I hesitate before nodding. “My mother told me as much.”
“A brilliant man,” Thorne murmurs. “Troubled, perhaps. But brilliant.”
There’s something wrong with the way he says it. Like he’s memorized the phrase. Practiced it.
“I pulled strings to make sure you had a place here, once I saw your name on the admissions list.”
“That was… kind of you.”
A silence stretches between us. The breeze shifts, unsettling a sheaf of parchment on the edge of his desk.
“You remind me of him in some ways,” he says, almost absently. “Though not so much in others.”
I study his face. There’s something too careful in the way he’s talking to me—something slinking behind the stillness.
A sharp knock interrupts.
Thorne’s gaze flicks to the door. “One moment,” he says, moving to answer it.
He leaves the door ajar as he steps into the hallway, voice low, speaking to someone just out of view. A staff member, maybe. I can’t make out the words.
My eyes drift to the corner of the room.
Propped beside an unused reading chair, a stack of maps is laid out on a side table, with more rolled maps leaning against the wall beside them. Most of them are old—thick parchment edged in gold, detailing fault lines and ancient borderlands. I’m drawn to the one on top showing Whittaker’s grounds in delicate inkwork, drawn before the Logistics building was even built.
I almost fail to notice the one beneath it.
A plain map. Folded once. Faded topography shaped in a way that’s instantly familiar.
I shift my weight subtly for a better angle, just enough to catch the outline of mountains along one edge and a wide body of water curving like a sickle near the bottom.
I know that curve.
The lake.
My lake.
And just beyond it—though the names are too small to read—I’m almost certain I see the ridgeline that cuts above my farm in Virginia.
No marks. No ink. No indication of why it’s here.
Just the wrong map in the wrong place.
But what the hell is it doing here?
The floor creaks softly as Thorne returns, smoothing the cuffs of his sleeves. He motions for me to sit in one of the two high-back tufted-leather chairs across from his desk. “Apologies,” he says, as if nothing’s shifted at all. “Where were we?”
“You were saying I remind you of my father?” I sit down.
He waves the question off. “He too had a way of hiding things in plain sight. You—” He stops, watching me intently now, as if trying to read me. “Your power. It’s… untempered. Curious.” He walks to the window, looking out over the quad. “When he died…” A shadow crosses his face in that moment, gone in the next. “The world will not be the same because of it,” he says finally, searching my face.
I nod, slow and guarded. “Were you able to connect with him… before he?—?”
“Your father was a complicated man. Always chasing shadows. Never content with the world as it was.”
A chill drifts across the floor. He didn’t answer the question.
“I do remember the last time I saw him, though,” Thorne says, his voice quiet now. “He was wearing that awful blue shirt he always favored—I always told him to throw it away; too many holes.” He shakes his head as he looks out toward the quad again. “But he was asking for my help regarding you, as a matter of fact.”
