He woke up already awake.

  That was the only way he could describe it afterward — not the usual surfacing through layers, the body negotiating with consciousness, the slow arrival of the day. He simply opened his eyes and was there, completely, the way a light came on when you hit the switch. Full. Clear. Like a window someone had cleaned from the outside while he slept.

  He lay still for a moment and took inventory.

  No aches. That was the first thing. His back, which had been conducting a long-running argument with the ground every morning since the grave, had nothing to say. His hands felt loose and good. He breathed in and the air arrived cleanly, no residue of the previous day in his chest the way there usually was when he'd been on his feet for too long.

  He sat up.

  The camp was still in the early-morning quiet, the fire down to coals, a thin mist sitting in the low places between the tents. He felt the air — cool, slightly damp, the smell of morning and woodsmoke and the river carried on the small wind. All of it arrived with unusual specificity, like a dial turned up two notches.

  Good sleep, he thought. Good dream.

  He remembered the dream clearly. Emma in her gown, that laugh. He held it for a moment with the deliberate care he'd learned to use with the good memories, not gripping, just holding — feeling its weight and then letting it sit. It was his. It would stay.

  He stood and stretched and felt entirely like himself, which was notable because he hadn't felt entirely like himself since Connecticut.

  The stream was a ten-minute walk from the main camp, a tributary of the Silver Run that passed close enough to be useful and far enough to give the illusion of privacy. He'd been using a particular pool of it — a widening where the current slowed and the surface settled, protected by an overhang of willow that kept the wind off. In the early mornings, before anyone else arrived, the surface ran as smooth as glass.

  He knelt at the edge the way he always did, scooped water with his hands, drank. Cold. Clean. He'd stopped tasting it after the first week, the way you stopped tasting clean water, which meant it simply tasted like nothing, which was the best thing water could taste like.

  He rinsed his face. Smoothed his hands over his jaw — three days of growth, more or less, he'd lost exact count. He looked at the reflection in the pool.

  Something stopped him.

  He looked again.

  His hair. He had brown hair going gray at the temples — had for years, Claire's doing apparently, she'd noticed it first and made a joke about the distinguished look that had immediately become the thing she called him whenever he forgot to do something. The gray had been there. Had been there for years. He'd stopped thinking about it the way you stopped thinking about the shape of your own nose.

  He looked at the reflection and turned his head slowly, looking for it. The right temple. The left.

  The pool was still enough. The light was coming up. He could see.

  Not there. Not either side.

  He frowned and leaned closer, which accomplished nothing except making his reflection larger and equally gray-hair-free.

  He sat back on his heels.

  Huh.

  He reached up and felt his temple with his fingers, as if his fingers would have information his eyes didn't. Just hair. Normal-feeling hair. He pressed harder, as though the gray might be hiding underneath. It wasn't.

  He sat there at the edge of the pool for a moment.

  Then he cupped his hands and looked at the water again, in case the reflection had changed its mind.

  It hadn't.

  "What are you doing?"

  He looked up. Dorn was standing behind him with a fish on a line and the expression of a man who had arrived at a river to find something he hadn't expected.

  "Looking at my reflection," Theron said.

  Dorn looked at the pool, then at Theron, then at the pool again. "For how long?"

  "A while."

  Dorn appeared to accept this as in keeping with Theron's general character. He came and crouched beside him and looked at the reflection too, from what seemed like genuine curiosity about what was worth this amount of looking.

  Theron pointed at his own temple. "Gray," he said. "I had gray hair. Here."

  Dorn looked at the side of his head with the attention of a man trying to be helpful. "I do not see gray."

  "That's the problem."

  Dorn considered this. He looked at Theron's hair, at the reflection, back at the hair. "Yesterday — gray?"

  "It's been gray for years."

  "And now—" Dorn made a gesture: gone, disappeared, no longer present.

  "Yes."

  They both looked at the reflection.

  "Good?" Dorn said eventually, with the careful intonation of a man not certain whether to offer congratulations or concern.

  Theron turned this over. His hair had stopped going gray overnight. He was forty-two years old and living on foraged food and river water and sleeping on the ground, which was not typically the formula for reversing the aging process. He had eaten three unfamiliar silver-green leaves for dinner. Before that he'd had smoked fish and something that Dorn's wife had made that tasted like dense bread.

  He had no way to explain it. He had some ingredients for a hypothesis.

  "I don't know yet," he said. He touched his temple again. The hair was completely normal except for what it wasn't doing.

  Dorn shrugged — the particular shrug that meant strange things happen around you and I have made my peace with this — and stood up. "I cook the fish," he said.

