Ethan woke to the sound of a rooster and the smell of smoke.

  For three disoriented seconds he didn't know where he was. The ceiling above him was rough timber, dark with years of cooking soot, low enough that he could have touched it from where he lay. Grey morning light came through gaps in the wooden walls in thin, slanted bars. His body was wrapped in a coarse blanket that smelled of straw and someone else's sweat, and beneath him was a thin mat laid over packed earth.

  Then the previous day assembled itself in his mind, and the disorientation became something worse, because he knew exactly where he was and the knowing didn't help.

  He sat up. His right elbow flared with pain where it had struck the root, the joint stiff and swollen beneath his sleeve. Flexing it carefully, testing the range, he found nothing broken, but the bruise would be deep and slow to fade.

  The room was small, partitioned from the rest of the house by a wooden screen that didn't quite reach the ceiling. Through the gaps came movement, the soft scrape of a pot being moved, the pop and hiss of a fire being fed. Someone was already up. Given the light, someone had been up for hours.

  His boots were where he'd left them, beside the mat. His jacket was folded beneath his head. A habit older than thought made him check his pockets, the inventory of a man whose possessions were now the sum total of his connection to a world that might not exist anymore. Notebook, two pens, wallet, dead phone, analog watch. The watch read 5:47, though he had no way to know if it was still keeping accurate time. Winding it was a small ritual, and small rituals were all he had.

  Boots on, he stood, ducking under a beam, and pushed the screen aside.

  The main room of Jirō's house was larger than the sleeping area but still modest by any standard Ethan had known. A cooking fire burned in a sunken hearth at the room's center, the smoke rising through a gap in the thatch above. A woman knelt beside the hearth, stirring something in an iron pot. She was perhaps fifty, thin-faced and sharp-eyed, with grey streaked through her hair. She looked up when Ethan appeared and her expression communicated a complete thought without a single word: *So this is the problem my nephew has brought into our house.*

  Masa. Jirō's aunt, the woman Tomoe had been sent to find the night before.

  She pointed at a spot near the hearth. Ethan sat. She ladled rice porridge into a wooden bowl and set it before him, then placed a cup of water beside it. The porridge was plain, unseasoned, and the best meal of his life. He ate slowly, conscious of her watching him, and tried to make his chopstick grip look less foreign than it was. He'd eaten with chopsticks a thousand times. These were thicker and rougher than any he'd used, carved from a single piece of bamboo, and his stiff elbow made the familiar motion clumsy.

  Masa said nothing. She returned to her work with the steady efficiency of a person who had decided to reserve judgment but wanted the accused to know that judgment was coming.

  Ethan was finishing the porridge when Jirō came through the doorway, bringing cold air and the smell of wet earth. He'd been outside already, and the mud on his sandals said he'd walked some distance. He exchanged a few words with his aunt, too low and fast for Ethan to follow, then crossed to the hearth and sat across from him.

  In the daylight, through the hearth smoke, Ethan studied the headman's face. The deep lines around his eyes and mouth looked different in the morning. Less like laugh lines and more like the marks left by years of squinting into weather and difficult decisions. His three-fingered left hand rested on his knee, relaxed, the stumps of the missing fingers so fully healed they looked like they'd always been that way.

  Jirō studied him back. Neither of them rushed.

  "You said you came from the gate," Jirō said at last. He spoke with the same careful deliberation as the night before, pitching his dialect toward something Ethan could parse. "The shrine on the hill. The one with the carvings on the stone."

  "Yes."

  "Tell me what happened. Everything."

  Ethan considered how to answer. The truth was impossible, but everything short of the truth was a lie, and lies had a way of collapsing at the worst possible moment. He was in this man's house, eating this man's rice, alive because this man had chosen to intervene with three armed villagers. The least he owed Jirō was honesty, even if honesty sounded like madness.

  "I was at the gate during a storm," he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care, reaching for the oldest and simplest constructions his academic Japanese could produce. "Lightning struck the stone. The air between the pillars opened. I walked through. When I came out, I was on the hillside above your valley."

  Jirō's expression didn't change. He waited.

  "Where I come from," Ethan said, "the gate is very old. A ruin. The shrine around it is gone. There is a city in the valley below, and the mountains are covered in roads." He paused. "Where I come from is very far away. Not in distance."

  The fire crackled. Masa had stopped stirring.

  Jirō was quiet for a long time. He picked up a stick from beside the hearth and adjusted a log in the fire, sending a spiral of sparks upward through the smoke hole. The gesture had the feel of something habitual, a way of occupying his hands while his mind worked.

  "My grandmother," he said finally, "told me a story when I was young. She said that in her grandmother's time, a man appeared at the shrine during a great storm. A man who spoke strangely and wore strange things and did not belong to any lord. The village took him in. He lived among them for many years. He knew things he should not have known, and he was kind, and when he died they buried him near the shrine because he asked them to."

  Ethan's hands went still around the bowl.

  "My grandmother said the gate was a door between worlds," Jirō continued. "She said the gods made it during the war in heaven, and sometimes it opens, and sometimes things pass through. She said the man from the storm was proof." He set down the stick. "I thought it was a story for children. Most of the village thinks the same. The shrine is a place to leave offerings and avoid at night, nothing more."

  "But you kept the story."

  Jirō looked at him. "I keep everything. That is what a headman does."

