Chapter 1

I Woke Up Where the Dead Are Filed

Reanimation Entry 027

I woke up dead again.

By this point, death had become less of a cosmic mystery and more of a clerical dispute with breathing complications.

The first thing I noticed was pain.

Not dramatic pain. Not heroic pain. Not the kind of pain poets write about while leaning against windows during rainstorms. This was practical pain. Administrative pain. Pain with a clipboard. Pain that had clearly been assigned to every inch of me and told to report back with findings.

My lungs inflated like two damp paper bags being tested for structural integrity.

My spine lit up one vertebra at a time.

My heart—

My heart hurt.

That was different.

The rest of my body ached like it had been assembled during a budget meeting. My muscles trembled. My nerves sparked. My teeth felt too new in my mouth, which is a sentence nobody should ever have to think, let alone experience firsthand.

But my heart hurt in a way the machinery had not caused.

It hurt like it remembered something I did not.

A voice said my name.

“Michael.”

And my heart broke before my mind knew why.

That was the first sign something had gone wrong.

Or right.

With my medical history, those had become aggressively similar categories.

I tried to open my eyes. One obeyed. The other apparently required a committee vote.

The world arrived in pieces.

White light.

Condensation.

Glass above me.

A ceiling far too high for any room that had good intentions.

Seven narrow lights burned overhead in a circular arrangement, each one a different temperature of sterile brilliance. They shone down like judgmental stars, which felt excessive considering I had only just regained the privilege of blinking.

Around the lights, steel ribs arched upward into darkness. Cables descended from them like mechanical vines. Tubes ran into my arms, throat, chest, abdomen, and places I refused to emotionally acknowledge until absolutely necessary.

Something hissed beside my ear.

Something clicked beneath my ribs.

Something under the table hummed with the smug confidence of a machine that had violated several natural laws and expected applause.

I tried to speak.

My tongue made a brave attempt at language and immediately resigned.

“Mmmph.”

A shadow moved over me.

“Motor control is returning,” said a man’s voice. Calm. Measured. Clinical. The voice of someone who could watch a house burn down and accurately describe the flame pattern.

Another voice, closer, softer.

“Michael, can you hear me?”

My heart answered before I did.

The monitor beside me erupted into a rapid staccato of beeps.

I did not know that voice.

I knew that voice.

Both statements were true, which was rude.

I forced my right eye wider. The room blurred, sharpened, blurred again, then decided to become a place.

I was lying on a table inside a glass-walled chamber. Beyond the transparent barrier stood figures in pale uniforms, their faces masked, their hands folded or tapping screens. Some stared at me with awe. Others stared with fear.

Several stared with the particular expression scientists wear when their experiment starts developing opinions.

Excellent. Always a crowd-pleaser.

A man stood just beyond the glass, tall and narrow, with silver-dark hair combed back and a face arranged in permanent restraint. His eyes were tired in a refined way, as if exhaustion had been tailored for him. He wore a white coat over a charcoal uniform, and every line of him suggested discipline, precision, and a catastrophic allergy to being wrong.

I hated him immediately, which felt encouraging. Hatred required continuity.

The woman beside him was harder to look at.

Not because she was frightening.

Because something inside me recognized grief wearing her face.

She stood very still, one hand pressed to the glass. Her hair was dark, gathered loosely at the back of her neck. Her eyes were sharp and wet and furious with the effort of not becoming either.

I had no idea who she was.

I missed her so badly I almost died again out of spite.

The monitor screamed.

“Cardiac response spiking,” someone announced.

“Emotional Continuity Network is overloading,” another voice said.

“Reduce stimulus.”

“No,” the woman said.

One word.

Soft.

Absolute.

The room obeyed her for half a second before remembering it was full of professionals.

The man in the white coat lifted two fingers.

“Do not sedate him.”

“Doctor Orison, his heart rate—”

“I can see his heart rate, Len.”

“He may destabilize.”

“He is destabilizing because he is waking.”

“That is not comforting.”

“It was not intended to comfort you.”

Ah.

So that was Doctor Orison.

I would have written his name down in my mental list of people to distrust, but at that moment my mental list was mostly static, screaming, and the word breakfast floating through the wreckage with surprising confidence.

