Alex Kade's life is falling apart in ways he cannot explain.
The code on his screen rearranges itself into symbols he has never seen. Rooms tilt without warning. Memories arrive uninvited, too specific, and centred on a single detail he cannot explain: a shimmering violet powder his mother has been adding to his food.
The MRI is clean. The doctors have no answers. And the fractures are getting worse.
When a woman named Crystal arrives in Amsterdam with an explanation he is not prepared to believe, Alex is pulled through a portal into a world where magic is real, ancient orders wage a shadow war across fifteen realms, and the blood running in his veins makes him the most wanted man in all of them.
With his three closest friends beside him, Jordan, sceptical and sharp; Lena, whose sketchbook holds more power than she knows; and Mark, who has always been built for a world bigger than the one he grew up in, Alex sets out to understand what he is, who has been hunting him, and why the most powerful sorcerer to have ever walked the realms vanished from the world and left a boy behind in Amsterdam.
Alex Kade's life is falling apart in ways he cannot explain.
The code on his screen rearranges itself into symbols he has never seen. Rooms tilt without warning. Memories arrive uninvited, too specific, and centred on a single detail he cannot explain: a shimmering violet powder his mother has been adding to his food.
The MRI is clean. The doctors have no answers. And the fractures are getting worse.
When a woman named Crystal arrives in Amsterdam with an explanation he is not prepared to believe, Alex is pulled through a portal into a world where magic is real, ancient orders wage a shadow war across fifteen realms, and the blood running in his veins makes him the most wanted man in all of them.
With his three closest friends beside him, Jordan, sceptical and sharp; Lena, whose sketchbook holds more power than she knows; and Mark, who has always been built for a world bigger than the one he grew up in, Alex sets out to understand what he is, who has been hunting him, and why the most powerful sorcerer to have ever walked the realms vanished from the world and left a boy behind in Amsterdam.
Glitch
The rain had been falling since late afternoon, soft at first, then steady, then the kind of Amsterdam rain that seemed less like weather and more like a decision the city had made.
Alex Kade sat hunched over his desk, one hand buried in his hair, the other resting uselessly beside the keyboard. His monitor glowed in the dim flat, washing his face in pale blue light. Lines of code stretched across the screen, neat, logical, obedient. At least, they were supposed to be.
He blinked.
The letters moved.
Not the usual tired-eyes blur. Not the flicker of a cheap monitor or a bug in the display. The text changed while he was looking at it. Brackets folded into curves. Numbers crawled sideways. Whole lines of code rearranged themselves into symbols he did not recognise, sharp hooked things that looked too old to belong on a laptop screen.
Alex froze.
The symbols pulsed once.
Then they were gone.
His code sat there again, perfectly normal, the cursor blinking at the end of a line as if nothing in the world had happened.
Alex pushed back from the desk so hard the chair wheels bumped against a pile of laundry behind him.
"Nope," he said aloud.
The flat did not answer.
Outside, rain whispered against the windowpanes. Beyond the glass, the canal was a dark strip between lines of leaning houses and wet bicycles. A tram bell rang somewhere in the mist, faint and lonely, and then the sound dissolved into the rain.
Alex rubbed both hands over his face.
"Too much coffee," he muttered. "Too little sleep. That's all this is."
He said it with the confidence of a man explaining something to a child. Unfortunately, he was the child, and he was not convinced.
The flat around him looked exactly as it always did. Posters of old rock bands on the wall, one corner peeling loose. Takeout boxes stacked beside the bin because taking them the last three steps had apparently been too much for him. A mug of cold coffee beside the keyboard. His jacket over the back of the sofa. The life of a man who wrote code for a living and pretended that was enough structure to qualify as adulthood.
Everything was familiar.
That was the problem.
The familiar things looked staged.
Alex stood up. His knees felt oddly loose.
"Water," he told himself. "Water is good. Hydration. Very adult."
He took one step towards the kitchen and the room tilted.
The walls did not move exactly. They shimmered, as if the flat were a reflection in disturbed water. The desk lamp flickered, once, twice, then stretched into a thin vertical thread of light. The air pressed against his skin. His stomach dropped.
For half a second he felt weightless.
Not dizzy. Not faint.
Untethered.
Then reality snapped back into place.
Alex grabbed the edge of the desk and swore under his breath. His pulse was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
"Okay," he said. "That was new."
He made it to the kitchen by keeping one hand against the wall, which made him feel ridiculous but also alive, so he accepted the trade-off. He filled a glass from the tap and drank too fast, cold water spilling down his chin and onto his hoodie.
He lowered the glass.
The kitchen was gone.
He was smaller.
That was the first thing he knew. The counter was too high. The sunlight was too warm. The smell of onions and garlic and something rich bubbling on the stove filled the room. His legs were bare below a pair of shorts, and one knee had a plaster on it with cartoon dinosaurs.
His mother stood at the stove.
Not the way she looked now. Younger. Softer around the face. Her dark hair tied back, one hand on a wooden spoon, the other held above the pot.
Alex tried to speak, but the memory had no room for his voice.
His mother opened her hand.
