Chapter 17

Tuesday evening, I called my dad.

I hadn't planned to. We talked Sundays, 7pm his time. That was the deal we'd fallen into since I'd arrived. Short calls, fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty. He'd ask about school. I'd say fine. He'd mention something about the house or the weather or a game he'd watched. I'd make the right sounds. We'd say goodnight and hang up and neither of us would say anything that actually mattered.

Sunday's call had been the worst one yet.

By then I'd been carrying the weight of Lucia for over a week. The assembly, Cross's office, the conversation with Dao in the dark, Sasha's scattered papers across the library table at two in the morning. All of it sitting inside me like something I'd swallowed that wouldn't dissolve.

And Dad talked about the faucet in the upstairs bathroom and I said "that sucks" and "you should call the plumber" and the whole time my brain was full of a girl who'd been drained hollow and a word that meant people disappearing and nobody caring. I just sat there with the phone pressed to my ear and lied by saying nothing at all.

That call had left me feeling emptier than the one before it. So now it was Tuesday, and I was dialing his number without really deciding to, because the emptiness had gotten worse and I needed to hear his voice even if I couldn't tell him why.

He answered on the second ring. "Eli?"

"Hey, Dad."

"It's Tuesday."

"I know."

A pause. I could hear the TV in the background, some show he was half-watching. Then the volume dropped. He'd picked up the remote. He was paying attention.

"What's going on?"

"Nothing. I just wanted to call."

"You just wanted to call." He repeated it back to me, flat and careful. The voice he used when he knew I wasn't telling him something but hadn't decided yet whether to push. "On a Tuesday."

"Is that okay?"

"It's always okay. You know that." Another pause. Longer. "Talk to me, Eli."

I held the coin between my thumb and forefinger, turning it the way I'd watched him turn it a thousand times. Sitting at the kitchen table after a long shift. Standing in the driveway when he didn't know I was watching. The small unconscious gesture of a man holding onto something he couldn't name.

"I don't know what to say."

"That's a first."

I almost smiled. "I mean it. I called because I wanted to talk to you, and now I'm sitting here and I don't know how to say any of the things I want to say."

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Softer.

"Yeah. I know that feeling."

"You do?"

"Every Sunday night. I hang up and think about all the things I should've asked you. Real things. Not how's school, how's the food, are you sleeping okay. Things that actually matter." He took a breath. "But I don't know how to get there. You're at this school I've never seen, learning things I don't understand, and every week you sound a little more like someone I'm still getting to know. I keep asking the easy questions because I'm scared if I ask the hard ones, you'll tell me something I can't help with."

The words sat between us. I could hear the TV playing faintly in the background. The familiar soundtrack of a house I wasn't in anymore.

"It's quiet here," he said. "I keep meaning to tell you that. Your room is the way you left it. I walk past it sometimes and it still surprises me. The door's open and nobody's in there and the house just echoes differently without you."

I felt that all the way through.

I thought about the empty seat at the kitchen table. The room upstairs that wasn't being slept in. The coin warm in my hand, connecting me to him across all the distance I couldn't explain.

"I found one of your mother's old boxes last week," he said. "In the basement. Must've missed it when I packed everything up. Had some of her teaching things in it. Lesson plans, student papers, that red pen she used to carry everywhere." He paused. "And a notebook I'd never seen before. Not a school one. Personal."

My hand tightened around the coin. "What kind of notebook?"

"I didn't read much of it. Felt like I'd be..." He trailed off. "But I saw your name in there. She'd written things about you. Things you did when you were little. Like she was tracking something."

The room went very still around me.

"Tracking what?"

"I don't know. Times you said things you shouldn't have known. Times you reacted to people before they said anything." Another pause, careful now. "She used to ask you questions, remember? When you were small. Whether you could feel things other kids couldn't."

"I remember."

"I always thought she was just being protective. Anxious. You know how she was." His voice got quieter. "But reading that notebook. She wasn't anxious, Eli. She was writing things down like she was looking for evidence. Like she knew what she was looking for and was just waiting for it to show up."

I sat on the edge of my bed, gripping the coin hard enough that the ridges pressed into my skin. My mother, keeping a notebook. Tracking the things I did. Watching for evidence of something she understood better than she ever let on.

"Dad. Do you think she knew? About the things I can do?"

Silence. Long enough that I thought maybe the call had dropped.

"I think she worried about things she couldn't protect you from," he said finally. "Things she couldn't explain to me because I wouldn't have believed her." He took a shaky breath. "I think I let her worry alone. And I think that's something I'm going to have to sit with for a long time."

