She regarded him in silence for a long moment, pulling her legs into a pretzel.
“My parents wanted me to enroll in an online program,” she said, once the quiet had stretched on for too long. “I pushed for more. I wanted the experience.” She said it with derision, like experience was something laughable. Something worthy of scorn. “In the lecture halls, there’s a thousand noises. Someone’s turning a page. Someone has a cough. Someone keeps clicking their pen. I thought I’d be able to keep up if I just stayed on top of the note-taking. But there’s no point if the notes are full of holes.”
He thought of her penciled butterfly, the way the words trailed off and bloomed into wings spread wide. He saw now what else peeked out of her knapsack. An exam, an angry redSEE MEslashed across the top.
A scoff broke away from her. “Not that you care.”
Colton wanted to tell her she was dead wrong. He’d never cared about anything more in his life. Instead, he stayed quiet, every last one of his bones aching. Outside in the hall, a cluster of students trickled past. A disembodied laugh pushed through the door in a muffle. His hands felt full of hairline fractures. Insubordination, ground deep. The legs of his chair stuttered over tile as he stood, indicating for Lane to do the same.
“Come here.”
Her eyes tracked him as he moved toward the window. “Why?”
“I want to show you something.”
Reluctantly, she joined him at the easternmost wall. Beyond the dormered roof of the student center there stood a sparse wood. Its belly of gnarled oaks clawed at the sky. Its edges were bordered in a tangle of evergreens.
“Look out there past the trees,” he said. “What do you see?”
She rose up onto her toes, eyes narrowed. “More trees.”
Resting his temple against the sun-warmed glass, he peered down at her. “For someone so opposed to stepping on toes, you seem to have no problem stepping on mine.”
She traced a heart into the gray cloud of her breath and didn’t acknowledge him. “Oh, wait.” Her fingertip stilled against the glass. “Idosee something. There’s a little roof poking out of the trees.”
He remained propped against the window, watching her. “How much do you know about Godbole’s history?”
“I skimmed that portion of the welcome packet,” she admitted.
“I’ll give it to you in a nutshell, then,” he said, “because it’s important for what I’m about to tell you.”
This got her attention. She angled her face up to his, her hands disappearing into the cuffs of her sleeves.
“Devan Godbole was a laughingstock well before he became an academic namesake,” he said. “No one believed his theories on slipping between worlds. He spent years being laughed out of international science councils until Whitehall found him.”
Lane stood rapt, dwarfed in his shadow. Knotting and unknotting the drawstrings of her sweatshirt. The first flurry of nerves ran through him. He wasn’t telling her anything expressly forbidden, but he was skirting dangerously close.
“Godbole needed a financier,” he continued. “Whitehall needed someone with vision. They spent the next several years following an EMF meter over the whole of the world, mapping out ley lines from one country to the next. They were in Wiltshire when they found it—Godbole’s fingers hooked on a wrinkle. The way Whitehall tells it, it was a mild, sunny day in England when Godbole peeled back the sky and looked through to the other side to see that it was raining.”
Lane frowned up at him, her tears dried and gone. “What does any of that have to do with the house in the woods?”
“Whitehall calls it the Sanctum. They were following an ancient coffin road through the countryside when they first found the rift. The tear was along the base of an old stone foundation. I don’t know why they brought it back. Sentimentality, maybe. But they had the foundation dismantled and the stones shipped from England.”
That was two years before Godbole’s accreditation. Shortly thereafter, and six months before the ribbon was cut at Godbole’s great glass monolith, Devan Godbole went missing. Without a trace. Without a warning. Vanished. Like a lark, as if he’d blinked out of one reality and into another. He’d never reappeared.
“Whitehall had the Sanctum erected in Godbole’s honor,” he said. “It was built with the same stones they brought with them from England.”
She stared at him, her mouth screwing up to one side. He wished he knew what was going on in her head. What she made of him, in the quiet of her mind.
As if he’d spoken his wish right out loud, she said, “I’m trying to figure out how this circles back to me failing out of school.”
“You’re not failing out of school,” he said. “Don’t be so dramatic. And this isn’t about you at all. It’s about the notes Dawoud gave you. All those Latin ambigrams? She’s experiencing a dissociative blockage.”
Her fingers tightened over the drawstrings. “What is that?”
“I overheard some of her supervision meeting with Whitehall the other day. She’s been trying to get out of her head, right?”
“Right.”
