Chapter 8

We drove west as the afternoon turned to evening. The Ohio flatness gave way to hills, and the hills got steeper as we crossed into territory that felt older, wilder. The trees along the highway were turning. Maples and oaks going red and gold in the slanting light.

"You did something to him," I said. Not a question.

Cross kept her eyes on the road. "I helped him accept a difficult situation."

"You mean you messed with his head."

"I mean I smoothed the path. Your father is a good man who loves you very much. Without some assistance, that love would have made him do something foolish. Call the police. Try to stop you from leaving. Create a scene that would have drawn attention we don't need."

"So you just reach into people's minds whenever it's convenient?"

"When it's necessary. There's a difference." She glanced at me. "You'll learn the same techniques at Mudwick. How to calm someone who's panicking. How to ease someone past their resistance. It's not manipulation, Eli. It's guidance."

"Sounds like manipulation to me."

"Then you'll have to decide for yourself when you've learned enough to judge."

I stared out the window at the passing trees. The coin was still in my hand, warm from my grip. I hadn't let go of it since Dad pressed it into my palm.

Somewhere around the state line, I pulled out my phone.

Seventeen texts from Shelby. The first few were frantic. Then came the ones after she'd talked to my dad, her confusion mixing with her fear. The last one, sent forty minutes ago, was just: please.

I stared at the screen for a long time.

I'm okay, I typed. I have to go away for a while. There's a school that can help me with what's been happening.

Send. Three dots appeared almost immediately.

what school?? eli you collapsed. you were shaking and your eyes went weird. your dad was losing his mind looking for you.

she's a teacher. it's a special program. for people like me.

people like you?? what does that even mean

I didn't know how to answer that.

I know this doesn't make sense. I'm sorry. I can't really explain right now.

can't or won't

Both, I thought. But I typed: Can't.

A long pause. The dots appeared and disappeared several times.

you're scaring me. whatever's going on, you can tell me. we're friends eli. we've been friends for three years.

Three years. Three years of her showing up because her mother told her to. Three years of me being a chore she'd learned to care about.

But she did care. I'd felt that in the park, underneath everything else. The obligation had become real somewhere along the way.

I know. And I'm sorry. I'll explain when I can. I just need you to trust me right now.

how am I supposed to trust you when you won't tell me anything

I didn't have an answer for that. Eventually I put the phone away.

Cross explained things while she drove. The information gave me something to focus on besides the ache in my chest and the weight of my father's coin in my pocket.

"Mudwick isn't somewhere you can travel to by normal means. The school is built on a confluence. A place where so much happened, so many intense experiences accumulated, that the boundaries between locations got thin. Portals connect Mudwick to other saturated places. We're going to one of those access points now."

"What kind of place?"

"An old courthouse. Trials, verdicts, moments of justice and injustice. People left pieces of themselves there for over a hundred years. That's what makes it usable."

The highway gave way to smaller roads. We crossed into West Virginia as the sun started getting low, painting the turning leaves in shades of copper and blood.

"Tell me about Mudwick," I said. "What's it actually like?"

"Old and layered. The buildings were constructed by different people in different centuries for different purposes. You'll feel traces of everyone who ever passed through. Students, teachers, patients, prisoners. All of them left something behind."

"That sounds overwhelming."

"It is, at first. Most new students take a few weeks to learn how to filter. Some take longer."

"And some never learn at all?"

She glanced at me. "Some don't. But I don't think you'll be one of them."

The light was gold now, slanting through the trees. We turned off the main road onto something unpaved, wound through forest that felt like it hadn't seen people in years, and finally stopped in front of a building that looked like it had been forgotten by time.

The courthouse was small. Stone walls stained with age. A bronze plaque by the door that nobody had polished in decades. Windows that were dark even though the sun was still up.

Cross got out of the car. I followed with my duffel bag, the coin pressed tight in my palm.

"Stay close to me inside," she said. "First transit can be disorienting. Some people get sick. Some people feel like they're dissolving. Neither sensation lasts long."

"That's comforting."

"I'm not trying to comfort you. I'm trying to prepare you."

She led me up the steps and through a door that should have been locked but wasn't. Inside, the courthouse was even smaller than it looked from outside. A single room with wooden benches, a judge's platform at the far end, dust everywhere.

