majority of people dwell.”

  “And what about… solid land?” I ask.

  “Solid land…” Dawn’s father repeats. “If you mean a place that doesn’t float, there’s no such place… not on Tersain. Did I understand your question correctly?”

  “All too well…”

  So that’s how it is, I then think. For some bizarre reason, I’m on one of the many fragments that make up a world called Tersain. This defies the laws of physics… yet I can’t help believing this man’s words.

  I bite my lip.

  They’re speaking English, or something close to it… should that prove that I’m in the future? Their accent and vocabulary are a bit odd… maybe they’ve changed over time. Perhaps there’s a way to figure out if I really am in the future or not.

  “Listen,” I say. “Has this world always been like this, made up of many floating islands?”

  It takes a few seconds before Dawn answers:

  “Maybe you want to know about the Fragmentation?”

  “Fragmentation?” I echo.

  “Yes!” she confirms, beginning to explain. “It is said that, thousands of years ago, Tersain was a single, big sphere. There were no fragments; it was all one giant whole. One day, though, something happened: the sun’s light turned black, then flared with a sudden burst of brilliance. The sky changed, losing many stars and filling with new constellations and nebulae. The world was shaken by a deep tremor, and suddenly it broke apart into thousands of pieces. That was the Mastodonic Sundering, or more simply the Fragmentation—the event that made Tersain what it is today.”

  I get it! I think. So I really am in the future! Yet something feels off… why do I sense that my theory is wrong? I’ve no reason to doubt it… I don’t understand!

  A faint but persistent feeling still lingers in the back of my mind—an irrational impression that something, invisible to me, isn’t as it should be.

  “Looks like you must have an interesting story to tell us,” Dawn’s father remarks.

  “Huh?”

  “You drop onto this fragment without the slightest idea of not only where you are, but even how the world works!” the man declares. “So there are two possibilities: either you’re making fun of us, or something serious happened to you, and I’d like to know who I’m hosting. You haven’t even told us your name!”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry,” I say, only now realising how rude I’ve been. “My name’s Ethan Knight, and… well, I can’t really tell you where I come from… because I don’t fully understand where I am.”

  “Well, do your best,” the man encourages me. “Describe the place you’re from.”

  “All right,” I nod, trying to find the right words. “I’m from… uh?”

  Dawn’s father raises a hand to stop me.

  “Would you excuse me?” he says, and his tone sounds less like a request and more like an order. “You can tell me about it later.”

  With that, he gets up and leaves the room, leaving me and Dawn at the table.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I ask nervously.

  “Relax,” she replies, standing as well. “Come on. I’ll show you where you can freshen up, and then we’ll eat.”

  And so I find myself in a strange bathroom. It’s like stepping back centuries: there’s none of the amenities of a modern toilet. A basin, a tub, and a pitcher seem to be the only tools for washing, and a wood stove is there to heat water. Only the toilet itself looks more complex.

  It’s almost like they pulled it out of an aeroplane or a train, I think, eyeing the complicated mechanism attached to the bowl. I must’ve already asked myself this, but… where on earth have I ended up?

  ???

  Shutting the bathroom door behind her, Dawn returns to the room where she and her father were talking to Ethan a few minutes earlier. From there, she steps into an adjoining space, where she finds her father.

  “Is it from Antony?” she asks bluntly.

  “Yes,” the man nods, a carrier pigeon perched on his arm.“He’s on his way back.”

  ???

  When I come out of the bathroom, I hurry to the room where I was talking with Dawn and her father a little earlier. I see the girl there, but not the man.

  “All okay?” she asks when she notices me.

  The young woman seems to be studying a map. She quickly puts it away, getting up from the chair she was sitting on.

  “My father’s gone out, and he’ll be back a bit later,” she says. “So we’ll be eating on our own.”

  Dawn moves to another room, and I follow her into what must be the kitchen. That too is rather bare, with no appliances like a microwave, electric oven, or dishwasher. There are only various cupboards crammed with bags and parcels, and in one corner stands what looks like a wood-fired oven.

  In the centre of the room is a long table surrounded by four chairs. On it rest two glasses, a jug of water, and several containers filled with fresh and dried fruit, bread, and some other foods I don’t recognize, resembling cereal bars. Judging by the smell that pervades the place, the main food stored here must all be of that type.

  “Go on, have a seat.”

  Dawn is already sitting by the time she invites me to join her. Feeling slightly awkward, I do so.

  “There’s not much chance to restock out here, so we don’t have any wine,” she says, as though it’s a big drawback. “You’ll have to make do with water.”

  The girl stretches out to the plates in the middle and grabs a large handful of peanuts. I watch, somewhat taken aback, as she pops the nuts into her mouth, then moves on to a slice of bread. Next, I glance at the table in front of me.

  No plate… no cutlery.

  I look back at Dawn. She returns my gaze, one of the supposed cereal bars in her mouth.

  “What is it?” she asks innocently, her cheeks puffed out from the mouthful. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Erm… yes, I am!” I reply. “I was just wondering… what’s that bar you’re eating?”

