Where was I?

  Also important: who was I?

  And why did I not have answers to those questions?

  The rug beneath me wasn’t very comfortable, little protection from something cold and unyielding beneath it. I levered my upper body vertical, testing limbs, then pnted my front hooves and heaved myself to my feet.

  All four legs worked, and I found no signs of damage to any of them. I looked down at my golden-skinned hands in bemusement, torn between a vague sense of familiarity and a vague sense of disconnect. Everything looked intact, though. I shrugged off my blue-and-ivory coat and draped it over my own equine shoulders so I could inspect my human torso, my fringed embroidered blue bra not interfering with that. For some reason, it surprised me that there was no damage, nothing marring the smooth skin, but I had no idea what else I’d been expecting to see.

  I got dressed again, pausing to check my lower body, but I found only golden hide and a white-and-gold harness supporting white bags with rainbow fringes.

  I felt like I should recognize the room around me, round and windowless, all white marble with veins of gold, everything in warm colours and geometric designs and metallic highlights, but I couldn’t give it a name or formute any associations. Well, I couldn’t give myself a name.

  I looked in my bag for hints. I found a gatherer’s staff and a water gourd and a lumina stone on a cord, a guitar and a book with a pen, jewellery and hair accessories and a cord with weights on the ends, a weighted bnket and a plushie cat toy, a really beautiful kettle with cups and spoons, three medical kit boxes and a few tents of different kinds and an assortment of food and tea. The clothes were clearly not all meant for a centaur.

  I pulled out the book and flipped through it, looking at sketches of a cat and of ornithians and of people I couldn’t remember, although I wasn’t sure the art was actually good enough that it could have triggered memories. If these were my work, I seriously needed to practice more.

  None of that gave me any hints at all.

  I wasn’t getting any answers in here.

  The only way out of the room was via a single doorway. I brushed aside the countless strands of glittery beads and stepped carefully past it. The stone slope on the other side needed some attention, but when I reached the end of that and began to climb a more gradual incline with better traction, it got easier. The lighting was poor, but I could see a brighter gleam ahead.

  I stepped out into the gring sun of midday. I raised an arm to shield my eyes, squinting, but my eyes adjusted and I decided I could manage long enough to find some shade.

  The ft ground was broken by cracks, the edges of the stone rounded smooth but the crevices between extending a long way down. I didn’t think I could get out of one if I fell, so I stayed clear of edges as much as I could, crossing bridges when I had to in order to stay on the track.

  Why was I following the track? Had I decided to?

  Well, it did seem like an obvious thing to do. Presumably it existed for a reason and must go somewhere.

  I passed between a pair of tall stone pilrs, and from there, the track turned into a proper road, much wider.

  I stopped. There was someone here, sitting on the grass, a human.

  “Hello,” I said, as he got up. Greeting him seemed like the right thing to do.

  “Hi,” the human said, and his voice sounded gentle. “Do you remember where you are?”

  “No. I don’t remember... anything, really. Do I know you?”

  “No. But I know who you are. I’m Reese, I’m a friend. You just went through something that’s rough the first time and it’s not a surprise that you’re a bit scrambled. It’ll all come back. There’s a shelter just down the road, my friends Lakshmi and Nadya are waiting there and warming up a snack and some rosemint tea, maybe we can go down there and you can take your time getting your bearings where it’s safe?”

  “We’re not safe here?” I looked around in sudden arm. Something in that resonated—there should be danger.

  “We’re safe for the moment, but just in case anyone not friendly shows up. Besides, there’s fresh berries and fruit there, and it’s a better pce to make a fire.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’d tell you my name if I could remember what it is.”

  “You’re Nathan. Does that ring any bells?”

  I considered that. “No, not really, but it’s good to know.”

  The human, Reese, a broad-shouldered man with soft-brown skin and purple hair that was sort of fluffy and deep purple on top but clipped short and paler purple lower down, gestured, and I fell into step beside him.

  “You’re in the Heavenmeet Grassnds,” Reese said. “You just came out of the Quincunx.”

  “Quincunx.” I echoed the word, frowning. “There’s something about that... something I was doing.”

  “Yes, there is, but it can wait.”

  “How did I get here and why don’t I remember anything?”

  “Hm. Sometimes... there’s a thing that can happen that will send you to the nearest Quincunx site that you’ve been to. That happened. But sometimes it’s rougher than others, and this time, everything was wrong. It was your first time, which is always the worst. It’s harder the more sites you’ve been to, and you’ve been to four. And this was... very abrupt, from what I’ve been told. So really, it would be more surprising if you’d walked out with everything working properly.”

  “Oh. How do you know what happened? Were you there waiting?”

  “I got a message asking me to come meet you and try to help. I live in the closest vilge so I do that when I can. Lakshmi and Nadya were visiting me so we could talk about some things that are happening so they came along.”

  “Got it. Thank you.”

  “We’d do it for anyone, but from what we’ve heard, you have a history of going out of your way to help other people. Everyone needs that back sometimes.”

  “Do I? Hm. That feels right, that my job is...” I saw an adolescent calico felid curled into a ball in the middle of a street. “People scared and hurt and I try to make it better and... something. This is frustrating.”

  “I know,” Reese said. “Just try to be patient. You were in Whisperwillow a couple of hours ago, and that is not right next door.”

  “There’s something important that I should be... my friends! I... can’t remember them, but they were in danger! I think...”

  “The message I got said that would be a big thing for you, and they’re safe. You don’t need to worry about them right now.”