My throat felt tight. I wanted to tell him everything. About Mudwick, about saturation and reading people, about a girl named Lucia who disappeared in the night. About a word called culling and what it meant and why I was scared. About Cross and her office and the way she looked at me sometimes like I was something she'd been waiting for.

I couldn't say any of it. But for the first time, the silence between us didn't feel like distance. It felt like two people standing on opposite sides of a wall, both pressing their hands against it.

"I miss you, Dad."

"Yeah?" He sounded almost surprised. Like he hadn't been sure.

"Yeah."

"I miss you too, kid. Every day." A pause, and I could hear him smiling a little. "Call whenever you want, okay? Doesn't have to be Sundays. Doesn't have to be scheduled. Just call."

"I will."

"And Eli? That notebook. I'll keep it for you. If you want to read it sometime."

"Yeah. I'd like that."

"I love you, E."

"Love you too, Dad."

I hung up and sat on my bed for a long time, phone in my hand, watching the light fade from the sky. The coin rested on my nightstand where I'd set it down. Small and ordinary and real.

Mom had kept a notebook. Had written things down, tracked the evidence, looked for something she recognized in her son. And Dad had found it in a box in the basement, surrounded by lesson plans and red pens and the ordinary wreckage of a life cut short.

I wondered how much she'd known. Whether she'd understood what I was before anyone else did. Whether this school, this world, all of it, was something she'd seen coming.

My phone buzzed that night. Shelby.

Over the past week her messages had shifted in ways I was trying not to notice. She'd sent a photo of a squirrel on her school's roof with the caption this guy has more school spirit than half the football team. Then did you know they make pumpkin spice ramen now? the apocalypse is real eli. Then a day of nothing, which somehow felt louder than the messages. Then hey. just checking in. you don't have to respond. just want you to know i'm here.

You don't have to respond. Just want you to know I'm here.

Three years ago her mother told her to be nice to the quiet kid who'd just lost his mom. That was the whole origin story. An obligation handed down from a parent who believed in being neighborly. And Shelby had shown up at my locker with a bag of gummy bears and a joke about the guidance counselor's hairpiece, and she'd never stopped showing up.

The obligation became a habit. The habit became real. And now, months into getting almost nothing back from me, she was still texting squirrel photos and pumpkin spice updates like the door was open even when I kept closing it.

Most people would've taken the hint by now. Shelby didn't take hints. She just kept knocking.

Tonight's message was different, though. Less breezy.

eli. okay. i know you're busy with fancy boarding school stuff. but christmas break. you're coming home right? we should actually hang out. like in person. with our faces. wednesday at 2. denny's. cheese fries. nonnegotiable.

I started typing the usual deflection. Then stopped. Deleted it.

yeah, I wrote. i'll be there. we should definitely hang out.

yay!! okay i'm holding you to that. we can go to denny's and you can tell me all about your rich people adventures.

can't wait

I put the phone down. The conversation had been warmer than anything we'd exchanged in weeks, and that warmth sat on my chest like something heavy. Christmas break. Three weeks away. Going home, seeing Shelby, pretending everything was normal when nothing was normal anymore.

The distance between us wasn't just miles. It was everything I couldn't tell her. Every lie I'd have to maintain while sitting across from her at Denny's, pretending to be the person she remembered.

She deserved better than what I was giving her. She'd always deserved better. And she kept showing up anyway, which made it worse.

I needed air.

The dorm hallways were quiet, most people at dinner or holed up studying. I walked without destination, letting my feet choose. Past the library, past the practice courts, past the old chapel where they'd told us everything was fine. The November air was cold enough to sting but I didn't mind. Better than the stuffiness of my room. Better than staring at my phone and trying to figure out how to be two people at once.

Near the Threshold Studies wing, I almost walked into Professor Blackwood.

He was coming out of his classroom carrying a stack of books so tall he couldn't see over them, muttering to himself about something that sounded like "tertiary resonance frequencies." His hair was doing the thing where it looked like he'd stuck his finger in an electrical socket, and there was chalk dust on his collar and both elbows.

"Eli! Perfect timing. Hold this." He transferred three books to my arms before I could object. "I've been reorganizing the portal reference library and I got somewhat carried away. Did you know there are seventeen documented portal sites in the British Isles alone? Seventeen! And that's just the ones we know about. The undocumented ones could fill a book. Several books. Which is part of the problem, actually, because the books that do exist are scattered across four different shelves and two storage closets and I found one in the bathroom, which raises questions I'd rather not answer."

"Do you need help carrying these to your office?"

"Would you? That would be wonderful. I've been making trips all afternoon and I keep finding more. It's like the books are multiplying." He peered at me over the remaining stack. "How are you settling in? I heard your squad won the practice match. Unconventional strategy, from what I gathered."

