The change in her magic was more pronounced this time.

She felt it while she was walking to the library—a sudden lightness, as though a weight she had been carrying without knowing it had been removed. But it was not a removal. It was an absence, a deeper absence, the sense of a well losing another inch of water when she pressed her awareness to the bottom. She stopped on the sidewalk and let the people walking behind her flow around her like water around a stone, and she pressed her hand to her chest and confirmed it: two percent gone. Two percent of her power, drained into the indifferent air of a world that could not hold it, lost like heat dissipating into cold space.

She had been on Earth for sixty-two days. She had lost two percent of her magic. At this rate—and she suspected the rate would accelerate, as the body's magical system began to recognize its fundamental incompatibility with this dimension, as though her cells were slowly remembering that they did not belong here—she would be ordinary in approximately four years and eight months.

She was not ready. She was not ready at all.

But readiness, she was learning, was a luxury that the universe did not guarantee. You did not have to be ready for the ground to open beneath your feet. You did not have to be ready for the world to change. You only had to be ready to keep standing after it changed, which was a different and harder thing entirely.

The shelter had begun to feel less alien over the past weeks. Mira knew its rhythms now: the clang of the bathroom pipes in the morning, at exactly six-forty, the sound of Alma's key in the front door at seven, the particular squeak of the vacuum cleaner that Alma ran through the hallways every afternoon at four, the way the hot water in the shower on the second floor always ran out before the cold. She knew which showers were least likely to run out of hot water, and which corner of the common room was warmest in the evenings, and which of the volunteers who came through during the day were worth talking to and which were simply there to feel good about themselves, to check a box marked did something kind today.

She had a routine. That was the remarkable thing. She, who had spent sixteen years in the service of magic—studying, practicing, pushing the boundaries of what her craft could do, spending hours in the aetheric archives and the practice chambers and the meditation gardens of Thornhaven—now had a routine that had nothing to do with magic at all. Wake at seven. Breakfast at seven-thirty, which was oatmeal on Mondays and eggs on Tuesdays and Thursdays and cold cereal on Wednesdays and Fridays, the rhythm of the week mapped onto the rhythm of the body. Walk to the library by eight-thirty. Read until noon. Eat lunch—usually a sandwich from the deli on the corner, which had become her regular spot because the man who ran it, whose name was Dmitri, never looked at her strangely when she counted out her coins, never rushed her, never made her feel like she was taking too long. Back to the library by one. Read until five. Walk back to the shelter. Dinner at six, which was always something hot and always something she could eat without thinking about it too hard. Evening in the common room, usually reading, sometimes talking to June or Destiny or, less often, Patricia, who still did not speak much but who had begun, occasionally, to nod at Mira in passing—a small acknowledgment, the language of people who do not need words to say I see you, you are here, we share this space.

It was a life. A thin, strange, shadow of a life—but it was hers, and it was something. It was a foundation she could build on, if she had enough time to build.

She was learning to speak English more fluently, though her accent remained odd, a slight wrongness in the placement of emphasis that made people ask where she was from at least once a week. She deflected these questions as best she could, offering vague answers about a country far away, a place without a name they would recognize, a place where the sky was different. Most people did not push. Most people, she was discovering, did not particularly care about the origins of a woman who lived in a shelter and spent her days at the library. They had their own problems. They were busy with their own invisible weights. She was just another person struggling to get through the day, and the struggling was the common language, the thing that made strangers into something like kin.

But some people cared. Elena, who had not forgotten her, came by the shelter once a week with whatever she could spare—clothes that no longer fit her, food from her own kitchen, sometimes just company, the particular gift of someone who sat with you without needing anything from you. Elena was a social worker, Mira had learned, working for a nonprofit that served homeless youth, and she had been on her way home from a late shift when she found Mira standing on that corner, looking up at the wrong sky. She had stopped, and she had helped, and she had not stopped helping since, and Mira did not know what to do with that kind of persistence, that kind of faith. It did not fit into any framework she had learned.

"Why?" Mira asked her once, on one of her visits, when the question had grown too large to contain and had pushed its way out of her mouth before she could stop it. They were sitting in the common room, the television on in the background with the sound turned low, and Elena was teaching her to play a card game called solitaire, which was called solitaire because you played it alone, which Mira thought was either very honest or very sad.