And something else. A pressure in the air I hadn't felt before. Not quite emotions, but something adjacent to them. The residue of people who'd stood in this room waiting for verdicts that would change their lives. Defendants sweating through their shirts. Witnesses choking on lies. Families in the gallery hoping for outcomes they couldn't control.

"You feel it," Cross said.

"I feel something. People who were here. What they were going through."

"That's what makes this place useful. Strong emotions leave strong traces. Fear mixed with hope and desperation. A hundred years of it, soaked into these walls."

She walked toward a door at the back of the room. I hadn't noticed it before. It was set into the wall at an odd angle, like someone had added it as an afterthought.

Behind the door, stairs led down into darkness.

We descended. The air got colder, danker. At the bottom was another room, this one carved from stone instead of built from wood. And in the center of the far wall was a doorway.

Not a door. Just a frame. Stone covered with carved symbols I didn't recognize, enclosing what looked like solid rock.

Cross put her hand on the stone and the air changed. I don't know how else to describe it. The pressure shifted, the way your ears pop when you change altitude, except it was happening everywhere at once.

"Stay close," she said. "And whatever you feel, keep walking. Don't stop."

She stepped forward into solid stone.

And vanished.

I stood there for three heartbeats. Four. Then I followed.

Transit felt like dying. At least that's what I told myself.

Not painful but wrong in a way that I can't describe. Like being taken apart and put back together, except the person doing the putting wasn't quite sure where all the pieces went. I couldn't feel my body. Couldn't see anything but darkness. Couldn't hear my own breathing.

And then I was somewhere else.

A massive chamber. Stone walls rising high above me, lined with doorways on multiple levels. Balconies and staircases connecting them. Students and faculty moving with purpose through the space.

The Portal Hall.

I fell to my knees. The sensory overload was worse than anything I'd experienced before. Every person who passed was broadcasting their emotional state, and not just current feelings but layers underneath. Their histories trailed behind them like shadows. Decades of students had walked through this hall, and every one of them had left traces that clung to the stones. I couldn't separate the living from the echoes of the dead.

And the doorways. Each one pulled at me differently. Faint tugs from a dozen directions, like standing in a room full of open windows with wind blowing through each one. I couldn't tell what I was feeling. Couldn't tell if I was sensing the places they led to or the accumulated passages of everyone who'd ever walked through them.

It was too much. Too many whispers at once and none of them loud enough to understand.

Someone was saying my name. Cross. Her hand on my elbow through my jacket sleeve, not touching skin.

"Breathe. Focus on one thing. Just one thing."

I tried. Picked a flagstone at my feet. Gray stone worn smooth by generations of footsteps. I tried to see just the stone, not the people who'd touched it, not the doorways pulling at me. Slowly the roar dimmed to something almost bearable.

"Better?"

"Not really."

"It will be. Can you stand?"

I could, but barely. The coin was still in my hand. I'd held onto it through the transit without realizing, and somehow its weight helped ground me.

Cross led me through the hall, navigating the chaos with practiced ease. Students glanced at us as we passed. Some looked curious. Others looked sympathetic in a way that told me they remembered their own first transit.

I felt every one of them. Fragments of who they were pressing against my awareness like strangers brushing past in a crowd.

We climbed stairs, passed through doorways, emerged into evening light that made me squint. The sun was setting, painting everything in shades of orange and gold.

The main building of Mudwick rose ahead of us.

It was exactly as Cross had described. Buildings that argued with each other. Colonial bones with antebellum additions and Civil War wings and sanitarium extensions and modern attempts to stitch it all together.

And I could feel the people who'd passed through.

Not the buildings themselves, but everyone who'd ever lived and worked and suffered here. Students from a century ago, their anxieties somehow still present. Nurses who'd walked these halls when it was a hospital. Patients who'd never left. The human residue was so thick it was hard to tell where one life ended and another began.

The grounds stretched out in every direction. October trees dropped leaves onto paths that wound between buildings. Students crossed the lawns in groups, their breath visible in the cooling air.

"How do people live here?" I asked.

"You learn to filter. You build walls in your mind. You find the places that feel quieter and you rest there when you need to."

"What if I can't learn?"

Cross stopped walking and turned to face me.