The woman leaned closer to the glass.

“Michael,” she said again. “Look at me.”

I looked.

The moment I did, something opened inside me.

Not a memory.

A wound.

I saw rain on a window.

A hand slipping from mine.

A red light reflected in black water.

A woman turning away before I could say—

Nothing.

The vision vanished.

My body jerked against the restraints.

Restraints.

That was the next thing I discovered, after pain, lights, tubes, grief, and the dramatic return of my apparently very opinionated cardiovascular system.

My wrists were bound to the table by silver bands. My ankles too. A broader restraint crossed my chest, rising and falling with my panicked attempts to breathe like a man instead of medical equipment with a pulse.

This was not my favorite arrangement.

To be fair, I did not remember having a favorite arrangement. But I felt confident this ranked low.

I tried again to speak.

This time, my mouth produced a sound like gravel reconsidering its career.

“Wha…”

The woman’s eyes tightened.

Doctor Orison stepped toward a console beside the chamber.

“Language assembly is active. Michael, do not force speech yet.”

Naturally, I forced speech.

“Where…”

My throat burned. My lips cracked around the word.

“Where…”

The man touched the console. Something retracted from my throat with a wet, mechanical slither.

I gagged.

Dignity, I would later learn, is one of the first casualties of resurrection. It does not regenerate quickly.

My lungs expanded more cleanly.

I coughed hard enough to make the room lean sideways.

The woman flinched but did not look away.

“Where,” I rasped, “am I?”

Doctor Orison looked at me with the solemn patience of a man about to ruin my day with nouns.

“You are in Novum Vey.”

I stared at him.

Nothing.

No recognition.

No flicker.

No handy little memory crawling out of my skull to explain why that name sounded like a city designed by people who thought sunlight was inefficient.

“Is that,” I said slowly, “a hospital?”

Doctor Orison hesitated.

That was not promising.

“It is a continuity facility.”

I blinked.

Once.

Twice.

My left eye finally joined the organization.

“A what?”

The woman shut her eyes.

Doctor Orison said, “A medical research facility.”

“Then say hospital.”

“It is not a hospital.”

“Then say prison.”

A few people beyond the glass shifted.

That got them.

Good.

My humor was alive.

My memories might have been eaten by the great cosmic paper shredder, but sarcasm had survived impact.

Doctor Orison’s expression did not change, which made me want to outlive him on principle.

“You are not a prisoner,” he said.

I tugged weakly at the restraints.

The bands did not move.

“Bold interior design choice, then.”

“Those are for your protection.”

“Yes. Historically, that sentence has always led somewhere cozy.”

The woman made a sound.

Not quite a laugh.

Not quite a sob.

It cut through the room more sharply than the alarms had.

I looked at her again, and the ache in my chest deepened.

“Who are you?”

Her hand slid down the glass.

For one terrible second, I thought she might break.

Instead she rebuilt herself in front of me.

It was a small act. A tightening around the mouth. A lift of the chin. A little funeral for whatever answer she had wanted to give.

“My name is Sera Veylin.”

Sera.

The name struck something buried.

A door in the dark.

A bell underwater.

A match held in a room full of old letters.

Sera.

My eyes burned.

I hated that. I had just come back from death and already my body had decided to leak dramatically in front of strangers.

Very poor onboarding experience.

“Sera,” I repeated.

Her lips parted.

Doctor Orison watched the monitor.

“Recognition?”

I ignored him.

A man learns priorities quickly when strapped naked under seven judgmental ceiling lights. First priority: do not give the scientists everything they want. Second priority: determine whether anyone has pants.

Sera swallowed.

“Yes,” she said. “Sera.”

“Do I know you?”

Her answer came too late.

That told me enough.

“You did,” she said.

The room went quiet.

A beautiful silence, really, if you enjoy being emotionally stabbed by grammar.

I breathed in carefully.

The air tasted metallic and cold. Recycled. Filtered. Fake. There was no smell of rain. No food. No dirt. No human life outside the antiseptic worship of surfaces.

Just machines.

Just glass.

Just the soft hiss of systems keeping me alive as though life were an argument they could win by maintaining pressure.

“How long?” I asked.