Purple powder fell from her fingers.
It caught the sunlight as it dropped, not dull like spice, not powdery like flour. It shimmered. Violet and silver and something darker beneath both. It sank into the stew, and for a moment the surface of the food rippled as if something underneath had turned over in its sleep.
His mother stirred once. Twice. Three times.
Her lips moved.
Alex could not hear the words.
The kitchen changed.
He was outside now, running through a field, laughing because she was laughing behind him. Bees moved lazily through flowers. The sun warmed his face. His mother called his name, and for a moment the sound was the safest thing in the world.
Then the warmth drained away.
A shadow stood at the edge of the field.
It had no shape Alex could hold onto. It was simply there, watching from the bright place where nothing should have been dark.
His mother stopped laughing.
The flowers bent towards the shadow.
Alex blinked and found himself back in his kitchen, adult-sized, shaking, one hand gripping the counter hard enough to hurt.
The glass slipped from his fingers and cracked in the sink.
He stared at it.
"What the hell was that?"
The question sounded too small for the room.
He closed his eyes and tried to pull the image back. His mother's hand. The purple powder. The shadow in the field. But the memory had already retreated, leaving only colour and dread behind.
Alex backed away from the sink.
For a long minute he stood in the middle of the kitchen and did not move. The fridge hummed. The rain went on against the window. Somewhere down the canal a boat slid by and the wash of it touched the stone of the embankment and went away again. Ordinary sounds. The sounds of a city carrying on without him.
He made himself breathe.
He made himself think.
The list of rational explanations was not long, but it was familiar. He had pulled three late nights in a row trying to push a release. He had been living on filter coffee and stroopwafels and the takeaway noodles from the place on the corner. He had not slept more than four hours at a stretch since Tuesday. He had been staring at the same lines of code for so long they had started to look unfamiliar even when they were not. He had had two glasses of wine with the leftover pasta. The flat was hot. The rain had been on for a week. People hallucinated under less.
He could call Jordan.
He pictured the conversation. He pictured Jordan answering with the careful, level tone Jordan used when he thought someone was unravelling. He pictured himself trying to describe a kitchen flashback to a man who had met his mother dozens of times over the years, and the look that would arrive on Jordan's face when he tried to do it. The look that would say I love you, mate, but you need to sleep.
He could already hear it. He did not need to phone someone to hear his own voice say it back to him.
He picked the larger pieces of the glass out of the sink and dropped them carefully into the bin. He ran the tap until the splinters slid down the drain. He filled a fresh glass and drank it slowly this time, in small sips, the way he had been told to drink water as a child when he had been ill.
The flat had not changed around him. The posters were still peeling. The takeaway boxes were still by the bin. The screen on the desk still showed his code at the line he had left it at. Everything looked exactly as it had ten minutes ago. Nothing in the room agreed that anything had happened.
He closed the laptop.
He turned off the lamp.
In the bathroom he stood under the shower until his skin had gone pink and then a little pinker than that. He pulled on a clean T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit bottoms and went to bed, although the air in the flat was too warm for any kind of cover, so he lay on top of the sheet and listened to the rain on the window.
Stress, he told himself. The release. The coffee. The hours.
Tomorrow he would eat something with a vegetable in it. Tomorrow he would knock off at six. Tomorrow he would book a long weekend somewhere out of the city.
It was a long time before sleep came.
When it did, it came in pieces.
He was at the edge of a quiet room he had never seen, with a high window letting in a light that was the wrong colour for any sun he knew. An old man stood at the centre of the room with his back to him. The robe the old man wore moved as though it were heavier than cloth. The old man began to turn. Alex could see the line of his shoulder, the white of his beard, the corner of a face he half-recognised from a place he could not name.
Then he was somewhere else, and the dream was gone, and the rain was on the window of his flat in Amsterdam, and he was asleep at last.
Office Light
By morning the rain had thinned to a fine drift, more idea than weather, but the canal under the Ceintuurbaan still ran dark and the cobbles of De Pijp were slick where the trams had passed. Alex chained his bicycle to the rack outside the building and stood for a moment on the kerb, hood up, breathing through the cold.
He had not slept well. He had slept in pieces. Somewhere in the pieces an old man with a white beard had begun to turn towards him in a room he had never seen, and the turning had not finished by the time the alarm pulled him out. The image had not gone with the rest of the dream. It had walked into the morning with him, faintly, the way a smell from someone else's kitchen can follow you into the street.
The agency was on the second floor of an old building above a wine shop near the Albert Cuyp end of the street, three rooms knocked through into one, plants that nobody had quite decided whose responsibility they were, a kitchenette with a tap that ran a degree warmer than it ought to. Alex took the stairs two at a time out of habit, not energy.
Joost was already at his desk, headphones on, talking quietly to someone in Lisbon. Femke from product waved without looking up. The coffee machine was making its small important sounds in the corner. Alex hung his jacket over the back of his chair, dropped his bag underneath, and went to make himself something to drink with the expression of a man who needed it to work.
