The smell of wet asphalt was the only thing Roberto could feel.
He was lying down. He knew because the cold ground seeped through his thin shirt and reached his back. There were shouts all around him—overlapping voices, hurried and distant, as if they were coming from inside a tunnel. Someone was crying. A car horn. A siren.
He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt as heavy as if they were made of concrete.
The last thing he remembered was the child. A little boy, no more than five, standing in the middle of the crosswalk with his eyes wide, staring at the headlights coming toward him like two furious suns. Roberto didn’t think. His legs moved before his mind did, and he felt the dull impact against his hip, his body spinning through the air, and then—nothing.
Now there was only the cold and the smell of rain.
“The child...” he murmured, but his own voice sounded strange, as if it were coming from somewhere else.
No one answered.
The noise began to fade. The voices, the siren, the crying—it all went out like the volume on a television being slowly turned down. In place of the sound came a silence so complete that Roberto could feel his own heart beating in his ears. Or at least, he thought it was his heart. Each beat grew slower. More spaced out. More distant.
Ah, he thought. So this is how it is.
He didn’t feel afraid. He felt tired. An ancient weariness that wasn’t just of the body—it was from twenty-five years of carrying a burden no one could see. From the late nights studying for civil service exams he never passed. From jobs that demanded everything and gave almost nothing back. From the electric bill that always arrived at the worst possible time. From his mother calling to ask if everything was all right, and him always saying yes, always yes, because what else could he say?
At least the child is okay, he thought. At least there’s that.
And then the silence swallowed everything.
The first thing he felt was warmth.
Not the suffocating heat of São Paulo in January, but something different—a soft, enveloping warmth, like being wrapped in thick blankets beside a fireplace. It smelled of wood and something sweet he couldn’t identify. Herbs, perhaps. Or dried flowers.
Roberto tried to open his eyes, and this time he succeeded.
The ceiling above him was made of dark wood, with thick, uneven beams. It wasn’t the ceiling of his apartment. It wasn’t the ceiling of any hospital he knew. The light coming through the window on the right was golden and gentle, filtered through a rough-cloth curtain swaying in a light breeze.
Where...?
He tried to sit up, but his body didn’t obey properly. His arms were too short. His hands were too small. He looked at his fingers, and his heart—this new, fast, tiny heart—began to race.
They were a child’s hands.
Before he could process anything, a door opened with a familiar creak, the kind only old, well-used doors made. A woman entered carrying a wooden basin with a damp cloth. Her brown hair was tied in a loose bun, dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her eyes were red from crying for days. But when she saw that he was awake, the basin nearly fell from her hands.
“Rem!” Her voice cracked halfway through the name. “Aldric! Aldric, come here, he’s awake!”
She set the basin down on a table beside the bed and knelt next to him, her hands trembling as they touched his face with a tenderness Roberto hadn’t felt in years. Decades, perhaps. Not since he had been a real child.
“My son, thank the heavens, my son...”
Her tears fell onto his face, hot and heavy. Roberto—or whoever he was now—remained still, staring at the woman who cried as if the entire world had ended and begun again in the same instant.
Heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway. A man appeared in the doorway—tall and broad, with callused hands and a face that looked as if it had been carved by the sun and hard work. His eyes were damp, but he wasn’t crying. He held back his emotions in his clenched jaw, in the way he gripped the doorframe hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
“Rem?” His voice was deep and careful, as if speaking too loudly might break something.
Rem. That was the name. Not his—not really. It belonged to someone else. To a child who had a fever, who had nearly died, who...
Roberto looked at the woman. He looked at the man. He looked at his own small hands.
And he understood that he hadn’t died.
Or rather—he had died. Roberto had died on a street in São Paulo, in the rain, saving a child he didn’t even know. But someone, something, some mechanism he couldn’t understand, had put him here. In this body. In this bed. In this house that smelled of wood and herbs.
He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know when it was. He didn’t know why.
But he knew one thing: the woman kneeling beside the bed, with tears running down her face and trembling hands on his cheeks—she loved this boy more than anything in the world.
And the man in the doorway, holding back his emotions so fiercely that his fingers had gone white—he did too.
Roberto felt something tighten in his chest. Something that wasn’t fear, confusion, or the shock of being in a body that wasn’t his.
It was something he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
“Mother?” he said, and the voice that came out was thin, small, the voice of a child. The word came in a language he didn’t know, but somehow understood and spoke as if it had always been his.
Elara sobbed and hugged him so tightly that he felt every rib in that small body. Aldric crossed the room in two long strides and wrapped his arms around them both, and Roberto remained there, squeezed between those enormous arms and that relieved crying, feeling their warmth, the smell of earth and sweat and soap, and thought:
I’m not going to waste this.
Not this time.