Doctor Orison’s gaze sharpened.

“How long what?”

“How long was I dead?”

Behind him, someone dropped a stylus.

Not comforting.

Sera looked away.

Doctor Orison glanced once at her, then back to me.

“Michael—”

“How long?”

He folded his hands in front of him.

“Nine years.”

That should have meant something.

Nine years.

A child could be born and learn to speak in nine years.

A city could change its skyline.

A war could start, burn, end, and be misremembered by people who profited from it.

Someone could bury you.

Someone could stop crying.

Someone could learn to live without you.

Nine years should have landed like a planet on my chest.

Instead, my first coherent thought was:

That explains the haircut.

Not mine.

Doctor Orison’s.

I did not know what his hair had looked like before, obviously. But he had the energy of a man who had aged nine years in a room without music.

I laughed.

It came out as a broken cough with ambition.

Several monitors objected.

Doctor Orison frowned.

“Michael, try to remain calm.”

“Wonderful,” I rasped. “I die for nine years and come back to homework.”

“You have not merely come back.”

“Oh good. I was worried this would be simple.”

Sera looked at me then. Really looked.

Something like relief moved through her face, so brief I might have invented it.

“You still do that,” she whispered.

“Do what?”

“Make jokes when you’re terrified.”

I considered denying it, but terror was currently chewing through my spinal cord with excellent posture.

“Seems efficient.”

Her eyes shone.

My chest hurt again.

This was becoming suspicious.

Doctor Orison touched the console again. A projection bloomed in the air above me: translucent rings, neural diagrams, cardiac rhythms, body maps rotating in layers. I saw my own outline split into systems.

Heart.

Mind.

Body.

Soul.

Spirit.

Strength.

Will.

The seven words hovered in pale light like a diagnosis written by a poet with security clearance.

“What is that?” I asked.

Doctor Orison’s face became stiller.

“The Unison Array.”

The words were meaningless.

They were not meaningless.

A pressure built behind my eyes.

Seven lights.

Seven systems.

Seven parts of a man.

Something inside me whispered:

Unison Life begins with the heart.

I jerked my head toward the ceiling.

“What did you say?”

Doctor Orison glanced at Sera.

“I said nothing.”

“No. Someone said—”

The chamber lights flickered.

Only once.

But every person beyond the glass noticed.

Sera’s hand returned to the barrier.

Doctor Orison leaned closer to the console.

“Log anomaly.”

A technician replied, “Already logging.”

“What anomaly?” I asked.

No one answered.

Always charming when people begin documenting you instead of conversing.

I pulled harder against the restraints. My muscles trembled. I had the strength of a newborn deer and the emotional stability of a haunted elevator.

“Take these off.”

Doctor Orison shook his head.

“Not yet.”

“Do you have any idea how annoying it is to wake up from being dead and immediately lose an argument?”

“Several of your previous cycles suggest yes.”

My blood went cold.

Previous.

Cycles.

There it was.

The word entered the room and took a seat.

Sera closed her eyes again.

I stared at Orison.

“How many?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand this time.

“Twenty-seven.”

For a moment, the machines were the only things making noise.

Twenty-seven.

I had died once.

No.

I had died enough times to have a number.

Enough times to need tracking.

Enough times that some technician somewhere had probably made a spreadsheet. I could feel it. Humanity’s first instinct after violating death would absolutely be spreadsheet creation.

I swallowed.

It hurt.

“Reanimation Entry twenty-seven,” I said.

Doctor Orison’s expression changed by half a degree.

Not much. But enough.

“You remember the entry format?”

“I just heard it.”

“From whom?”

I looked at the seven lights.

“I don’t know.”

Another silence.

This one had teeth.

Sera turned toward Orison.

“Cael.”

His name in her mouth carried warning.

He did not look at her.

“Michael, listen carefully. Your memory will return in fragments. Some will be sensory. Some emotional. Some chronological. Some may be inaccurate.”

“That’s a generous way to say broken.”

“It is more accurate to say unsequenced.”

“Doctor, I have been awake for maybe five minutes, and already you are winning the award for Most Punchable Vocabulary.”

Someone behind the glass coughed.

Bram Hallow entered the room like the answer to a question nobody gentle would ask.

