The resonance anchor was cold under Marcus's fingertips. He traced the seam where bronze met stone, feeling for the faint vibration that meant the Lattice channel was live and feeding properly. It was. A low, steady pulse, like pressing your hand against someone's wrist.

  Four anchors, four cardinal points, each one embedded in the lab floor at a precise distance from the spectral array at the center of the room. Marcus had checked the northern anchor twice already. He checked it again.

  The temporal research lab was nothing like Kaeso's office. Where the office was cluttered, intimate, buried in parchment and half-finished instruments, the lab was open and severe. High ceilings, narrow windows that let in thin shafts of dawn light, bare stone walls threaded with Veins thicker than anywhere else in the College. The hum was louder here. Not the background murmur he'd grown up with, the sound so constant you forgot it existed. Here it had a presence. A low tone you could feel in your teeth.

  Marcus straightened and looked at the observation chair. It sat facing the spectral array, a lattice of bronze rods and crystal lenses mounted on a rotating frame, angled to catch and focus the resonance field. The chair itself was simple. Wooden, with leather straps at the wrists and chest. Not for restraint. For stability. When the field pulled at your reservoir, your body sometimes tried to follow.

  He touched his citizen's seal through his robe. The bronze was warm, glowing a deep, healthy green. Full reservoir. He'd tithed yesterday morning, eaten well, slept hard, and woken before dawn with his body humming like the Veins themselves. Stronger than before, the way he always felt the day after the Toll.

  Today. Finally, today.

  The lab door opened. Professor Kaeso entered carrying a leather case and a cup of something steaming. He looked like he hadn't slept. Dark circles under his eyes, his reading glasses already on, his robes slightly creased.

  "You're early," Kaeso commented.

  "Couldn't sleep."

  "I noticed." Kaeso set the leather case on the workbench and opened it, revealing a row of calibration crystals nested in velvet. "I've been running the numbers again."

  Marcus waited. He knew that tone. Kaeso working up to something.

  Kaeso pulled one of the crystals free and held it up to the window light, squinting at the inclusions. "The return signal," he said. "From the target coordinates."

  "Still strong?"

  "Stronger." Kaeso set the crystal down. "I ran three independent measurements last night. The signal has increased by eleven percent since our last calibration session. If that were instrument drift, I'd retire." He tapped the readout with one finger. "And it's not noise. The pattern's too consistent."

  "What does that mean?"

  Kaeso removed his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve. Slow, deliberate, the way he always did when he was thinking. "It means something at those coordinates is responding to our probe. Actively." He slid them back on, eyes still on the crystal. "In thirty years of temporal research, I have never encountered a resonance pattern this... eager."

  Eager. As if the past wanted to be found.

  "Could it be residual?" Marcus asked. "From our first two attempts? We talked about the groove-wearing effect, each attempt making the next easier."

  "The groove effect might explain a few percent of the gain between attempts — we don't have clean numbers on it yet. But eleven?" Kaeso picked up the crystal again, turning it between his fingers. "It's your experiment, Marcus. Your call. But I don't like running with a variable I can't isolate."

  "But the field is stable."

  Kaeso glanced at the list in his hand. "The field is stable. Calibration is clean. Anchors are holding." He set it down. "By every metric I can measure, we are ready." He paused. "Which is precisely why the signal anomaly troubles me. Everything else is behaving exactly as predicted. This one variable is not."

  Marcus crossed to the spectral array and ran his hand along one of the bronze rods. Cool, aligned. The crystal lenses were clear, their facets catching the thin morning light and scattering it in pale arcs across the ceiling. Marcus breathed in deep. Yes, it was ready.

  "What's your recommendation?" he asked.

  Kaeso was quiet for a moment. "We proceed. But we proceed carefully." He reached into the leather case and produced a small brass disc, flat, with a needle that quivered against a marked dial. "I've modified this resonance gauge to track the return signal in real time. If it spikes beyond the threshold I've marked here" (he tapped a red line scored into the dial) "we abort. Immediately. No discussion."

  "Agreed."

  "And Marcus." Kaeso set the gauge down and met his eyes. "The abort protocol. The physical pull threshold we discussed yesterday. I need you to hear me on this, not just agree."

  "I'm listening."

