In the morning, I feel a little silly about having cried. No amount of rationalizing the reasons I might have to come over all emotional will counteract the embarrassment that comes from having a breakdown in front of strangers. It doesn’t matter how cute my new face is, crying is an ugly experience and I am mortified to have shared it with both Ma and Puck.

  Ever since my arrival in this body, in this place, I’ve depended on everyone around me for all but the most essential actions. Now I have cried like a five year old who missed her nap, and exposing myself emotionally like that cuts too close to giving up all pretense of adulthood. I will not let myself be infantilized, not even by my own dumb ass.

  Puck is the only person in range when I exit the wagon, so I start by asking, “Is there something I can do?”

  “You’re still quite injured,” she says gently. “I’d rather not see you overwork yourself while you’re healing.”

  “Please? I’m so bored. I feel like all I do is sit around waiting to feel better.”

  “And why shouldn’t you, love? Look at the state of you — bruised up arm you can’t move properly, face still scabbed up. You’re recovering well, but you aren’t recovered.”

  When she sees I am perturbed by the prospect of yet another day spent resting quietly, she says, “Let’s go do a bit of foraging. I’ll see if I can teach you something useful.”

  So I eat breakfast and we spend the next few hours puttering around the woods, in easy shouting distance of the fire, looking at mushrooms and bits of moss and the fiddleheads of ferns, Puck narrating all the while about some neat leaf or another and its use in medicine. I am fascinated but can’t remember names by the time we return to camp. I want a notebook. I want use of my right hand.

  My shoulder joint sends a burning ache of warning at the mere thought of writing.

  During our foraging adventure, Puck lets me hold the mushroom bag. It’s quite a lot smaller than her collecting basket, with straps that fit neatly around my wrist, and at first I thought it was a little patronizing but I quickly grasp she has the experience to assess what I can handle. After walking around the woods for hours, even at so easy a pace and on mostly level ground, I am exhausted. My right ankle hurts. The preemptive shoulder pain from my fantasy about taking notes triggers irrational anger, and I feel my functional age drop from five years old to three.

  “I need to go lie down,” I say, as graciously as possible.

  “Rest well, love. You did good work today.”

  I’m still pissed off, but Puck’s words make me feel a little better despite my new status as campsite toddler.

  *

  I can’t remember the last time I was this badly incapacitated. Even colds blow over pretty quickly, and I never had a major injury. I tripped on stairs once in a while, but in the way where you grab for the handrail and your heart jumps into your throat and you count your blessings because God knows that’s not a hospital visit you can afford — and then you go back to the rest of your day and forget about it. It’s not the sort of thing that results in days upon days of compromised movement or sleep as pain management.

  It’s also weirdly off-putting that no one is making demands over the things which are within my power. Instead, the feeling that I’m being entertained instead of usefully employed persists. Puck has me help carry mushrooms while she identifies flora and fungi. Ma asks me to monitor the fire pit. Finch invites me along when he’s doing dishes or laundry. Brand and Thirsan make no requests of me at all.

  This is not the kind of culture I am used to. The workplace attitude of “Leaning time is cleaning time” gradually simplified into “If you aren’t busy, look busy.” Even my parents assumed that being home sick meant I could still do light chores. I feel like one of those people who go on vacation and can’t enjoy the beach because there’s no goal.

  My thoughts aren’t the problem, I think. I could sit on a beach on vacation for a couple weeks. It’s just the social conditioning of constant activity: I’ll get in trouble if I’m caught looking too relaxed. I feel guilty that I’m not doing more, even if I’m not actually sure what I should be doing.

  Because, of course, I don’t actually know. I might have camped a few times but I know nothing about survivalist hobbies, and as much as this place is basically familiar — people and beds and frying pans and cardigans — the differences give it all an uncanny quality. I don’t recognize any of the names Puck uses for plants, or the shape of their leaves, and I have no idea if that’s because I just never noticed these or if they truly aren’t something I would have seen before. The massive, silvery-gray trees around us are nothing like the massive trees I know of. I don’t recognize the fish or the birds, but I don’t know how much of that is a personal failing and how much goes to show that I am not in Kansas anymore. So even if I had been a prepper weirdo, I’m not sure how much it would help me here. Any fish I could catch one-handed might still be poisonous and I wouldn’t know.

  Wandering around, at least, either improves my stamina or reveals how much of it I have recovered. The light foraging trips with Puck get a little longer each time, and I don’t need a nap quite as urgently when we are done. I stay awake long enough to watch her chop up leaves and throw them into the soup pot, or press my finger to the thread she’s wound around bundles of plants while she fastens a knot into place.

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  The feeling of doing toddler-level labor doesn’t change, but I resent it less.

  “I understand why it’s important to hang the herbs,” I say, holding the end of a string with several bundles of herbs knotted along its length. “But why do you hang some of them outside, and some of them inside the wagon?”

  “These ones are repellents,” Puck answers. “As they dry, they release a scent into the air that deter pests and things from the campsite.”

  “Will you still use them in food or medicine or… whatever? Once they’re dry?”