He came through a side door beyond the chamber, broad-shouldered, dark-uniformed, and built with the kind of practical gravity that made hallways behave. His hair was cropped close. His jaw looked personally offended by nonsense. A compact weapon rested against his chest, not aimed, but present in the way a locked storm is present.

He scanned the room first.

Then me.

Then the exits.

Then me again, this time with a look that said he had already calculated how much trouble I would become and was disappointed by the number.

“Subject is awake,” he said.

“Subject can hear you,” I said.

His eyes narrowed.

“Good.”

“Worse. Subject can complain.”

Sera looked down.

This time, I was almost sure she smiled.

Almost.

Bram did not.

“Restraints holding?” he asked.

Doctor Orison nodded.

“His motor recovery is incomplete.”

“I did not ask about his optimism.”

I liked Bram immediately.

Which was unfortunate, because he looked like the kind of man who could break my ribs with one hand and then write an incident report in complete sentences.

“Who is he?” I asked.

Bram answered before anyone else could.

“Security.”

“Ah. Prison, then.”

“No,” Doctor Orison said.

Bram said nothing.

His silence was much more honest.

I turned my head, slowly this time, taking in the chamber. The glass walls were etched with fine lines of circuitry. Condensation crawled down the inside in tiny rivers. Beyond the room, I could see a corridor lined with sealed doors, each marked by numbers, symbols, and names too distant to read.

But I could read one.

Because it was directly across from me.

A storage wall.

Transparent drawers stacked vertically behind reinforced casing.

Inside each drawer: small black archive cores suspended in gel.

Labels glowed beneath them.

FREEMAN, MICHAEL — CYCLE 001
FREEMAN, MICHAEL — CYCLE 002
FREEMAN, MICHAEL — CYCLE 003

The list continued down.

My own name repeated like a clerical haunting.

The dead are not supposed to see their filing system.

It does something to a man.

I stared until the labels blurred.

“Those are…”

Doctor Orison stepped slightly into my line of sight.

“Continuity archives.”

“Mine?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

I waited for panic.

It came.

But beneath it came something worse.

Curiosity.

This, I would later realize, was one of my more troubling character defects. Show me the ruins of my own identity, and some awful little scholar inside me will ask about the architecture.

“What’s in them?”

Sera answered.

“You.”

I looked at her.

She regretted saying it. I could tell.

Not because it was false.

Because it was too true.

“How much of me?”

She did not answer.

Doctor Orison did.

“Enough.”

I laughed once.

Dry.

Mean.

Small.

“Enough for what?”

His eyes held mine.

“To bring you back.”

The seven lights hummed overhead.

My heart beat hard.

Not fast now.

Hard.

Like it was knocking from inside me.

Like something wanted out.

I turned back to Sera.

“You said I knew you.”

“Yes.”

“Were we…”

The question would not finish.

Maybe my mind could not form it.

Maybe my heart refused to cheapen it.

Maybe I was afraid she would say no.

Maybe I was more afraid she would say yes.

Sera’s fingers curled against her palm.

Doctor Orison spoke gently.

Too gently.

“Michael, emotional continuity may return before relational context. You may feel attachments before you understand them. This can create distress, false certainty, dependency responses—”

“Do you ever stop explaining people to themselves?”

His mouth closed.

Good.

I looked at Sera again.

“Were we close?”

She inhaled as if the air had edges.

“Yes.”

That was all.

Yes.

A whole life compressed into one cruel little word.

A memory flashed.

Not sight.

Touch.

Her hand in mine.

Cold.

Trembling.

A metal floor beneath my back.

Blood in my mouth.

Her voice near my ear.

Not now.

Not yet.

Please, Michael.

Forgive me.

The chamber vanished.

I was falling through black water full of white lights.

No.

Not water.

A city.

A city made of hospital lights and gravestones.

I stood in a street paved with polished bone-white stone. Towers rose around me, each shaped like a medical monitor, each window blinking like a heartbeat. Rain fell upward. Names were carved into every surface, billions of them, layered over one another until language became texture.

At the end of the street stood a table.

My table.

The reanimation table.

Empty.

Above it burned seven lights.

One by one, six went dark.

