I think most people carry an image of themselves that’s out of date. Younger, healthier, still able to fit in those pants, things like that. Me, I was a 26-year-old pizza guy who’d been chasing 20-year-old college girls until he caught the wrong one and ended up here. Twelve years ago.

“It’s not like we own a mirror, but I see my reflection sometimes, and I look older, more like my dad.”

“Because you know you’re supposed to. You came from a place where it happened to everyone, so you expect it. I didn’t, so I don’t. And you’re not.”

I carefully pushed her away, just enough to look in her eyes. She believed it, and it scared her a little.

“What if it’s not here being there, but me being here? How I got here. How I… died.”

I hadn’t thought about her much since Angel arrived, but she’d been very focused on my death, even if she’d gotten the date wrong. And she’d said she brought me back.

“I don’t think she has that kind of power. We’re not, well, for that, and it’s always bothered me about your story. Whisking a man away at the moment of his death to hump him back to life as a hero, like some kind of slutty valkyrie? Not a chance; she probably got that story out of a comic book.”

Angel was always trying to make our exploration more effective, so it surprised me one day when she said, “I think we need to go back.”

We’d been together for about two years, moving steadily away from the cave in a widening spiral, learning about our world and each other. I stopped picking fruit and gave her my full attention.

“I think we’re looking for the wrong thing. Or the right thing in the wrong way.”

“I tried smoke signals once; nobody turned up.”

My weak joke earned me an expected weak smile and an unexpected big hug, which lasted long enough to remind me that she was growing up fast. If at ten she’d looked twelve, at twelve she looked fifteen, but I was saved from further fifteen-will-get-you-twenty thoughts by her next words.

“I don’t think this world is real. I think it’s part of there.”

“I don’t understand. If we’re there, how come you’re getting older?”

“How come you’re not?”

Sometimes, late at night, comforting each other, I told her about my life, and she told me about there.

How much of it was metaphor, and how much was real, I never understood. It was hard for her to put it into words, but somehow important to try. She talked about a room full of doors full of rooms, where the way back was never the way you’d come, and once said it was less a place than a “collection of layered experiences”, most of them imperceptible to a merely human mind.

Angel counted herself among the merely human, something I suspected wasn’t completely true. The others like her, the ones she wasn’t sure weren’t her future selves, were capable of navigating between the layers of there. I was pretty sure she’d done it herself at least once, escaping to here, but I never asked.

I didn’t care what she was, or might have been, or could become. She was my friend, my partner, my damsel-out-of-distress, my anchor. I believed she had the power to leave, but chose to stay.

I was happy, maybe for the first time. I think she was, too.

It was good, not being alone. The dynamics were a little weird at first, with Angel being older and younger, more stable and more vulnerable, but we fit somehow. As partners, I mean, not physically. I’d be lying if I said that I never desired her as the woman she was rapidly growing into, but I never made a pass, and she never teased. We often slept together for warmth or comfort, touching-but-not-that-way as she’d put it, but while it occasionally came up, she never reacted to its presence.

Partners. Friends. Explorers in a world that didn’t seem to have anyone for me to save, or anything to save them from. A world that she didn’t know any more about than I did.

On the plus side, she was awesome at catching rabbits, which significantly reduced the amount of bugs in my diet. I was the better cook, which surprised us both, once we had a variety of things to cook. She was smarter and better educated, filled with ideas for how to improve our lives and extend the reach of our exploration together.

Always together. By unspoken agreement, we never went off on our own, never went out of earshot.

“Angel.”

She jerked in surprise, then relaxed in my arms. “It’s… not entirely appropriate. Are you sure?”

“It was either that or Anchor.”

She laughed and pulled away slightly, staring at me with those older-than-she-looks eyes, understanding what I wasn’t saying. A tiny smile grew into a big one, and we finally met.

“Hello, Jack; I’m Angel. My name is Angel.”

“Hi, Angel. How do you feel about eating bugs?”

“Bugs?”

“Beetles and crayfish, mostly. Sorry, I’ve been away for a while, so the larder’s bare, and I usually have terrible luck catching rabbits.”

“This is a terrible resort and I shall be leaving a scathing review.”

I hugged her. She needed it.

She clung to me fiercely, and something shifted inside. She wasn’t the wrong redhead any more, not an underage replacement for the one I’d spent so much time wanting to screw or strangle or both. Suddenly I hated there, whatever it was, and whoever had made her live nameless and afraid. I wanted to destroy what had hurt her, protect her from being hurt again, and…

Huh. I wanted to be a hero. For the first time, maybe really the first time, it wasn’t about me.

Ji, ta, shizen. A phrase that mattered to my cranky old sensei, that I’d just memorized to keep him teaching me new things. Self, others, nature. Caring about more than yourself. Caring for more than yourself.

Turns out I’d been alone long before I got here.

I’d thought about this a lot over the years. “The three weeks?”

“Yeah. It’s not like there are rules, but she’s not stupid. She must have snagged you on the right day, then went back to set you up the night before, and somehow missed. Like something changed between A and B, or from your viewpoint B and A, and it threw off her aim.”

I tried to wrap my head around the idea that she’d slept with me before I slept with her, but found myself more focused on the girl beside me. “You’re not really twelve, are you?”

“Ten, technically; we’re early bloomers. But we don’t really change when we’re there.”

She shivered a bit as she said that, and I caught the implication: she’d been ten years old for a very long time, in a place she was glad to be away from. There was a lot more I wanted to ask her, but I changed the subject to try to lighten the mood.

“I’m Jack, by the way. And you’re…?”

She shrank inside her furs, suddenly looking lost and very, very young, and in a tear-stained whisper I could barely hear, begged, “please… give me a name”.

Well, that hadn’t worked.

Everything started spinning as I unpacked her awkward sentence, and I stared in shock. It was her face. Her voice, her hair, her freckles, her everything-that-was-still-growing.

“You… she… how does that even work?!”

“We’re complicated. I don’t really understand it very well myself, but I think there are about a dozen of us. It varies from time to time, and I’m certain that at least two of the ones I’ve known were the same person at different ages, but I don’t know if they were also her, or me, or…”

She shrugged apologetically. Oddly enough, that gesture gave me the confidence to say, “you’re not her; you’re… more grown up.”

I’d surprised a smile out of her. “Thanks. When I say it in my head, it sounds like wishful thinking, but for what it’s worth, you’ve seen us both from the outside, without all the complications.”

“Can you at least tell me if it was all bullshit? I know this is isn’t the world I’m from, but did I really die there, and am I really supposed to become some kind of hero and save this world?”

She closed her eyes and sighed, and when she opened them again she looked much, much older. “I’m sorry, but yeah, it’s probably true, at least in broad strokes. It’s hard to move between worlds. Moving someone else must have been a lot harder, even with a solid connection, and she wouldn’t have tried something like that without a good reason.”

“And I think she screwed up.”