Jack crossed the threshold. Caleo shut the kitchen door and dropped the wooden bar into its brackets before he asked another question.
The bakery worked around them. Trays rang against the long table in the front room, oven doors opened and closed, and an employee called that the honey loaves were ready to turn. The afternoon heat had settled thickly beneath the rafters. Jack's trousers were no longer transparent, but they had dried against him in hard pale creases. His sandals left damp marks on the kitchen tiles.
Mrs. Gowrie stood at the flour table with both forearms sunk in dough. She studied Jack's wet hair and the reopened bandage around his palm and did not waste time asking whether he was well.
"Caleo, take him upstairs. There's broth left from dinner in the small pot. Mara can mind the back door."
"Mrs. Gowrie, I can still hear you," a woman called from beyond the ovens.
"Then I needn't repeat myself."
Caleo took the pot from the cooler edge of the stove, found a half loaf beneath a cloth, and put both on a tray. He moved quickly without the bright disorder Jack remembered from their first day together. No dramatic sweep of the cloak, no complaint about being made to carry respectable crockery. He handed Jack the bread because it was the lightest thing and led him up the narrow stairs.
Jack followed because Caleo had made following easy.
The room above the bakery had not changed. The wide bed still consumed most of it. Stones, carving tools, and folded scraps of paper crowded the desk. A shirt Caleo seldom wore hung from one bedpost, and the patched shorts Jack had borrowed lay folded at the foot of the bed as if Caleo had expected to find some use for them again.
Caleo set down the tray and pulled the blanket free.
"Those clothes have to come off."
Jack put the loaf beside the broth. His fingers would not manage the wet knot at his waist. The cloth had tightened as it dried, and every tug pulled the fabric across skin already rubbed raw by the walk. Caleo waited until Jack stopped trying.
"May I?"
Jack lifted his hands.
Caleo worked the knot apart and loosened the trousers without touching the skin beneath. Jack pushed them down. The damp cloth resisted at his knees and came free inside out, taking the loosened bandage from his palm with it. His vest followed. He stood naked beside the bed while Caleo gathered the uniform into a heap.
There was no pleasure in being seen this time. The fountain had taken that from him for the afternoon. Red bands marked both heels above the sandal straps. One knee was scraped. Matching bruises lay behind both knees where Dorian had shoved him against the bedframe. The bruise at his hip had darkened until it surrounded the nearly healed wound like spilled ink, and his open palm had left three diluted spots of blood on the trousers.
Caleo inspected each injury and then Jack's face.
"Sit down."
Jack sat. Caleo wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, knelt to unfasten the sandals, and carried everything wet to the wash basin. When he returned, he brought a clean cloth, a cup of water, and the narrow jar that had smelled of crushed leaves when Caleo used it on Jack's head.
He cleaned the palm first. The water stung. Jack watched flour dust along Caleo's forearm turn to paste where the wet cloth touched him.
"What happened?" Caleo asked.
Jack had spent the walk refusing to answer that question. In the room above the bakery, with his clothes soaking in the same basin that had held the road dirt days earlier, he found too many answers.
"A boy named Dorian knew me."
Caleo spread salve over the torn blister. "From before the road?"
"He knew this body. The other Jack."
Caleo's hand paused. Not for long. He folded clean linen over Jack's palm and began wrapping it.
"What did he do?"
Jack told him about the memory beneath the arch and recognizing Dorian as the boy who had been there. He told him that Dorian expected the old relationship to continue and could not understand why Jack sat with Finn, Edric, and Kai now.
"He said we were always having quick fucks. That I was always willing."
Caleo tied the bandage. His eyes remained on the knot. "Were you?"
"I don't know. He says we were. The memory I have makes it seem possible."
"That isn't what I meant. Yesterday."
Jack closed the blanket around his waist. "At first. I kissed him. I let him open my trousers. I wanted his mouth on me, and I liked it."
Caleo sat back on his heels.
"Then he tried to turn me over. I said no. He went back to sucking me, and I thought he had accepted it, but he tried again and put his thumb into this." Jack touched the bruise at his hip. "I told him to stop. He didn't."
The bakery continued below them. Someone laughed in the front room. A peel scraped beneath a row of loaves, and the oven gave a low iron complaint as its door closed.
"I put him through the doorway," Jack said. "He was on the floor with his trousers around his legs. I could stop him, so I did."
Caleo's attention moved from the bruise to Jack's face. "Good."
The word carried no surprise that Jack had managed it and no demand that he turn what happened into something larger.