Elena was quiet for a moment. She was holding a cup of tea from the coffee shop next door, cradling it in both hands as though she was cold, though the room was warm. "I don't know," she said finally. "You looked lost. And I've been lost before, and someone stopped for me. So."

"So you stop for other people."

"Yeah." Elena smiled, but it was a complicated smile, with something sad in it. "I guess I figure—if someone didn't give up on me when I was falling apart, the least I can do is not give up on other people when they're falling apart. It's not gratitude, exactly. It's more like... reciprocity. Delayed. Out of order. But still real."

Mira thought about this. It was not love, what Elena felt for her—or at least, it was not the specific kind of love she needed, the resonant frequency, the complementary happiness that would open the door. But it was something. It was the recognition of shared experience, the understanding that one person's falling apart was not so different from another's. It was the opposite of judgment, which was, she was beginning to understand, one of the rarest things in any world. To be seen without being judged. To be met where you were without being asked to explain how you got there.

She was learning about herself, too. About the person she was when magic was not a factor—when the extraordinary power that had defined her for sixteen years was stripped away and she was left with only the ordinary: the body, the mind, the heart. Three things, all of them fallible, all of them limited, all of them somehow still working.

She was not, she discovered, very good at being ordinary. She was impatient. She jumped to conclusions. She assumed that her way of seeing the world was the correct way, and she became frustrated when others did not follow, when they did not see what she saw or understand what she understood. She had been a leader in the Veil—a senior witch, a teacher of younger students, a voice in the coven council—and that leadership had calcified into a kind of reflexive authority that did not translate well to Earth, where she had no authority at all, where she was just another woman in a shelter who did not have a home, who did not have papers, who did not have a history anyone could recognize.

She was trying to change. That was what surprised her most. She, who had been so certain of herself in the Veil—who had never doubted her own capabilities, who had moved through the world with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what she was and what she was worth—was now full of doubt. Full of questions. Full of the uncomfortable awareness that everything she had known was wrong, or at least incomplete, and that the correction was going to cost her something she could not yet calculate.

It was terrible. It was also, she was beginning to think, necessary. To be wrong about yourself was, perhaps, the first step toward being right about something else.

She went to bed that night and lay in the dark, feeling the two percent that was gone, and tried not to be afraid. Four years and eight months. Four years and eight months of learning and failing and trying again, of watching and waiting and practicing the strange new skill of being human in a human world. She would not waste it. She would learn what she needed to learn, find what she needed to find, and she would get home. Or she would die trying.

She was not sure which outcome frightened her more. The dying, or the failing.

But she lay there anyway, in the dark, in the shelter, in the world, and she did not run. She had come to this world without choosing it, but she would not leave it without fighting for the right to choose. That, she thought, was perhaps the most human thing she had done so far.

In the morning, she would get up, and she would go to the library, and she would learn something new. That was the plan. That was always the plan.

It was not much of a plan. But it was hers.

That night, she dreamed of the Thornwood.

She was walking through the silver-barked trees, and the indigo leaves were falling, and the amber light was everywhere—in the air, in the ground, in the spaces between the leaves—and she could feel the ambient aether humming against her skin, the way it always had, the way it was supposed to, and she reached for it and it came to her easily, eagerly, as though it had been waiting. She was whole in the dream. She was herself. She was a witch walking in a world that knew what witches were, and the trees were speaking to her in the low harmonic that she had known since childhood, and she understood them, she understood everything, she was home.

Then she woke up.

The shelter room was grey with early light, and June was coughing in the next bed, and somewhere down the hall someone was running water, and the dream was already fading at the edges, dissolving like morning frost, and Mira lay very still and let it go. She did not try to hold on to it. She had learned, in two months, that holding on to things that were already gone only made the loss larger. The Thornwood was gone. The magic was going. The dream would be gone by the time she finished her coffee.

She got up. She dressed. She went to breakfast, where the oatmeal was lumpy and the coffee was burnt and the morning was ordinary in every way that mattered.

And somehow—in the lumpiness and the burntness and the ordinariness—she found a reason to keep going. Not hope, exactly. Not happiness. But the small, stubborn willingness to see what the next hour might bring. To see what she might learn. To see if the person she was becoming could, eventually, become someone worth loving.

It was not much of a reason. But it was enough to start with.