Chapter 10

Echoes met in a basement classroom that had probably been something else before it was a classroom. The walls were old stone, damp in places, and the ceiling was low enough that the taller students had to duck through the doorway. The air felt compressed. Thick with years.

The instructor was a thin woman named Professor Aldridge who looked like she'd been teaching this course since the building was new. When she walked past me to the front of the room, I felt something I hadn't expected. Weight and density. Like the air around her was thicker than it should be. Decades of accumulated experience radiating off her in waves that made my awareness bend.

She nodded at me when I sat down. "Mr. Lawrence. We'll see what you can do."

There were maybe fifteen other students, all first-years, all watching me with varying degrees of interest. I found an empty chair near the back and tried to become invisible. It didn't work.

"Since we have a new student," Professor Aldridge announced, "let's do a practical demonstration. Everyone to the practice room."

Students stood, and I noticed several of them touch things before they moved. A bracelet. A ring. One girl pressed her palm flat against a worn leather bookmark, and for a moment the leather glowed faintly gold, like embers catching breath. When she tucked it into her pocket, she moved differently. More confident. More centered.

The practice room was through a door I hadn't noticed. Smaller than the classroom, empty except for bare stone walls. It felt different the moment I stepped inside. Heavier. Like the air had weight you could lean against.

"This room has been deliberately saturated," Professor Aldridge explained. "Generations of students have used it for exercises. The experiences stored here are layered and complex. Your task is to read them."

The other students spread out. Some closed their eyes. Others pressed their hands against the walls.

What happened next made me understand why Dao had wished me luck.

The girl with the leather bookmark touched the stone first. Her eyes went distant, reflecting something that wasn't in the room. Around her fingers, the air shimmered like summer haze, and the wall seemed to respond. A faint pulse of warmth spreading out from her palms. She started speaking in fragments.

"...scared, couldn't breathe, then it clicked and she finally understood how to..." Her voice trailed off as she went deeper.

Across the room, a tall boy with his hand pressed flat against the opposite wall had gone very still. The temperature around him dropped noticeably. When he exhaled, I could see his breath. His eyes were closed but moving, tracking something invisible.

Another student murmured dates. "1987... no, older... 1952, there was a fire somewhere close by, I can taste the smoke..."

One by one, they sank into the walls like divers slipping beneath dark water. And one by one, the magic became visible. Faint glows around hands where they touched stone. Air shimmering and distorting. Temperature shifts that made the room feel like it had weather. They were reading decades of accumulated experience, and the room was talking back.

I pressed my palm against the cold stone. Closed my eyes. Reached for whatever they were reaching for.

Nothing.

My hands stayed ordinary. The stone didn't glow, didn't warm, didn't respond. I felt the same blur I always felt when I tried to read places. A pressure against my awareness, like being in a crowd where everyone was talking at once. But when I tried to focus on it, tried to read the room the way the others were reading it, I got nothing but fog.

No that was wrong. Not nothing. Fragments.

A student who'd stood in this corner fifty years ago, frustrated and scared. Another one near the door, proud of something she'd finally learned. A professor who'd taught here when the stones were newer, his impatience still somehow present.

People. I was reading the people who'd been here, not the room itself.

"Mr. Lawrence." Professor Aldridge was standing beside me. Up close, that weight was almost overwhelming. Everything she'd ever felt, everyone she'd ever taught, pressed against my awareness like standing too close to a bonfire. "What do you perceive?"

"People," I said. "Students who practiced here. A teacher. Their emotions."

"And the saturation itself? The accumulated experience stored in the stone?"

"I can feel that something's there. But I can't read it directly. Only the traces people left behind."

Professor Aldridge's expression was hard to interpret. "You're reading the human residue. The emotional echoes of individuals. That's not the same as reading place-memory."

"I know."

She turned to the girl with the bookmark. "Ms. Buckley. Show us what you found."

The girl's eyes refocused slowly, like waking from a deep dream. "A student from the 1960s. She was the first person in her family to show the gift. The room remembers how hard she worked to prove herself."

"And how did accessing that feel?"

"Warm. Determined. Like borrowing someone else's resolve."

Professor Aldridge nodded approvingly. "Your token helped you connect?"

"Yes, ma'am." The girl touched her pocket where the leather bookmark rested. "Like turning up the volume on something I could barely hear before."

The contrast couldn't have been clearer. Ms. Buckley, connected, glowing, drawing something real from the stone. Me, standing there with ordinary hands and a blank wall that didn't want to talk.

"Cross mentioned you were unusual," Professor Aldridge said finally. "I didn't realize she meant foundationally unusual."

"Is that bad?"

"It's not good or bad. It just means the standard curriculum won't work for you. We'll need to find another approach." She turned back to the class. "Everyone else, continue the exercise. Mr. Lawrence, observe. Try to understand what the others are doing even if you can't replicate it."

So I stood there and watched. Watched my classmates read layers I couldn't see, describe experiences I could only glimpse as fragments. Watched the room respond to them with glows and temperature shifts and visible magic.

Like a tourist pressing his nose against glass.

The good eggs felt heavier in my stomach.

Second period was Threshold Studies.

The classroom was on the third floor of the east wing, and it looked like someone's attic had exploded. Maps covered every wall, some of them clearly old, others hand-drawn on notebook paper. Shelves held objects that didn't seem to belong together, and some of them hummed with visible residue. A brass compass next to a child's snow globe, both radiating faint but distinct colors. A chunk of what looked like railroad track beside a delicate glass vial filled with something that shimmered and pulsed like a living thing.

Professor Blackwood stood at the front, and he was nothing like Aldridge.

