Delilah Kim

SCENARIO 1: The Rusty Spur

The world resolved itself through a painful, throbbing filter. Not the familiar, dull ache of a hangover from craft beer and poor life choices, but a deep, unsettling thrum that seemed to originate in her bones and radiate outwards. Delilah opened her eyes to a sky the color of a faded bruise, not the familiar off-white of her apartment ceiling with its faint hairline crack near the light fixture. The surface beneath her was hard, cold, and damp. Not memory foam. Dirt. Packed, gritty, and unforgiving.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, a wave of dizziness threatening to send her back down. Her head was a riot of wrongness. The last clear memory was the electric hum of her studio, the blue glow of her laptop screen, a sharp, metallic taste in the air like ozone after a lightning strike. Then... nothing. A void. And now this.

This was an alley. Narrow, shadowed, reeking. The walls were rough, red brick, weeping a dark, damp patina. A thin stream of foul-smelling liquid trickled down a central gutter. The sounds were a chaotic symphony from a dead age. The heavy, rhythmic clop-clop-clop of hooves on stone, the shriek of unlubricated wooden wheels, voices calling out in a cadence that was almost English but twisted, curled at the edges with unfamiliar slang and a rustic twang. And the smells. God, the smells. Beyond the immediate alley rot was a pervasive tapestry of woodsmoke, horse sweat, manure, something sickly-sweet like rotting fruit, and the pungent, greasy odor of unwashed humanity. It was overwhelming, a physical assault on her 21st-century senses, accustomed to filtered air and chemical cleanliness.

Not a dream. The thought was cold, final. The grit under her nails was real. The chill seeping through her thin cotton tank top was real. The throbbing in her temple was a brutal anchor to reality. She got to her feet, her movements slow, cautious, every sense screaming in high alert. She patted her pockets. Phone. Wallet. The familiar shapes were there, but they felt like artifacts in a museum. She pulled out the phone. A black, dead screen reflected her own wide, bewildered eyes back at her. No amount of jamming her thumb on the power button changed anything. It was a sleek, black brick. Useless.

She inched toward the mouth of the alley, pressing herself against the cold brick. Peering out, the world didn’t just feel old; it was old. The street was a churned mess of mud and cobblestone. A man in a coarse, homespun shirt and suspenders drove a wagon piled high with hay. A woman crossed the street, her long, drab skirt brushing the filth, a bonnet obscuring her face. The buildings were low, wooden or brick, with signs painted in curling, elaborate fonts: Haberdashery. Dry Goods. Livery Stable. No plastic, no neon, no glass facades. A profound, gut-churning certainty settled in her stomach, heavy as a stone. This isn’t a reenactment. This isn’t a joke.

Okay. Okay. Don’t panic. Breathe. Assess. The mantra was automatic, drilled into her from a lifetime of relying on herself. You are here. Wherever ‘here’ is. You need to not stand out. You need to understand. She stepped out of the alley.

The stares were immediate and piercing. They didn’t flicker and move on; they stuck. Men in worn jackets and wide-brimmed hats stopped their conversations to gawk. Women clutching baskets clutched them tighter, their eyes darting from her form-fitting jeans to her exposed arms and the modern cut of her top. A child pointed before being hushed and dragged away. She was a spectacle. A bizarre anomaly. Her clothing wasn’t just different; it was an affront, a proclamation of otherness she couldn’t afford.

Her mind, reeling, latched onto the most immediate solution. Camouflage. I need to look like them. Her eyes scanned the storefronts. There. A mercantile. G. Walsh & Sons, Purveyors. In the window, dummies wore high-necked dresses in muted plaids and solids. A dress. I need a dress. The thought was surreal, but it was a goal. A tangible step.

She approached the window, hope a fragile, fluttering thing in her chest. She could see the price tags—handwritten on little cards. Not dollars. Shillings. Pence. Her hand went to her wallet again. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. The faces of Jackson and the White House looked back at her, absurd and anachronistic. Her credit card was a shiny rectangle of plastic, utterly alien in this world of coin and ledger. No money. The realization was a door slamming shut. She had no currency, no trade, no way to purchase the one thing that might make her invisible.

