Page 48 of Embers of Midnight

“Deal,” I say, and mean it.

Darian is exactly where we left him when I step back into the bright heat outside, arms folded against the railing like a painting of patience. When he looks up, the static in him softens. I hate that I notice.

“How’s Taya?” he asks, falling into step on my right. His knuckles find the stripes at my sleeve again because apparently my nervous system needs tasks.

“Like sunshine with knives,” I say. “10/10 would trust to hide a body.”

“Accurate.”

We cut through the courtyard toward the Dimensions wing. The building itself refuses to be just a building; the air thins in a pleasant way near the threshold, wards pinging gently off my anchor. The plaque reads Interdimensional Navigation in tidy letters.

“Want me in the room?” Darian asks. It lands like do you want a wall.

“I can handle class,” I say, which is true. “You can lurk in the back and judge my note-taking.”

“Deal.” His hand leaves my sleeve. Butterflies go stupid for a second, then remember the rocks again.

The lecture hall is tiers and light and a polished projection table the size of a boat. Kieran Holt stands at the front like a man whohas broken many devices and learned to love manuals. Early thirties, pale, sleek silver-blond hair, one cybernetic eye that ticks like a clock when he’s amused, which he currently is not.

“Welcome to Interdimensional Navigation,” he says, voice dry enough to start a good fire. “If you can’t hold three ideas in your head at once, acquire friends who can. We travel in groups for a reason.”

A low ripple of laughter. He taps the table. A three-dimensional model of layered, translucent planes blooms into the air. Light threads between them like called nerve endings.

“Terms first,” Kieran continues. “Prime is your Earth—baseline physics, baseline rules. We classify adjacent realities as Folds. Our home here is Aetheris—Registry index A-7. You’ll hear it called the Aether Fold because someone with a naming job lacked imagination.” His cybernetic eye flicks; the projection labels a layer in clean script: AETHERIS (A-7). Earth below it reads PRIME (E-0).

“Time ratio between Prime and Aetheris sits at roughly one-to-one,” he goes on, “with drift measured in seconds per day, not meaningful hours. That is by design. The Academy wouldn’t place itself in a Fold where you lose a month every time you nap. We tried that once. The complaints were epochal.”

He swipes to zoom. Lines stretch between the layers—some bright, some dully pulsing, one or two dark. “Gates bridge layers. Each has three attributes: Anchor—what holds it in place; Key—what opens it; Threshold—what lets you pass without youratoms filing for divorce. Anchors can be geographic, emotional, or made—see: artifacts, runes, terrible decisions.”

A hand goes up. Kieran points, patient.

“What’s a made Anchor?” a boy asks.

“Anything crafted to fix a Gate in the world so it stops wandering like a toddler,” Kieran says. “Runic pylons. Warded arches,” he adds, glancing at me like he knows I arrived through one, “doors built of things the world respects. Anchors sing to each other. You will learn the songs. If you’re tone-deaf, we will give you gadgets.”

He toggles the view again. A sphere blossoms—Aetheris, not a planet so much as a layered topology of rules. Points flare across it, each with a flickering index. “Stability Index. Green Gates are fine. Yellow want love. Red will kill you in creative ways. If you find a Gate that reads gray, it’s dead. Treat it like a corpse. Be respectful. Don’t poke it.”

I writedon’t poke dead gatesin my neatest hand because I feel judged.

“Drift,” he says, and the room settles. “Drift is the difference between where a Gate believes it exits and where you actually exit. Think tide. Think wind shear. Think a friend who promises to be on time and arrives eight minutes late forever. Drift accumulates with distance and instability. We correct for it. We always carry breadcrumbs: temporary Anchors you seed behind you to build a path home.”

My pen pauses. “What if your breadcrumbs get eaten,” I ask before my brain can stop me. “By, I don’t know, evil weather.”

Kieran’s mouth almost smiles. “Then you use Echo—the lingering resonance of your passage. You reverse-read the Gate’s last song and follow the hum back to where you last knew yourself. If Echo’s corrupted—Null tech, malice, an argument with physics—you switch to Tether.” His eye clicks. The projection shifts to a simple knot drawn in light. “Tether is what Caelum Thorne would call a promise and I would call a contract. You fix a line between a you in the now and a place you have claim to. You keep it taut. You do not cut it. You do not give it to anyone who smiles too much.”

He taps a corner of the model where darkness pools. “Hazards. Cold iron makes Gates sulk. Null nets mute them. Remember: some layers hate you on principle. Do not assume air, pressure, or memory behave. Bring redundancy. Bring a person who thinks of failure before success.”

Darian coughs once behind me like someone’s been mentioned.

Kieran sweeps us through Etiquette—authorization, clearance, who to notify before and after, the two-person rule (“if you insist on being stupid, be stupid in pairs”), and what to do when a Gate opens for someone who did not ask. “You leave,” he says flatly. “You notify. You do not negotiate with doors.”

He drops a holo-map of corridors between layers and traces the sanctioned routes between Prime and Aetheris. We learn how Gatekeepers log departures, how the Ward grid listens for Anchors, how to spot a fake key, how to refuse an invitationthat smells like a trap without making the Gate mad. He demonstrates a micro-Anchor—silver disc, hairline runes—that hums in my palm the way my ID does.

By the end, my head aches in the good way. I know two new ways to not disappear and one to pull someone else out of a bad decision.

On our way out, Kieran catches me at the edge of the aisle. “Good question,” he says, like it cost him nothing and means more than the grade. His gaze flicks to Darian hovering politely outside the door, then back. “Pick friends who carry rope,” he adds.

“Already working on it,” I mutter.