While the machine fussed, Sanne came in. She was wrapped in a knitted scarf that she had not yet untied, and she was holding a hand to her throat in the cautious way of someone who has spent the last two days losing.
"Still bad?" Alex asked.
"Worse." Her voice came out roughened. "I'm drinking tea. I'm drinking nothing but tea." She squinted at him. "You look terrible, mate."
"I'm taking that as a compliment."
"You shouldn't."
She moved around him to the kettle and set it to boil. From a paper sachet she dropped a chamomile bag into a tall mug. From the small fridge she took a carton of milk and stood half-warming a measure of it in a saucepan on the little hob, because Sanne, when she was ill, did things the way her own mother had done them.
The smell of warm milk lifted from the saucepan and reached him before he had quite registered it.
His coffee finished pouring. He took the cup and turned away with a nod for her, and went back to his desk, and that should have been the end of it.
He opened his laptop. He read three emails without taking any of them in. He stared at the line of code he had left open the night before. He drank a careful mouthful of coffee.
The smell of warm milk was still in his nose.
He was four years old.
That was the first thing he knew, the way a body knows the height of a counter without being told. His feet did not touch the floor. He was on a wooden chair that had been pulled out from the kitchen table and turned to face the room. He could feel the edge of the seat through the back of his pyjamas. The kitchen was the kitchen at the Jordaan house, the one whose floor he could still draw from memory, the slate tiles cold to small feet, the cupboard above the fridge with the round brass handle that he had not been tall enough to reach until he was seventeen.
His mother stood at the stove. A pan of milk sat on the smallest ring. She did not turn. She watched the milk the way she watched it for him later, when he was older and sick and she had brought him tea in bed.
She turned the heat down.
She lifted the pan from the ring without taking her eyes off it.
She crossed to the counter, poured the milk into a green-rimmed cup, set the pan back on the cool side of the stove, and laid a teaspoon down on the saucer beside the cup. All of this without a wasted motion. All of this without looking at any of it. The little hot routine of a careful mother and a small ill child.
Then she went to the cupboard above the fridge.
Her hand went to it without looking. She did not glance at the handle. She did not measure her reach. Her fingers found the brass and turned, and the door was open and her hand was inside before she had stopped walking, and she came back with a small dark jar in her palm that he had never been allowed near.
She uncapped it.
She tapped a small fold of violet onto the teaspoon, and the violet caught the kitchen light and shimmered, and was, he understood now with a slow drowning shock that was both the child's and the adult's, the same violet. The same. The exact same.
She came to the chair.
"Open up, sweetheart."
He opened his mouth. He always opened his mouth. He could feel his own small body lean towards her as the spoon arrived. He could feel the cold of the metal on his lip. He could feel the chalky sweetness on his tongue, the powder dissolving into the saliva he did not know yet how to control. He could feel her hand on the top of his head as she lifted the cup of warm milk to his lips and gave him something kind to wash the something else down with.
"Good boy," she said.
Alex came back to himself with the coffee cup half-tilted in his hand and a small dark spatter of it across his trouser leg.
The agency was around him. The rain was on the window. Joost was still talking quietly into his headphones. The clock on the wall said nine forty-one.
It had been almost no time at all.
He set the cup down carefully on the desk because his hand was shaking and he did not trust himself to drink from it. He stared at his keyboard until the keys stopped moving. He did not think they were moving really. He thought it was his eyes.
He stood up.
"Sanne," he said. His own voice sounded thin.
She looked over from her desk. Whatever she was about to say went away when she saw him.
"Sit down," she said. "Right now."
He did not sit. He put a hand on the back of his chair to keep level and breathed once through his teeth.
"I'm alright. I'm going to make a phone call." His mouth was not doing what he wanted. "I'll be in the small meeting room. If anyone needs me, ten minutes."
"Alex."
"It's fine. I just didn't sleep." He attempted a smile in her direction. He did not look to see whether it landed.
He took his phone into the glass-walled cubicle at the back of the office and shut the door and sat down carefully on the edge of the table. He scrolled through his contacts past his mother's name without letting himself look at it. He found the practice. He pressed call.
The receptionist answered after two rings. He recognised the voice. He had been recognising the voice for as long as he had known what a receptionist was. He gave his name and his birthday and asked to be seen, and when she asked what it was concerning, he told her more honestly than he had expected to tell her.
"I'm having," he said, "memories I shouldn't be having. Vivid ones. They come on without warning and they go on long enough that I lose the room I'm standing in." He paused. He had not been planning to add the next sentence. "I want to be sure I don't have a tumour."
There was a pause on the line. Not theatrical. The pause of a woman who had been doing this job for thirty years, and who had recognised the voice on the line as the boy she had been handing lollipops to in the waiting room since he was four years old.
"Tomorrow at half past nine," she said. "He'll fit you in before the regular block. Come to the front when you arrive, don't sit in the main waiting area, I'll buzz you straight through."
"Thank you, Anneke."
"Tomorrow."
He sat with the phone in his hand for a little while after she had hung up. The glass of the meeting room looked out onto the main floor, where Sanne was watching him over the top of her chamomile cup with her face arranged not to look like it was watching, and Joost was still murmuring into his headphones, and Femke had taken her shoes off under the desk because she always did by ten.
