“No problem,” she said in response to my query. “Sally and Jesse are still sitting with Leroy. I got reprimanded for staying out overnight without a note, but it was pretty pro forma. Of course, now I’d better spend tonight in the dorm to calm everyone down—I’ll take the bus over first thing in the morning.” She seemed disinclined to give more details, and I suspected that Hall’s guardians had put more effort into trying to bind her than she let on.
After a while, she put down her book, and I realized that I’d misunderstood her distress. “Mr. Spector, my friends have been arrested, and I haven’t entirely avoided trouble myself. I know that Barlow and his gang are FBI, and I know you are too. I think there’s more going on than I’ve been told, and I think the reason Miss Marsh hasn’t told me is because it’s yours to tell. Want to let me know why you’re so interested in Kirill’s books? Or shall I guess?”
Spector looked at her and put his head in his hands.
“I’ll fill out the paperwork,” I told him.
He lifted his head slightly. “And what will you list as ‘reason for disclosure?’”
I shrugged. “Magically bound blood sister to several people who already know?”
“I’ll fill out the paperwork.” He sighed and raised himself back up. “My apologies, Miss Winslow. It’s been a long week. There’s some concern that the Russians may be interested in the art of body switching for purposes of espionage. They might have researched the topic at Miskatonic—which is widely believed to hold the best esoterica collection in the world. Kirill Barinov is a Russian who had access to that collection. We have no concrete reason to suspect him.”
She leaned back. “That’s good, because Kirill knew about as much about body swaps as I know about pig farming. He once claimed to have accomplished astral travel but—actually, I’m not going to tell you how he thought he did it, because it wasn’t entirely legal, but it was illegal in an entirely boring way. If you’re looking for magical insight in those notebooks, you’re looking in the wrong place.”
“That may well be the case,” said Spector. “But it’s a lead, and at the moment it’s the only lead we have access to. And even if Mr. Barinov wasn’t sent by the Kremlin, they could have pressured him later.”
“That’s possible. He sure wasn’t happy to go back.” She reached for a notebook from the stack. “And he didn’t even try to bring these. Anything else I should know?”
“Not that you’re missing, as far as I’m aware. I’m afraid there’s not much to know. We found very little before Barlow and his—team—showed up. I was trying to persuade the Miskatonic special collections librarian to let me look at access records, but that won’t be possible until Barlow calms down.” He gave me a sideways look, from which I gleaned—or chose to glean—that he wasn’t trying to hide our visit to Upton, but thought that piece of mixed Hall and Innsmouth history mine to tell. And so I would, I decided, when we had a moment less surrounded.
Spector went on: “There’s nothing unusually suspicious about Kirill Barinov, so far—there are foreign students at every major university, just trying to learn. But the things we look for are high enough stakes that it’s worth checking out every possible lead. False trails are ninety percent of the job.”
I nodded and took a notebook, and did not say: the stakes were already high, but we may have raised them too far just by looking.
*
We ate dinner at a Polish place in Kingsport—good, solid food, kielbasa and potatoes and soups warm against the winter night. Trumbull returned to Arkham immediately afterward, but Spector we persuaded to wait in the car while I gave the others a short lesson. I delivered Audrey to her dorm just before curfew, hoping that I appeared a reasonable facsimile of a chaperone.
It was late when we got back to campus, but Neko and Caleb tarried long on Trumbull’s porch. I half woke, later, as Neko came in. “Is all well?”
“Yeah,” she said. She sounded a bit—not sad, exactly, but not happy either. I opened my eyes to see her sitting on her bed, one shoe off and looking out the window in lieu of removing the other.
“Are you certain?”
She offered a little smile. “Just confirmed that neither of us actually wants to pick up where we left off, that’s all.”
I pulled myself out of the luxuriously empty bed, hugged her, and didn’t try to say anything on a topic about which I knew little.
Half asleep again, I woke when she said, “You should talk with him about what you want, too.”
“I know,” I said. “We should all talk.”
*
“The library is still barred,” reported Trumbull at breakfast. She ate her egg and stale pierogi mechanically.
“I expect it’ll be closed for a while,” said Spector. “Once George has something he wants, he’s not likely to let go until he’s done regardless of inconvenience to everyone else.”
“They’re still questioning faculty and students as well,” she added, an afterthought.
Spector grimaced and stood. “I’d better go commandeer a phone. If I can get a few people at headquarters to see sense, we might be able to sort this out. You can do without me today?”
“I need to stay on campus,” said Trumbull. “I have the geometry students again—I hope Peters has lost interest. I don’t much like paperwork.”
I would have preferred to go back to Hall rather than remain in Barlow’s web, but nodded and assured them that we had plenty to do. We had much study to fit in, and much planning.
Audrey appeared about the time Trumbull left, and it occurred to me that we could all take the bus over if we wanted to. But Audrey was clearly pleased to get away. Caleb went in search of Dawson, and returned a few minutes later with her in tow.
“I don’t think Dean Skinner’s as pleased with Barlow as he was a few days ago,” she reported. “Little enough he can do about it now, more’s the pity.”
In Trumbull’s office, the stacks of notes had grown, and the strange machine gained a few gears of doubtful function.
“Can you read this stuff?” Audrey asked me.
I looked at the top sheet, careful not to touch anything. “About as well as I could read one of Dr. Einstein’s papers. The language is no problem. The words, on the other hand…” Atop another pile I caught a glimpse of my own name, and Caleb’s. That one, I did not examine too closely.
This time, as we rode our braided streams, we tried deliberately to reach beyond mere shared sensation. People are more than bodies—else the Yith could not travel between them, nor ordinary magicians traverse dreams. But it’s also true that emotions are heart and breath and heat.
We were all of a piece, twined together in ritual. But beneath that, as I tried to push through without pushing away, I could sense a particular flavor to each of the people around me. Caleb was full of wonder and fear, still edged with anger. Dawson felt much the same, with brittle suspicion caging the whole. Charlie at his core was all yearning. Audrey remained full of a deep confidence that welled up under her frustration, strengthening it even while constraining its depth.