The first fragment came three nights later.

  Eiran had been working late on the chronometer project, practicing the compensation balance technique under Havelock's supervision. His eyes ached from close work. His fingers were stiff from the precision required. When he finally fell into bed, still dressed, he was asleep almost before his head touched the pillow.

  And then he was somewhere else.

  Not a place he recognized. Stone walls, rough-hewn, with a narrow window showing mountains in the distance. Cold air that smelled of pine and woodsmoke. A workbench in front of him, covered with tools he didn't recognize, similar to his own but different in subtle ways. Older. Cruder. And yet somehow more purposeful.

  He was working on something. His hands, not quite his hands but thicker and weathered, moved with practiced ease. A glass tube. A metal frame. Mercury, bright and alive, rolling in a sealed chamber.

  The pressure was wrong.

  He knew this, though he didn't know how he knew. Something about the air, the weight of it, pressing down on the mercury from above. The readings didn't match what they should. Which meant something was wrong.

  He woke.

  The room was dark. Cold. Silent except for his own breathing, which came too fast, as if he'd been running. Eiran lay still, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  A dream. Just a dream, vivid in the way dreams sometimes were. The stone workshop, the mountain view, the hands that weren't his hands. All just fragments of his exhausted mind, mixing the day's work with random images.

  But the pressure. He could still feel it, the wrongness of it, like a splinter caught beneath the skin of his thoughts. Something about the air pressing down, insistent and real.

  He sat up. The movement made his head swim, and he realized he was hungry. Desperately hungry, as if he hadn't eaten in days, though he'd had bread and cheese just hours before.

  Eiran lit his candle with shaking hands and ate what remained of his provisions. The hunger faded slowly, replaced by a lingering disorientation that didn't quite feel like being awake.

  Sleep, when it returned, was dreamless. He was grateful for that.

  ---

  The second fragment came the next night.

  Same stone room. Same mountain window. But the light was different, evening now and golden and slanting, and he'd been there longer. Months longer. He knew this without knowing how. The workbench was more cluttered. The tools showed wear. And the device in front of him was different, more refined, a tube of glass rising from a brass base.

  The mercury rose and fell with the weather.

  He understood this now. The pressure of the air, and it was air that pressed, that had weight, that filled the world invisibly and pushed down on everything equally, changed before storms came. Changed with altitude, with temperature, with a hundred factors he was beginning to name.

  If you could measure the pressure, you could predict what was coming.

  He woke.

  Same darkness. Same hunger. Same sense of dislocation, as if he'd been somewhere else for a very long time and had only just returned.

  Eiran ate, though he had less to eat now. The provisions he'd bought were running low, and he wouldn't be paid until week's end. He'd have to stretch what remained, or go hungry.

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  The feeling stayed with him through the morning. At the workshop, his hands remembered motions he'd never learned. His eyes tracked the barometer on Havelock's wall with new attention, watching the mercury column, thinking about pressure and weight and the invisible force of the air.

  "You seem distracted." Havelock's voice cut through his thoughts.

  "Sorry, sir. Just tired."

  "Mm." Havelock studied him with the assessing look he usually reserved for problematic mechanisms. "You're pale. Have you been eating?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Enough?"

  Eiran hesitated a fraction too long. Havelock's expression shifted.

  "Take your lunch break early. There's bread in the back. The delivery yesterday included more than we ordered. Eat something."

  "I can't-"

  "It's not charity. It's practical. You're no use to me if you faint over the chronometer components." Havelock turned back to his work. "Eat. Then we'll continue the balance wheel practice."

  The bread was fresh, better than what Eiran usually bought for himself. He ate it in the back room, alone, and tried not to think about what it meant that Havelock had noticed his hunger.

  Tried not to think about the dreams, either. The stone workshop. The mercury rising and falling. The pressure of the air, invisible and measurable and suddenly, impossibly, real in his mind in a way it hadn't been before.

  ---

  The third fragment was longer.

  He was in the mountain workshop for what felt like years. Seasons passed outside the narrow window: snow, thaw, green summer, golden autumn, snow again. He worked on the device, refining it, failing and trying again. The locals thought he was mad, a hermit obsessed with a glass tube and some quicksilver. But he could feel it now, the weight of the sky pressing down, and he knew he was right.

  The storms came when the pressure dropped. The clear weather held when it rose. There were patterns, rhythms, a language written in the invisible air that no one else could read.

  He was close. So close. If he could just find the way to prove it.

  He woke.

  Dawn light. His body aching with exhaustion, though he'd slept through the night. And the hunger again, sharp and insistent, demanding to be fed.

  Eiran didn't have food left. He'd eaten the last of the bread before bed. His coppers were almost gone, and payday was still two days away.

  He dressed slowly, his thoughts foggy, and made his way to the workshop. The morning air was cold enough to clear his head a little, but the sense of dislocation remained, as if he was walking in two worlds at once, the stone mountain workshop overlapping with Kettleford's familiar streets.

  The pressure of the air. He could almost feel it now, even awake. The weight of everything above him, miles of invisible substance pressing down with patient, constant force.

  "Eiran."

  He looked up. Havelock was standing in the workshop doorway, watching him with an expression Eiran couldn't read.

  "You're late."

  "I'm sorry, sir. I-" He stopped. What could he say? I've been dreaming about another life, another person, another world? I'm seeing things that don't make sense, feeling things I've never felt? "I slept badly."

  "You've been sleeping badly all week." Havelock stepped aside to let him enter. "And eating poorly. And staring at things that aren't there. What's happening?"

  "I don't know."

  The honest answer surprised them both. Havelock's eyes narrowed.

  "Dreams?"

  "What?"

  "You heard me. Dreams. The kind that stay with you after you wake."

  Eiran stood very still. "Why would you ask that?"

  "Because I've seen it before. Not often. But sometimes." Havelock crossed to the main bench, began organizing the day's work. His voice stayed casual, almost too casual. "When I was younger, there was an apprentice in my master's shop. He started having dreams. Vivid ones, he said. Full of ideas he'd never thought before. Within a month, he'd designed a new gear mechanism that revolutionized the trade."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He died. Fever, or so they said." Havelock's hands stilled on the tools. "He was seventeen. Had an unusual name that no one knew where it came from. And then he was gone, and his mechanism belonged to my master, and no one spoke of his dreams again."

  Silence. Eiran's heart was beating too fast.

  "I'm not saying that's what's happening to you," Havelock continued, turning to face him. "I'm saying you should be careful. Whatever you see, whatever you feel, keep it to yourself. Think about it before you share it with anyone. Even me."

  "I don't understand."

  "Good. That means you're still thinking clearly." Havelock picked up a calibration tool and handed it to Eiran. "Now. The compensation balance. Let's see if those shaking hands of yours can still do precision work."

  They could. Barely. But throughout the day, Eiran felt Havelock's eyes on him, watching, assessing, waiting for something.

  That night, he didn't dream. He slept deep and dark and woke feeling almost normal. But the memory of the stone workshop stayed with him, and the sense of something waiting, something pressing like the weight of invisible air, didn't fade.

  Something was coming. He could feel it the way he felt a storm before he saw the clouds.

  He just didn't know what it was.