Chapter 19

The two weeks before break were the longest of my life.

We couldn't talk about it openly. That was the first rule Sasha laid down the morning after we'd made the decision. No conversations in the dining hall, the library, the common rooms. Nothing in writing except the group text, and even that stayed vague. We didn't know who was watching, but after the registrar had known Dao's name before he gave it, we had to assume someone was.

So we went to class. We ate meals. We studied for finals like students who had nothing on their minds except grades.

It was miserable.

Cross scheduled a one-on-one development session with me the second Tuesday. End of semester assessment, she said. She wanted to see how my reading had progressed since October.

We sat in her office and she had me practice layered readings on a set of old tokens she kept in a wooden box. A tarnished watch. A clay marble with a chip on one side. A strip of leather so old it had gone stiff. Each one dense with someone's history, concentrated and vivid in a way that still surprised me every time I held one in my hands.

"Start with the surface," she said. "Then go deeper. Don't rush."

I picked up the marble. The surface came easy now. Joy. A child's joy, uncomplicated and fierce, the kind of happiness that doesn't know it has an expiration date. Underneath that, something older. Patience. Years of someone turning this marble over in their fingers while they thought through difficult problems, wearing a groove in the clay with their thumb.

"Good," Cross said. "Now the third layer."

I pushed. And there it was, faint but unmistakable. Loss. Not the sharp kind. The kind that settles into your bones and becomes part of your architecture. Whoever had loved this marble had eventually lost whoever gave it to them.

"Remarkable," Cross said. She was watching me the way she sometimes did, with that expression I could never quite name. Like I was confirming something she'd suspected for a long time. "Your layered reading has improved significantly. Most first-years can't isolate emotional strata like that until spring."

Her voice was warm and patient and she paused to explain resonance patterns I hadn't fully grasped yet. I wanted to tell her everything. About Derek, about Jerome, about the portal in sublevel three. She was the one adult at this school who actually seemed to care about me as a person and not as a puzzle to solve.

But the group had agreed. Nobody outside the five of us. Not even Cross. Not yet.

So I smiled when she said my progress was remarkable. Told her I was feeling good about the work. She squeezed my shoulder and said she was proud of me.

I walked back to the dorms carrying a secret I wished I could hand to someone who'd know what to do with it.

Blackwood was worse.

He taught a special session on portal theory the second week, a guest lecture for first-years, and the five of us were scattered around the room pretending to be interested. He stood at the front bouncing on his heels the way he always did, hands moving through the air like he was conducting an orchestra only he could hear, and he talked about portal maintenance with the genuine enthusiasm of a man who loved his subject more than anything.

"Portals aren't doors," he said. "They're relationships. Between the place you're leaving and the place you're arriving. You have to maintain both sides or the relationship deteriorates. It's like any connection. Neglect breeds instability."

He drew a diagram on the board. Two circles connected by a line that he kept embellishing with smaller lines and arrows until it looked like a nervous system.

"The portal network wasn't built in a day. It was grown. Cultivated. The founders identified natural thin points, places where the boundary between here and there was already weak, and they coaxed them open over decades. Some of those original pathways are still active. Some went dormant. And some were closed on purpose."

Dao's pen stopped moving. I saw it from three rows back. The pen just stopped and his hand went flat against his notebook and stayed there.

Blackwood kept going, oblivious. Or what looked like oblivious.

"Closed portals are fascinating, actually. Most people assume closed means destroyed. It doesn't. A closed portal is more like a sleeping one. The pathway still exists. The relationship is still there. It's just been suppressed. Given the right conditions, the right resonance, a closed portal can be reawakened. Though I should note that tampering with closed portals is extremely dangerous and extremely prohibited." He grinned. "Which is why it's so fun to talk about in theory."

The class laughed. I didn't.

Thaddeus sat through the whole lecture with his grandmother's token in his pocket. I know because I saw him reach for it four separate times. His family name was carved into the building where Blackwood's office was. His family had built half this campus. And here he was in a plastic chair, learning about portal maintenance from a man who clearly adored his subject, while somewhere on campus a portal was being used to move students to a place they didn't come back from.

He didn't throw up this time. I almost wished he had. The stillness was worse.

After the lecture, Blackwood caught me by the door. "Eli! How's the transit feeling these days? Still rough?"

"Getting better," I said.

"Good, good. Some people never get used to it, you know. I had a colleague once, brilliant practitioner, thirty years of experience, still turned green every time she stepped through a portal." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Don't tell anyone, but I still get a little flutter myself. That moment of wrongness in the between-space? I think it's actually beautiful. Most people are so busy not vomiting that they miss how extraordinary it is to be nowhere for three seconds."

He clapped me on the shoulder and walked away humming something I didn't recognize, his jacket pocket bulging with the stack of index cards he always carried.

I stood in the hallway and felt sick for reasons that had nothing to do with portals.

Sasha used the two weeks to finalize her patrol schedule analysis. She'd been mapping security rotations since before we'd decided to go through the portal, back when it was just data points in a notebook. Now the data had a purpose.