He went back to his desk. He did not say what the phone call had been about. Sanne did not ask. She brought him a glass of water and put it next to his keyboard and went away again without saying anything, which was the kind of thing Sanne did when she had decided you needed to be left alone.
He got very little done. He answered emails one by one with the small unfocused energy of a man whose mind was elsewhere. He took the long way home in the late afternoon, cycling slowly along the Singelgracht and out towards Westerpark, looking at faces because looking at faces felt like the most ordinary thing in the world and he wanted ordinary.
That night the dream came back.
He was at the edge of the same quiet room. The old man stood at the centre. The robe moved as it had moved before. The old man had turned a little further this time. Alex could see the line of his beard, the angle of his cheekbone, the lift of a hand. The hand had been about to gesture. Then the dream slipped, and the old man was gone, and there was only the sound of a wind somewhere very far away.
When Alex woke before the alarm, he lay in the dark and listened to the rain that would not stop, and counted the hours until the practice opened.
The Familiar Practice
The practice was where it had always been, on the ground floor of a narrow brick building on a quiet street off the Lindengracht, ten minutes' walk from the house in the Jordaan that he had grown up in and that his mother still lived in. Alex did not let himself look in the direction of the house. He went to the door of the practice, pulled it open, and stepped into the dry warmth of the waiting room.
Anneke was at the reception, behind the same low counter she had been behind for as long as he could remember, the same neat row of files on the shelf beside her, the same children's corner in the bay window with the same wooden train set that he was almost sure he had played with himself at four. She looked up.
"Alex." Just his name, in her voice, in the brief private greeting she had been giving him since he could walk. "Sit. He's nearly done. Two minutes."
"I'd rather stand."
She gave him a look that knew. "Then stand."
He stood. Two minutes were long. The waiting-room clock ticked. A poster on the opposite wall reminded the world to get its flu jab. Another poster, gentler, said it was alright to ask for help. He had been looking at both posters since he was twelve.
A door at the end of the short corridor opened. An older woman came out, said something quiet to Anneke, and was gone again. Anneke pressed a button without looking up.
"Through you go," she said.
He walked the corridor he had walked since he was small enough to hold his mother's hand, and tapped on the door, and went in.
Dr. de Vries was at his desk with his glasses pushed up into his white hair, writing something in a pad in the unhurried way of a man who had not been hurried in forty years of practice. He looked up. The look did not need to perform anything. He had known Alex from the day Laura Kade had brought him in, twenty-five years before, in a small green blanket and a borrowed car seat.
"Sit, Alex."
Alex sat.
"Tell me."
He told him. He kept it as straight as he could manage. The lines of code that had rearranged themselves on his screen the night before last. The room that had tilted in his flat. The first memory, the one of the kitchen and the stove and the violet powder. The way the room had come back to him afterwards as though nothing had happened. The smell of warm milk at the office, and the second memory, the one with the chair and the spoon and his mother's hand on the cupboard above the fridge. He told him about the dreams of the old man at the edge of sleep, although he could not say why he was including them. He told him that the memories were not playing the way ordinary memories played. They took the room from him. He could not see what was in front of him while they were on him. He said the word that he had said to Anneke the day before, and it was harder to say to Dr. de Vries' face.
"I want to be sure I don't have a tumour."
Dr. de Vries did not write anything for a moment. He set the pen down on the pad.
"Look at me, please."
Alex looked at him. The white pen-light came on. The light tracked across his pupils, the left one first, then the right. Dr. de Vries asked him to follow a finger with his eyes, then to touch his own nose with his index finger, then Dr. de Vries' finger, then his own nose again. He had Alex stand and walk three steps to the door and three steps back. He had Alex close his eyes and hold his arms out level with his shoulders and stand for the count of ten. He sat back down and made a single note in the pad.
"How much caffeine?"
"More than I'd say out loud."
"Sleep?"
"Patchy this week."
"Anything you've taken that I don't know about? Anything new?"
"No."
"Any history of seizures, head injury, fainting, anything in childhood?"
"No, you'd know."
"I would, but I ask anyway."
Alex managed a half-smile. He felt very tired.
Dr. de Vries was quiet for a moment.
"Alex," he said, in a softer voice. "Can I ask you something I've been meaning to ask you for longer than I should have left it."
Alex waited.
"On your father's side. Anything like this. Anything at all. Episodes, headaches, dissociation, anything you remember being told as a child."
Alex looked at his hands.
"I never met him. I don't have anything from his side. My mother never wanted to talk about him. I stopped asking when I was about thirteen."
Dr. de Vries did not move for a beat.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I knew that. I'd hoped, perhaps, that something had come down to you. A name, even. It would have been useful to know if anything on his side ran like this." He shook his head once, almost to himself. "Your mother and I have known each other since before you were born, and there's one wall in her she's never let me past, and that is the one. I respected it. I'm not sure I should have."
It was the most honest thing Dr. de Vries had ever said to him, and they had been talking for twenty-five years.
Alex did not know what to say.