Only the first remained.

Red.

Warm.

Alive.

A voice—not Sera’s, not Orison’s, not mine exactly—spoke from everywhere and nowhere.

Unison Life begins with the heart.

Then something moved between the gravestones.

A figure.

Me.

Not me.

A man with my face stood beneath the red light, older and colder, wearing a dark coat soaked with rain that fell upward from his shoulders into the sky.

He smiled.

“You’re late,” he said.

I tried to answer, but my mouth filled with dirt.

Then the city cracked open beneath me.

I woke screaming.

This time, my voice worked perfectly.

Alarms burst through the chamber.

The restraints tightened.

My back arched against the table. Every nerve in my body fired at once, and for one magnificent second I became a symphony of bad decisions.

Hands moved beyond the glass.

Sera shouted something.

Doctor Orison’s voice cut through the noise.

“Do not sedate him!”

“His neural load is exceeding threshold!”

“Let him surface!”

“He’s rejecting the anchor!”

“He is not rejecting it,” Orison snapped. “He is remembering around it.”

That sounded important.

I would have appreciated it more if my skull had not been trying to become weather.

The red light above me brightened.

Only the red one.

The others dimmed.

I felt my heart slow.

Not because the machines controlled it.

Because something inside me chose to listen.

Sera’s voice reached me through the alarms.

“Michael. Come back.”

Come back.

As if I had somewhere else to go.

As if this had happened before.

As if she had stood beside other tables, other bodies, other versions of me, and begged the same name out of the dark.

I turned my head toward her voice.

The vision receded.

The chamber returned.

Glass.

Machines.

Seven lights.

Sera.

Her face had changed. Not much. But something had slipped. Some practiced wall had cracked.

She looked terrified.

Not of me.

For me.

That mattered.

I did not know why yet, but it mattered.

I breathed.

Once.

Twice.

The alarms staggered down.

Doctor Orison watched the readouts with a reverence that made me uncomfortable.

Bram had moved closer to the chamber door, weapon lowered but ready.

“Was that normal?” I asked.

My voice shook.

Nobody answered fast enough.

I closed my eyes.

“Wonderful.”

Doctor Orison entered a command. The restraints loosened by a fraction.

Not open.

Just less cruel.

“Michael,” he said, “what did you see?”

I laughed without humor.

“A city.”

Sera’s face went pale.

Doctor Orison leaned forward.

“Describe it.”

“No.”

His brows drew together.

“You need to tell us.”

“I need several things. Pants. Water. An explanation. Possibly a lawyer. Breakfast is climbing the list.”

“This is serious.”

“I woke up strapped to a table under a chandelier of science sins after being dead for nine years and apparently twenty-seven times. I assumed serious was included.”

Bram made a sound.

It might have been approval.

Or indigestion.

Doctor Orison’s gaze sharpened.

“You said city. Did you see Novum Vey?”

“I don’t know what Novum Vey looks like.”

Sera’s voice was quiet.

“It was not Novum Vey.”

We all looked at her.

She immediately seemed to regret speaking.

Doctor Orison turned slowly.

“Sera.”

She kept her eyes on me.

“You’ve described it before,” she said.

I stared at her.

“When?”

Her answer was barely more than breath.

“Every time.”

The room tilted.

I wanted to sit up, but my body had filed a formal objection.

Every time.

Not one death-state vision.

Not an isolated hallucination.

A recurring place.

A place that waited for me.

A place with my face inside it.

I looked at the archive drawers again, each one bearing my name like evidence.

“How many of me remember it?”

No one spoke.

I smiled weakly.

“Ah. That many.”

Doctor Orison exhaled through his nose.

“There are aspects of your reanimation history that must be introduced carefully.”

“No. There are aspects of my reanimation history you would prefer to introduce carefully because panic makes patients inconvenient.”

Bram said, “He is not wrong.”

Doctor Orison shot him a look.

Bram remained professionally unbothered.

Sera stepped toward the chamber door.

“Let me in.”

“No,” Doctor Orison said.

“Cael.”

“His emotional response to you is unstable.”

“His emotional response to everything is unstable. He just woke up inside a glass coffin with branding.”

I appreciated that.

Deeply.

