At the end of her first month on Earth, Mira felt the change.

It was subtle—so subtle that if she had not been a witch, trained from childhood to monitor every fluctuation in her own magical reserves, she might have missed it entirely. But she was a witch, and she had been monitoring her magic continuously since the Crossing, and she felt it now: a tiny, almost imperceptible decrease in the total volume of power she carried. The well was a little shallower. A little more depleted.

She sat on her bed in the shelter, late at night, the room dark around her and the others sleeping, and she pressed her fingers to her sternum and closed her eyes and felt for the center of her power. It was like pressing on a bruise to remind herself it was real. The magic was still there—she could feel it, a warmth at the core of her, the accumulated inheritance of thirty-two years and sixteen generations of witches before her—but it was less. One percent less, if she had to put a number on it. Maybe one and a half.

One percent. It did not sound like much. But she knew, with the certainty of her training, what one percent meant. Her personal reserve was finite. She had been born with a certain amount of magic, and it was not replenishable here, in this world where there was nothing to draw from, no ambient aether, no ley-lines, no living substrate to conduct the current that made magic possible. Every spell she cast would deplete it further. And even if she never cast another spell—even if she simply existed here, breathing and sleeping and walking the streets like any other human—she would still be losing it. A slow, inevitable bleed, as though her body, stranded in a dimension it was never meant to inhabit, was slowly learning to let go of the thing that made her other than human.

Five years. That was her estimate, based on the rate of decay she was observing. In five years, if she did nothing, if she simply existed here in this world without casting a single spell, her magic would be gone. She would be ordinary. She would be human, in the most complete and final sense of the word.

And then she would never go home.

The thought was so sharp that it took her breath away. She had not allowed herself to think about home—not really, not in the way that would make it real. She had been so focused on learning the basics of survival: eating, sleeping, walking without being hit by cars, finding the library, reading the books, understanding the words, navigating the strange flat geography of this world where everything was labeled and nothing was alive. She had been so busy being a displaced person that she had not allowed herself to be homesick, and now the homesickness hit her like a physical blow, a wave that came from somewhere below her stomach and rose into her chest and throat and behind her eyes, and she had to press the heel of her hand against her mouth to keep the sound inside.

She was not a woman who cried easily. In the Veil, she had been considered somewhat cold—even her teachers had noted it, the way she approached emotion as though it were a subject to be studied rather than experienced. She felt things, of course she felt things, but she felt them the way a scientist feels the temperature of a room: as data, as information, as something to be recorded and analyzed and understood rather than simply surrendered to. And now, lying in this dark room in this shelter in this world that did not know her, she was feeling something she did not have a framework for. Grief, yes. But also something larger. The grief of having been, however briefly, someone else.

She went outside. The shelter was quiet at this hour—two in the morning, when even the street noise had died down to a low murmur, and the city had that particular quality of emptiness that exists only in the small hours, when even the insomniacs have given up and the night belongs to the genuinely sleepless or the actively lost. She stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the sky.

In the Veil, the sky was always the same: perpetual dusk, purple and gold and deep arterial red, the colors of magic at the edge of the visible spectrum. The sky in the Veil was never blue, never black, never anything but that particular quality of almost-night that never quite became night and never quite became anything else. Here, the sky was blue in the day and black at night, and the black was full of lights that were not stars—satellites and planes and the diffuse glow of the city spreading in every direction—but Mira looked up anyway, searching for Polaris or the Three Sisters or any of the constellations that she had used to navigate between the continents, and she found them: dimmer here, fainter, but there. The stars did not care about dimensions. They burned on regardless, indifferent to the small matter of which universe they happened to illuminate.

She was still connected to the same universe. That was what she was reminding herself. The same stars, the same planets, the same laws of physics. It was just that in this corner of the universe, in this particular region of space-time, magic did not exist. Or rather: it did not manifest naturally. It had to be carried by a living body, as she was carrying it, and it was bleeding out of her at a rate she could not stop.

She thought about the Crossing.

She had not intended to cross. She had been conducting a routine survey of a ley line anomaly in the Thornwood's northern reaches—a standard magical diagnostic, the kind she had performed dozens of times without incident, the kind that any senior witch could perform in her sleep, which was appropriate, because Mira had, on occasion, nearly done exactly that. The anomaly had been minor: a slight irregularity in the flow of aether along a secondary ley-line, the kind of thing that was usually explained by a tree root or a buried stone or some minor geological disturbance. She had been thinking about what to make for dinner. She had been thinking about a student's thesis defense that was coming up the following week. She had been thinking about anything except the ground beneath her feet, which was, in retrospect, exactly the wrong thing to be thinking about when the ground was about to open and swallow her whole.

The ground had opened. Not like an earthquake—not the violent heaving she might have expected—but like a door swinging open, a clean division in the fabric of the world, as though the space between here and there had been folded flat and she had slipped through the crease. She had not even had time to be afraid. One moment she was standing in the Thornwood, and the next she was falling, and then she was here, on her hands and knees in something cold and damp, and the world she knew was gone.

The Council would be looking for her. In the Veil, her absence would have been noticed immediately—she was a senior witch, a member of the coven in the capital city of Thornhaven, and her disappearance would have triggered an immediate search protocol. They would be trying to find her. They would be attempting to locate the point of the Crossing, to trace the dimensional signature, to open a return path. She knew this because she would have done the same, if their positions were reversed. It was what the coven did. It was what family did.