Dr. de Vries took the moment for him. He turned to the phone on the desk, pulled it across, and dialled a number from memory.
"Pieter. Hendrik de Vries. I need a favour for a patient." He listened. "Yes. Today, if you can. It's an MRI for an exclusion. Reality dissociation with vivid intrusive recall, no neurological history, exam clean. I want to see his structurals before the end of the day." He listened. "Two o'clock. Excellent. I'll send the referral now. His name is Alex Kade, K, A, D, E, born oh-one." He paused. "Pieter, between us. He's family." He put the phone down.
"VUmc," he said to Alex. "Two o'clock. Take the tram, don't cycle. I don't want you on the road today."
"Thank you."
"Sit a minute longer."
Alex sat. Dr. de Vries wrote on the pad in a careful steady hand, tore the sheet off, folded it in half, and pushed it across the desk.
"This is for you, not for them," he said. "It's a list of what I'm ruling out and in what order. Read it on the tram. It'll be less frightening than what your own head is making of it now."
Alex took the sheet and held it without opening it.
"When you've had the scan, come back to me. Tomorrow morning at the latest. We'll look at the images together and we'll decide what next." Dr. de Vries paused. "Alex. There's almost certainly an ordinary explanation for what you're describing. Brains do unusual things under stress, and yours has been under more stress than you're giving yourself credit for. The MRI is to take the worst of the worries off the table. Do you understand me?"
"Yes."
"And whatever the images show, we'll look at them together. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Alex stood. He felt, in some way he did not understand and would not have shared aloud, that he had been seen by a person for the first time in days. He thanked Dr. de Vries again, more quietly than he had meant to, and turned for the door.
"Alex."
He stopped, hand on the handle.
"Have you eaten?"
"Not yet."
"Eat something on the way. Anything. Anneke has biscuits at reception if you have nothing else." Dr. de Vries did not look up from the pad. "Two o'clock. The tram."
"Yes."
He went out. Anneke pressed a tin of biscuits across the counter at him without comment and watched him take two. He thanked her. He stepped out of the practice into the cold morning, and the door clicked shut behind him on the dry warmth of the only room in Amsterdam where he had ever been completely safe.
He stood on the pavement for a moment.
Then he walked, with the unopened sheet of paper in his fist, towards the nearest tram stop, and away from the street his mother lived on.
The Scan
The VUmc was twenty minutes by tram and a different city by the time he got there, white corridors, the smell of industrial cleaner, a queue at the coffee bar that did not move. He gave his name at the front desk and a young woman with a clipboard told him to follow the blue line on the floor.
The radiographer was friendly in the impersonal way of a person who did this twelve times a day and remembered none of them. She asked him about metal in his body, watches, jewellery, piercings, dental work. She gave him a thin gown and a locker. She told him to lie flat on the table and not to move, and to press the rubber bulb in his hand if he needed her to stop the machine for any reason.
The table slid. The white tube closed around him.
He had read about the noise. He had not read enough. It came in long mechanical phrases, a banging that arranged itself into patterns that were not music and were not quite not music either, that rose and fell and stopped without warning and started again from somewhere else. Alex shut his eyes and breathed through his nose and counted backwards from three hundred. He got to two-thirty-something. He lost count. He started again. He thought about Dr. de Vries' folded note in his jacket in the locker, and how he had not opened it.
When the table slid out again, the radiographer was already telling him he had done well, the way a person tells a child.
"You'll see Dr. Maas in fifteen minutes. Through the door at the end and turn right. He has the images."
Dr. Maas was a younger man than Dr. de Vries, leaner, slightly tired, sitting in front of a wall-mounted screen on which Alex's brain was rendered in careful slices, plate after plate of the inside of his own head.
"Sit, please."
Alex sat.
"You're a friend of Hendrik's."
"He's my doctor. Since I was a baby."
"Right." Dr. Maas nodded once, and then turned to the screen, which seemed to him to be the more important thing. "There's nothing here, Alex. You can see for yourself. No mass, no lesion, no haemorrhage, no oedema, no white-matter abnormality that I'd call to anyone's attention. The ventricles are the right size. The cortex is the right thickness. Your brain is, in the very narrow sense in which I'm qualified to make the claim, structurally a perfectly ordinary brain."
Alex stared at the screen. He had not understood how badly he had wanted the screen to show him something until Dr. Maas told him there was nothing. The relief came first. The other thing came a few seconds behind it, slower and heavier, and settled in his stomach.
"Then what is it?"
"He'll work that out with you. There are several possibilities." Dr. Maas folded his arms. "Migraine variants present with sensory disturbance and disrupted recall, particularly under stress, and the literature on temporal-lobe phenomena is rich enough to keep a man busy for a year. Sleep deprivation does extraordinary things to perception, as anyone who has trained as a junior doctor will tell you. The intrusive-memory pattern you described to Hendrik is consistent with a number of things that are not what the MRI is for. None of them are pleasant to live with. None of them are dangerous in the way the MRI was for."
"Thank you."
