“I was a nautical engineer, before all of this. This—” He gestured around them, to the darkened, sweat-stinking barracks lurching in the storm. “This world didn’t exist. It was a story in the news. A story I clicked past without reading. Autotrawlers crewed by slave crews. Another world, a degraded shadow of our own. How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.”