  “This?” she says, waving what remains of the piece of food she just bit into. “It’s a dehumidified stick. You’ve never had one?”

  “Never.”

  I reach out and pick up one of these ‘dehumidified sticks.’

  Must be something like freeze-dried food, I think, taking a bite. Well… it’s nothing special.

  ???

  When bedtime comes, Dawn tells me to use the same room I found myself in when I woke up. Once she leaves, I close the door, take off my uniform blazer and tie, and lie down on the bed. As I do so, I grimace in pain.

  Ouch…

  I unbutton my shirt and expose my torso, examining by the light of a new oil lamp a large burn on my abdomen. Then I look at my wrist, where my watch is—there, too, I have an unpleasant burn on my skin, though it’s wrapped in a bandage.

  The watch isn’t working, I reflect, observing the instrument’s motionless hands, its materials half-melted. I don’t think I’m mistaken—lightning struck me. Did the watch attract it?

  Not that I can be entirely sure the flash I saw was actually a lightning bolt. But I think it’s reasonable to interpret it that way.

  Basically, my watch served as the ideal conduit for cancelling out the potential difference between the sky and the ground. That produced a strike that hit me full force. At that point…

  The discharge burned both the entry point and the exit point.

  I close my shirt again.

  Ow… I think again as the fabric slides over the wound. Struck by lightning… with that, plus the fall I took, I’m lucky to be alive. If I hadn’t ended in the lake… and if there hadn’t been any fragments beneath me?

  I don’t want to think about it. Instead, I try to relax, aware that tomorrow I’ll need all my strength to figure out the situation I’ve ended up in and how to get out of it.

  It isn’t easy, but eventually I drift off to sleep.

  ???

  The sun is shining beyond a mountain that rises from the island. Although it’s already mid-morning, the air is still cold and damp. Birds fly above the treetops that cover much of this floating mass of rock. White clouds fill the sky together with many dark shapes: other fragments.

  I watch that strange sight for a few moments. Then, I turn my attention back to the block of wood in front of me. I raise the hatchet in my hand and swing it forward with a groan. The blade strikes the target at an angle, splitting it into two uneven pieces.

  “Phew…” I huff.

  “You’re not very handy, are you?” remarks the master of the house, watching me from nearby.

  Oh, sure… I know the height of my manual skills is changing a light bulb, I think sarcastically, picking up a new log. And it seems like you don’t even have bulbs here…

  I’m about to raise the axe, but he stops me.

  “Hold on.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I think you’ve paid me back.”

  A large amount of chopped wood lies by my side.

  “You’re tough!” the man adds.

  “Thanks…”

  Though in reality, I nearly wore myself out…

  I worked harder than I normally would: despite the immense effort and silently enduring the pain of my injuries, I wanted to repay my debt to these people as soon as possible. My body, unaccustomed to this and still weakened by the lightning strike, didn’t exactly approve, but I was stubborn.

  “Go ahead and freshen up,” the man says. “Then, if you feel like it, come back and help me put this wood away. After that, we’ll figure out how to get you back to wherever you came from.”

  If you knew where I came from, you wouldn’t say that so easily, I think as I walk away.

  I’ve been working since dawn—or at least since what I assumed was dawn. In this world, there’s no real horizon for the sun to rise over. Still, there’s a light-dark cycle, so I’ve guessed two things: Tersain rotates on an axis, just like Earth, and the atmosphere itself distinguishes day from night.

  When the sun is on the opposite side of the world from the observer, the thickness of the intervening atmosphere is such that it dampens the light until it disappears. As Tersain rotates, the amount of air the light must pass through decreases, so gradually the sun takes shape, lighting the sky first red, then blue.

  I think something called ‘scattering’ has to do with this, though I’m not sure I remember exactly how it works.

  Anyway, that’s the least of the things that gave me plenty to think about while I was working. Another oddity is the islands themselves: regardless of the fact that they float in the air, you’d still expect that all the fragments would have a top and bottom oriented in the same way, with the underside of the rocks covered in hanging plants and the upper surface featuring trees and waterways. Yet, I’ve noticed with dismay that if I use this method to distinguish up from down, many islands show orientations that are even opposite each other. What’s more, whatever grows on their surface behaves as though it’s subject to a gravitational field relative to each individual fragment. I’m sure I saw a river flowing placidly along an island even though, from my point of view, that river was upside down.

  I’ll definitely have to ask for explanations at the first opportunity—even if I suspect I’ll come across as stupid… for these people, such phenomena seem normal.

  While walking from the back of the house to the front, I hear some strange noises. Perplexed, I follow them to a ring of low hedges at the side of the building. There, in the clearing formed by the shrubs, is Dawn.

  She has a long wooden staff in her hands, which she’s spinning back and forth. I watch as she wields the implement in what look like practice strikes. She performs a series of flowing movements meant to barrage some imaginary opponent with blows. Then, suddenly, she thrusts one hand forward and shouts:

  “Ah!”

  Something ripples through the air in front of her palm, striking one of the hedges. The effect is like a sudden gust of wind, and I would take it for just that if not for one detail: a strange light appeared at the girl’s hand the moment she cried out.

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