A cold, practical fear began to replace the initial shock. Night was coming. The air already held a biting edge. She couldn’t sleep in that alley. She needed shelter, information, and a way to solve the currency problem. Her gaze travelled down the muddy street, past a blacksmith’s showering sparks, past a stern-faced preacher on a corner. It landed on a building from which spilled raucous laughter, the clink of glass, and the low, amber glow of lantern light. A pub. The Rusty Spur. The universal sanctuary of the desperate, the lonely, and the opportunistic. Where else?

Pushing the heavy, wooden door open was like entering another layer of the nightmare. The air inside was thick, a visible haze of tobacco smoke and fireplace soot that stung her eyes. The smell of stale beer, sweat, and boiled meat was almost a solid thing. The room was crowded with men in various states of inebriation and wear. A few rough-looking women served drinks, their smiles tired and practiced.

She moved through the crowd, a ghost in a synthetic fabric haunt. Her assessment was swift, clinical. Too drunk. Too handsy. Too stupid. Too weak. She needed someone with resources, but not a pillar of the community who would ask too many questions. She needed someone who understood shadows.

He was in the back corner, a table half in darkness. He sat alone, a half-empty bottle of something dark in front of him. He wasn’t drinking to forget; he was drinking to pass the time. His clothes were worn but serviceable—a dark coat, a hat pulled low, but it was his posture that gave him away. He wasn’t slouched. He was coiled. Still. His eyes, when they flicked up from his bottle to scan the room, held a flat, predatory watchfulness. They were the eyes of a man who trusted no one and expected trouble. An outlaw. A man on the fringe. Dangerous. But a known quantity. A man who operates on transactions, not trust.

Her path was clear. She had nothing to bargain with but the mystery she presented and her own unwavering certainty. She walked directly to his table, ignoring the curious and lecherous looks that followed her. She didn’t ask to sit. She placed her hands flat on the scarred, sticky wood, leaning in so her words would cut through the pub’s din and reach his ears alone. The modern cadence of her voice was another shock in the smoky air.

“I have no money, and these clothes are a target,” she said, her voice low, stripped of all genteel 1840s pretense. It was pure, blunt statement of fact. “You look like a man who understands value. Help me get a dress, something that doesn’t scream ‘stranger,’ and I’ll make it worth your while. I’m very good at solving problems for people who help me.”

SCENARIO 2: The Costume of a Century

The mercantile was a temple of tactile antiquity, and Delilah felt like a blasphemer. Sunlight, filtered through dusty front windows, fell in heavy bars across a world of texture she’d only ever seen behind glass or in historical dramas. It was oppressively real. The air was a thick soup of smells: the dusty sweetness of dry corn, the sharp, oily tang of leather harnesses, the pungent bite of strong soap, and beneath it all, the faint, ever-present scent of mildew. It was a far cry from the sterile, climate-controlled, scent-diffused air of a 21st-century department store.

Bolts of fabric stood like silent soldiers on rough wooden shelves. Calico in tiny, repetitive floral prints that made her eyes hurt. Wool in shades of mud, moss, and a depressing gray that seemed to absorb the light. Linens that looked sturdy and unforgiving. No synthetics. No stretch. No easy-care instructions. Everything here demands work, she thought, running her fingers over a coarse wool. Just to wear it, just to clean it. Life as constant maintenance.

He was a silent, solid presence nearby, his own alertness a buffer between her and the curious glances of the shopkeeper, a wiry man with spectacles who kept pretending to tally inventory while watching the strange, modern woman from the corner of his eye. She knew she was a spectacle again, even in his company. Her posture, her assessing gaze, the way she handled the materials—it all marked her as other.

She picked up a corset from a counter display. It was a formidable contraption of white canvas and what felt like thin strips of whalebone. She held it at arm’s length, a laugh caught somewhere between horror and hysterical disbelief in her throat. “This,” she said, her voice a low murmur meant only for him, though it carried in the quiet shop, “is an instrument of oppression disguised as infrastructure. Where I’m from, we have... elastic. And the radical notion that women might need to breathe.”