  Masa placed a cup of water beside Jirō without being asked. He drank. The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people recalibrating what they understood about each other, about the world, about what was and was not possible on a spring morning in a valley between mountains.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "The men who found you last night," Jirō said. "Takeshi and the others. They will talk. They have already talked. By midday, everyone in this village will know that a stranger came from the gate, and by tomorrow, the villages downstream will know, and within a week, the rumors will reach people I cannot control."

  "What people?"

  Jirō's jaw tightened. "This valley belongs to Lord Kasuga Nobutora. He holds these mountains for the Azai clan. He is not a man who hears rumors and ignores them. He is a man who hears rumors and sends riders."

  The name meant nothing to Ethan. He searched his mental catalog of Sengoku-era figures, the database of names and dates and alliances he'd spent twelve years building, and found nothing. A minor lord, then. A vassal operating below the level of historical record. The kind of man whose ambitions and cruelties were real enough to the people who lived under them but left no trace in the documents Ethan had studied in climate-controlled archives in Oregon.

  *You studied this era your entire career,* he thought. *And you don't know this man's name. You don't know any of their names. You know the warlords and the battles, and none of that matters here.*

  "What will he do?" Ethan asked.

  "He will want to know what you are. Where you come from. What you know." Jirō paused. "If he decides you are useful, he will take you. If he decides you are dangerous, he will kill you. If he cannot decide, he will take you and then kill you."

  The words were delivered without drama. They were facts, arranged in order of likelihood, by a man who dealt in facts because his village could not afford the luxury of hope.

  "How long do I have?"

  "Days. Perhaps a week, if the roads are bad." Jirō's eyes moved to the doorway, where the morning light was brightening. "You cannot stay in this house. You cannot walk freely in the village. If Kasuga's men come and find you sitting at my hearth, it is not only you who dies."

  Ethan set down the bowl. The porridge sat heavy in his stomach. "Where would I go?"

  "There is a woman," Jirō said, and something in his tone shifted, became more careful. "She tends the shrine. She lives there, near the gate, away from the village. She knows the shrine better than anyone alive. Better, maybe, than anyone has known it."

  "The shrine where I came through."

  "Yes." Jirō's three-fingered hand opened and closed on his knee. "Her name is Rei. She is..." He paused, searching for a word. "She is difficult. She does not welcome company. She will not be pleased that I am sending you to her."

  "Then why send me?"

  "Because she is the only person who may understand what happened to you. And because Kasuga's men will not go near the shrine. They are afraid of it." A thin smile crossed his face. "Soldiers are more superstitious than farmers. Farmers cannot afford to be afraid of their own land."

  From somewhere outside came the bright, carrying sound of Tomoe's voice, calling to someone across the yard. Jirō glanced toward the door with the particular expression of a parent who knows their child is about to complicate something.

  Tomoe appeared in the doorway a moment later, slightly out of breath, the perpetual dirt smudge now on her chin instead of her cheekbone. She saw Ethan and her face split into the gap-toothed grin he recognized from the night before.

  "He is still here," she said, as if this confirmed a private wager.

  "Tomoe." Jirō's voice carried the quiet weight of a man who had said his daughter's name in that tone ten thousand times and would say it ten thousand more. "Go check the south paddies. Tell Ichirō the water level is too high."

  "I checked them already. The level is fine."

  "Then check them again."

  The girl looked from her father to Ethan. The curiosity in her face was enormous, practically gravitational, and Ethan watched her weigh it against her father's tone. The tone won, but only barely. She retreated from the doorway with the exaggerated slowness of someone making sure everyone noticed her obedience.

  Jirō watched her go. The thin smile returned, briefer this time, tinged with worry.

  "My daughter talks," he said. "To everyone. About everything. She does not understand danger because she has never been hurt by it. I would like to keep it that way."

  "I won't put her at risk," Ethan said.

  "You already have." The words were not cruel. They were the simple arithmetic of a headman. A stranger in the village was a variable. Variables attracted attention. Attention, in this region, killed people. "Every hour you are here, the risk grows. For my family, for the village, for you."

  He stood. The conversation was over, and the decision had already been made, and Ethan understood that it had probably been made before Jirō walked through the door. The morning talk was not an interrogation. It was a headman making sure he was sending the right kind of problem to the right place.

  "I will take you to the shrine this evening, after dark," Jirō said. "Stay in this room. Do not go outside. My aunt will bring you food."

  He crossed to the doorway and paused, one hand on the frame.

  "The woman at the shrine," he said, without turning. "She will ask you questions I did not ask. Answer her honestly. She will know if you do not."

  Then he was gone, out into the bright morning, and Ethan was alone in the dim room with the fire and the smoke and Masa, who had resumed stirring the pot with the air of a woman who had seen many of her nephew's decisions and was reserving this one for later evaluation.

  Ethan took out his notebook and opened it to a blank page. His pen moved before his mind had fully organized the thought.

  *Day 2. Kaminari Village. Headman Jirō knows about the gate. Family story, at least two generations back. Another traveler, possibly. He's sending me to the shrine keeper tonight. Her name is Rei. She lives alone at the gate.*

  He paused, pen hovering.

  *Jirō is afraid. Not of me. Of what my being here will bring to his door. He's right to be.*

  He closed the notebook and sat by the fire, waiting for dark, while outside the walls the village moved through its morning, unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the stranger sitting thirty feet from the well, eating their rice, carrying a secret that could get them all killed.