"Go and see Hendrik in the morning. Sleep tonight if you can. Eat. Drink water that isn't coffee." A dry smile. "You're not going to die today, Alex. That part I can give you."
He thanked Dr. Maas again, more out of habit than feeling, and went back through the white corridor and down the blue line in reverse, and out of the front of the hospital into a thin grey afternoon that had not yet decided whether it was going to rain again.
He stood on the pavement.
He could not place what he was feeling. Relief, definitely. The cold lift of being told the worst thing he had been carrying all day was not true. But under it, like a stone under water that had not been there a minute before, the realisation that the door he had wanted to be open was closed. There was nothing wrong with his brain. Which meant there was something wrong with something else.
He took the tram back into the city without looking at the people on it.
His bike was chained where he had left it that morning, against the railings outside the practice. The light was beginning to drop behind the gables. He unlocked the chain with cold fingers and wheeled the bike out into the street, and instead of turning west towards Westerpark and home, he turned east, because he wanted the long way and the long air, and he wanted to cycle a little of the city to remind himself that he was still in it.
The Herengracht in the late afternoon was the Herengracht. The water was dark green. The trees along the bank were holding the last of their leaves the way an old man holds his coat. A boat went by underneath one of the bridges, its wash slapping against the stone, and Alex took the long curve along the canal at a quiet pace, looking at the water and not at anything else.
A bottle of Chocomel.
He saw it before he understood that he was seeing it. He was on a picnic blanket in Vondelpark, and the grass smelled of summer, and his mother was sitting cross-legged at the corner of the blanket the way she always sat, and he was sixteen years old. He could feel the sun on the back of his neck. He could see the rim of a paper plate on which sandwiches had been arranged with the unnecessary care she had always given to packing them. He could feel his own teenage knees, sharper than they were now, and the cold of the grass through the corner of the blanket where it had ridden up.
She was reaching into the picnic bag.
Her hand came out with a bottle of Chocomel. The bottle was cold. The condensation on the glass caught the sun the way the violet would catch it in a moment, although he did not know that yet, sixteen and warm and a little bored.
She glanced once around the park. He had not seen the glance at the time. He saw it now, looking at her hand from inside the memory and from outside it at once. It was the same glance he had now seen her give from behind a kitchen counter and the corner of an eye twenty-one years earlier, the private check of a woman making sure the room is hers.
She unscrewed the cap.
She tipped a small fold of violet into the bottle.
The violet hit the chocolate and disappeared.
She screwed the cap back on and swirled the bottle once, twice, three times. The pattern of three, again. The same pattern of three.
"Drink your Chocomel, sweetheart. Before it goes warm."
He drank it. He drank it all in three pulls, the way teenagers drink things. He handed her the empty bottle. She put it back in the picnic bag without comment and asked him about the girl from his class, the one he had been pretending not to talk about, and he had told her, because he had told his mother everything.
His handlebars jerked.
Alex came back into himself on the curve of the bridge over the Herengracht at Leliegracht, the wheel of his bike turning sideways under him, a woman's voice shouting somewhere behind him, the cobbles tilting fast as his front wheel hit the lip of the kerb and the bike went out from under him.
He came down half on the pavement and half on the grass strip by the railing, the bike on top of him, a man in a dark coat already crouching at his shoulder and saying something in Dutch he could not parse.
"I'm alright," he said, in Dutch, on automatic. "I'm alright. I'm sorry."
The man looked at him with the practised concern of someone who had been alive in Amsterdam long enough to have pulled three other people off the cobbles in his life. He helped Alex sit up. He picked up the bike. He set it against the railing. He waited until Alex had got his breath back, and then he asked, more softly, whether he should call anyone.
"No. Thank you. I'm alright. I just," He could not finish the sentence. "I'm alright."
The man looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, the small nod of a stranger deciding to trust the answer, and walked on.
Alex sat on the cold paving stones with his back against the wet stone of the bridge and his bike leaning beside him, and watched the boat that had passed under the bridge a minute ago carry on along the canal as though nothing at all had happened above its head.
He took his phone out of his jacket with hands that he could not entirely make obey.
He pressed call on Jordan.
It rang twice.
"Alex?"
"Jordan. I need," he said. "I need you. I'm on the Herengracht. I'm at, at, the Leliegracht bridge. I've just come off my bike. I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt, mate, but I can't drive my own legs at the moment, and I don't want to be on my own."
A breath on the other end, then no breath, then a breath again.
"I'm coming. Stay where you are. I'm five minutes. Don't move."
"Yes."
The line stayed open. Alex stayed where he was. The boat went around the bend of the canal and was gone. The light dropped a little further behind the gables. The rain that had been thinking about itself all day finally arrived, very lightly, in small cold ticks against the back of his hand.
He sat there and waited for his friend.
Jordan's Flat
By the time Jordan got him into the flat, the rain had thickened.
Jordan lived three minutes' walk off the Herengracht in one of the narrow houses that lean over the canal as if listening to the water, and he had walked the bike back with one hand on it and one hand on Alex's elbow, not saying anything, the kind of careful silence Jordan had been able to do since he was eleven years old and Alex had broken his collarbone in the park. He had wheeled the bike into the ground-floor hallway and propped it against the wall, helped Alex out of his wet jacket, and put a hand on the small of his back as they went up the stairs. He had not asked anything yet. He was waiting.