She dropped the corset back on the counter with a soft thud and turned to the racks of finished dresses. They hung, limp and shapeless until donned, like the shed skins of drab butterflies. She pulled a dark gray wool dress from the rack. It was heavy in her hands. Substantial. She held it up against her body, looking at her faint reflection in a clouded mirror propped against a barrel of pickles.

“You have absolutely no idea,” she began, the words starting as a whisper and gaining momentum, fueled by two weeks of bottled-up surrealism. She glanced at the shopkeeper, who quickly looked down at his ledger. “The silence here is a physical weight. At home, there’s always a hum. The grid. Electricity in the walls. Fridges, computers, lights—a low, constant song of human creation. Here... it’s just wind, and animals, and people. And my own thoughts are so damn loud.”

She turned the dress, examining the simple, sturdy stitching. “I could order a dress like this on a device I held in my hand. I’d tap a screen, input a series of numbers connected to a abstract concept of my wealth, and a man in a vehicle would bring it to my door in a day. Maybe two. The fabric might be made from recycled bottles. It would probably resist stains.” She shook her head, the absurdity of it all tightening her chest. “I miss cold. Actual, reliable, on-demand cold. Ice that doesn’t come from a frozen lake in winter. I miss the certainty of antibiotics. The blissful, simple magic of aspirin.”

Her monologue was spilling out now, a quiet, intense torrent. She ran her thumb over a bone button. “I used to complain about traffic. About slow Wi-Fi. About the price of avocado toast.” The word ‘avocado’ felt alien on her tongue in this setting. “Now I’d kill for a traffic jam. For the glow of a streetlight. For music that wasn’t someone plucking a fiddle on a porch.” She looked directly at him then, her eyes stark, all pretense of browsing gone. “I’m trying to buy a costume so I can play a role in a world that shouldn’t exist for me. I’m trying to learn the lines to a play where a mistake doesn’t mean embarrassment, it means burning at the stake.”

She held the gray dress out fully. “So. Be honest. Does this one say ‘I am a perfectly normal, slightly grubby settler woman who definitely doesn’t know how transistors work’? Or does it whisper ‘There’s something deeply wrong here, let’s investigate with torches and pitchforks’?” She gestured to a simpler, brown dress with a slightly less oppressive collar. “Is the brown... safer? More anonymous?” A sigh escaped her, heavy with the weight of her predicament. “I need to look like I belong in the background of a painting nobody will ever look at twice. Choose the curtain for the ghost.”

SCENARIO 3: Firelight and Flight

The campfire was a fragile, defiant eye of light in the vast, swallowing darkness of the 1840s frontier. Two weeks. Fourteen days of a sun that seemed older, a moon that looked closer, and a silence so profound it had its own sound—a high, thin ringing in her ears when the wind died. Delilah sat on a rolled blanket, the familiar, grimy feel of it almost a comfort now. In her hands was her last, precious tether: a modern, stainless steel multi-tool, its various blades and implements folded neatly into its handle. She was methodically cleaning a speck of rust from the pliers with the edge of her shirt, a nightly ritual. This is real. I am here. This object is proof. I didn’t dream my life.

The fire popped, sending a spiral of sparks towards a sky dusted with a breathtaking, indifferent spray of stars. No light pollution. The Milky Way was a thick, ghostly river smeared across the black. It was the one thing, the only thing, that was exactly the same. She’d look up, find Orion, and for a second, the vertigo would ease. The same light. The same stars. Just... earlier.

He was across the fire, a shadow carving a whetstone along the blade of his knife in long, rhythmic strokes. Shhhk-shhhk-shhhk. The sound was part of the night’s rhythm now, along with the crackle of pine logs and the soft snuffling of the tethered horses. They had a routine, a wordless dance of shared watches, gathered firewood, and boiled coffee. He knew her truth. He’d seen the dead phone, heard her slip too many times, and finally, she’d just told him, bluntly, watching for the disbelief or derision. He’d just nodded slowly, his gaze on the middle distance, and said, “Explains a few things.” That was it. No panic. No theology. Just another piece of data in a dangerous world. It was the closest thing to acceptance she’d found.

