“In the end, the coin reappears from where it was tucked inside his sleeve.” Turning his wrist, he brandished the nickel between two fingers. “The assistant emerges from behind a trick wall in the box. But the sky? The magician doesn’t reappear. There’s no illusion. There’s no sleight of hand. He’s just gone—out of one reality and into the next.”
A shiver thrummed through Delaney, and she swore Price marked it. His gaze darted instantly away. She was grateful when a commotion moved through the room, like wind bowing a field of feathered reeds. At first, it washed over her in a sea of indistinguishable sound. A dissonant rustle. A white-noise whisper. It took her several lagging seconds to realize that the cause of the upheaval was Richard Whitehall, sequestered in the open doorway.
The dean of Godbole was small and bowed, his eyes bottled by thick-rimmed glasses and his hair a neat crown of white. The red bulb of his nose sat nestled into a wiry mustache, which in turn curled around a pensive frown. He looked, Delaney thought, like someone’s drawing of what a professor should be, down to the rectangular pads at his elbows.
“Off my desk, Mr. Price,” he said.
“You got it.” Pushing off the edge, Colton moved aside to make room for Whitehall. It took the old professor several lengthy moments to settle into place. In the interim, the room flooded with the ambient sounds of shifting bodies. Papers shuffled. A shoe scuffed carpet. Someone coughed. Adjusting his spectacles, Richard Whitehall peered up at the roomful of people.
“A full house this year,” he noted. “Mr. Price has been injecting his usual brand of theatrics into the first day, I trust.”
Delaney was warmed at once by the professor’s pleasant disposition. Slowly, the chill in the room began to thaw. A bit of tension bled out of her, and for the first time since stepping inside Godbole’s tower of glass, she relaxed into her seat.
At the front of the room, Whitehall pried his glasses off his face. “Mr. Price likes to talk about magic,” he said, “but I’m afraid the truth is slightly less exciting. What we do in this room isn’t magic. It’s instinct. And it’s in here.” He tapped two fingers against the wall of his chest. “It’s the feel of the worlds between heartbeats. Either you sense it or you don’t. Pass through a door between realities without understanding its precise shape, its bladed edges, and, at best, you may never find your way home again. At worst, you’ll come back in ribbons.”
Silence fell heavily over the room. Outside the window, clouds clotted low across the sun. It brought the roomful of shadows into stark relief, as though the watchful dark might rise up and take on a corporeal shape. As if it might sprout teeth.
Delaney’s heart beat faster.
Huffing a breath on his lenses, Whitehall set to polishing. “Time,” he said, rubbing his glasses with a pocket kerchief, “runs much like a river. Every so often, shifts in the timeline cause that river to undergo a bifurcation. A single stream of events splits into a series of smaller distributaries—fragments into innumerable realities. Something small as a pebble can fracture a river in two. So, too, can the most seemingly insignificant of variables change the entire trajectory of human history—”
His voice was swallowed up beneath the rustle of garments, the fleeting tatters of a whisper. For several seconds, Whitehall’s words became incomprehensible. All along the edges of the room, the shadows yawned, stretching out their limbs as though emboldened by Delaney’s sudden severance from the fold. Reaching for her with dark, chilly fingers. Laughter broke out, and several students in the audience nodded along to an unintelligible joke.
Smiling just a beat too late, Delaney chanced a look at Colton to find him staring. He had, she noted, without quite meaning to, the kind of eyes that should have been warm—the sort of brown that turned to liquid gold in the light. Instead, his stare was hard and cold. The chill of his scrutiny trailed down her spine. She wished he would look anywhere else.
“This,” Whitehall said, his voice sharpening into clarity as the room resettled, “is where each of you comes in. You’ll make careers out of studying those metaphysical pebbles—examining the ripples they make across time and space. At Godbole, you’ll spend the next four years learning to walk between worlds. It’s no small undertaking. I advise you to seek out Mr. Price’s assistance wherever possible, no matter what idle threats he may have doled out about eating up his office hours.”
This was met with polite laughter, quiet and a little more than unsure.
Whitehall replaced his glasses and checked his watch. “I’m told by the board that this is meant to be an hour-long orientation, but I’ve no interest in that. My expectations were emailed out at the date of your acceptance.” He glanced up at them, his smile aloof. “If you haven’t already, be sure to read through the syllabus. We begin tomorrow.”
A tepid stillness followed. No one moved. No one save for the shadows, quivering in their corners.
“He means get out,” Colton said, and the room broke into upheaval.
When Delaney was still small and prone to daydreams, she’d peered out into the midnight pitch of her backyard and found a boy peering back. His nose and mouth were edged in moonlight, the inverse of his cheeks pooled with shadow.
“Hello,” she’d said, and the fast-fading memory of her voice sounded wrong in the uninhabitable space between her ears. She knew she ought to be afraid—she’d always avoided the dark—but something in the chilly abyss of the boy’s stare kept her rooted to the spot. He’d looked, she thought, as frightened to see her as she’d been to see him. A little regal, a little hungry, with his chin upturned and his features gaunt, his arms too long and thin for the rest of him.
But when the wind moved through the trees, he was gone. Where his mouth had been, there was only the thin rictus of a branch. His unblinking stare was little more than the empty hollows of an elm.
For a while afterward, the dark felt less an enemy and more an ally. A friend to play with, alone in the quiet. She’d been tugged along after the shadows, like a fly lured to the glittering orb of a silk-spun web. Drawn to the topmost step of the cellar, where darkness seeped up the stairs like ink. Drawn to the woods at twilight, where moonlight played between the trees. Drawn to the mirror glass of her window, where night pressed its hungry face against the panes.
“I see you watching me,” she’d whisper, and feel a sickly sort of thrill. “Are you lonely, too?”
These days, she knew better than to follow the dark where it led. She knew it had teeth, and she had the scars to prove it. She was far too careful with herself to believe in things she couldn’t see and touch.
That, more than anything, made Godbole feel dangerous.
Whitehall’s seminar that morning had left her cold. Weak in the knees, the way she felt when she was staring down the shadows. Nothing about the curriculum was tangible. There was the sky, too tenuous to touch. There were other worlds, too distant to see. It felt like the luring dark, starving and staring. Waiting for her to stagger close enough to bite.
She’d known the reputation that Godbole carried. She knew that scholars of Howe University went on to publish their research in privatized annals, knew they specialized in the study of alternate historical outcomes—the sinking of theSanta Maria, a third world war, public health care without the discovery of penicillin.
She knew, and yet she hadn’t truly believed. It felt like something out of a fairy tale—that there were places in the sky where the air grew thin enough to step through. Moreover, it felt more and more like a mistake, that something in her test results suggested she’d be capable of doing it.
Little glass Delaney, who’d never left her shelf.
She didn’t like to take the T, for fear of mishearing the station announcements. She did her best to avoid ordering food at the deli counter, for fear of angering the shop clerks. The girl who couldn’t ride a subway alone or order cold cuts by herself wasn’t the sort of person who stepped through a tear in the sky.
