Fredrick Grant's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Fredrick Grant went to sleep in a Kansas cabin in 1847 and woke on a beach that did not belong to any map he knew. The sand was pale green. Two suns hung low over the water. He still wore his wool trousers and the boots he'd pulled off before bed, though he did not remember putting them back on. A hundred yards down the shore, waves curled tall and clean, and past them the sea went flat as a plate all the way to the horizon. He had been here three days. He wanted to go home. He had built a shelter from sticks and blue leaves near the tree line, and he kept his few belongings inside a hide sack he'd stitched from something he had killed with a rock. Neither the sticks nor the animal matched anything he'd seen back home. That was the trouble. He had no memory of arriving, no wound on his head, no bottle he'd drunk from. One moment he was under a wool blanket. The next, this. Without knowing how he'd slipped, he could not begin to guess how to slip back. On the third evening he saw the creature come out of the surf. It walked on four legs, cyan and shaggy, with feathered antennas rising from its head and eight dark eyes set in a friendly face. It carried a board under one paw. Fredrick raised his hands slow, the way he would with a strange horse. The creature sat down in the sand and spoke plain English. "You're new," Zephyr Starpaws said. "Smell like somewhere else. (Wool. Smoke. Old.)" Fredrick asked if he knew how a man got here. Zephyr's antennas twitched toward the flat water offshore. "Signal down there. Pulses. Been pulling things in for a while. People. Objects. You, maybe." He tilted his head. "I ride out to it most nights. You want a lead? That's your lead." Fredrick looked past the breakers to the still water beyond. Something under it was reaching for him, and had already reached once. He had his first thread. Now he had to follow it out past the waves.