Evelyn pulled the desk chair to the window wall and sat down in it, which I had never seen her do. She sat back and waited.
"Start from the Tuesday," she said.
"I was three weeks into the semester, in the university library, on the way to get coffee. A woman I cared about had just asked me a question I'd been waiting a year to answer. Between one step and the next, the library was gone, and Earth was gone. The question came with me. I didn't see this world again for a hundred years."
She didn't move. The notebook stayed shut on her knee.
"A hundred years."
"A hundred years. When it ended, I was put back into the same heartbeat it took me from. The concrete was still wet. I walked home, and my mother had rice on the table."
Ori sat on the corner of the desk with her hands in her lap. She had been in the mourning colors since before I woke up that morning and she was still in them, and she had not said why.
"Your transcript has no gap. I've read it twice."
"The gap isn't in the paperwork, Evelyn. It's in me. Charlene's version of me is true right up to that library, and everything you've caught since is the hundred years showing through."
She opened the notebook and did not write in it.
"I watched what you did to Rodion. I've checked your flight logs myself. So I'm past asking whether you're lying. The problem is the size of it." She looked up at me. "I can verify a fast man. I cannot verify a century. Give me something I can hold."
"Then get your coat. What you just asked me for deserves better than an answer at a desk, and it's dinner time where we're going."
She looked at the clock on her own wall. "It's half past one."
"Not everywhere. Coat, notebook, take my arm, and don't let go until I tell you."
She asked no questions. She got the coat, took my arm with a grip above the elbow, and looked where I nodded, at the corner behind the door.
"The first two steps are dark," I said. "Breathe normally. The dark is on our side."
The shadow behind the office door took us. Two steps of cool dark that smelled of rain under bark, a turn I made for the both of us, and the third step came down on dry pine needles in a different evening.
We stood under an umbrella pine on a hill, in a small park going dark, with the smell of roasting chestnuts coming up from the street below. The canopy overhead blocked half the sky.
Below us, between two rows of cypresses running down the hill toward the avenue, floodlit against the last of the light, stood the Colosseum. The clouds above it were still pink where the sun had been.
Evelyn did not move for a long time. Scooters went by on the avenue. A church bell rang somewhere behind us and stopped.
She let go of my arm one finger at a time. Then she took out her phone and looked at the screen, and kept looking at it.
"My phone has found an Italian carrier," she said.
"It'll do that here."
"It is half past seven in the evening." She turned the phone so I could see it, as if I were the one who needed convincing. "I have roaming charges, Chairman. I can be invoiced for this."
"Invoice me. I'll pay the roaming." I looked down at the Colosseum with her. "Nobody's ever billed me for one of these. I like it."
Ori had left the desk when Evelyn took my arm, and she came off my shoulder somewhere in the dark between the second step and the third. She was up on a branch above us by then, hands behind her back, watching Evelyn hold the phone.
"He has told her what he is," she said, to nobody in particular. "So this one will have to be seen. Not on a cold hillside beside a woman looking at a telephone. There is a correct way to be received. This one will wait for a table."
She was still in the mourning colors when she said it. She was not wearing them when we sat down.
Evelyn put the phone away. She looked at the Colosseum for a while, and then at the pine over our heads, and then at me.
"How."
"Trees, mostly. Every tree on this world is one tree underneath. I go into one and come out of another."
"Then there is no distance."
"There's precision. If I've marked the far end, I come out at it. If I haven't, I come out somewhere near it, which is why we're standing on a hill instead of down there. I've never been to Rome before tonight."
"Shadows work the same way?"
"Over shorter ground."
"How much of the year does this save."
"All of it. Last week I spent an evening marking eleven cities so November lands where I aim it. You were right. It can't be flown."
I started down the hill.
"Walk with me. You'll think better moving, and the rest of it takes a while."
We came down out of the park and along the avenue toward the lights. A chestnut man turned his pan, and Evelyn walked beside me with her hands in her coat pockets, asking questions in strict order.
"The circles. Fifty-one parcels. What do they share?"
"Every one sits on a door. A thin place. Where the two sides get close enough that something can come through."
