The ceiling crack started near the window frame and wandered northeast, splitting once, like a river on a map.
Lucian lay in his bed and catalogued his own existence. Breathing: yes. Ribs: whole. Hands: clean. No stone dust, no blood, no evidence that anything had happened except an ordinary night's sleep. He pressed two fingers against his left side and counted the ribs under the skin. All there. All intact. He had done this four times in the past minute. This was fine. This was a reasonable response to an extremely vivid nightmare.
It was a dream.
Not a real question. A decision. A dream: the most specific, most physiologically precise nightmare in the history of bad sleep. He could reconstruct the exact sequence of sounds the building had made as it came apart. He could describe, with anatomical accuracy, what it felt like when a rib broke: the specific wrongness of it, the way the body stops trusting the information coming from that side. He had experienced, in exhaustive detail, the sensation of his lungs going flat. Of his heart deciding it was done.
His parents' death anniversary was in three weeks. He had been having nightmares near the anniversary for five years. This was one of those nightmares. More intense than usual, yes, more intense than anything he had ever dreamed, but the mechanism was familiar: grief, proximity, stress. The dampening essay. The Pattern Theory exam. The fact that he lived and studied in the same institution where his parents had been killed by a Threadwork accident, and some part of his brain processed this with all the subtlety of a collapsing building.
Not mysterious. Just grief.
"...and the practical component is worth sixty percent," Tomas said, from across the room, "which means the theory prep is basically decorative, but Davos always puts theory questions on it anyway and..."
Something in Lucian's chest went very still.
He had been waiting for those words. Not consciously, consciously he'd been counting ribs, but underneath that, some part of him had been listening for this sentence in this cadence. He had known it was coming the way you know a staircase is there before you look down.
Because I know Tomas. Tomas was a predictable person. Three years of living six feet apart from someone produced a model of them accurate enough to anticipate sentences. This was not unusual. This was not evidence of anything.
Tomas dropped the boot.
The flat impact against the stone floor hit Lucian somewhere in his sternum, and his hand went to his ribs before he'd authorized it. He released it. Breathed. Looked at the ceiling.
"Sorry," Tomas said.
"It's fine." Lucian sat up.
Something new at the base of his skull: a tightness, very faint. A hum, like a thread pulled slightly too taut and vibrating at a frequency he couldn't locate. He turned his head experimentally. The sensation didn't move. It wasn't in his neck or his ear. It was deeper than that: in some interior place he couldn't point to even with his Threadsight, which he was not opening today, which he was absolutely not opening.
He had hit his head during sleep, probably. Stress did things to the body.
He washed his face, pulled on his student robes, and was fine.
The dining hall smelled like it always smelled: warm bread, weak tea, the faint scorched edge from the Thread-fed warming units running all morning. Lucian took his usual table near the east windows and looked at his porridge.
It looked back.
He took a spoonful. Warm. Present. Tasting of nothing in particular. He took another. He was trying, with some scientific detachment, to identify something different about this porridge (some variation in temperature or consistency that would prove he was eating new porridge in a new morning) and finding nothing. It was the same porridge. The same seat. Tomas across from him eating eggs and sausage in the same focused, fueling-a-machine way, talking about Pella from his Warding seminar in the same order of details. She definitely looked at me.
Lucian had the next line in his mouth before he used it.
He put down his spoon. The anniversary, he told himself. The stress. Very vivid. His brain had encoded the morning in such precise detail that even Tomas's conversation was reproducible, which meant he'd been paying more attention than he'd realized, more than a tired third-year eating porridge usually paid, and the only explanation for that level of covert observation was...
A girl two tables over set down her tray harder than she'd meant to.
The clatter went through Lucian like a blade. Both hands hit the table, flat, bracing. He stayed very still until his heart stopped making its case. Around him the dining hall continued its morning: people eating, talking, moving trays, generating noise. Nobody looked at him. He had not made a sound.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking slightly.
He pressed them flat and breathed past the ceiling that wasn't there.
Grief, he told himself. Anniversary proximity. He was fine. He had always been fine.
The copper taste was at the back of his mouth. Faint but there, a metallic edge. Old pipes, he had thought yesterday. He was thinking it now. The thought felt less like a conclusion and more like a line he was reciting.
He did not open his Threadsight. He was not ready for what it would show him.
The walk to the lecture hall took him through the main courtyard. He took the longer path, past the maintenance outbuildings. Forty seconds. He did not think about why.