  “But they were... dammit, I need to remember! What else do you know?”

  “Calm down. Rushing isn’t going to help. There’s the shelter.”

  There were rge animals tethered outside; my mind told me it would be a pair of ornithians, one purple-red and one blue, but my eyes informed me that it was a trio of horses instead, one dark and one golden and one with a darker reddish head and legs and paler body. They could reach the fountain and the shade of the fruit trees if they wanted, but they seemed more interested in absently grazing the green grass. Saddles had been left on a couple of benches, which must be more comfortable for them.

  The cob building had colourful paintings around the outside, showing a sunrise and a clear day and somehow I knew that the other sides had been painted with sunset and a moonlit night.

  Inside it was cooler, and I smelled something wonderful and savoury from the pot resting on the metal grating of the firepit. There was less gre, but it was still bright, the ceiling partly tiles of colourless gss and partly coloured ones and partly dark clouded ones like smoky quartz.

  There were two people, too. By the fire, stirring the contents of the pot, was a saurid, and I knew she was a she because the markings around her eyes were a brighter cyan than her muted sea-green scales and her tail was long and thin, but I wasn’t sure how I knew that.

  Nearby, on a woven grass mat, an aquian sat, one with pale rose hair and sky-blue skin, wearing not only the usual sarong but a open-fronted jacket with bell-shaped sleeves, maybe as protection from the Grassnd sun.

  “The saurid is Lakshmi,” Reese said. “The aquian is Nadya. Nathan fell about as hard as we expected, regaining her memory is going to be a bit slow.”

  Her? Yes, of course her, why did that register at all?

  “Perfect storm of bad conditions,” Lakshmi said sympathetically. “Nothing’s lost, it’ll all come back.”

  “Come sit down,” Nadya said. “Or y down. What do centaurs do? I haven’t spent much time around centaurs yet, so probably I’m being rude.”

  I took en up on it and folded all four legs under me, then shrugged. “Somewhere between, I suppose? It’s not all that comfortable for sleeping, though, so I...” I stopped, then continued more slowly, “usually change? What?”

  “That’s a thing you’ll remember,” Reese said, checking the contents of the pot.

  “I didn’t mess up your stew,” Lakshmi said mildly.

  “Never thought you did.” Out of a satchel at his side he produced a dle and four broad shallow bowls and four spoons. “Is the tea ready?”

  “Soon.”

  “I have to remember,” I said. “My friends are in danger.”

  “If you don’t know who they are or where they are or what the danger is,” Reese said, “you aren’t going to be much use to them.”

  “I... I guess I can’t argue with that. What else do you know?”

  “There is a long-term threat to your friends. They are not currently in danger.”

  I couldn’t accept that. These three seemed like good and thoughtful people, but everything in me screamed that I needed to remember, that someone important needed me, there was something I needed to be doing and I couldn’t just wait.

  I’d been here before, I’d seen the sun crawling across the painted floor changing colour as it went through the gss tiles, and had asked about it, and... A female voice, They got the idea to create something beautiful and they did, while we looked at the light deep red with morning sun, but red light went with blue and white lights that ripped apart the night and...

  “Easy.” A gentle hand on my shoulder brought me back to the shelter; I blinked and found I’d pulled my arms in so tightly I could feel the strain in my muscles.

  “I’ve been here.” I forced myself to rex.

  “Not all that surprising, since you’ve been to the Quincunx site before. Can you remember who you were with?”

  “Someone... someone who matters a lot. Someone who... ah!” An image fshed through my mind of a woman with rosy hair falling, clutching at a knife deep in her abdomen, so much blood and a fast-spreading moss infection and the bottom dropping out of the world. I felt my shoulders hunch, my own nails digging into my arms.

  “Think of them here,” Reese said. “Not whatever that was.”

  Here. I’d been right here with that woman, and she mattered, we’d sat here and had breakfast and she’d told me how the ceiling had been designed to cast light on the intricate floor throughout the day in constant steady motion, not because there was any practical point, just because they could.

  Just like the shelter that was all living wood, and we’d been at that with... with a younger man who always had a book in his hands, always writing in it or sharing something from it. And one with gss walls that created an illusion, and I saw long intricately-braided lic hair and intense fascination with the whole effect, a sketchbook in hand, and that led to music on a hillside with trees around us and... and there was a near-white felid who brought both stories and pnts to life and an affectionate bck-and-white cat and a jotun with hair like a waterfall who was just overflowing with warmth and kindness and energy. All the images tumbled together, tinted with countless emotions but overying it all was a desire to be with them so intense that it ached.

  “Nathan?” Reese said.

  “I’m okay. I’m getting... some. Five people and a cat, over and over. And I know I love them... not in love with, not some fairy-tale crap, I know them and I love them and I need to make sure that... that someone can’t get near them... dammit! I did something, didn’t I? Trying to help people, but there’s going to be fallout from it and the people that matter the most to me are the ones who are at the worst risk.”

  Lakshmi set a cup beside me and one beside Nadya, who was holding a bowl, then sat down with two more, keeping one and setting the other beside her in front of the empty grass mat. “I suspect, based on a decade in this world, that those people knew exactly what they were doing and would have done it anyway. You handed everyone a solution to a universal problem, and to protect themselves and their loved ones, the whole world is downright eager to unite behind it.”

  “It’s pretty mindblowing,” Nadya said. “Back at home, you couldn’t get a million people to unite behind agreeing that water is useful, let alone anything that would merely make life better all around. I really love this world.”