  "Thank you," Theron said, and stayed at the pool a moment longer, not because he expected to discover anything new, but because he was a man who liked to be sure.

  The gray hair was still gone. He got up.

  He tested his memory at the healing spot while the fish cooked.

  It was something he'd done intermittently since arriving — checking himself, the way you checked equipment that had been through hard use. He had fifteen years of medical training stored in his head, all of it acquired before the grave, all of it subject to the usual erosions of time and disuse. He'd found, in the first weeks, that things were blurrier than he'd have liked. The specific dosage for a pediatric fever — he'd had to reconstruct it from principles, working back from what he knew about body weight and metabolism, rather than simply knowing. The precise sequence of a tension pneumothorax repair. Certain anatomical landmarks he'd use routinely and then one day couldn't picture precisely until they came back in pieces.

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  He'd accepted this. Memory was lossy. He was working from old equipment.

  He sat at the boulder and looked at his hands and thought: Mrs. Calloway. April, twelve years ago. Abdominal trauma, vehicle collision, two-hour surgery, complicated by unexpected vascular involvement at the—

  He stopped.

  He'd remembered her name in approximately half a second, which was not remarkable on its own. But then he'd kept going, and the surgery had arrived in sequence — not a general impression of it, the vague professional memory of that was a difficult one, but the actual procedure. He could see the room. He could see the overhead light and the specific drape arrangement and the assistant across from him — Hendricks, Dan Hendricks, who'd transferred to a hospital in Phoenix the following year and sent a card at Christmas for a while after. He could see the field. He could see where the complication had appeared and feel the particular quality of stillness he'd gone into to solve it, the way time behaved differently in those moments.

  He sat with this for a second.

  He tried another one. Older. An appendectomy from his residency, his second solo procedure, which he remembered in the general shape of sweating, successful, went home and slept twelve hours. He pushed for detail.

  The detail was there.

  All of it. The attending's name — Okafor, Dr. Rose Okafor, who had a habit of humming under her breath during uncomplicated procedures and going completely silent when they weren't, which everyone learned quickly to read. The smell of the room. The specific slight tremor in his hands that had been there on his first solo procedures and that Okafor had told him, with the brisk kindness she brought to everything, would either go away or become unnoticeable, and it had, it had gone away by the fourth procedure, but he could feel it now in the memory as clearly as if he were back in the room.

  He looked up at the camp. The ordinary morning sounds. Dorn cooking. A child somewhere learning to be loud about something.

  What, he thought, with the precision and calm of a man who had survived a lot of strange things in the past months by not panicking at them, is happening to me.

  He thought about the plant. Silver-green leaves. Honey and copper. Three leaves, eaten with dinner. A dream more vivid than any he'd had since the grave. A night's sleep that had felt like being cleaned from the inside out. And now this — gray hair absent, memory doing something it hadn't done since he was thirty-two and had just passed his boards and had the whole medical canon organized in his head like a freshly indexed library.

  He didn't have enough data. He knew he didn't have enough data. One dose, one night, one morning of strange clarity. He was a scientist, or had been — he knew better than to draw conclusions from a sample size of one event.

  But he also knew how to read a preliminary result.

  This is interesting, he thought carefully. This is very interesting. Don't tell anyone yet. Watch it. Test it. More data.

  "Fish is ready," Dorn called from the fire.

  Theron stood up, smoothed his hands down his legs, and went to eat breakfast.

  Sora found him at the healing spot afterward.

  She'd been waiting for the promised herb-showing since yesterday, which she communicated not by asking again but by materializing beside the boulder with the patient intensity of a child who has decided that being present and visible constitutes a polite form of reminder. He'd seen it work on Dorn. It worked on him too.

  He showed her the things he'd brought back from the Honeywoods, one at a time, the way he'd learned to teach — name it, show it, explain its use in whatever combination of his language and hers and hand signals they had between them. She listened the way she always listened, completely, nothing leaking out.

  He reached the Sweetleaf last. Three leaves left, folded in a corner of his pouch. He almost skipped them — he wasn't ready to explain something he didn't understand himself, and Sora asked questions.

  He folded the pouch closed.

  She noticed. She looked at it, then at him.

  "Later," he said.

  She held the look for a moment — that particular Sora look, the one that meant I accept this for now but I'm noting it — and let it go.

  Good, he thought. More time to figure out what I'm actually dealing with.

  The rest of the day was ordinary in the way he'd come to value ordinary days — useful, full, uncomplicated. Juran's splint checked and intact. A woman with a deep thorn wound in her foot, cleaned and bound. A child with an eye infection he treated with a diluted wash of something that had shown antibacterial properties in his testing. Small things. The accumulated work of being the person people came to.