She handed me a highlighted page the Friday before finals. We were in the library, both of us pretending to study for Echoes while she slid the paper across the table between our textbooks like we were passing notes in middle school.

"Shift change happens at 2:15 AM near the eastern foundations. There's an eleven-minute window where the corridor is unmonitored. That's our gap."

"Eleven minutes isn't a lot."

"It's enough to get through a door. What happens after that is a different problem."

She said it in her analysis voice. Steady, precise, organized. But the page she'd handed me had been rewritten at least twice. I could see the eraser marks where her pencil had pressed too hard and left grooves in the paper even after she'd rubbed the words away. Sasha didn't erase. Sasha got things right the first time.

If she'd rewritten this page, her hands had been shaking when she wrote it.

"Sasha."

"Don't." She picked up her Echoes textbook and opened it to a random page. "I've checked the numbers three times. The window is real. We can debate the rest in January."

I looked at the page. Blue ink for confirmed patrol times. Red for the gap. Green for alternate routes. Her color system, applied with the same precision she brought to everything, holding the chaos at arm's length through the sheer force of organization.

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me either." She turned a page in her textbook. "Just pass your finals so nobody has a reason to look at us twice."

Marcus existed at the edges.

He came to meals but sat apart. Showed up for Drift practice but didn't stay after. I'd catch him on his phone in the hallways, always turning away, always ending the call when someone got close. His grandmother. The calls were getting shorter. Not because he had less to say but because she had less left to give.

He found me once, outside the dining hall on a Wednesday evening. Snow had started falling and the campus looked like a postcard, all white and quiet and beautiful if you didn't know what was underneath.

"She said Renwick again," he said. No greeting. No preamble. "And something new. A number. Sublevel three, room twelve." He looked at the ground. "She doesn't know who I am half the time but she remembers a room number from forty years ago."

"Marcus."

"Don't." He held up a hand. "Don't say you're sorry. Don't say it'll be okay. Just write it down and give it to Sasha."

He walked away into the snow. I watched him go and thought about the armor he'd worn since September, all those layers of distance and silence, and how the armor was still there but there was nothing left inside it to protect.

Finals came. I passed everything. Didn't care.

Dao aced portal theory, which was ironic in a way that made him laugh the bitter laugh he saved for things that weren't actually funny. Thaddeus helped me study for Echoes and we sat across from each other in the library quizzing on resonance concepts while trying not to think about what we'd be doing when we came back in January.

"Define sympathetic attunement," Thaddeus said, reading from his notes.

"The phenomenon by which two saturated objects or locations sharing a common emotional resonance can influence each other across distance."

"Good. Example?"

"Two tokens saturated by the same person in different periods of their life. Changes in one can be felt in the other because the underlying emotional signature connects them."

"Perfect." He set down the notes. "Eli?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think that works with people too? Sympathetic attunement? Not between objects, but between people who share something?"

I thought about the five of us scattered across the dining hall pretending not to know each other. The shared weight of what we'd learned pressing on each of us differently but pressing on all of us the same.

"Yeah," I said. "I think it does."

He nodded. Picked the notes back up. "Define residual emotional stratification."

We studied until the library lights dimmed. When we left, the campus was dark and quiet and the snow had stopped and the sky was so full of stars it looked like someone had spilled something across it. Thaddeus paused on the path and looked up.

"My grandmother used to say the stars are just the places God hasn't gotten around to filling in yet. Holes in the ceiling." He smiled. "I miss her."

"She sounds wonderful."

"She was. She is." He reached into his pocket and I knew he was touching the token. "Good night, Eli."

"Good night, Thaddeus."

The night before everyone scattered for break, Dao and I lay in our bunks in the dark.

"January," he said.

"January."

"We're really doing this."

"Yeah."

His speaker was off. The room was silent except for the building settling around us, the old bones of Whitmore Hall creaking in the cold. The traces in the walls pressed close, all those decades of students worrying and hoping and being afraid. I could feel them the way I could always feel them now, and I wondered how many of those students had known what was underneath the school and how many had just sensed something wrong without ever finding the word for it.

"My grandmother sent me a package," Dao said. "Lock picks. Good ones. Professional grade. She didn't include a note. Just the picks in a box with my name on it."

"She knows."

"She's always known." He was quiet for a while. The darkness in the room felt thick, like it had weight. "She's giving me what she wishes someone had given my grandfather. The right tools and no illusions about what they're for."

I held the coin. Warm from my hand. Connected to a man in Ohio who was waiting for me to come home and a woman in a photo who'd been running from something her whole life.

"Get some sleep," I said.

"Yeah. You too."

Neither of us did.

The Portal Hall was busy the morning everyone left for break.

Students lined up with bags and coats, saying goodbye to friends, promising to text, hugging people they'd see again in three weeks like they were shipping off to different continents. The noise bounced off the stone walls and mixed with the hum of active portals until the whole chamber vibrated like the inside of an instrument.