  "When the field activates, you will feel the draw on your reservoir. That's normal. The window needs power to stay open. You'll feel a visual connection, almost like being pulled forward by your eyes. Also normal." Kaeso held up one finger. "If the pull moves to your chest. If it feels like the Drawstone, like something reaching in and taking hold, not draining, but gripping... you break the connection. You don't wait for a clearer image. You don't push for ten more seconds. You shut it down."

  "I will."

  "Say it back to me."

  Marcus blinked. "If the pull becomes physical, chest not eyes, I break it."

  "Thank you." Kaeso turned to the spectral array and began slotting calibration crystals into the lens mounts, his hands quick and practiced. "Eight bell. Let's get you seated."

  The leather straps settled across Marcus's chest and wrists. Snug. Designed for function, not comfort. He could feel the chair's contact with the floor, and through it, the Lattice feeding the lab. That same vibration, amplified. The spectral array loomed above him, its bronze lattice and crystal lenses glowing faintly where the calibration crystals had been seated.

  Kaeso moved between the anchors, touching each one, murmuring activation sequences that made the hum of the Veins rise in pitch.

  Marcus's hands were steady. His breathing was steady. His mind was not — two years of research, three semesters of calibration, two failed attempts that had shown him nothing but static and the faintest suggestion of shape, like trying to see through frosted glass, and now this. The signal strong. The field stable. His reservoir full and humming.

  The last anchor hummed to life. Kaeso crossed back to the workbench, picked up the resonance gauge, and angled it where Marcus could see. Needle just below the midpoint. Resting state.

  "Initiating the field," Kaeso said. "You'll feel the draw in three... two..."

  The hum changed.

  It dropped in pitch and spread. No longer coming from the walls but from everywhere, from the floor, the air, the space between the crystal lenses. Marcus felt the spectral field open like a hand unclenching. His reservoir responded immediately, magic flowing out of him in a steady current, drawn toward the array. Not the sharp pull of the Drawstone. Smoother. A river finding its course.

  The crystal lenses caught the flow and focused it. Light hit the space between the bronze rods and kept building until Marcus had to squint, then look away.

  "Resonance is building," Kaeso said from somewhere behind the glare. "Return signal is holding strong, no it's growing. Marcus, what do you see?"

  The light resolved.

  A valley. Wide, green, ringed by low hills. Late afternoon, the sun hanging low, casting long shadows from a tree line to the west. And it was autumn. He could tell by the color of the grass, by the brown and gold of the leaves, by the quality of the light itself, that amber softness that only came in the weeks after first frost.

  "I see it." Marcus gripped the arms of the chair. "The valley. Kaeso, it's autumn — late autumn, the trees have turned, there's frost damage on the lower slopes. We're looking at it. We're actually looking at it."

  "Noted. Signal holding steady. Reservoir?"

  Toll, the draw was powerful. He could feel his reservoir dropping, the field pulling magic out of him like water through a siphon. But he was full, and the drain was manageable. He had minutes.

  "Fine. I'm fine."

  The image sharpened. On the first two attempts, he'd barely gotten smears of color, shapes that might have been landscape or might have been artifacts of a struggling field. This was different. He could see individual trees. The texture of the hillside. A thin ribbon of smoke rising from somewhere just beyond the nearest ridge. A campfire, maybe. People.

  He leaned forward against the chest strap. The smoke meant someone was there, in the valley, right now, at whatever "now" meant 2,347 years ago. The settlement. The refugees. Maybe even...

  The pull changed.

  It happened between one heartbeat and the next. The smooth current flowing from his chest toward the array tightened. Contracted. Became a rope rather than a river. And the rope was attached to something.

  Marcus gasped. Not a drain but a grip, something reaching through the spectral field and closing around his center of gravity, around the place where his magic lived. The Drawstone pulled. This hauled.

  "Marcus." Kaeso's voice, sharp. "The gauge. It's past the line. Break the connection."

  Marcus reached for the release. His hand found the bronze lever on the arm of the chair. He gripped it.

  He hesitated.

  Because the image. The valley had come alive, the resolution leaping beyond anything the SERE should have been capable of, and there, right there, on the far side of the ridge, a cluster of tents, rough fabric stretched over wooden frames, smoke from three fires, and people moving between them, small figures in heavy clothing, and the valley floor marked with cart tracks, and this was it, this was the moment, the settlement before the city, before the Veins, before the stabs, before everything —

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  "Marcus! Break it now — Cass, please!"

