Ash had been staring at the same page for forty minutes.

The library’s back section suited him for the same reason it suited nobody else: low ceilings, tall shelves, no sightlines to anything that mattered. The book in front of him was open to Chapter four of the applied resonance theory index.

He had read the first paragraph twice and retained neither sentence. He was dull around the edges in a way he didn’t have a name for, flatness that sat behind the eyes rather than in them, and the library was quiet enough that it didn’t ask him to be otherwise.

Evelyn was at the table three rows back, already there when he arrived. Her long silver-white hair spilled over one shoulder, catching the low library light with every slight movement of her head.

He had felt the Shade from the entrance, the held-door weight, enormous and still, familiar enough to locate without effort. She had a folder open and a moving pen writing down notes.

"You’re not reading," Evelyn said.

She hadn’t looked up. The pen was still moving, her black-gloved fingers elegant and precise.

Ash looked at the page in front of him. "No."

The pen stopped. "Neither am I. At least not right now."

He looked up. She was looking at him directly now, her ice-blue eyes steady.

Ash got up from the desk to put the book he wasn’t going to read away.

When he reached for the top shelf, his arm surged before the motion had committed, hand closing around the wrong spine, the impact traveling back through his wrist and forearm before the crash hit and his arm went slack from the shoulder down.

Evelyn crossed the distance before he registered the movement. He caught the faint scent of a frost-scented perfume clinging to her. Her grip was firm, the gold-trimmed cuff of her jacket brushing his skin as she held him steady. The motion made her long hair sway forward, brushing against his shoulder.

She let go without a word, a black gloved hand sliding slowly off his arm.

Ash took the correct book off the shelf with his working arm and carried it back to the table. Evelyn returned to her seat, crossing one leg over the other.

After a moment she said, "The eastern district Gate. Did you hear about it?"

"A little bit. Just what I gathered from some people in passing," Ash said.

"There was no resonance frequency." She turned another page. "You know there’s a forty-eight hour pre-emergence scan. Documented error margin of four percent."

"That’s not an error margin for zero warning."

"No." She set the pen down. "The system is supposed to give us two days. It gave nothing."

"Maybe the system has limits nobody’s acknowledged yet."

Evelyn looked at him like Ash had spoken a word of her mother tongue. "Yes," she said. "That’s what I think as well."

She pulled a separate sheet from behind the folder and pushed it across the table. A list of dates, district names, classification numbers in tight handwriting.

Ash did his best to at least pretend he knew what he was looking at and settled on the easiest data point to look at. The dates.

The entrance exam Gate was one as well? Ash thought.

"And this has been going on for two years?"

"Two years." She tapped the bottom third of the list. "The gap between incidents was averaging six weeks when I started tracking. It’s been running under three weeks for the last four months."

"And nobody from the academy has flagged this?"

"Nobody from any Guild has flagged it either. I’ve checked the public dispatch records." She took the sheet back. "The system isn’t broken. A broken system would produce errors. This is producing absences, which is a different problem."

"You think it’s deliberate."

She didn’t answer immediately. She put the sheet back behind the folder and picked up her pen.

"I think something is generating Gates in a way the detection system wasn’t designed to see," she said. "Whether that’s deliberate or a natural phenomenon the system was never calibrated for, I don’t know yet."

The held-door Shade was exactly where it always was, but from this distance, closer than a corridor, closer than a seminar table, it felt aimed. It wasn’t pressing outward against its seal but oriented toward a point outside herself, with the focus of a decision already made and held. Whatever she was keeping herself sealed for, it wasn’t abstract. She had a target.

The hunger stayed quiet, not sated, not suppressed, making space as it did around Seth, the void rearranging itself for reasons Ash hadn’t found the bottom of yet.

"How long before the interval drops to one week?" he asked.

"At the current rate? I think in six weeks. Maybe four."

Neither of them said anything. Through the transom windows, afternoon light sat flat and even across the shelving.

"Eve. What happens when it does hit one week?"

Evelyn’s pen stopped.

She looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn’t read, not offended, not quite surprised, more like someone who had heard a door open in a room they thought was empty.

Then she looked back at the folder and the pen started moving again. "Then it stops being a pattern," she said, "and starts being a problem."

Ash stayed until the light through the transoms shifted. He gathered his book and stood.

He was almost through the door when Evelyn said, without looking up, "And roll down your sleeves before you enter the main corridor please."

He checked. The left one had worked its way up past the elbow. He pushed it down.

"The eastern district Gate," she said, pen still moving. "It was the third this month with zero warning."

Ash stopped with his hand on the door frame.

"I know," he said.

"No you don’t," Evelyn said. "But you should."

Ash walked through the main corridor with his sleeves down and thought about it the whole way back. He didn’t see where he was going and walked into someone at the corridor junction.

"Owww what the heck" Phoebe winced, steadying herself back up. She sounded different. Like she wasn’t reading from a script.

"Sorry about that, are you alright?" Ash extended a hand.

She brushed his hand aside. "Yeah I’m doing alright."

"I know its getting late, but I need to go to the first-year block," Ash said. "Can you come with me?"

Phoebe adjusted her bag. The response came before she could stop it. "Fine, I guess we can go."