The flat was warm and cluttered, as always. Books everywhere, most of them stacked in ways that would eventually become structural engineering problems. Coffee mugs on the windowsill. A half-finished puzzle on the dining table, all grey sky and missing sea. A notebook lay open beside it, filled with Jordan's small controlled handwriting.
Jordan went straight to the kitchen.
"Coffee?"
Alex laughed once. It came out wrong.
"Probably the last thing I need."
"Tea, then."
"You don't drink tea."
"I own tea. There's a difference."
That almost helped.
Alex sat at the table and watched Jordan search through a cupboard with the grim determination of a man excavating ruins. Eventually he produced a box of herbal tea that looked as if it had been bought during a previous personality.
Jordan held it up. "Chamomile. Apparently."
"Is it expired?"
"Almost certainly."
"Coffee is fine."
Jordan made coffee.
When he sat down opposite Alex, his face had changed. The easy humour was still nearby, but set aside. His eyes were sharp, focused.
"Start from the beginning."
Alex wrapped both hands around the mug. "You're going to think I've lost it."
"I reserve the right to think that later. Start."
So Alex told him.
Not well at first. He jumped around. The code on his screen the night before last. The room bending in his flat. The first memory, the kitchen and the stove and the violet powder. The smell of warm milk at the office and the second memory, the chair and the spoon and the cupboard above the fridge. Hendrik. The MRI. Dr. Maas at the screen and the clean image of a perfectly ordinary brain. The bike along the Herengracht and the third memory, the picnic and the bottle of Chocomel and the three swirls. He stopped twice because saying it aloud made it sound worse, and once because his throat closed around the words purple powder as if his body did not want them out in the room.
Jordan listened.
He did not interrupt. That was one of the dangerous things about Jordan. He could make silence feel like a tool.
When Alex finished, Jordan leaned back and looked at his coffee as if it might have a footnote.
"Okay," he said.
"That's it?"
"That's me not saying the first six things that came into my head."
"Say them."
"Fine. The MRI takes the worst of the structural things off the table. The rest of the list is long. Severe sleep deprivation, which you have. Caffeine to a degree I imagine you have approached. Migraine variants of the kind Dr. Maas mentioned. Stress. Trauma processing. Dissociation under load. Some less pleasant possibilities I'm not going to name until they need naming." Jordan paused. "None of them would explain why your handlebars went sideways under you on the Herengracht today because you saw your mother in Vondelpark nine years ago."
Alex stared at him.
Jordan lifted one hand. "You asked."
"I know how it sounds."
"I don't think you do. You're underselling it."
Alex let out a breath and looked away.
Jordan's expression softened. "But I also know you. You don't come off your bike on a wet afternoon because your laptop flickered."
"It didn't flicker."
"I know. You said shifted."
The word sat between them.
Jordan tapped one finger against the side of his mug. Once. Twice.
"The powder," he said. "That's the bit I don't like."
Alex looked back at him. "Not the screen?"
"That's in the top three."
"Good to know."
"The powder sounds specific. Too specific for random stress nonsense. And it sounds three times specific, in three different memories spread across two decades of your life, in your mother's hand, in the same colour, in the same gesture. That is what stress doesn't look like." Jordan frowned. "And you said her face was blurred in the first one, but her hands were clear?"
"Yeah."
"Her hands in all three?"
Alex thought about it. The stove. The teaspoon. The cap of the bottle. The brass handle on the cupboard above the fridge.
"Yeah," he said. "Her hands in all three."
"That feels like memory."
Alex did not like the way that landed. "You said you were going to make me feel better."
"I never said that."
"You implied tea."
"Tea isn't a legally binding promise."
Alex almost smiled, then did not.
Jordan saw it and let the joke die.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"I don't know. I wanted you to tell me I'm tired and stupid."
"You're tired."
"Helpful."
"And occasionally stupid, but not about this."
Alex looked down at the table. His hands were still shaking, faintly. "I feel like there's a room in my head I've never been allowed into. And now the door is open a crack."
Jordan was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, "The old library."
Alex looked up. "What?"
"The one on Prinsengracht. We used to spend entire Saturdays there reading weird old folklore books. Hidden worlds, old rituals, all that stuff."
"You think my hallucinations have a library card?"
"I think if your brain has coughed up a specific purple powder and a shadow field nightmare and a teaspoon and a bottle of Chocomel across three different memories in three days, there's a chance it's attached itself to something you read as a kid. Or, less comfortably, something you read as a kid was closer to truth than it should be."
Alex stared at him.
Jordan grimaced. "I heard it. I regret it."
"No, carry on. You're doing great."
"I'm saying we test the story. We find the books. We see if anything matches. If nothing does, you go back to Hendrik in the morning and we widen the search again."
"And if something does match?"
"Then I pretend to be even less worried."