Dao and I walked down together. He was catching a portal to the San Francisco junction, then his grandmother was picking him up. I was taking the Cincinnati gate, then Dad was driving me the rest of the way.

"January," Dao said at the bottom of the stairs. He held out his fist.

I bumped it. "January."

"Don't do anything interesting without me."

"Define interesting."

"Anything that would make Sasha add a new color to her notebook." He grinned, but it didn't reach his eyes. Then he grabbed his bag and disappeared into the crowd heading for the upper-level gates.

I found the Cincinnati portal on the ground floor. First-year level. A stone archway carved with symbols I'd been learning to recognize but couldn't yet read. The portal keeper on duty checked my name off a list and waved me through without looking up.

"Keep moving, don't stop, happy holidays."

I stepped through.

Transit hit the same way it had the first time. That wrongness. The feeling of being taken apart and not quite reassembled. No body, no breath, no floor beneath my feet. Just darkness and motion and the between-space opening around me like a held breath.

I kept walking. That was the rule. Cross had drilled it into me back in October and every transit class repeated it. Keep moving, don't stop, don't look at the lights.

The lights were there. They were always there. Faint drifts of something at the edges of my perception, moving in patterns that almost made sense. Will-o'-wisps. The things that lived in the space between portals, drawn to practitioners the way moths found flames.

I'd learned to ignore them. Most students did. Three seconds of wrongness and then you were through.

But this time, halfway between Mudwick and Cincinnati, something else happened.

A flash. Not light. Not sound. Something I felt the way I felt people when I touched them. A burst of emotion so vivid it stopped me mid-step.

Terror. Not mine, but someone else's. Old terror, layered and deep, the kind that comes from being in a place you can't escape. And underneath the terror, something fainter. Recognition. Like whoever had felt this had been through this exact space before and knew what was waiting on the other side.

Then a third layer. The deepest one. The one that almost knocked me off my feet.

Grief. Not for a person. For a self. The specific grief of someone who understood they were being erased and couldn't do anything about it except leave this one scream pressed into the dark like a handprint on a wall.

Someone had been moved through this portal against their will. And they'd left a trace in the one place traces weren't supposed to stick.

Then it was gone. The between-space spat me out and I was standing in the Cincinnati transit point, blinking under fluorescent lights.

It looked like a bus depot because it was one. Or had been. The Greyhound station on Gilbert Avenue, closed down a decade ago, repurposed by Mudwick's portal network as a junction point. The kind of place nobody looked twice at. Peeling linoleum and plastic chairs bolted to the floor and a faded departure board on the wall that hadn't displayed a schedule in years. A bored attendant sat behind what used to be a ticket counter, reading a magazine.

The portal itself was disguised as a maintenance door in the back hallway. You walked through and came out into the old waiting area like you'd been in the bathroom the whole time. If any regular person wandered in, they'd just see a kid with a duffel bag walking out of a hallway.

My ears were ringing. My hands were shaking.

"You okay, kid?" The attendant looked up. "First transit of the day that didn't puke. Congrats."

I nodded. Couldn't speak. What I'd felt in the between-space was still sitting on my chest, heavy and wrong. I grabbed my bag and walked out through the front doors into gray December light.

Dad was parked at the curb in his truck, engine running, hazards on. He waved through the windshield with that big-shouldered, whole-arm wave that was so completely him. Like he was flagging down a ship instead of greeting his son thirty feet away.

I got in. He grabbed me in a one-armed hug before I could even get my seatbelt on, then held me at arm's length and looked at my face.

"You got taller."

"Did I?"

"For sure. You're going to catch up to me soon." He pulled back into traffic. The truck smelled like coffee and the air freshener shaped like a pine tree that hadn't smelled like pine in probably two years. "How was the bus ride?"

The bus ride. That was the cover. Mudwick told parents their kids took a charter bus to the nearest regional transit hub. Dad thought I'd just spent four hours on a Greyhound instead of seconds in a space between spaces where someone had left a scream.

"Long," I said. "Boring."

"That's buses for you." He glanced at me again, the same checking look. Making sure I was real. "Hungry?"

"Starving."

He smiled and turned onto the highway and I pressed my forehead against the cold window and watched Cincinnati give way to suburbs give way to flat Ohio nothing, and I tried not to think about what I'd felt in the dark.

A person. In a place where people weren't supposed to leave traces.

I filed it away the way I'd been filing things away all semester. Another piece that didn't fit yet. Another question I didn't have language for.

But this one sat heavier than the others. Because whatever I'd felt in that transit space, whoever had left that trace, they'd been terrified. And the terror had the same flavor as what I'd read off Lucia's residue the week before she disappeared.

The same hands. The same taking.

Dad asked about my semester and I said good and he said good and we listened to the radio for two hours through flat gray landscape while the heater rattled and the sky got lower and darker and Ohio closed around us like something familiar that didn't quite fit anymore.