"You will," she said. "Because the alternative is going back to Ohio and waiting for your ability to break you. You can do this, Eli. I wouldn't have brought you here if I didn't believe that."

I wanted to ask what she would have done if she didn't believe. But I didn't ask. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

The dormitory was in the east wing, first-year students on the ground floor. Cross walked me to my assigned room and handed me a key.

"Get settled. The headmaster wants to meet with you before dinner. I'll take you to his office, then someone will walk you to the dining hall after." She hesitated. "The first few days are the hardest. After that, it gets easier. I promise."

She left and I stood in the hallway for a moment, holding my key, feeling the weight of a hundred years of students pressing in from every direction.

Then I opened the door.

The room was small. Two beds, two desks, two windows overlooking grounds that stretched toward dark trees. One bed was already claimed. A backpack on the mattress, clothes scattered on the floor, the casual chaos of someone who'd been here long enough to stop caring about neatness.

The person those things belonged to was sitting on the other bed scrolling through his phone. He looked up when I walked in.

"You're the mid-semester transfer." Not a question. "Cross's project."

"I guess so."

"I'm Dao." He set his phone aside and studied me with open curiosity. "You look like shit, if you don't mind me saying."

"First transit."

"Ah. Yeah, that'll do it." He gestured at the empty bed. "That one's yours. Bathroom's down the hall, dining's in the main building, and if you need anything in the middle of the night, don't wake me up unless someone's actively dying."

I dropped my duffel on the bed. The mattress creaked. I could feel traces of everyone who'd slept here before me. Not the mattress itself, but the anxiety of first-year students who'd lain awake wondering if they belonged. Their worry had soaked into this space and I was swimming in it.

"You felt that," Dao said. He was watching me carefully. "The room."

"The people who were here before. What they were feeling."

He nodded slowly. "Zant thing. My grandmother was the same way."

"Zant?"

"That's what we call ourselves. Short for cognizant. Aware of things other people aren't." He tilted his head. "Cross didn't tell you?"

"She called it being a reader. Talked about saturation and place-memory. Never used that word."

"Old school terminology. Everyone here just says Zant." He said it casually, like it was the most natural thing in the world. "You're a Zant. I'm a Zant. Welcome to the club."

Zant. One syllable. It felt better than "reader" or "practitioner" or any of the other words Cross had used.

"My grandmother was one of the strongest of her generation," Dao continued. "According to family legend. Though family legend also says we're descended from Filipino royalty and I've seen exactly zero evidence of that." He sat up straighter. "So. Mid-semester transfer. That's unusual. Cross must really want you here."

"She said I needed training. That what I can do is getting worse."

"What can you do? Besides feel the ghosts of anxious freshmen in your mattress?"

I hesitated. But there was something about Dao that made lying seem pointless. Maybe it was the way he looked at me, direct and unimpressed and not particularly interested in pretense.

"I read people," I said. "Not places. People. Their emotions, their memories, sometimes their whole histories. If I touch someone, it all comes flooding in and I can't stop it."

Dao whistled low. "That's not supposed to be possible. Standard teaching says place-memory is the foundation. People are too dynamic to read the way you're describing."

"Tell that to everyone I've accidentally read."

"Fair point." He leaned back against the wall. "So you're here because you can do something the textbooks say you can't do. That's going to make your academic life interesting."

"I'm starting to figure that out."

We sat in comfortable silence. The room still pressed in from every direction, but it felt less overwhelming with another person here. Less like drowning and more like treading water.

"I should warn you," Dao said. "I talk in my sleep sometimes. Also I snore. My last roommate requested a transfer after two weeks."

"I'm used to worse."

"Worse than snoring?"

"I grew up in a house that's three years deep in grief. A little snoring's nothing."

Something shifted in Dao's expression. Not pity. Recognition.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "I can work with that."

Cross came back twenty minutes later and walked me to the main building. The headmaster's office was on the second floor, behind a door that looked older than the hallway around it.

She knocked once and opened it without waiting for a response.

The office was smaller than I expected. Bookshelves on every wall, crammed with volumes that looked like they'd been actually read instead of just displayed. A desk covered in papers. Two windows overlooking the grounds, the last light of sunset turning the glass orange.

