Qi Jingsen’s legs ached.

Three months in Earth gravity. By hour three he’d stopped noticing the strangeness. By hour forty-seven, he just wanted to sit down. Every step cost twice what it should, his knees protesting the constant work of not collapsing under his own weight. Mars-born and Mars-raised, and the planet of his ancestors wanted to crush him flat.

He stopped in a side street off the main plaza. Low foot traffic. A vending machine humming against one wall, its glow casting blue-white light across the narrow space. Good enough.

The Roman and the girl caught up, both breathing hard. The Roman’s eyes were everywhere—the vending machine, the electrical lines overhead, the distant roar of a truck passing on the main road. Taking inventory. Probably ranking everything by how fast it could kill him.

The girl was watching him.

That caught Jingsen off-guard. Most new arrivals were too overwhelmed to focus, spent their first hours spinning in circles, jumping at sounds. This one had her terror locked down tight. Her eyes tracked his movements the way no thirteen-year-old should know how to watch.

“邵嫦,” she said. Pointing at herself. The name she’d given the Roman earlier.

“Qi Jingsen,” he replied. “戚景森.”

Her face shifted. Not quite recognition—his Mandarin was fifteen centuries evolved from hers, the tones flattened, the vocabulary alien—but something had landed. She understood name.

She spoke again. Fast, musical, with rising and falling tones that modern Mandarin had smoothed away centuries ago. Middle Chinese. Tang dynasty, probably, given the clothes. His literary training caught fragments: place, maybe. What or where. A question about location.

“Tokyo,” he said slowly. “日本。東京。”

Her eyes widened. The words meant nothing—Japan hadn’t existed when she was alive—but she caught answer. He was responding to her question.

She tried again. Pointing at herself, then at him, then at the Roman. A gesture that meant us. Then a broader sweep at the city around them. Why here? Why us?

That, Jingsen thought, is the right question.

“I don’t know,” he said in Mandarin, knowing she wouldn’t understand. “I really don’t.”

The Roman cleared his throat. Loud. Theatrical. Demanding attention like a patron in his atrium.

Jingsen turned to face him. Marcus—that was the name the Roman had shouted at the girl earlier, audible even from across the barrier.

“Tu es—” Marcus started. More Latin. Useless.

“Non parlo Latino,” Jingsen tried. Modern Italian, descended from Latin through two millennia of drift. “Io sono… un amico. Amico.”

Marcus’s face screwed up. Processing. Something landed—amico was close enough to Latin’s amicus that the meaning traveled.

“Amicus?” Marcus repeated. Suspicion and hope both, somehow.

Jingsen nodded. “Sì. Amico.”

It wasn’t much. It was almost nothing. But Marcus’s shoulders dropped half an inch, and that was worth something.

Shao Chang was still watching him. Still calculating. Jingsen met her eyes and saw something he recognized: a survivor assessing whether this new variable would help or hurt her.

Fair enough, he thought. I’m doing the same thing.

He needed to move them somewhere safer. Somewhere he could think. But his legs ached, and his head ached, and two new arrows floated above two new heads, and the weight of that was—

Three arrows now.

Seven total since I arrived in this century.

He’d tried not to count. Counting made it real. But the numbers were there anyway, whether he wanted them or not.

Seven marked. Seven arrows scattered across this city.

Four others were out there somewhere. The Taiwanese engineer who’d vanished into the subway system, convinced he could find a pattern in the train schedules. The samurai who’d walked off toward the Imperial Palace without a word. A Greek philosopher who sat in Ueno Park asking questions no one could understand. And the American woman—clever, that one—who’d taken one look at Jingsen, decided she didn’t need allies, and disappeared into Shinjuku.

Seven arrows. Seven agendas. And none of us know the rules.

Jingsen looked at Marcus Valerius Maximus, Roman merchant, thirty-seven years old, helpless in this world.

He looked at Shao Chang, Tang dynasty slave girl, thirteen years old, watching him the way no child should.

These two hadn’t run. Hadn’t decided they were better off alone. They’d followed him into an alley because he was the only thing in this world that made even a little sense.

The Driver is still collecting.

The memory hit him before he could stop it. That white void. That voice.

Jingsen had been dying when the Driver found him. The decompression alarm screaming, the airlock breach, his lungs already burning as the pressure dropped. He’d had maybe thirty seconds left. Maybe less.

And then—

He shut the memory down. Not now. Not in front of them.

But the Driver’s words echoed anyway, the way they always did. That patient voice. Amused, even. Speaking Jingsen’s native language with such perfection it was almost impossible.

“You’re going to be interesting. I can tell.”

What happened next—what the Driver had shown him, what he’d been offered, what he’d—

Not now.

Jingsen looked at the Roman. The girl. Two more pieces on a board he couldn’t see.

You wanted to know why I came back, he thought. I came back because I’ve seen what the Driver does to people who try to play alone.

And I’m not ready to find out what happens when he gets bored.

#bonds-of-time #bondsOfTime