Chapter Text
The light hit her all at once.
For a half second, no more than that, her body made a perfectly ordinary mistake. The kind it had made a hundred times before. The kind that belonged to automatic doors and polished tile and the brief humiliation of stepping out of a grocery store into unfiltered summer.
Too bright, she thought distantly, blinking hard as her eyes watered. She lifted a hand, already annoyed with herself. She should have remembered the sunglasses. She always forgot the sunglasses.
The heat didn’t behave the way it should have.
It wasn’t layered with asphalt or humming with engines. It didn’t carry the soft roar of traffic or the chatter of people behind her. It sat on her skin with a dry, deliberate weight, like it had been placed there on purpose. The air moved, not pushed by passing bodies or machines, but by wind that had traveled some distance before finding her.
The soundscape was wrong.
She opened her eyes again, slower this time.
There was no parking lot. No sliding glass doors yawning shut behind her. No strip mall, no faded flyers, no gum-blackened concrete.
Instead, the world stretched.
Wooden buildings crouched low against a sky too wide to be accidental. Fences threw short, sharp shadows. Cloth awnings snapped lazily in the breeze. The ground beneath her feet was dust-packed earth, scuffed and honest, marked by traffic that had nothing to do with tires.
Recognition landed before disbelief had time to warm up.
Sandrock.
Not as a symbol. Not as a vague impression. As a place.
The slope of the path was right. The way the buildings leaned into each other for shade was right. Even the color: sun-bleached reds and browns softened by age, was exactly what it should have been. She could have walked it blindfolded and still known where she was by the way the air changed near the open spaces.
Her breath caught, then steadied.
All right, she thought. All right.
If this wasn’t a dream—and it didn’t have the slippery quality of one—then there were only so many explanations available. She ran through them quickly, efficiently, the way she always did when something didn’t make sense.
Not dead. She felt far too solid for that. Not asleep; dreams didn’t hold temperature this consistently.
Which left…
A corner of her mind supplied the word with wry, almost offended clarity.
Isekai.
The thought was so absurd she nearly laughed. Of all the ridiculous narrative containers to end up in. She’d spent years joking about it, rolling her eyes at the trope, and now here she was, standing in the dust of a desert town she knew better than some real cities she’d lived in.
“If this is what happened,” she thought dryly, “I’d like to file a complaint about the onboarding process.”
The humor steadied her. Gave her something to lean on.
Because if this was Sandrock, then there were rules. And if there were rules, there was a role.
The conclusion arrived fully formed, as if it had been waiting.
She was the Builder.
Of course she was. That was the only configuration that made sense. The Builder moved freely. The Builder arrived with knowledge and survived the gaps between cause and effect. The Builder was allowed to be early, allowed to be wrong, allowed to learn without paying the full price.
Her shoulders loosened a fraction. The world, for all its impossibility, slotted into something survivable.
She didn’t stand there gawking. Builders didn’t do that.
She oriented herself instead, eyes already tracking the flow of the town. She knew where problems clustered. She knew where people gathered when something needed doing. She took a few steps forward, expecting—without quite articulating it—to feel the familiar resistance give way. A pause. A cue. The subtle shift that said: this is you now.
Nothing happened.
No one turned. No one looked up with relief or expectation. The town breathed around her, unconcerned.
That was… odd.
She adjusted course toward the workshop area. If she was needed, it would be there. It always was. The logic of the place demanded it.
The logic did not respond.
She slowed, unease threading through the certainty she’d been leaning on. Not fear yet. Just friction. Like a door that should have opened and didn’t.
Then she saw her.
Lucy was crossing the yard, sleeves rolled, posture loose in the way of someone already deep into the rhythm of work. There was dust on her boots and purpose in her stride. She carried a bundle of materials under one arm, her voice easy and unforced.
Recognition hit again, sharper this time.
Lucy.
Not just a Lucy. Her Lucy.
The Builder she had designed. The one she’d shaped down to the smallest details. The one who, in retrospect, she’d made look a little too much like herself—same general build, same stubborn line to the shoulders, the familiar echo of her own face softened and idealized.
She’d noticed it back then and laughed it off. Of course you make your protagonist look like you.
Everyone does.
Standing here, watching Lucy move with unthinking confidence through a world that responded to her, the joke curdled.
Lucy did not flicker. She did not hesitate. She did not feel like a placeholder waiting to be overwritten.
Lucy existed.
Already here. Already working. Already occupying the role the world had quietly refused to hand over.
The wrongness of it wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t tear or scream. It simply… settled.
Lucy passed close enough that their shadows brushed. She glanced over—not with recognition, not with narrative weight, but with the polite, fleeting awareness reserved for strangers who might need to be navigated around.
“Sorry!” Lucy said automatically and cheerfully, shifting her path by a hair’s breadth so they didn’t collide. Then she was past her, attention already elsewhere, the town reattaching itself to her presence as naturally as breath.
The world did not pause.
Something inside the newcomer did.
Relief came first, sharp and surprising. Relief that the town was intact. That the machinery of it all was running. That nothing had broken just because she was here.
Then the dread crept in, slower and heavier.
If Lucy was the Builder—her Lucy—then there was no space left in the story for another one. No quiet immunity. No guarantee that knowing what was supposed to happen would keep her safe while it did.
She stood there a moment longer than anyone else would have, suddenly aware of her own stillness. Of how conspicuous it was to do nothing in a place that valued doing.
She was in Sandrock.
She knew this place.
But the story did not know her.
And that meant, she realized, with a small, tightening breath, that whatever happened next would happen to her without permission.