We took a step, and I staggered. My balance was all wrong. Hermes looked at me impatiently. I took another step. Gravity difference, I realized. I’d heard the Saeli talking about how different planets had different gravity. I’d never realized that Earth and Plato were different. I felt slightly heavier. I put my shoulders back and took a deep breath. Hermes led me, following the smell, which was coming from a little house on the quayside. Earth. Apart from the oddness of gravity, and the vividness of the colors, it didn’t seem much different. I kept reminding myself I was in Greece, in Lucia when it was one of the Lost Cities. In the Remnant at this moment, my parents were children. They might not even have met. It was warm, but no warmer than it might be at home in the middle of summer.

Inside the house were tables where people were sitting eating, like any eating hall at home. An old man was grilling fish over coals. I had been wanting fresh fish earlier, but these were different from the fish I knew. They were silvery, not black or red, and shaped like the fish I had seen on mosaics, the shape of an elongated alpha, with flat tails and tiny jaws.

“Skubri and wine,” Hermes said, because I was standing frozen in place staring at everything. The old man looked at us incuriously and gave us hot fish on flatbread and cups of wine. I paid him from my purse, and he gave me change, a custom I remembered from when I was in Lucia at home, in my past and this Lucia’s future. It made me feel more confident. It was strange and yet familiar, something I had mastered as a traveler, and this was merely more travelling.

“Do you know if Matthias is in town?” I asked.

“No, he’s gone with the Goodness, he won’t be back until spring,” the old man said.

“Thanks.”

“Strangers in town?” the old man asked.

“Yes,” I said, again pleased with the familiar. I’d had this conversation over and over when I’d spent my year in Lucia. “From—” and then I remembered that if I told the truth, or even an amended version of the truth and pretended to be from Kallisti in this time, I’d be in serious trouble. “From Petra.” It was a settlement about two days’ walk away, on the other side of the island. I hoped he wouldn’t know everyone there.

“Come round on a fishing boat?” he asked.

“Mmm,” I said, then took my plate and left before he asked which boat and how long it took.