"Three boys saw us in the hallway," Jack continued. "Today Dorian brought Akira and another boy from their table. They threw me in the fountain, used the same slur he had used for Finn, and called us even. I went to Field Practical in the wet uniform and failed the receiving ward while somebody counted each attempt. Seven times. Maybe eight. I made nothing."
Caleo rose and poured broth into a bowl. He did not say the lesson was unfair or invent a kind of magic Jack might secretly possess. He tore bread into the broth, pushed the bowl into Jack's hands, and sat beside him on the bed.
"Eat before it gets cold."
Jack took one mouthful. The broth tasted of onion, pepper, and the brown crust from the bottom of the pot. His stomach tightened around it before accepting it.
"Dorian said this body remembered what it was for."
Caleo tore a piece from the remaining loaf but did not eat it. Crumbs gathered in his palm while he waited for Jack to decide which part came next.
"The sword knew," Jack said. "When Master Draek put it in my hand, I knew how to use it. I knew how to hurt Kai after the bout was already won. The staff knows too. It knows a hundred things I don't. Then Dorian put his mouth on me and the body knew him. It liked him."
"You liked what he was doing."
"How can you tell the difference?"
Caleo lowered his eyes to the bread between his fingers.
"I can't."
The admission made the room less safe and more honest.
Jack set the bowl on his knee. "Dorian acted as if he had used me that way whenever he wanted. Maybe he had. Maybe this body liked being fucked. Maybe the other Jack got fucked often and was good at it. Dorian certainly thinks so."
His voice had gone bitter. The bitterness was his; Jack knew that much because it had lived in him before the road.
"I don't care if he slept with everyone in Thornfield," he continued. "I care that I don't know whether I did. I don't know whether I want boys because he did. I don't know if I wanted Dorian, or if his hands found something this body remembered and I followed it."
Caleo's bare foot moved against the floorboards. "He never met me."
Jack turned toward him.
"The other Jack," Caleo said. "He never met me. Whatever happened in this room the morning you left was new to both of us."
That did not answer Dorian. It did not answer the memory under the arch or the desire that had moved through Jack before he understood its source. It gave him one thing the dead boy could not have chosen first.
"No," Jack said. "He never met you."
Caleo ate the piece of bread at last. He waited while Jack managed another spoonful of broth.
"Was he cruel?" Jack asked.
"The Drake boy?"
"Me. Him. Whichever one people mean when they look at my face."
Caleo leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. "People in Briartown know the Drakes. They know there was a young one who came through and made trouble. I never met him."
"What kind of trouble?"
"I heard stories. Drunk. Fights. People paid afterward so the trouble would become a misunderstanding. Auntie told me not to repeat gossip about nobles unless I wanted to spend my life proving which words were mine."
Jack thought of the sword moving past Kai's surrender. Dorian's contempt for the lower table had sounded practiced, as if Jack had once shared it. The Academy gave him emeralds, private lodging, and an allowance large enough to surprise a cashier. Somewhere outside Thornfield, Eomer Drake had arranged all of it for a nephew Jack could not remember being.
"What if he is still in here?" Jack asked.
Caleo did not answer quickly, so Jack continued. "Not talking. Not thinking where I can hear him. Just leaving things behind. The sword. Dorian. People who hate this face. What if the dead boy is using my hands to go on making everyone's life hell?"
Caleo turned the uneaten end of the loaf between his hands. He named Mrs. Tern's repaired hinge, the staff Jack had chosen over the sword, and Dorian going through the doorway when he refused to stop. He did not ask who had done those things. Jack had already claimed each one while telling the story.
"I don't know if part of him is in there," Caleo said. "I know he isn't the only one."
The answer left room for the thing Jack feared. Caleo did not promise that the cruel reflexes would vanish or that every desire could be sorted into two separate piles. He only refused to let the dead boy own everything the body did now.
Jack stared into the broth. A skin had begun forming across the surface.
"The cart story wasn't true," he said.
Caleo became still beside him.
"The cart was real. The road wasn't. Not this road."
Jack waited for a question. Caleo made none.
"Where I came from, we called it a car. Metal, glass, an engine inside. No horses. I was walking home from school when one came off the road and killed me. Then I woke naked here, in a body that had already been cut open and thrown away."
Caleo's fingers crushed the soft center of the loaf. He repeated the word died under his breath, neither denying it nor pretending to understand.
"There wasn't anything between. No voice. No choice. I woke with his wounds and his cock and that ring locked around it. I had pieces of his language in my head. Thornfield. Eomer. Drake. Even Jack." Jack pressed the bandaged hand against his knee. "His name was Jack Drake. My name was already Jack. I didn't even get a clean name to keep us apart."