“Branding?” I asked.

Sera pointed upward.

With effort, I followed her gesture.

Etched into the metal ring around the seven lights were words I had not noticed before.

THE LAZARENE REANIMATION PROCESS
CONTINUITY DIRECTORATE
SUBJECT: FREEMAN, MICHAEL
CYCLE: 027

There it was again.

Subject.

I had never hated a word so quickly.

“Do not call me that,” I said.

Doctor Orison looked back at me.

“What?”

“Subject.”

“It is a designation.”

“It is a leash with better typography.”

His mouth tightened.

Sera’s eyes flashed with something like pride.

Bram muttered, “Definitely awake.”

I tugged my wrist again.

“Open the restraints.”

“No,” Doctor Orison said.

I looked at Sera.

She hesitated.

That hurt more than it should have.

“You too?”

Her face changed.

“Michael—”

“You know me?”

“Yes.”

“You care whether I panic?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to trust you?”

Her silence answered before she could.

There was a crack in her composure now. Not dramatic. Sera Veylin did not appear to be a woman who shattered loudly. She seemed like the kind of person who broke inward, repaired the damage with wire and discipline, then returned to work because grief did not submit proper leave forms.

“I want you alive,” she said.

The words landed strangely.

Not safe.

Not calm.

Not cooperative.

Alive.

As if that were harder than it sounded.

I looked at Doctor Orison.

“And you?”

He did not blink.

“I want you whole.”

The word stirred something in me.

Whole.

Not alive.

Not functional.

Whole.

The red light above me softened.

For the first time since waking, my body stopped fighting the table.

Not because I trusted them.

Trust is not a thing a man produces on command, especially when surrounded by archives of himself.

But because exhaustion arrived like a government agency and took jurisdiction.

My head sank back.

I stared up at the lights.

“Am I?”

Doctor Orison’s voice was very quiet.

“No.”

Honest.

Cruel.

Necessary.

I closed my eyes.

Sera said, “But you can be.”

There it was.

Hope.

Small.

Uninvited.

I was suspicious of it immediately.

Hope has terrible timing. It shows up in ruined rooms wearing clean shoes.

“How?” I asked.

Doctor Orison did not answer.

Sera did.

“One part at a time.”

The red light pulsed.

Heart.

The word formed in me without sound.

Heart.

I saw rain again. Her hand. Blood. A ring on a chain. A door closing. My own voice saying something I could not hear.

Then Sera leaned closer to the glass and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The words froze me.

Not because she said them now.

Because I remembered them from the vision.

From the metal floor.

From the blood in my mouth.

From the moment before whatever death had taken first.

My eyes opened.

Sera saw recognition before I understood it.

Her face went still.

I breathed her name.

“Sera.”

“Yes?”

“What did you do?”

The room changed.

Not physically.

The lights did not explode. The machines did not fail. Bram did not raise his weapon. Doctor Orison did not shout for sedation. The glass did not crack.

But every living person beyond that chamber reacted as though something had just entered with a knife.

Sera’s hand slid away from the glass.

Doctor Orison said, “Michael, that memory is not stable.”

I ignored him.

My heart hammered once.

Hard.

Original or not, it seemed to have opinions.

“What did you do?” I asked again.

Sera looked at me with the unbearable expression of someone who had rehearsed a thousand explanations and trusted none of them.

“I saved you,” she said.

A tear fell before she could stop it.

“Or I killed you.”

The red light above me burned brighter.

My chest filled with grief that had no story yet.

And somewhere beneath the city, beneath the table, beneath the archive drawers where twenty-six dead versions of me waited in black gel and patient silence, something answered my heartbeat.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Like a knock from the other side of death.

Doctor Orison whispered, “It’s beginning.”

I stared at Sera through the glass.

The woman I did not remember.

The woman my heart had found first.

The woman who had buried me.

The woman who had maybe put me in the grave.

I wanted to hate her.

I wanted to trust her.

Mostly, with the kind of magnificent stupidity only the newly resurrected can manage, I wanted breakfast.

But beneath all of that, deeper than pain, sharper than fear, older than memory, one truth moved inside me:

I had not come back empty.

I had come back missing someone.

And she was standing right in front of me.