Sighing, I pull out my phone and text Mads—what do you think of time travel—no punctuation, no context. To my surprise, she writes back:you sound like dad. It’s the most I’ve gotten from her all week. At least it’s something.
I consider telling her all of it, typing the whole story out, but it seems so far-fetched. She’d probably think I was messing with her. So I shove my phone in my pants pocket and tuck my freezing fingertips into the sleeves of my sweater. It’s another cloudy evening, the damp scent of oncoming rain thick in the air, and my impatience is growing by the second.
A creak sounds from behind me. The door swings open and out bounds William, phone clutched in his hand, followed by Sumner. The floodlight basks them in a bright glow.
“Delaney,” William says as he jogs over to me. “Did you know this telegraph device can capture images?”
The flash in my face is so jarring it takes me a second to realize he’s snapped a photo.
“Oh good,” Sumner intones. “He found a better subject.”
William comes around to reveal the blurriest, most heinous picture of me I’ve ever seen. He beams, equal amounts proud and impressed.
“Nice one,” Sumner says over my shoulder. “Send it to me.”
I scowl. “Like hell.”
He smirks. “Think I’ll wallpaper my entire room with it.”
“My sincerest apologies on behalf of Sumner,” William interrupts, tossing a barbed glance his way. “A lady should not be kept waiting.”
Sumner’s subtle eye roll doesn’t fly past me. “I was on the phone with my brother.”
I’m aware Sumner has a younger brother in fifth grade, but that’s the extent of it. It doesn’t matter the reason. They’re here now.
William steps alongside me and shifts out of his frock coat, offering it to me. He’s wearing the Ivernia sweatshirt I’d found for him underneath. I’m taken aback by this gesture, but William doesn’t seem to give it a second thought.
“Oh.” The material is thick and weighty in my hands, and I can feel the residual warmth of his body heat. “Are you sure?”
He nods curtly, and so I pull my arms into the sleeves, his earthy-sweet patchouli scent enveloping me. It’s a bit long on me, but it keeps the chill away.
Sumner’s mouth presses into a firm line as he looks around. “So this is where it happened?”
William and I exchange a glance. “Yeah, extremely underwhelming I guess,” I say. “It’s not like there’s any evidence.”
Sumner retrieves his phone from his jacket and taps over to something, then stares at the screen, brows furrowing. He starts walking toward the incline, the one that leads to the grassy field littered with elms. The outer loop is just beyond it. William and I follow in silence until he stops near the top.
“What are you doing?” I finally ask.
“When you’re solving an equation and the answer is incorrect, the first thing you do is retrace your steps to see where you went wrong,” Sumner says, then tips his phone flat so we can see. “I thought maybe we’d start here. Look.”
He has the compass app open, but instead of finding true north, the needle spins in a constant rotation. Glitching, almost as if it can’t figure out where it’s supposed to orient itself.
“How peculiar,” William says under his breath.
Sumner searches my eyes. “What’s your guess?”
Adrenaline fires through me, because I know enough about physics to understand what this could mean. A compass needle will point toward Earth’s north magnetic pole unless something is interfering with it, like a stronger magnet. But that isn’t the case here. We’re out in the middle of nature.
“A”—I blink away my disbelief—“magnetic vortex?”
“I think so,” he says quietly.
Considering this is where William and I ran into each other, it’s easy to assume his presence must have triggered it. It’s a physical indication something unordinary occurred here.
I glance around, as if the answer to how this happened might pop out from behind a tree. My eyes leap to the lampposts along the outer trail—then it occurs to me. A small detail I’d forgotten on an otherwise overwhelming night. They hadn’t just flickered when William came colliding into my life. They’dpulsed.
And the floodlight—it hadn’t clicked back on, had it? I was so preoccupied with William that I didn’t give it a second thought until now. It has to be related.