"Something like that."

"Good. Good." He started walking, and I followed, trying to keep the books balanced. "Unconventional is underrated in this world. Everyone wants to do things the established way because the established way has a manual. But the most interesting practitioners I've known were the ones who couldn't follow the manual if you stapled it to their forehead."

I almost laughed. "That's reassuring."

"It should be. The portal network itself was discovered by someone everyone thought was doing it wrong. She kept insisting she could feel connections between saturated sites that nobody else could detect. Took twenty years for the establishment to admit she'd been right all along." He kicked his office door open with practiced ease. "Twenty years of being told she was broken. Can you imagine?"

I could, actually.

We set the books down on his already cluttered desk. Blackwood started sorting them by some system only he understood, talking the whole time about portal resonance theory and something called "sympathetic attunement" that I followed about a third of.

His enthusiasm was genuine and infectious, the kind of passion that made you want to care about things even when you didn't fully understand them.

"The thing most people don't understand about portals," he said, stacking three volumes on top of a pile that was already leaning, "is that dormant doesn't mean dead. A dormant portal is sleeping. That's all. The resonance is still there, just quieter. Like a heartbeat that's slowed down but hasn't stopped." He tapped a diagram on the cover of one of the books. "You'd be surprised how many portals that people assume are broken are actually just waiting for the right kind of attention."

"What kind of attention?"

"Oh, it varies. Some respond to sustained saturation exposure. Some need specific harmonic frequencies. Some just need someone who's listening the right way." He smiled, the slightly distracted smile of a man who lived more comfortably in theory than in the world around him. "Half the maintenance closures around here are just excuses to stop people from asking questions about where certain doors lead. Nobody wants to admit that we've mapped maybe thirty percent of what's actually under this building. The rest is locked, boarded up, or labeled 'structural concern.' Which is the institutional equivalent of putting a Post-it note on a mystery and hoping nobody peels it off."

He said it like a conspiracy theory he found charming rather than alarming. The kind of thing an eccentric professor would say because the borders between curiosity and paranoia had never been clearly drawn in his mind.

"You're welcome to borrow any of these," he said, gesturing at the pile. "The Alcantara text on threshold mechanics is particularly good. A bit dense, but worth the effort."

"Thanks, Professor."

"And Eli?" He paused, holding a book open to a page covered in diagrams. "If you ever feel lost, or like things don't make sense. That's normal. That's what discovery feels like from the inside. The sense-making comes later."

He said it warmly. Like someone who genuinely wanted me to be okay. Like a teacher who remembered what it felt like to be new and uncertain and surrounded by things you couldn't yet understand.

I thanked him and left. Walking back across the grounds, I thought about what he'd said. Dormant portals just sleeping. Maintenance closures as institutional Post-it notes. Discovery feeling like being lost.

It was the kind of thing you wanted to believe, coming from a person you wanted to trust.

I ended up at the lake.

I don't know why I always ended up here. Something kept pulling me, the way the Sign halls pulled at students who were ready to declare. Except this wasn't a Sign. This was older than Signs. Older than Mudwick. Older than whatever system people had built to organize things they didn't fully understand.

The water was dark and flat. November had stripped the trees around the bank down to bare branches that looked like cracks in the sky. Somewhere across campus, a door closed and the sound carried farther than it should have in the cold air.

I almost turned back when I saw someone already there. But then I recognized the silhouette. Marcus, sitting on the bank, staring at the water. The arrogance that usually armored him was gone. Not just cracked, like it had been during the Drift match. Gone. He looked smaller without it. Older and younger at the same time.

"You shouldn't be out here alone," I said.

"Neither should you."

I sat down a few feet away. The ground was cold through my jeans. Whatever warnings people whispered about this place, Marcus didn't seem to care. Maybe he had bigger things to worry about.

We sat in silence for a while. I didn't push. He'd talk or he wouldn't.

"My grandmother is dying," he said finally. "Hospice. Weeks left, maybe days."

"I'm sorry."

He picked up a stone and turned it over in his hands, not looking at me. "She raised me, mostly. My parents were always traveling, doing family business, being important. Gran was the one who was actually there. Sat with me when I was sick. Taught me to play chess. Read me stories about the old families and what they used to mean before everything fell apart."

"Sounds like she meant everything to you."

"She's the only person in my family who ever treated me like a person instead of a legacy to maintain." He threw the stone. It skipped twice before sinking. "And now she's dying, and she keeps trying to tell me things, warn me about things. But she can't always remember what she was warning me about. It comes in pieces. Fragments that don't connect."

"What kind of things?"