Where she'd felt dense with accumulated weight, Blackwood felt scattered. His attention jumped from thing to thing like a hummingbird, his hands constantly moving, picking up objects from his desk and putting them down again. He wore a tweed jacket that had seen better decades and his gray hair stuck up at angles that suggested he'd forgotten mirrors existed.

"Ah! The new student!" He beamed at me like I was a present he'd been hoping for. "Lawrence, yes? Cross mentioned you. Sit anywhere, sit anywhere. We're discussing transit theory today, which sounds dull but isn't. Nothing about portals is dull, I promise you that."

I found a seat near the middle. The students around me seemed relaxed in a way they hadn't been in Echoes. A few were smiling.

"Now then." Blackwood picked up what looked like an ordinary doorknob. "Who can tell me why this matters?"

A student in the front row raised her hand. "It's from the Bellingham Gate?"

"Exactly! Exactly right. The Bellingham Gate, which operated from 1847 to 1912, connecting Portland to a lovely spot in the Swiss Alps. Closed now, of course. Tragic business. But the doorknob remains." He held it up to the light, and I could see it. The brass wasn't just old. It was saturated, carrying a faint golden shimmer that pulsed when Blackwood's fingers wrapped around it. "Everything that ever passed through that gate left traces in this brass. Sixty-five years of travelers. Their hopes, their fears, their terrible fashion choices."

A few students laughed.

"Portals aren't just doorways," Blackwood continued, setting the knob down and picking up a folded map. "They're relationships between places. Between the people who use them. Between the here and the there." He unfolded the map, revealing a web of lines connecting points I didn't recognize. "The portal network is alive. It remembers. And sometimes, if you're very clever and very careful, it talks back. If you're not very clever or very careful, then you won't find your way back."

He spent the rest of the period walking us through the basics of threshold theory. How portals worked. Why some connections were stable and others weren't. The history of the major gates and the practitioners who'd built them. I understood almost none of it. But unlike Echoes, that was fine. This was information, not ability. I could learn information.

When class ended, Blackwood caught my arm. "Lawrence. A word."

I stayed while the other students filed out. The doorknob from the Bellingham Gate sat on his desk, still pulsing with that subtle golden light.

"Cross tells me you have an interesting gift." His eyes were brighter than they'd seemed during class. More focused. "Reading people instead of places."

"That's one way to put it."

"It's a rare way to put it. In thirty years of teaching, I've met exactly two practitioners who couldn't read place-memory at all." He picked up the doorknob, turned it over in his hands. "Both of them found other paths. Neither of them were limited by what they couldn't do. They were defined by what they could."

"That's encouraging. I think."

"It's meant to be. Cross recruited you for a reason, Lawrence. Don't assume that reason was traditional." He set the doorknob back down. Then his expression shifted. Became more serious, the enthusiasm draining away until what was left looked almost careful. "One other thing. Be cautious about strangers approaching you. On campus, off campus, anywhere. There are practitioners outside these walls who would exploit your gifts. Especially a gift like yours."

"What kind of practitioners?"

"The kind who see potential as something to harvest rather than nurture." He held my eyes for a moment longer than felt comfortable. Then the warmth flooded back, like a light switched on, and he waved a hand, dismissing the topic before I could ask more. "It's nothing to worry about right now. Just be aware. Now get to lunch. The afternoon doesn't get easier."

Between classes, the hallways of Mudwick were a river of bodies and noise and emotional static. I found a bench in a corridor that was mostly empty. Sat down. Put my head against the cool stone wall and closed my eyes.

The wall gave me nothing. Just the same formless pressure, the same crowd of voices too blurred to distinguish. The stone had stories and I couldn't hear any of them.

But I could hear every student who walked past. Their nervousness, their boredom, their small private anxieties trailing behind them like smoke. A girl worried about a letter from home. A boy rehearsing what he'd say to someone he liked. An upperclassman carrying a weight that felt like failing a test she'd studied weeks for.

All of them readable. None of them asking to be read.

Footsteps stopped near me. Someone sat down on the bench without saying anything.

I opened my eyes. Thaddeus. He had his bag in his lap and was staring at the opposite wall like it contained fascinating information.

He didn't say "are you okay." Didn't ask about Echoes, though he must have heard. Just sat there, present and unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be even though I'd seen his schedule and knew he had Resonance Mapping in twelve minutes.

A minute passed. Maybe two.

"Echoes is brutal for everyone at first," he said eventually. His voice was quiet, aimed at the wall rather than at me. "Even the ones who look like they know what they're doing."

"They literally glowed, Thaddeus. Their hands lit up."

"I know how it looks." He adjusted his bag. "My first week, I was so overwhelmed by the practice room that I threw up. In front of Professor Aldridge and the entire class. On the wall, actually. She made me clean it."

I looked at him. This kid with his family name on a plaque and his mother on the board of governors. He'd thrown up on the practice room wall.

"She said it was the most visceral reaction she'd seen in twenty years of teaching." He almost smiled. "I don't think she meant it as a compliment."

"Did it get better?"

"Eventually. Not quickly." He finally turned to look at me. "You feel things differently than we do. That doesn't make you worse. It just means the map everyone else is following isn't going to work for you."

"What if there isn't another map?"

"Then you draw one." He stood up, brushed off his pants. Habit, probably. The pants were already clean. "I should get to class. But Eli, for what it's worth, Sasha's already trying to figure out how your ability works. She stayed up last night reading papers about emotional resonance theory. Highlighted the whole packet."

"Of course she did."

"That's what she does when she cares about something. She researches it." He shouldered his bag. "See you at lunch."

He walked away. The hallway filled back up with students and their trailing emotions, and I sat on that bench for another minute, thinking about a kid from one of the oldest families in the Zant world who'd vomited on a wall his first week and still showed up the next day.

It didn't fix anything. I was still the kid who couldn't read places in a school built around reading places.

But it helped. More than I'd expected.