1

It was a hot day, the sort of day that came at the tail end of summer in a last stand against the encroaching autumn. The sun felt like an open flame, a furnace, scorching the red dirt of the road until it cracked. Except for around Lyra Starling, where rainwater had turned the dry dirt of the road to mud. Water droplets were still dripping off her plastic grocery bags and her raincoat.

It had been raining in Boston, which was where she had been roughly five seconds ago.

“Um, hello? What happened?”

She turned in place, taking in the street. It cut through a small town that was most certainly not Boston, or anywhere near it. Instead of tall, grey buildings, this street was lined with buildings made of pale stone, stained red with dust from the road. They looked medieval and faintly Mediterranean and absolutely not at all like they belonged anywhere near New England.

The air smelled like wood smoke and cooking meat and horses. She could hear music coming from one of the buildings, not a radio, but maybe some sort of wind instrument. Across the street, an old woman who was sitting on a stool while she washed clothes in a basin of water paused to stare at her, raising one soapy hand to shield her eyes from the sun. A family with a young child was walking down the center of the street toward her, the two adults holding the little girl’s hands and lifting her as she jumped over imaginary potholes. Further down in the other direction, a few people were chatting around what looked like a very, very old fashioned food cart. More of a food wagon, really, complete with a horse dozing between the shafts in front of it.

Lyra took a hesitant step toward the old woman who was washing her clothes. “Hello? Where am I? Where — where did the city go?”

She knew it was a stupid question, because clearly Boston hadn’t up and walked away, but neither had she, damn it. She was supposed to be half a block away from home, not… wherever this dirt road was.

The woman gave her a disapproving look, the type that was apparently part and parcel of old ladies everywhere, and said something incomprehensible.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

Lyra moved closer, the red dust of the road turning to mud where it clung to her rubber boots. She paused when the woman rose to her feet, her pale blue eyes widening. She made an odd sign, touching the thumb-side of her fist to her head and then raising her hand to the sky and opening her fingers. She looked nervous, like Lyra, with her raincoat and grocery bags, was some dangerous thing.

“Can you tell me where I am?” Lyra asked a little desperately. Belatedly, she realized the question probably made her sound like she had lost it, so she added, “I’m not crazy, I promise.”

The old woman spoke again, and this time Lyra heard the words clearly enough to realize she was speaking another language. What language it was, was beyond her. It sounded like a cross between Dutch and Japanese and German, with odd tonal shifts and harsh consonants. Whatever it was, Lyra had never heard it before in her life.

“Do you speak English?”

She took another step toward the old lady, mentally cursed herself when the woman took a hurried step back and nearly knocked over her stool. Giving up on communicating with her, she turned toward the young family, panic making her movements fast and jerky. The family had paused maybe twenty feet away and were watching her with wary concern.

“I need help,” she said, desperation clawing its way into the voice. Where had Boston gone?

This wasn’t a dream. She didn’t know what it was, but in dreams the sun didn’t turn her rain jacket into a greenhouse and the plastic handles of her grocery bags didn’t cut off the circulation in her fingers. The little girl was looking at her as if she was an alien, ET straight out of his spaceship. The looks on her parents’ faces weren’t much better, but at least unlike the old woman, they didn’t back away from her.

They spoke to each other in the same foreign language as the old woman had used. Even without being able to understand their words, she could tell they were arguing. The man said something to the woman in a sharp tone, which she dismissed with a scoff before releasing the girl’s hand and stepping forward. When she spoke to Lyra, her words were low and soothing, but she was no closer to being able to understand them.

“Do you speak English?” Lyra repeated, enunciating the words carefully. “Spanish? German?” She had taken a couple of years of each in high school and college, and while she was far from fluent in either, she could probably muddle her way through asking for help if she needed to.

But the woman just gave her a confused frown, even when Lyra thought to ask “Habla Español?” and “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” instead. The woman gestured up and down the street and said something that must have been a question. Lyra guessed it was a question along the lines of Where did you come from? because that was what she would ask if someone showed up in the middle of the street during a sunny day, still dripping with rainwater.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, mirroring the other woman’s questioning look up and down the road, then giving an exaggerated shrug that made her grocery bags swing.

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The woman pointed at her and asked another question. When she took a step closer and reached out, Lyra realized she was pointing at her rain jacket, which was one of those sunshine yellow ones that tied around her waist and cost more than it should for something made out of rubbery plastic. Before the woman could touch it, the man grabbed her arm and pulled her back, saying something sharp and angry.

The woman retorted, and Lyra was left to stand there while the two had an argument she couldn’t understand. The commotion attracted the attention of the people who were gathered by the food cart, and before long, she found herself standing in the center of a small crowd. It was really only seven or eight people, but it felt like a lot more as they spoke and shouted incomprehensibly at each other and to her. Someone tugged on the sleeve of her rain jacket and the old woman who had been washing her clothes yelled at them. Someone else grabbed one of her grocery bags by the handle and pulled.