"Old family stuff. History that doesn't make it into the textbooks." He picked up another stone. "She keeps saying a name. Renwick. Says it like I should know who that is. Like it's obvious. 'He was the one who figured it out, the one who found the way.' Then she trails off and starts talking about something else entirely. Or she just goes quiet."

"Renwick." I filed it away the way I'd been filing things away since September. Names and dates and fragments that didn't connect yet but felt like they should.

"She talks about the school, too. The old parts. Says things about being careful, about not trusting the quiet places." He threw the second stone. This one didn't skip at all. "Half of what she tells me sounds like paranoid rambling. The other half sounds like the most important thing I've ever heard. And I can't tell which is which."

He wasn't delivering intel. He wasn't building a case. He was a boy sitting by a lake watching his grandmother disappear in pieces, and the pieces she kept trying to hand him didn't fit together.

"I used to resent her for making me come to Mudwick," he said. "Thought she was trying to relive her glory days through me. Make the Holloway name mean something again." He stared at the water. "Now I think maybe she was trying to put me somewhere she thought was safe. Somewhere she could watch over me."

"What do you think now?"

"I think safe isn't what I thought it meant." He picked up another stone but didn't throw it. Just held it. "When Dao talked about extraction that day. About students being drained. Gran used a word once. Culling. Said it happened before. A long time ago. Said it's still happening." He shook his head. "I didn't understand what she meant. I thought she was confused."

"And now?"

"Now I don't know what I think." He threw the stone hard. It didn't skip. Just punched through the surface and disappeared. "She mentioned a portal. In the sublevels. Near the eastern foundations. Said it was closed for maintenance but that wasn't the real reason." His voice was flat, reciting fragments he'd been turning over for weeks. "Said if I ever saw anyone go through it, I should run."

He wasn't telling me because he had a plan. He was telling me because carrying it alone had become too heavy and I happened to be sitting next to him.

"Why are you telling me this?"

Marcus was quiet for a long moment. The lake held itself still between us, that patient dark surface reflecting nothing.

"Because you felt something from Lucia before she was gone. Because my grandmother is dying and the last thing she's trying to tell me is something I can't piece together on my own." He looked at his hands. "And because I've been carrying this for weeks and it's getting heavier and I'm tired."

It wasn't a call to action. It wasn't a plan. It was just grief, spilling out because it had to go somewhere.

"I'm sorry about your grandmother," I said. It was inadequate. Everything was inadequate when someone was losing the person who raised them.

"Yeah." He didn't get up right away. We sat there together, watching the last light fade off the water. "Don't tell the others about the hospice thing. About Gran dying. I'm not ready for their pity."

"I won't."

"The stuff about the portal, though. The culling." He hesitated. "Maybe that's worth sharing. If something's really happening, they should know what she said. Even if it's just fragments."

"Are you sure?"

"No." He started to stand, brushing dirt off his pants. "But I'm tired of carrying it alone."

He walked back toward the buildings. I watched him go, smaller than he'd looked the first day I met him, when his name and his posture and his attitude had made him seem like the biggest person in the room. All of that stripped away and what was left was a kid losing his grandmother. Somebody who'd spent his whole life in armor and didn't know how to walk without it.

I stayed by the lake a moment longer.

The water had gone from dark to darker. Whatever was underneath the surface, whatever made this place pull at me the way it did, it was patient. It could wait.

I thought about Shelby making Christmas plans. About Dad alone in a quiet house, holding a notebook full of evidence my mother had gathered about a son she understood better than anyone knew. About Lucia's shell from Veracruz and Sasha's growing timeline and Dao's hands that wouldn't stop moving.

About Blackwood saying dormant portals were just sleeping.

About Marcus saying his grandmother had tried to warn him.

About Cross asking me to come to her directly if I noticed anything strange, and the way that request had felt less like an invitation and more like a perimeter.

I walked back to the dorms as the last light bled from the sky.

That night I dreamed of drowning. Not in water. In absence. In the feeling of everything that made me who I was slowly draining away, leaving nothing but an empty shape that looked like Eli Lawrence but wasn't anymore. I could feel the draining happening and I couldn't stop it. Couldn't move. Couldn't call for help. Just lying there while something pulled me apart from the inside.

I woke up gasping, heart pounding, the traces of anxious students pressing in from the walls.

Just a dream. Just my fears taking shape while I slept.

I lay in the dark and listened to Dao breathe and told myself that Lucia Medina had left for a family emergency. That her saturation had been fine. That I'd misread everything. That the whispers about Miriam were just superstition. That Marcus's grandmother was confused and dying and none of her fragments meant anything.

I almost believed it.

Almost.