“I wasn’t psyched out. I just…I hated her guts so much I knew if I got on stage, I’d make such a bad impression the director and company probably wouldn’t want me again. I just had to listen to her lines and it hit me. I’d be scowling the entire way through. She doesn’t exist. It was just—”

She sighed as the light changed. The young woman saw a crowd take off across the street but she lingered for a moment. Then she took a step.

“Unrealis—”

Her foot never hit the ground. The young woman took the wrong step off the sidewalk on the streets of Galway, Ireland.

Straight into another world.

1.00 P

She fell into another world. Mid-step, walking off the sidewalk onto the street, she put her foot down on nothing but air.

She fell out of the day and into a void, a shout of surprise on her lips. The smartphone in her hand glowed as she fell, ear buds still playing a hangup tone back to her.

The light from her world was there for just a second. And in that brief window before the gateway between worlds closed, she could see she was falling down into a vast tomb.

Falling. Falling, through the air. For a moment, less than a microsecond, the world was illuminated. The ceiling, vastly high above her, the ground, worryingly distant as well. A seemingly endless tomb—a thousand feet below—

She started screaming but the thump as she hit the stone floor knocked the wind out of her.

For a moment, the girl from Ireland just lay there. The light was gone. The darkness, absolute, but for a slight glow from the old, battered iPhone she’d been carrying. The traveller lay there for a second in pure shock.

“What the fecking fuck? How the—what? What? What the f—”

She had a tendency to swear when she got upset. Which was sometimes often. The young woman pushed herself up. She wheezed; the impact had bruised her gently, but she was alive. And now—

It was dark. Her iPhone lay on the ground, cushioned from the fall by her much less expensive body.

That was something.

“Fecking manholes. What in the shite is happening here? I could have sworn I was—what happened?

What?”

She hadn’t seen a subterranean hole when she fell and she felt certain she should have broken more bones.

“Hey! Can anyone hear me? I fell and—Sam? Are you there? Sam? Hello?”

Her voice cut off as her fumbling fingers activated her smartphone and the beam of light illuminated—

everything.

A tomb. Vast, and at first, featureless. Something so monumental that it deserved another name. The girl looked around, shifting her glowing electronics to flashlight-mode to better see.

And she did.