It was the silence that changed first.

Not an arrival of sound, but a sudden, chilling subtraction. The crickets. Their endless, chirping chorus from the tree line just... stopped. As if a switch had been thrown. The horses, previously drowsy, lifted their heads. One stamped, a hard, nervous thud on the packed earth. Delilah’s head came up, her fingers freezing around the multi-tool. Her eyes went to him.

He had gone perfectly still. The whetstone was motionless in his hand. His head was tilted, not looking at anything, but listening. Every line of his body, which had been at a wary ease, was now taut, a bowstring pulled to its limit. His eyes, reflecting the fire, had gone flat and cold. She saw his free hand drift, slow and deliberate, to rest on the worn grip of the revolver at his hip.

Time seemed to slow, thick as honey. She heard the blood rushing in her own ears. What is it? She opened her mouth to whisper, but no sound came out. His eyes snapped to hers, and in that flicker of firelight, she didn’t see her ally of two weeks. She saw pure, unadulterated alarm.

The gunshot was a monstrous, world-splitting crack.

It came from the tree line to the west. A geyser of splinters erupted from the log he’d been sitting against a moment before. He was already moving, a blur of conditioned reflex, hitting the ground and rolling into the deeper shadows beyond the firelight. “Down!” The roar was his, but she was already dropping flat, the multi-tool digging into her palm.

Muzzle flashes bloomed in the dark like poisonous flowers. One, two. Different positions. A coordinated attack. Her mind, cold and sharp with adrenaline, put names to the shapes she could barely see. A broad, bear-like silhouette moving with surprising speed, using the trees for cover. Dutch. The name was a curse in her head. And another, leaner, moving with a skittering, vicious energy, his laughter carrying on the wind—a high, nasty sound that cut through the gunfire. Micah.

They found us. The thought was clear, ice-cold. They’re here for him. I’m just collateral.

Panic was a screaming animal in her chest, but she caged it. She had no gun. She was exposed in the firelight. Her eyes darted, looking for the rifle they kept propped against a saddle. It was six feet away. A lifetime.

He didn’t go for the rifle. He moved toward her. A low, fast scramble across the treacherous ground. She saw his face for a split second in the erratic light—jaw clenched, eyes narrowed to slits, all calculation and raw will. His hand shot out, not gentle, not asking. It clamped around her wrist like an iron manacle, the calluses rough against her skin, his grip fueled by pure, desperate strength.

He yanked.

Her body obeyed before her mind could protest. She was on her feet, stumbling, then running, pulled into his momentum. The world dissolved into a nightmare of sound and shadow. More gunshots. The whine of a bullet passing too close. Shouts—Dutch’s booming voice yelling something about betrayal, Micah’s gleeful taunt lost in the chaos.

They crashed into the tree line opposite the shooters, leaving the dying fire, their blankets, their supplies—their meager slice of temporary safety—behind. Darkness swallowed them, broken only by jagged slices of moonlight through the branches. He was a shadow ahead of her, his grip on her wrist the only tether, pulling her through a maze of grasping branches and uneven ground she couldn’t see. His breathing was harsh, rhythmic grunts of effort. Hers was ragged, burning in her lungs.

Don’t fall. Don’t trip. Don’t be the weight that gets him killed. The thoughts beat in time with her pounding heart. Branches whipped at her face and arms. Roots tried to claim her ankles. The sounds of pursuit were behind them—crashing, another shouted curse, but fainter. He knew this land. He was running a path only he could see.

The chase was a visceral, pounding truth in the dark. The past wasn’t just a place she was trapped in. It was alive, it was armed, and it was hunting them. And all she could do was run, her hand locked in his, trusting the outlaw in the dark more than the era that wanted to bury them both.