Chapter 17
A deepening chill sweeps through the air as I wait outside the back door of Segner House. I’d told Analiese I had a history group project, which is the only class Sumner and I share this semester, and I needed to focus on it. In reality, Sumner told me to meet him and William out here at eight.
It’s now ten after.
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’d pulsed.
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.
“What?” he says, voice low.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Do you remember anything strange happening with the lights that night?”
He thinks for a moment. “No, but the Wi-Fi was down. I came back to stream and I couldn’t connect.”
“So it was only happening out here,” I rationalize. “But—why?”
Sumner turns to William. “I don’t suppose,” he drawls, “you can explain?”
William clasps his hands behind his back. “I was working with a galvanometer and, much like this, it was going awry.” He nods to the pocket of his coat. “It’s recorded in my journal.”
My fingertips brush leather as I reach for it, handing it over. He flips through a few pages before passing it back, so I read the last entry he’d logged: 2nd of September, 1859: Galvanometer unreliable, odd occurrences this evening.
Sumner produces a pen from his jacket and pushes his sleeve up to his elbow, then begins writing equations on the inside of his forearm.
One long, then a shorter one. When he finishes, he studies it, then shakes his head.
“Look, if time travel exists, it would have been explained by now. Time is defined in one direction. Forward. Even if the magnetic vortex is the common denominator, it’s hard to theorize that someone can then travel back in time.
You can’t un-rot a banana that’s gone brown. ”
In theory, this is true. But William is here, which disproves every concrete thing we’d come to understand about our physical world.
“Nothing is impossible when we’re talking about the universe,” I say, hearing my dad’s words tumble from my tongue. “There’s so much we don’t know. Even if we don’t fully understand something, it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Because clearly”—I swoop my arm toward William—“he is real.”
William slides his gaze to mine. “Might there be a connection?”
I blink. “A connection?”
“Between you and me,” he clarifies.
Sumner shoots me a warning look. I know what it means, but a tender ache of guilt builds anyway. There is one connection—the not-insignificant fact that he founded Ivernia—though we swore not to tell him. That’s reason alone not to preemptively rule this out as a random occurrence.
My heart trips as William holds my gaze. Flecks of deep gold ring his irises, nearly identical to the sun-kissed strands in his hair. The faintest scattering of freckles dot his nose, and his two front teeth overlap slightly, a charming characteristic.
I am distracted by this beautiful boy who has no right being this gracious or attractive.
Is a different kind of connection possible? As in I’ve crossed barriers of space-time to find you because we are meant to be together? An in-every-universe-I-will-love-you kind of fate?
“Probably not,” Sumner says flatly. “Let’s go to the lounge. It’s freezing out here.”
William smiles at me, pure and wholesome, before gesturing after you.
Heat zips straight to my head. William is charming.
There. It won’t kill me to admit it. I am a sucker for an English accent because I am only human (and American), and it doesn’t help that said accent is attached to a face with exceptional bone structure and a smile that could melt arctic ice caps.
It also doesn’t help that he told me I have striking eyes.
When he acts like this, it’s easy to pretend he’s a regular student. Not a complex cosmic mystery.
When we reach the admin building, William, a fan of this technology, swipes us in with his badge and holds the door open.
Sumner steps in first, turning to me as I enter after him. “I keep thinking—”
“Try not to hurt yourself,” I volley.
He presses down the hint of a smirk. “I keep thinking,” he repeats, “about what would trigger daylight in the middle of the night.”
That’s what William said, hadn’t he? Back when he recalled the last dredges of his memory. But when we turn to see if he’d have any idea, he looks as lost as us.
Together, we bound down the hall toward the Forgotten Lounge. As we approach the door, I drop my gaze to his journal and flip to his last entry, my breath quickening as something occurs to me. We’ve gone over what we were doing and where we were, but we’ve neglected to pay attention to when.
“Hey.” I stop in my tracks. “Did anything significant happen September second in 1859?”
It’s comical, really, how Sumner looks to William for confirmation while William looks to me, as though I’m able to answer my own question when he’s the person who lived through this very specific point in time.
Suddenly, a voice that does not belong to me, or Sumner, or William goes, “Actually—yes.”