But they would not be able to find her if there was no magic here to trace. And they would not be able to open a return path if they could not reach the place where she was. She was, for all intents and purposes, invisible to them. A woman erased from her own world by a door that had opened in the wrong direction.

She stood on the sidewalk for a long time, looking up at the sky. The stars did not answer her. They never did, but she always looked anyway, the way you look at a face you love even when you know it cannot speak.

Then she went back inside, climbed into her bed, and lay in the dark, counting the remaining years as they bled away: four years, eleven months, twenty-nine days. Twenty-eight days. Twenty-seven. The arithmetic of loss. The mathematics of exile. She had learned, in one month, to count time in a new way—not the way she had counted it in the Veil, by the movement of the amber light and the cycle of the aether, but by the thing she was losing, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one breath at a time.

In the morning, she went to the library again. She pulled books from the shelf at random—not English textbooks this time, but dictionaries, encyclopedias, anything that might give her a framework for understanding this world and the rules that governed it. She learned about atoms and molecules and the periodic table, the strange names for the substances that made up everything she could see and touch. She learned about cells and DNA and the biological processes that governed organic life, the machinery of the body that humans had mapped with such painstaking precision. She learned about stars and galaxies and the age of the universe—thirteen point eight billion years, give or take, a number so large it made her head ache in a different way than grief did, the ache of insufficient imagination.

None of it was wrong, exactly. But none of it accounted for what she knew to be true: that the universe was also made of magic, that there were dimensions beyond this one, that the human-shaped beings she passed on the street every day were only a small part of a vast and luminous whole that their sciences could not detect because they had no organ for detecting it. It was like trying to describe color to someone who had been blind from birth. They could learn the word. They could learn the physics of light refraction. But they could not, would never, know what it was to see.

But she was a part of that whole. She carried it in her blood. And it was draining out of her, one day at a time.

She checked out a book on dimensional physics—technical, dense, full of equations she could not solve—and brought it back to the shelter, where she read it by the clipped reading light until June, in the next bed, told her to sleep.

"Something wrong?" June asked, in the dark, her voice rough with sleep and something else—something that might have been concern, or might have been simple wakefulness, the particular wakefulness of someone who had learned to sleep lightly because the alternative was too dangerous.

Mira thought about how to answer. "I am very far from home," she said.

June was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car passed, its headlights briefly illuminating the gap at the bottom of the door, sweeping a band of white light across the floor before disappearing. "Yeah," June said finally. "I know that feeling."

And Mira realized, with a small shock, that she did. That the feeling of displacement that Mira had attributed to her unique situation—the loss of magic, the dimensional exile, the sudden and total severance from everything she had known—was not unique at all. June knew it. Destiny knew it. All of the women in this shelter knew it, each in their own way: the feeling of being far from where you were supposed to be, of having lost the map, of standing in a world that did not make room for you and did not know your name.

"I know," Mira said. "I know you do."

June did not say anything else. But she reached across the gap between their beds and patted Mira's hand once, briefly, in the dark.

It was the first time anyone had touched her with comfort rather than necessity—the first human touch that was not an act of assistance or guidance but simply an acknowledgment, I am here, you are here, we are both far from where we belong, and that is something we share. Mira held the memory of it carefully, like a small warm coal in the center of her chest, burning against the cold. She did not say thank you. She did not need to. Some things did not require words.

She lay in the dark and felt the warmth of the coal and the cold of everything else, and she thought: Four years, eleven months, twenty-nine days.

It was not enough. But it was a start.

In the morning, Destiny found her at the kitchen table, staring at a cup of coffee she had not touched. Destiny did not ask what was wrong—Destiny, Mira was learning, had her own reasons for not asking—but she sat down across from her and pushed a sleeve of crackers toward her and said, "Eat something. Coffee on an empty stomach makes everything worse."

Mira looked at the crackers. They were the kind with the orange cheese spread, individually wrapped in foil, the kind that existed in no cuisine she had ever encountered and which she had initially assumed were some form of artificial food product designed for astronauts. She unwrapped one and bit into it. The taste was somewhere between cheese and the idea of cheese, a mathematical approximation of dairy that was technically edible and functionally soulless. She ate three of them anyway.

"You look tired," Destiny said. She was peeling an orange, the smell of it sharp and bright in the air between them, and Mira found herself tracking the movement of Destiny's fingers—the efficient way she broke the skin, the careful way she separated the segments, the almost ritualistic quality of a task performed ten thousand times.

"I did not sleep well," Mira said.

Destiny nodded. "First month somewhere new is the hardest. Everything feels wrong. The bed's wrong, the food's wrong, the way the light comes through the window in the morning is wrong. You're not homesick yet—you're just... disoriented. Like your body's still waiting for the world to be the right shape." She ate a segment of orange. "It gets better. Eventually your body gives up waiting and just... settles. Becomes here. And then one day you realize you're not waiting for anything anymore. You're just living."

Mira thought about this. "How long did it take? For you?"

Destiny was quiet for a moment. "I'm still waiting," she said. "But I'm learning to live while I wait. That's different." She stood, brushing orange peel from her fingers. "Finish your crackers. Elena's taking you to the social services office today. You're getting an ID."

She left, and Mira sat with the crackers and the untouched coffee and the grey morning light coming through the window, and she thought: Your body gives up waiting and just settles. Becomes here. She pressed her hand to her sternum again. The warmth was still there, the coal still burning, but smaller now than it had been a month ago. She was learning to live while she waited. She was learning that waiting and living could happen in the same body, at the same time, without canceling each other out.

It was, she supposed, the first useful thing she had learned about being human.