The truth changed Caleo's attention. He studied Jack's face as if the familiar arrangement had become difficult to read, but he did not move away.
"Earth," Jack said. "That was the world. Or the planet. I don't know how to explain it without sounding insane. There was no real magic. No Thornfield. No Briartown. I had a phone, electric lights, cars, school. I was eighteen there too."
"Your language in the forest."
"English. You couldn't understand me because this mouth hadn't remembered how to speak yours yet."
Caleo put the crushed bread on the tray. "Why tell me about the cart at all?"
"Because you were a stranger, and if you decided I was mad or dangerous, I had nothing. The lie kept the part you could see."
"And now?"
Beneath the blanket lay the body Caleo had already seen, washed, desired, and touched. The long knees remained Jack's shape beneath the wool. The bandaged hand holding the bowl belonged to the boy from Earth and the boy trained with a sword. Jack had no seam to point at.
"Now you're the first person I trust enough to tell the part nobody can see."
Caleo's shoulder rested against his. "I believe you."
Jack had expected disbelief badly enough that the absence of it left him unsteady.
"Why?"
"Because I watched wounds close that should not have closed, and I heard a language nobody here knew." Caleo drew one knee onto the bed and faced him more fully. "I don't understand it. I don't know what else makes those things fit."
Jack tried to laugh. His throat made the beginning of the sound and closed around it.
"I was almost finished with school," he said.
The sentence had not belonged to this part of the account. It arrived anyway.
"Graduation was weeks away. I had an apprenticeship waiting. I was good with my hands before I had these hands. Not swords or magic. Real things. Hinges. Wiring. Engines, eventually. I was going to learn properly."
His mother had sent a message that afternoon asking what he wanted for dinner. His father had checked the oil in the car on Sunday and made Jack check it again while he watched. His friends had been arguing over where to meet that weekend, filling the group chat faster than Jack could read while he walked.
"They know I'm dead," Jack said.
Caleo said nothing.
"Someone saw the car. There would have been an ambulance. Police. My parents would have had to go somewhere and identify me." The bowl trembled in Jack's hands. Caleo took it before broth spilled across the blanket. "They've probably buried me."
The room blurred. Jack pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and saw the green traffic light again.
"My friends would have kept writing until somebody told them. One of them would make a bad joke because he wouldn't know what else to do. My mother would have to answer people asking what happened. My father would go quiet and start fixing things that weren't broken."
His breath caught. He dragged it in, but the next one caught in the same place.
"My dog sleeps across the doorway. Every night. You have to step over him if you want to leave, and he opens one eye to make sure it's you. He would have waited at the door when school let out. He doesn't know what dead means. He only knows I stopped coming home."
The first sob bent Jack forward. He put one hand over his mouth, but the sound broke around it and brought another behind it. The blanket slipped from one shoulder. Caleo took the empty bowl from the bed before Jack struck it with his knee, set it on the floor, and closed both arms around him.
Jack folded into the hold. He caught a fistful of Caleo's bare back beneath the cloak and clung hard enough to feel each breath move through him.
"I had a whole life," Jack said against Caleo's shoulder. "I wasn't finished with it."
Caleo held him tighter.
"There are people here." Jack's words broke between breaths. "That doesn't give the other life back. It doesn't make me less dead there."
No one told him to be grateful for what he had found. No one promised that one group of people could replace another. Caleo braced one hand between Jack's shoulder blades and let the grief come without giving it a better purpose.
Jack cried until his throat hurt and the flour on Caleo's skin had turned damp beneath his face. At some point Mrs. Gowrie climbed the stairs. She knocked once, set a covered plate outside the door, and went down again without entering.
When Jack could breathe without choking, he remained bent against Caleo. Neither of them pretended he had finished.
"What if I make your life hell too?" Jack asked.
Caleo's hand moved once along his back. "You probably will sometimes."
Jack lifted his head.
"People do," Caleo said. His eyes were red although Jack had not felt him cry. "You repaired a chair, ate Auntie's food, made a mess of my bed, and went away after promising to come back. Then you came back. That is what you've done to my life so far."
"We made the mess together."
"Most of it."
The correction was small and stupid. Jack laughed into the wet place his face had made on Caleo's shoulder. The laugh hurt, but it belonged entirely to the room.
Evening gathered outside the window. The bakery lamps came on below, gold-white rather than blue, and their light moved across the ceiling whenever someone crossed the yard.
Jack loosened his hand from Caleo's back. His fingers had left pale marks in the sun-browned skin.
"Can I stay tonight?"
Caleo reached down, caught the blanket where it had fallen, and pulled it around both of them.
"Yes," he said. "Stay."