The sun was through the haze. The old towers were bright in it. Students crossed the quad and called to each other and argued about exam formats. He filed the air temperature, the exact angle of the light, the particular quality of the morning haze, and placed each one in the same mental hallway where yesterday's memories lived, and the two sets of information were identical. Not similar. Identical.
He stopped walking in the middle of the courtyard.
Stress, said the part of his mind that had been saying this for the last hour and a half. Anniversary. Very vivid dream. He had simply been paying more attention to his surroundings than he'd realized, and his memory had encoded the details with unusual precision, and this was all...
A group of fourth-years was practicing Threadwork near the fountain. The Weft Thread structure of the exercise resolved automatically in his peripheral vision, the same three-Pattern sequence they were working through, the same correction the one on the left had been failing to make. His Threadsight hadn't activated. He had recognized the patterns before perceiving the Threads.
He had seen this exact exercise yesterday. He had seen these exact students fail at it.
At the base of his skull, the hum.
He kept walking.
The lecture hall was tiered and half-full. Davos entered at 7:58, as always. Chapter fourteen. Resonance dampening.
Lucian sat in his usual seat, fourth row near the aisle, and opened his notebook. He had filled two pages with careful annotations on this chapter last night. He did not look at them. He was watching Davos with an attention he had not applied to any lecture in three years.
First derivation. Second. Third.
His hand went up.
It moved before he told it to, physically rose while his mind was still a second behind, still watching, still observing, and then his mouth was opening and the words were arriving: "Professor, in the third derivation, wouldn't the dampening coefficient change if the resonance frequency exceeded the Thread-density threshold?"
Davos paused. Looked at him. "Good question, Vael. Yes, it would. We'll cover that next week, but you're ahead of the reading." A small nod. "Keep it up."
Lucian sat with his hand in his lap.
He had not chosen to raise it. He had not decided to ask that question. The words had come up through him the way breathing came up, involuntary, prior to decision, and they had been exactly the words he had spoken yesterday, in the same sequence, at the same moment in the same lecture. He had not remembered asking this question in a dream. He had not planned to reproduce it. His hand had simply known it was time.
The dream explanation sat down.
He looked at his notebook. At the date at the top of the page, written in his own hand: 14th of Ashara. He looked at it for long enough that the student to his left shifted uncomfortably.
Not a dream. He did not know what it was. He did not have a word for it or a framework that fit it or any academic text that addressed it. But he had lived through this morning before, and the morning was happening again, and the explanation he had been maintaining for the past three hours was structurally unsound and he could no longer afford it.
He sat in the lecture hall and let that land. Let it settle into the exact weight it was.
His hand was shaking.
He put it in his lap and covered it with the other one and breathed past the ceiling and listened to Davos finish the derivation.
After the lecture he went to the courtyard and opened his Threadsight.
The headache hit immediately, the familiar dull pressure. He held it open. Threads filled his vision: the Scarlet hum of the students around him, the Bright warmth of the sun, the Weft structure of the buildings. All of them elevated, vibrating slightly faster than he'd seen on ordinary days. The same elevation he had glimpsed yesterday in the two minutes before the alarms sounded, before the windows went to sand, before the stone forgot what it was.
He shut it down. Pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
At the base of his skull, the tightness had deepened. It was harder to ignore than this morning, more present, more insistent. It felt like something that had been there for a long time without his noticing, a sound that only becomes audible once you know to listen for it. He tried to perceive it with his Threadsight and couldn't: it was somewhere in his Deep Thread, his sense-of-self, too interior for his limited perceptual range to reach.
Whatever it was, it had not been there three days ago. He was certain of that. He had been certain of it since Tomas dropped the boot.
He needed to think about that. He needed to think about many things. He filed them in their places (this sensation, this morning, this specific quality of elevated Thread-activity) each to the precise location he always used: the long corridor outside the Temporal Studies wing, the east stairwell landing, the specific weathered stone of the fountain in the quadrangle. Each item in its place. Each place in the building he was about to watch kill everyone in it.
He walked toward the Chirothurgy tower.
Sera was coming out of it with her bag over her shoulder, walking at the clip she always walked at, and the feeling in Lucian's chest when he saw her was something that had no word for it in any language he knew.
She looked at him and slowed. The automatic social read happened instantly, she was always doing this, reading people, and whatever she found made her expression change.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey. You look tired."