“Hey, stop that,” Lyra snapped, yanking the bag away from the young man. The flimsy plastic tore and two oranges and a carton of milk felt to the ground. The little girl who was with the two people she had been talking to originally grabbed one of the oranges and backed away with it unnoticed, her small hands shielding her prize as she ducked behind her parents.

Panic was making her throat swell shut and her heart race madly inside her ribcage, but it wasn’t until a door opened further down the street and a man wearing dusty leather and metal armor stepped out that her panic turned into true terror.

He had a sun-lined, serious face, and as he walked toward the small crowd that surrounded her, the others backed away from him, all except for the old woman, who stepped forward and pointed at her before letting out a string of angry words. The man didn’t responded verbally, but put his hand on the hilt of the sword that was strapped to his hip and loosened the blade.

Lyra had never been in a situation where she honestly, truly thought she might die. The shock of Boston vanishing around her evaporated in an instant and fear, primal and mind-numbing, slammed into her. The sight of someone walking toward her with a sword, while she was surrounded by people with grabbing hands who spoke a language she couldn’t understand, made something inside of her snap. She turned, pushing between two of the people who were standing behind her, and ran, ignoring the shouts that followed her.

She ran past the food cart, where the horse gave a snort of surprise and the vendor called out to her. Further down the road, another horse-drawn carriage was coming towards her, so instead of trying to pass it, she ducked down the first alley she saw, startling a cat that leaped off the top of a partially crumbled, waist high stone wall with a gate in it that divided the alley from the main road. The cat ran partway down the alley before pausing to look back at her, its back arched and its tail puffed up in alarm. She slipped through the gate and sat with her back to the wall and her head down, trying to listen for sound of approaching footsteps over the pounding of her heart.

The cat crab-walked a few steps toward her. She stared at it and hoped it didn’t hiss or yowl and draw attention to where she was hiding. I didn’t mean to scare you, she thought frantically. I like cats!

The creaking and jingling of the carriage grew louder as it passed the alley she was in, and she heard a man’s voice call out. Someone else, maybe the driver, responded. All she could do was hope that, by some miracle, no one had seen where she had gone. She had no idea what would happen if that man with a sword found her, and she didn’t want to find out. Maybe he was just a cosplayer, but something in her gut told her he knew how to use that sword.

Thankfully, the cat seemed to be calming down. Its tail was still puffed up to twice its normal size, but it wasn’t giving her a feline death-glare anymore. Slowly relaxing, it sat down, looking at her with annoyance that was underscored by the way the tip of its tail twitched back and forth in the red dust of the alley street. Nothing seemed to be paved here, which just furthered her burgeoning theory that she had somehow ended up in some third-world country where no one spoke English and they used swords to hack up strangers who appeared in the middle of the road out of nowhere.

How she had gone from walking home from the grocery store in Boston to wherever this was, was a complete mystery. She supposed it didn’t make much difference whether it had been a glitch in the Matrix or aliens or something else. Whatever had happened, she was in deep shit and needed to, at the very least, find someone she could communicate with. If she could just talk to someone, she could start figuring out how to get home.

The cat must have decided to forgive her, because its tail stopped twitching and it yawned, exposing sharp white teeth and a rough pink tongue, before slowly ambling toward her. She had read a few too many news stories of people getting rabies from petting cats in other countries, but when the cat, a brown-grey tabby, bumped its head against her shin, she relented and ran her hand down its back.

The cat might not speak English, but at least it wasn’t shouting at her.

“Sorry for startling you,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the police station is, would you?”

It occurred to her that the man with the sword might have been what passed for law enforcement wherever she was. He’d had an official sort of look to him, and the other people had deferred to him when he approached. Maybe he wasn’t as dangerous as he looked?

The cat began to purr and flopped over onto its side next to her before twisting onto its back, exposing its belly. Lyra withdrew her hand.

“Sorry, kitty. I’m not falling for that trap.”

The tabby batted at the hem of her jeans, which were encrusted with swiftly drying red mud thanks to her flight down the dusty road. After a second, the cat sat up on its haunches and looked intently at the pale stone building to her right. Lyra followed the feline’s gaze, but didn’t see whatever had attracted its attention.

She reached towards the cat, intending to resume petting it, but paused when she saw its tail begin to swish back and forth in agitation. It had noticed something. The back of her neck prickled, though she wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or if she, too, could sense something approaching.

Moving as quietly as she could, she got to her knees and turned around to peek over the top of the crumbled wall. The horse-drawn carriage was out of sight and the street was empty — at least, the slice of it she could see was. Either no one had pursued her in the first place, or they had somehow missed which alley she had ducked into. Or they were sneaking around to the other side of the alley to ambush her.

She turned back around and instantly let out a scream that she only just managed to choke off by slapping a hand over her own mouth. She wasn’t alone in the alley anymore. A woman stood about ten feet away from her. She was watching Lyra silently and ignoring the cat, who was attempting to bat at the hem of the woman’s long, grey robes.

Well, Lyra assumed she was watching her, but it was hard to be certain, because the woman didn’t have a face.