  He noticed, doing all of it, that his mind was moving differently.

  Not faster, exactly. More organized. Like someone had returned a filing system to its proper order. Wound care: the precise sequence arrived without reaching for it. Herb dosages: he knew them, not approximately but exactly, the numbers sitting clean and accessible in a way they hadn't for months. He caught himself, at one point, thinking through the steps of a surgical procedure he hadn't performed in over a year, not because he needed it but because it was simply there, offered up unprompted.

  He kept his face neutral about all of this. You got better at keeping your face neutral after enough time in surgery — patients didn't need to see the moment you noticed something complicated.

  He sat by the fire in the evening and thought about it while the camp settled around him.

  Then he reached into his pouch.

  The three remaining leaves sat in his palm, small and silver-green, catching the firelight in the way they caught light — slightly too well, slightly wrong, that quality he'd noticed in the forest and hadn't been able to name. He looked at them for a moment.

  He ate one.

  The taste arrived: honey first, then the copper note, then the faint fizz at the back of the tongue that still didn't have a name. He chewed it slowly and swallowed and sat with the fire and waited to see if anything happened.

  Nothing happened, except that the fire was warm and the air was cool and the camp sounded like the camp.

  He put the remaining two leaves away carefully and lay down and looked at the stars.

  He thought about the gray hair. About Mrs. Calloway. About the dream of Emma that had felt less like a dream and more like a visit.

  Whatever you are, he thought at the folded pouch, not quite seriously, you seem to mean well.

  He closed his eyes.

  He dreamed of Ben.

  His son was seven, maybe eight — that age where he was all elbows and determination and absolute refusal to admit that something was hard. He was on his bike at the end of their driveway in Connecticut, the one with the small hill that had seemed enormous to small Ben, and he was trying to do it without help, which he'd announced that morning was what he was going to do, no hands, no running alongside, he had it.

  He did not have it.

  He made it two feet, wobbled, put a foot down. Stood the bike back up. Made it three feet, wobbled worse, put both feet down. Looked at Theron with the face of a boy deciding whether to be furious or laugh.

  "Again," Theron said, in the dream.

  Ben got back on the bike.

  He made it six feet. The wobble came, and this time he leaned into it instead of correcting against it, and the bike steadied for a half second — just a half second, but enough to feel — and then he went down in the grass at the side of the driveway and lay there for a moment.

  Theron walked over. "You okay?"

  Ben looked up at him from the grass. "I almost had it."

  "You did almost have it."

  "I'm going to get it."

  "I know," Theron said.

  He stood there while Ben got up, brushed grass off his knees, and walked the bike back to the start. He watched his son's face — that specific eight-year-old stubbornness, the complete refusal to accept the possibility of not, eventually, doing the thing.

  He got it on the seventh try.

  Not clean, not perfect — a wobbling, triumphant surge down the driveway that ended with an abrupt stop at the bottom because he'd forgotten about stopping, and a yelp, and then the pure ungovernable grin of someone who had done the thing.

  Theron stood at the top of the driveway.

  "Again," Ben said.

  He woke before dawn with the grin still on his face.

  It faded slowly, the way dreams faded — the edges going first, then the detail, until what was left was just the feeling. Ben on the bike. That grin. I'm going to get it.

  He was. He had. He was seventeen now, probably, somewhere in Connecticut, still getting things.

  Theron lay on the ground in the dark and breathed and felt the feeling for a little while before it went away entirely.

  Then he reached into his pouch and touched the remaining leaf.

  He didn't eat it. Not tonight. He just touched it — the small smooth surface, the waxy cool of it even in the warm pouch. Then he folded it back in carefully, the way you folded away something you'd decided to keep.

  More of these, he thought. I need to find more of these.

  Not urgently. Not with the need of someone afraid. Just the clear practical certainty of a man who had found something good and wanted to be sure he knew where it grew.

  He put his hands behind his head.

  Above him, the strange stars moved in their unfamiliar patterns across a sky that had never been his. He watched them for a while — not looking for anything, just watching, the way he'd learned to watch the things here that didn't have explanations. Note it. Accept it. Move on.

  He'd go back to the Honeywoods. He'd find the ash tree and the column of light and the little cluster of silver-green, and he'd take what he needed and leave the rest to grow.

  He'd figure out what it was doing to him. Or he wouldn't. Either way.

  He closed his eyes, and this time sleep came immediately, easy and clean, and he did not dream again, and in the morning he was already awake before anyone called him.