2. The Drift

His fingers sank into something yielding and wet and fibrous, then he crashed into it and lay full length. There was vertigo so intense all he could do for a moment -- a few minutes? -- was concentrate as hard as he could on not moving his head at all.

Then he opened his eyes and saw nothing but green, a dense, striated green. After a moment it registered on his brain as stalks of grass, tall and lush, filling his whole field of vision. He sat up bolt upright with a gasp and in the second before the vertigo seized him again he saw rolling pastureland, interspersed with bands and patches of forest. Eventually he dared slit an eye again, and the horizon failed to slew wildly to the side this time around. He gasped for breath, heart racing, mind refusing to accept what he was seeing.

It somehow didn't occur to him to assume it was a dream. The grass was too wet, too detailed, the fields and woods of the familiar Driftless landscape too real for his brain to conjure, the air too humid in his throat as he gasped again and again. He rocketed to his feet and almost fell, swayed, and caught himself, feeling faint again. Avi! ...what had he said? He'd said something! Something about -- something about the particles not moving in time by itself, but moving in space! Mateo clung desperately to that thought. Ok. Ok. This is fine. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong! I'm just ... shifted, right? Like one of those particles! Maybe Avi just got a whole LOT of those tachyons, he'll love that -- enough to move a person. I'm just a lot of subatomic particles stuck together, right? So I'm just like... a few miles outside of town. Ok. Ok. I just need to start walking and the physics department is going to frigging worship me. That goofy image made him swallow a crazy laugh, but any kind of laugh bolstered him, made him realize that he's made crazy science history, more than Newton and Einstein put together, even if he was just the accidental lab rat. Avi had made history, and he, Mateo, was fine and whole and just needed to start walking. He'd waded through the wet grass on shaking legs towards the edge of the field for a few paces before it occurred to him to pull out his cell phone. He flipped it open. No service. Of course. Of course. That's fine, this is all fine, everything is still fine, just walk until you get service. There might be a gas station somewhere around here, maybe closer to the highway, where he could borrow a phone.

A rutted dirt road with dense hedges bordered the field, and he set out down it, still shaking like it was the dead of winter and not an overcast late summer day. But the movement helped, steading him, starting to complete the alchemical change from terror to brimming excitement. He wanted to sing and jump around. He compromised by whistling, as paper-dry as his mouth still was.

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