"Tomas dropped a boot at six in the morning."
"Classic Tomas." A beat. "Are you coming to Uncle Ithrin's dinner next week?"
He knew the next line. He had said the next line. "Probably."
"He's going to ask about your marks." She stopped fully, turning to face him. "Lucian. Stop for a second."
He stopped.
She set down her bag and stepped toward him and took his wrist, two fingers at the pulse point, professional. She looked at his eyes: pupils, response. She looked at the skin of his forearm for something he couldn't identify. All of this in about seven seconds, quiet and thorough.
"Elevated heart rate," she said. "Pupils fine. You're not under cognitive influence." She released his wrist. "How long has your heart been doing this?"
"Since I woke up."
"Have you been exposed to anything? Thread-materials, unusual substances, anything..."
"No." He took her arm. Not gently: his grip found her elbow and held on. "Sera. I need you to be somewhere else this afternoon. After your next class. Leave campus, go to the Bright Quarter, go to Uncle Ithrin's, go anywhere. But don't come back to the Nexus after noon."
She went still under his grip. The clinical attention sharpened.
"Why?" Her voice was careful.
The penalty was there, a faint tugging in his Threads the moment he reached for an explanation. He felt the shape of what he couldn't say: the building comes apart at 3:22 PM. I died in it yesterday. I need you not to be here when it happens. All of it locked behind the thing in his soul that would not allow it. He tried the edges. Something is going to happen today. Something that... The tug intensified. I have a bad...
"I have a bad feeling," he said. The penalty allowed this. It was not enough. "A very bad feeling about today. I can't explain it. But I need you to not be here this afternoon."
Sera studied him for a moment. He knew what she was doing: building the differential. Anxiety disorder, panic response, grief anniversary episode, partial Cognist tampering, premonition. She was a fourth-year Chirothurgy student; she would have a framework for all of them. None of them added up to believe him and cancel her lab session.
"Come to the infirmary with me," she said.
"I'm not sick."
"Your hand is shaking."
He looked at his hand on her arm. She was right.
"I'm not sick," he said. "I need you to listen to me."
"I am listening." She said it without heat, the way you speak to someone who needs to hear that they're being taken seriously. "I'm listening, and I'm telling you that something is wrong with you physiologically, and I want a qualified Chirothurge to look at it. That's me taking you seriously, Lucian, that's not me dismissing you."
He wanted to tell her. The want was a physical pressure behind his sternum, heavier than the phantom ribs, heavier than the ceiling that kept not pressing down. He wanted to say: yesterday you were alive and then the building came down and I don't know if you made it out and I cannot walk through this morning not knowing and I have been carrying this for three hours and I am seventeen years old and I do not know how to do this. All of it real. All of it locked.
"I'll be fine," he said, which was what he always said.
She looked at him for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression, a decision being reached. "I have a lab at 2:00 that I can't miss. I'll find you after and we'll eat together, all right? And you're going to tell me what's going on."
He almost said please don't come back for the lab. The penalty pulled hard. He let it go.
"Okay," he said.
She picked up her bag. The over-the-shoulder wave, quick and dismissive and kind, his mother's exact gesture. He looked at the ground.
He stood in the corridor for a long time. Students moved around him, heading to the next class or away from it, carrying books and bags and ordinary mornings. He was an obstacle in the current. The only person in the building who already knew the ending.
He checked the clock on the wall.
10:14 AM.
Five hours and eight minutes.
He did not understand the mechanism. He did not know the rules or why him or whether it would happen a third time. He did not know what had changed at the base of his skull or what the tightness there was or whether it was connected to the day repeating or whether any of this had a connection he could find. He did not know what to do with five hours and eight minutes.
What he knew was that he had stood at the top of the east stairwell at 3:23 PM and felt the stone give way, and the ceiling come down, and his ribs fold, and his lungs go flat. He had four seconds of awareness after that. He could reconstruct them in exact order. He was not going to stand in that stairwell again.
He started walking. Down the corridor, out through the east gate, past the administration buildings, through the Athenaeum's main entrance and out onto the city street. The sun hit his face. Bread from a market stall two streets over. Voices, carts, the smell of the river. Real things. Solid things.
Distance. Distance was simple. If the storm could reach him two miles from the Nexus, he would know something. If it couldn't, he would know something else. Either way he would know more than he did now.
At the base of his skull, faint and persistent: the hum.
He kept walking.