The man behind the desk stood when we entered.

I'd expected someone severe. Distant. The kind of person who ran institutions and didn't remember individual faces.

Headmaster Vane was none of those things.

He was maybe late forties, with the kind of face that probably smiled easily and often. When he came around the desk to greet us, he moved like someone who was genuinely glad we were there. Not performing warmth. Just warm.

"Eli Lawrence." He didn't offer his hand, and I was grateful. "I'm Julian Vane. Welcome to Mudwick."

"Thank you, sir."

"Julian is fine. Or Headmaster Vane if you're feeling formal." He gestured to a chair across from his desk. "Please, sit. Vivian, you can leave us. I'll make sure he gets to dinner."

Cross nodded and left, closing the door behind her.

I sat. The chair was old leather, cracked in places, comfortable in the way things get when they've been used for decades. I could feel traces of everyone who'd sat here before me. Nervous students. Worried parents. People waiting for news that would change their lives.

Vane settled back into his own chair and studied me for a moment. When I tried to read him, I got nothing unusual. Just a man looking at a student. Calm and present. Oh, and very interested.

"Mid-semester transfers are rare," he said. "Usually we prefer to bring new students in at the start of the year, give them time to adjust alongside their peers. But Professor Cross was insistent that you couldn't wait."

"Something happened. Back home. I lost control of... whatever this is."

"She told me. A breakthrough, she called it. Your ability expanding faster than you could manage." He leaned forward slightly. "That must have been frightening."

It wasn't a question, but it wanted an answer.

"Yeah," I said. "It was."

"I want you to understand something, Eli. You're here because you're different. Because the world you grew up in didn't have a place for what you can do. That's a hard thing to carry, and I suspect you've been carrying it alone for a long time."

I didn't say anything. Couldn't, really. My throat had gone tight.

"Mudwick exists because you shouldn't have to carry it alone. Because there are others like you, others who understand what it means to feel too much or know things you can't explain." He smiled, and it reached his eyes. "You're not broken. You're not crazy. You're just aware of things most people aren't."

I thought about all the years I'd spent wondering what was wrong with me. All the times I'd felt like a freak for knowing things I shouldn't know.

"Professor Cross says I read people instead of places. That it's not supposed to be possible."

"The textbooks say it's not supposed to be possible. But textbooks are written by people, and people are often wrong." He picked up a pen from his desk, turned it over in his fingers. "What matters right now isn't what you can or can't do. What matters is learning to control it so it doesn't control you. That's what we're here for."

"What if I can't learn?"

"Then we'll figure out something else. But I don't think that's going to be a problem." He set the pen down. "You made it through your first transit. You're sitting in my office having a coherent conversation after one of the most disorienting days of your life. Those aren't the signs of someone who can't learn."

I wanted to believe him. Wanted to believe that this place could actually help, that I wasn't just trading one kind of isolation for another.

"First semester runs through December," Vane continued. "You'll be joining classes that are already in progress, which will be challenging. But your classmates have all been where you are. They'll understand." He stood, and I took that as my cue to stand too. "My door is always open, Eli. I mean that literally. If you're struggling, if you need someone to talk to, come find me. Any time."

"Thank you, sir. Julian."

He smiled at the correction. "Dao Reyes will walk you to dinner. He's your roommate, I believe. Good kid. Talks too much, but his heart's in the right place."

"I met him already."

"Then you know what I mean." He walked me to the door. "Give yourself time to adjust. The first few weeks are disorienting for everyone. But you'll find your footing. They always do."

I walked out into the hallway, not sure what to make of him. He seemed genuine. Seemed like someone who actually cared.

But I'd learned not to trust seeming.

Dao was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, hands in his pockets, looking bored in the way people look when they're trying not to seem nervous.

"Survive the headmaster?"

"I think so."

"He do the whole 'you're not broken, you're not crazy' speech?"

"Yeah."

"He means it. That's the weird thing about Vane. He actually means everything he says." Dao started walking toward what I assumed was the dining hall. "Come on. I'll introduce you to some people. Try not to read anyone accidentally."

"I'll do my best."

The dining hall was exactly as overwhelming as I expected. Hundreds of students, all of them broadcasting emotional states, all of them carrying their own accumulated histories. I kept my hands in my pockets and stayed close to Dao's shoulder like he was a ship I could follow through rough water.