  He pulled the lever.

  Nothing happened.

  The field was no longer under his control. The resonance anchors were screaming. A rising whine that shook the crystal lenses in their mounts. The pull in his chest intensified, dragging him forward against the straps. Not his magic anymore. Him. His body. His mass. Whatever was on the other end of this connection wasn't drawing power from him — it was drawing *him*.

  "Kaeso — I can't — it won't —"

  He saw Kaeso scrambling, heard the crash of something falling, heard the professor shouting an emergency shutoff incantation. The anchors flared white. The crystal lenses cracked, one after another, like joints popping.

  The pull ripped him out of the chair.

  There was no transition. No sense of passage. One moment he was in the lab, iron on his tongue, Kaeso's voice still mid-word... and then —

  Light, white, then gold, then a color he had no name for, then a frequency that bypassed his eyes and hit his bones directly. Pressure from every direction at once, like being at the bottom of an ocean. His reservoir emptied in a single spasm, everything he had pouring out of him to fuel a process he hadn't asked for and couldn't stop.

  The pressure vanished.

  He was on the ground. Hands and knees, fingers in cold dirt. Grass against his palms, stiff with frost. The air smelled like woodsmoke and wet earth and something green and growing underneath the cold.

  Silence.

  Not the silence of a quiet room. The silence of a world without the Lattice. No hum beneath him, no vibration in stone, because there was no stone. Just earth, hard-packed and cold. No stabs. No city.

  Just wind. And somewhere, very far away, the sound of a bird.

  His arms gave out. He hit the ground shoulder-first, rolled onto his back. The sky above him was enormous. More stars than he'd ever seen. No city glow to wash them out, no stab-light, nothing between him and the raw dark except the air itself.

  His mark was gone. He reached for his chest and found nothing. The chain had snapped during the displacement, or had never made it through.

  The emptiness inside him was total. Not the post-toll hollowness, the manageable ache that came with giving seventy percent. This was something else. Scraped to the walls. His reservoir was still there, he could feel its edges, but the space inside seemed vast now, cavernous, as if he'd never known how deep it actually went. He'd never been low enough to find out.

  The stars blurred. His vision was going. His body was shutting down, not dying, he didn't think, but folding in on itself, a reservoir with nothing left to hold.

  A thought surfaced, clear and absurd in the wreckage of his consciousness: he was cold. The frost was melting under his fingers, and he was so cold.

  Then nothing.

  * * *

  The sound hit Lucia first. A concussion that rattled the windows in the corridor and sent a vibration through the stone floor, up through her boots, into her teeth. She'd been walking toward the lab with two cups of tea, planning to sit in the observation gallery during the experiment. Something to tell Marcus about later. I watched you make history. You owe me breakfast.

  Her hands opened. She was running before the cups stopped spinning.

  The corridor was filling with dust. Fine stone powder sifting from the ceiling, and a smell. Hot bronze, scorched rock, and something sharper underneath, something that stung the inside of her nose. Ozone, maybe. Or the smell of magic burned past its limits.

  The lab door was off its hinges.

  Lucia shoved through. The spectral array had collapsed. Bronze rods bent at wrong angles, crystal lenses shattered across the floor, their fragments still glowing faintly with residual charge. Where the resonance anchors had been, lumps of melted metal smoked in cracked stone.

  Kaeso. On the floor near the workbench, propped against the wall. Blood ran from a cut above his left eye, tracking down the side of his face and dripping onto his collar. He was conscious. He was holding one of his instruments and squinting at it through the blood.

  "Where is he?" Lucia said.

  "Gone." Kaeso's voice was too calm. The voice of a man in shock who didn't know he was in shock. "The field inverted. I've never... the resonance inverted, the window became... he was just —"

  "Where is Marcus?"

  Kaeso looked at her. "I don't know."

  "Toll."

  Lucia scanned the room. The observation chair was empty. One of the leather straps had been torn clean off — not unbuckled, torn, as though something had ripped its occupant free with force the buckle couldn't match. Marcus's satchel lay on the floor near the base of the chair, where he must have set it before sitting down. His notes inside, the calculations he'd spent months on, his careful handwriting mapping two thousand years of history.

