The world arrived all at once, and it arrived badly.
There was no corridor of light, no quiet moment of adjustment. One moment Eleanor Caldwell was on the Thames in the dark with cold air in her lungs and Alice's voice sharp in her ear — and then everything was wrong and loud and on fire.
She was running.
Her legs were in motion before her mind caught up, which was, she would later decide, the only reason she survived the first ten seconds. The body she had landed in knew exactly what to do in a way that bypassed conscious thought entirely — the same way a hand jerks from a hot surface before the pain registers. Eleanor was the passenger. The body was already at work.