We claimed a corner table. Two people were already there.

"Sasha Okonkwo," Dao said, gesturing at a girl with a textbook. "Possibly the smartest person in our year. Definitely the most annoying about it."

Sasha looked up. She had sharp eyes and sharper cheekbones and an expression that suggested she was constantly evaluating everyone around her. When her gaze landed on me, I felt like I was being measured.

"You're the mid-semester transfer. Cross's project."

"Does everyone know about me?"

"Small school. Word travels." She didn't offer her hand, which I appreciated. "First-generation Zant. Scholarship student. I'm here because I test well and someone decided to take a chance on me. What's your story?"

"I read people instead of places. Apparently that's unusual."

"Unusual is an understatement. That's theoretically impossible." She looked at me with renewed interest. "We should talk later. I have questions."

"Everyone has questions about me. I don't have many answers."

The fourth person arrived before Sasha could respond. He was tall and blond and moved with the kind of easy confidence that usually meant money. The kind that came with expectations and a last name people recognized.

"Thaddeus Monroe-Whitmore," he said, sliding into the seat next to me. He offered his hand, then noticed me flinch and pulled it back. "Sorry. Dao mentioned you have touch sensitivity."

"Something like that."

"I'll be careful." His smile was warm and genuine. When I looked for the coldness underneath, the entitlement I expected to find, there wasn't any. Just kindness all the way down.

"Thaddeus is old family," Dao explained. "His ancestors probably founded some of the portals. But somehow he turned out okay anyway."

"The family curse skipped me," Thaddeus agreed cheerfully. "I'm the disappointment who doesn't care about legacy or power. They sent me to Mudwick hoping it would fix me. So far it hasn't."

I looked at the three of them. Dao, Filipino-American with a disgraced family name he was still figuring out how to carry. Sasha, first-generation everything, Nigerian parents and a scholarship that came with strings she hadn't fully seen yet. Thaddeus, white and wealthy and somehow apologetic about both.

None of them quite fit. I knew that feeling. Had known it my whole life, long before magic entered the picture. And somehow that made them fit together.

"So," Sasha said, turning back to her textbook. "Welcome to the island of misfit toys. Dinner's at six, breakfast at seven, and if you need help with the standard curriculum, I charge in favors."

"She's not joking," Dao added. "I owe her three favors and I'm terrified to find out what she's going to cash them in for."

"Knowledge is power," Sasha said mildly. "Favors are currency. Try the pasta. It's the only thing the kitchen doesn't ruin."

I got pasta. I sat with my unlikely new acquaintances. And for the first time since arriving at Mudwick, I felt something other than overwhelmed.

It wasn't belonging, exactly. Not yet. But it was the possibility of belonging. The first glimpse of a shape that might fit.

That night I lay in the dark listening to Dao breathe. He wasn't snoring yet, but the night was young.

The building settled around us. A century of students had slept in rooms like this one, and their presence lingered. Old worries about classes and friendships and futures. Old fears about whether they belonged, whether they were good enough, whether coming here had been a mistake.

I thought about Dad eating dinner alone in our kitchen. Wondered if he was turning his hand toward his pocket out of habit, reaching for a coin that wasn't there anymore.

I thought about Mom, who had felt what I felt and chosen to run from it. Who had built a normal life in a dying town and never told me why.

I thought about the way Dad had looked when Cross did whatever she did to him. The fog in his eyes. The anger draining away too fast.

Tomorrow I would start learning what I was. Start training to control an ability that everyone said shouldn't exist. Start figuring out how to belong in a world I didn't know the rules of.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Shelby.

just checking if you're okay. you don't have to explain anything. just let me know you're safe.

I stared at the message for a long time.

I'm safe. First day was a lot. I'll tell you more when I can.

The response came quickly.

ok. good night eli.

Good night, Shelby.

I put the phone down and closed my eyes.

The presence of everyone who'd come before pressed gently against my awareness. A hundred years of students feeling exactly what I was feeling right now. Wondering if they'd made the right choice. Wondering what they were becoming.

I wasn't alone. I was surrounded by the traces of everyone who'd ever been where I was.

For the first time, that was almost enough.