Prologue
Nooneexpectedit.
On a Tuesday in September, eight years ago, a routine high-energy particle experiment at CERN, the prestigious European physics laboratory, produced results no one has fully explained to the public. What the official report called “an anomalous spacetime event” lasted eleven seconds. What it actually did was tear a hole between worlds.
The aperture opened over the Missouri Ozarks. From the other side, it took orcs from half a dozen clans, scattered across distances that should have made any single event impossible. There was no discernible logic to the selection. A father, not his children. A warrior, not her clan leader. A child pulled from sleep while her mother, standing in the next room, was left behind. Whatever the experiment disturbed, it did not discriminate by family or clan or proximity. It simply took.
Approximately six hundred orcs emerged within a one-mile radius of each other. What the watching humans could not have known, and what took weeks and much cautious observation to establish, was that the newcomers were bewildered, not dangerous.
The humans built a compound while they sorted out what to do. Appropriate-scale housing. A large community hall. A perimeter that was, depending on who you asked, either a precaution or a cage. The orcs cooperated. They had arrived in a strange world with nothing but each other, and they were practical people.
That CERN bore some responsibility for their displacement was never officially confirmed. But it was never convincingly denied either, and that silence shaped everything that followed. The surrounding communities couldn’t quite summon the outrage that might have come otherwise. Fault has a way of softening hostility.
Gradually, the towns decided the newcomers were permanent. Jobs appeared: labor first, then maintenance work, then for those willing to undergo years of vetting and certification, security. The orcs who thrived learned English. Hard and fast and imperfectly, with accents that never fully smoothed out, but functionally. Well enough to work, to bargain, to make themselves understood.
Eight years in, Sunshine Valley and its neighboring towns have reached a state that resembles, from a distance, almost ordinary life.
It is not an ordinary life. But it is a life.
Among those six hundred is a StillWater orc who spent a lifetime running from his own stillness. He is very good at it.
Chapter One
Kragen
The last customer leaves the Taproom at eleven-forty. I flip the sign and start cleaning the bar.
Walt is at the far end with his coffee, the one he makes himself after nine because he stopped drinking his own beer years ago for reasons he’s never explained and I’ve never asked about. Walt is sixty-something and human, the kind of man who built something with his hands and has been watching it run ever since. The Taproom has been his for going on twenty-six years, a craft bar off the main drag in Sunshine Valley, two blocks from the post office. He hired me eight years ago when almost no one in town was hiring orcs for anything that required talking to customers.
I’ve been here since.
He watches the room the way he always does after close, not checking on anything, just appreciating what’s his. “Good crowd,” he says.
“Good crowd,” I agree.
That’s the whole conversation. Walt doesn’t require more than that, and neither do I, which is one of approximately four reasons this arrangement has lasted as long as it has.
I work from the taps toward the register, then the glasses, then the chairs, lifting each one onto its table, working my way across the floor. Walt finishes his coffee, rinses the mug, sets it in the rack, and says goodnight. The door closes. I lock it behind him and stand in the quiet before I remember I haven’t done the stage yet.
The Taproom after close has its own kind of quiet: the absence of people rather than the presence of emptiness. My guitar waits on its stand in the corner of the small stage, right where I left it before the first set. I’ll pick it up before I leave because I don’t go anywhere without it. This is not a decision I make. That’s how it is.
I played two sets tonight. The second ran long because someone requested an old song I hadn’t played in months, words and all, and I had to feel my way back into it. It took longer than it should have and ended up better than if I’d played it clean. That’s the thing about getting a little lost: sometimes you find something on the way back.
The crowd was good. They always are on Friday. I know most of them by name, and the ones I don’t, I know by order, which amounts to the same thing after enough time. This is what I built here: a Friday crowd of orcs and humans both, which took longer than building just one or the other, but it held. I am good at this. I’ve known it long enough that it doesn’t feel like pride anymore, just fact.
It’s just me and the guitar and the silence of a place I know completely. I sit on the edge of the stage and pick it up and play nothing in particular for a while: not a song, just my hands moving, the way they do when my brain needs somewhere to put itself.
Before the Emergence, I played adrathvik,a stringed instrument from my world that has no equivalent here. The closest Earth has to it is a guitar, so a guitar is what I play now. My hands made the transfer without much argument. This one has been with me since my first year here, a beat-up acoustic that has no business sounding as mellow as it does, and my hands know it like my own face. Better, maybe.
I play for twenty minutes without deciding to. The silence after is good.
Later, back at my apartment, I’m on the couch with the guitar across my knees and my phone in my hand. I’m scrolling the usual late-night algorithm, music content, always music content. The feed figured me out years ago.
A guitarist in Nashville. A fiddler in Ireland. Someone’s kid in a kitchen playing a tune she clearly just made up; those are the best kind.
Then the next video starts, and my thumb pauses over the screen.
A woman’s hands. That’s all I register at first: two hands on a small instrument, moving in a way that’s unhurried and exact. The instrument is laid flat across her lap, narrow-waisted and fretted. The sound coming out of it settles low in my chest, warm and resonant, like a room that’s been lived in for a long time and still holds the memory of everyone who’s ever been there. Not guitar. Not fiddle. An older voice than either. Although there was nothing like it where I came from, it makes me think of home.