  “Oh yes. Anything I can put in a bottle. It’s just lucky that they ward off trouble while I’m preparing them for storage.” She steps down from her footstool, shifts it over a few feet, and steps up again. “The ones inside are a little more delicate; too much light while they’re drying, and they lose potency.”

  The light here isn’t very strong to begin with, as the trees block so much of it, so I am mulling over how delicate this must make them as Puck tries to shift her footstool over again and is stymied by tree roots.

  “’Ey, gentlemen,” she calls. “Can one of you reach high enough to get the string over the hook?”

  Finch gets up from the fireside. “I’ve got it.”

  “Bless, love, thank you.” Puck hands him the string, and he reaches up and manages to push it into place, standing on his toes. The overhanging roof of the wagon is only just within his reach. He moves down the length of the string, toward me, and reaches for the next hook — but the ground is very slightly lower.

  “Pass me the footstool,” he says.

  “I can do it.” Thirsan rises from where he has been more preoccupied with watching Finch than the root vegetables roasting over the fire.

  “If I can’t reach it, you can’t reach it.”

  “Yeah I can.”

  “I’m taller than you.”

  “No you’re not.”

  Finch looks at him like he’s just claimed he can grow gills. Thirsan holds out his hand for the string, and Finch hands it to him, fully expecting to be proven right.

  He isn’t. Thirsan can reach the hook. Without acknowledging me, he takes the end of the string from my hand and loops that over the last hook, too. Then he turns to Finch and smirks.

  “You’re not actually taller than me yet,” Finch says, very slightly put out and unable to hide it.

  “I am. I keep telling you I’m taller, and you don’t believe me.”

  “Fine, back to back, let’s see. Puck, who’s taller?”

  “Oh honestly, boys, aren’t we a little old for this?” says Puck, then she squints and says, “Well look at that. Thirsan finally outgrew you.”

  “What?”

  “Ha!”

  “No way, the ground must not be flat here —“

  “I told you, I told you weeks ago —“

  “All right, all right, you two, go mind the vegetables please, thank you for your assistance…”

  Finch glances at me and insists one more time that there is no way Thirsan is taller than he is, this blow to his pride just a little more than he’s prepared to accept, and I want to tell him he’s still very tall and it doesn’t diminish him just because his moody teenage brother is very slightly taller, but I don’t think I should get in the middle of this. If I say something, I’ll say the truth and it will almost definitely make things worse. Thirsan will double down on gloating, or Finch will know I can see this dealt psychic damage and the damage will only magnify. Instead, I make myself busy helping Puck with the next bundles of herbs, and save Finch some pride by pretending not to notice he lost any.

  *

  Going nameless for however many days or weeks since whatever act of sorcery brought me here has been almost a relief, but the absence of a name is a vacuum desperate to be filled and I need to think of one before someone else does.

  I’ve been trying them on. I have a lot of idle moments in which to do this, so I run through names I’ve always liked — names I thought maybe I’d give to a daughter, if I had one, or names I’ve given to characters in video games. The boring Earth name my parents gave me never felt like it quite fit, like it was just sounds I’d grown accustomed to. With a new body to work with and no past to work from, choosing a name feels as important as choosing who I’m going to be while living with it.

  And yes, I take forever to name my player characters, too.

  When Puck sits me down to inspect the scar on my face after the last remnants of scab peel off, I ask her as casually as possible, “Do you like the name Akasha?”

  She makes eye contact very briefly, surprised, then goes back to studying the scar with unnecessary intensity. “Do you like it?”

  “I think so.” I don’t want to sound so nervous, but I am. I always liked the name but I only learned about it while watching a really questionable vampire movie. I doubt that movie made it to theatres here, though, and I think this face is pretty enough to be an Akasha. Still, I want Puck’s reassurance. Just in case Akasha was the name of this place’s Vlad the Impaler and I haven’t sidestepped the vampire association after all.

  “Would you like me to start calling you that, then?” she asks.

  “If it’s all right. If it isn’t weird. Is it a weird name?”

  “It’s very pretty, love. It suits the blue of your eyes.” She smiles, and I have no idea how a name can suit someone’s eyes but if Puck says it’s so, then I’ll trust her. Then she says, “Well, Akasha. You’re going to have a very striking scar for a while, but given time I think the worst of it will heal over. You might not even notice unless you’re looking for it. I’ve got an ointment that should help minimize the scarring, now that the scab is gone.”

  She goes to get the pot of ointment from her wagon, returns, demonstrates how much to use and how to apply it, and calls me Akasha again while telling me to keep it next to my bed and to apply it before I go to sleep and when I wake up. I feel an anxious thrill at hearing her say it. I have a name again.

  It feels momentous. I’m the joined existence of this body and the spirit inhabiting it. This is my identity, now: Akasha, short and bright-eyed and very cute, impatient to be useful, hopelessly oblivious. I’m working on it.

  Even though I don’t want to go back, I think about the body I left behind, rolling in the waves with an ill-fitting name. It deserved better.

  I’m sorry, I think, as though my thoughts will carry across time and space to who I was before. And who knows — maybe they do.