  And there, on the floor a few feet from the chair, glinting in the haze of dust and residual light: his mark. The bronze disc lay face-up, its chain snapped. The green glow was still visible, but fading. Dimming.

  Lucia picked it up. The metal was still warm.

  "By Cass, undo it," she said.

  "Lucia..."

  "Whatever this did, it sent him somewhere. So undo it."

  Kaeso squinted and wiped blood from his eye. "The anchors are destroyed. The lenses are..." He gestured at the shattered crystal littering the floor. "There is no field to rebuild, there is nothing..."

  "Then we tolling make a new one."

  "With what?" Kaeso set down his instrument and tried to stand. His legs weren't cooperating. He slid back down the wall and stayed there.

  "Lucia, listen to me. The field didn't malfunction." He wiped blood from his eye. "It inverted. The viewing window became a..." He stopped. "I don't have a word for it. A passage. Something opened, and the resonance locked onto Marcus and..." He gestured at the empty chair. "Pulled him through."

  "Pulled him where?"

  Kaeso's eyes went to the mark in her hand. His jaw set. The professor replacing the injured man.

  "Hold that where I can see it."

  Lucia held out the mark. The green was almost gone, but not quite. A faint pulse, like a heartbeat seen from very far away.

  Kaeso reached for the workbench and pulled a resonance reader closer. Standard College equipment, the same kind used in every stabilizer office in the city. He held it near the mark and adjusted the dial. "Every seal attunes to its owner's magical signature. You know the locator charm? The one parents use when a child wanders off at the market?"

  "My mother used it on me twice a week."

  "Same principle. The seal holds a connection to its owner. Direction and distance." He tapped the reader's glass face. The needle swung, hunted, then settled. Pointing down. Not toward the door, not toward the corridor. Straight down, into the floor, as if Marcus were somewhere beneath the building.

  Kaeso stared at the needle. "That's not a direction."

  He set the reader down and stood, unsteady, bracing himself on the workbench. Against the far wall, a cabinet had survived the blast. He limped to it and pulled out a second instrument, larger, older, trailing Lattice leads, and connected them to the remnants of a Vein in the wall.

  "The locator reads space. Direction and distance, nothing more." His hands were steadier now, working. "But if I run it through a temporal filter, the residual field should have enough charge for one reading..."

  The instrument hummed. The needle on the resonance reader twitched, swung hard to the right, and pinned itself against the stop.

  Kaeso read the dial. Read it again.

  "He's not anywhere, Lucia. The locator can't find him because he's not in the present." He met her eyes. "But the temporal filter is reading his signature. Active. Stable. At a temporal distance of..." He tapped the pinned needle. "More than this gauge can measure. It's pegged. The scale only goes to five hundred years and the needle's past the stop." He looked at her. "Oh Cass... he's at least a thousand years away. Probably more."

  "That's tolling impossible," she said.

  "The reading is unambiguous. He's not dead. He's not in some void between moments." Kaeso's voice went thin. Just at the edges. "He is further in the past than anything I can measure. And if I can't measure it..." He stopped. "I can't calculate a position. Can't even speculate how to find him, let alone bring him back."

  The words didn't make sense. Lucia waited for them to rearrange into something that did. They didn't.

  Lucia looked at the gutted lab. The bent bronze, the melted anchors, the dust still settling. She looked at the mark in her hand. The green was gone now. Not yellow-green, not amber, not the progression of a normal tithe cycle. Dark. Still connected to him, but fading. Whatever was left of the link between the mark and its owner was sputtering out like a candle on a windy day.

  "Then we figure it out," she said.

  She closed her fist around the mark. The metal bit into her palm.

  Kaeso stared at the needle pinned against its stop. Lucia caught it. His eyes went sharp, the way they did when a calibration produced unexpected results, when data contradicted a model. He was already thinking about what this meant.

  "Don't," she said.

  He looked up.

  "He's not a data point. He's Marcus." She held the mark where Kaeso could see it.

  Kaeso closed his eyes. "I know," he said.

  Somewhere in the corridor, voices. Running footsteps. The explosion had drawn people.

  She didn't let go.