Alex leaned back in the chair and looked around the flat, at the books and mugs and half-finished puzzle. Normal things. Human things. He wanted to stay there until morning and not go anywhere near his own mind.
Jordan picked up his phone.
"I'm texting Mark and Lena."
Alex frowned. "Why?"
"Because the medical issue is one possibility now and not the worst of them, and if any of the others turn out to be real you shouldn't be alone with them. Also, if this turns out to be supernatural, apparently we're forming a group, because that's how these things work."
"Jordan."
"What?"
"This is serious."
"I know."
The humour fell away so quickly Alex felt ashamed for missing it.
Jordan's voice dropped. "I know it is. And that's why I don't want you alone with it. Mark will make inappropriate jokes and carry heavy things. Lena will notice details the rest of us miss. I'll ask annoying questions. You'll hate all of us slightly, which will be good for morale."
Alex breathed out. This time the smile did arrive, tired and small.
"Tomorrow after work?"
"Tomorrow after work."
Jordan raised his mug. "To rational investigation."
Alex clinked his mug against it.
"And weird old books," Jordan added.
"And weird old books."
For the next hour they did not talk about it. Jordan cooked pasta the way Jordan cooked pasta, badly but with confidence, and they ate it at the table next to the half-finished puzzle, and they talked about a colleague Jordan hated but refused to name because hatred, he said, required standards, and about Mark's latest failed attempt at cooking, and about Lena's sketches that she insisted were not an exhibition because three framed pieces in a café did not count.
Alex laughed in the right places.
Part of him stayed on the bridge over the Herengracht with the rain on the back of his hand.
When the plates were cleared, Jordan stood and went to a cupboard in the hallway and came back with a folded blanket and a pillow that did not match the blanket.
"You're staying."
"Jordan, I should,"
"You're staying. The couch is yours. Your bike is in the hall. Your toothbrush is the green one in the bathroom, which has been there since the last time you stayed and we both forgot about it. I've texted your mum to say you're with me. You're staying."
Alex looked at him.
The fact that Jordan had thought to text his mother arrived inside him before he had time to put a wall up against it. His mother. His mother who. He could not finish the sentence in his own head.
He nodded, because nodding was easier than speaking.
Jordan put the blanket and the pillow on the couch. He brought him a glass of water. He turned the lamp down to its lowest setting and left the room without making a thing of leaving.
Alex sat on the couch for a long time before he lay down on it. The rain went on against the dark window. The flat creaked the small comfortable creaks of an old narrow house leaning over a canal. Somewhere upstairs Jordan moved quietly between rooms and then was still.
It was a long time before sleep came.
When it did, the dream did not come back.
Shadows of the Enclave is about a one young man and his three closest friends setting out into unfamiliar lands where they are hunted and forced to open their eyes and minds to possibilities beyond their wildest imaginations. Alex Kade thinks he might be dying. He is seeing strange codes on his computer screen, feeling rooms unexplainably tilt without reason, and reliving memories that seem too targeted to be normal. Then, there is the vivid violet power that he watches his mother add to his food in all these memories. Science and medicine have no explanation, yet his world keeps sliding. When a mysterious woman named Crystal saves Alex from being slain at the hands of a person he trusts intimately, he is thrust into a realm of betrayal, ancient magic and warring factions who want to use him because he is the last descendant of a famed wizard who had immense power and influence in Orin.
Shadows of the Enclave is an epic fantasy novel rooted in magic, theories of other worlds and hidden truths. The realms created by PM Blackwood are vivid in their visualization as well as their personalities. The book puts the protagonist through world bending, reality changing experiences. Alex’s psychological trauma in the early chapters as he experiences these rapid shifts in his consciousness immediately make him a sympathetic character, as readers yearn to figure out why exactly he is suffering. The genuine fear is something any reader who has experienced a health scare of their own will understand, and places Alex’s trauma on a level that is both realistic in emotion and otherworldly in experience. The story gradually unfolds because of where his memories lead him, first to his mother’s strange violet powder and then into another realm of existence entirely. These first unsettling experiences set the stage for a plotline that makes the protagonist question everything he’s ever known, and really look deep inside himself in order to make it through the trials he faces.
The structure of Shadows of the Enclave did hinder some of its potential suspense, however. The utilization of section headings every time a new scene started made the flow of the book feel choppy and stunted instead of fluid. It also took away some of the intrigue. The use of section headings themselves is not necessarily a bad thing, but these were very specific and literal to the point of stating point blank what the main setting of the scene would be or what the main conflict was at that point. It kept me from being able to draw my own conclusions about the story’s trajectory or make assumptions about what the next scene might hold. They felt more like something that would guide the author as they outlined the book rather than a device that enhanced the reading experience. After all, one of the best things about fantasy is that readers are going along on these epic journeys with the characters, and stepping wide eyed into a new scene, conflict or location and having to take in all the details and individual quirks of these spaces in order to learn where the characters have just ended up is a fun, rewarding experience for a lot of readers.
Overall Shadows of the Enclave should market well to young adult or new adult epic fantasy fans in particular. The tone of the storytelling by this author feels fresh and new in a genre that is constantly growing and gaining new fans.