"How many people can find them."
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"Just me." A moped came up behind us and she moved to my other side without breaking stride. "We're buying the ground around every door I can reach, Evelyn, before it matters whose ground it is."
"How near is the nearest one."
"The Apennines. Two hours east of here. Parcel nineteen. You approved the survey budget for it on your second Wednesday."
"Doors from where?"
"From the worlds I spent the hundred years on. There's a chain of them and Earth is on the end of it. The doors are how it connects. I walked the whole thing home, and I fought what lives out there most of the way."
She had the notebook out by then. She wrote something without slowing her pace, capped the pen, and kept walking.
"What lives out there?"
"Hungry things, and organized about it."
She stopped walking. I got three steps past her before I came back.
"You'll get all of it another day, and you won't like it."
"I would like some of it now."
"Not tonight."
She had taken her hands out of her pockets. She put them back in.
We stopped at the railing, with the Colosseum filling the street's end. Evelyn looked at it for a moment. Then she took out her phone, stepped to my side, and held it out at arm's length.
"Evidence, not sentiment," she said. "Hold still."
The screen caught the two of us with the travertine glowing gold behind, me with my hands in my pockets and no warning at all. She checked the picture and the time under it, and put the phone away.
"I need proof I stood in front of the Colosseum on a day that started in Manhattan. Continue, Chairman. One fact."
"The doors open. Earth's first opens in roughly ten months. Three hundred twenty-nine days on my count, give or take a season either way. The word on your window wasn't a guess, Evelyn. You found the month on your own in a week, and it half stopped my heart to watch you do it."
She put the notebook back in her coat and started walking again, and I went with her, along the fence and away from the tour groups. The sky behind the ruin had gone full dark. She got forty yards without saying anything, which for her was a very long time.
"My father ran nine lorries for thirty years and he is on the coast in a house I bought him. He rings on Sundays to ask how the yard is doing." She kept walking and she did not look over. "Who do we tell."
"Think it through."
She did. We went the length of the fence and she took most of it.
"Nobody believes us. There is no evidence that survives a second reading. The only demonstration is a man walking into a shadow, and to anyone who was not holding your arm that is a hoax." She turned the pen over once. "And if somebody did believe us, you become the finding. Not the doors. You."
"That's the other half of it. I'm the thing in the room nobody can check, every time. They start by working out whether I'm what's coming. They aren't stupid to start there. That's the year gone. I've done this on other worlds. The first six months are always the same. Lawyers. Polite people asking me one question in eleven different orders."
"Some of them would help."
"Some would. Not enough of them to be worth what the others do to us. Every crate gets inspected and every site gets a permit, and I spend November explaining myself."
She did not write that down either.
"My family."
"No. Not yet."
She stopped under a streetlight and turned to face me. Her lower lids were wet and she left them there. She was breathing through her mouth, and she did not blink, and she waited for me to answer her.
"I'd tell your father tonight and sleep fine," I said. "That's not what this is. It's four people knowing instead of two. Then your mother tells one person she'd trust with her life, and she's right to trust her, and that person tells one. Nobody in that chain does a single thing wrong, and it still ends with somebody's cousin who writes for a paper."
"Then never."
"Then later. There's something I'm building that isn't far enough along yet. Once it is, what a government decides to do about me stops mattering much, and the list gets longer. You're the one who decides who goes on it."
"I want the condition written down. Not the sentiment. The condition."
"You'll have it at the table."
She started walking again. I stayed level with her.
"Then there is you. That is the entire list."
"One of me. Fifty-one doors that I know of, and eight billion people. I'll be standing at the worst one, and everywhere else has to hold without me." A scooter went up the street and its noise went with it. "I've run the other version of this. It cost more than it saved."
"Cost whom."
"Not tonight."
She wrote not tonight in the notebook and did not call it a decline. I noticed and said nothing.
"Which door opens first?"
"The strongest one in three hundred miles of Texas. It sits under the university library, where a woman I care about studies at a corner table on the third floor."
She looked at me a second longer than she needed to. Two gulls came up off the fence of the ruins and went out over the street.
"You said cared," she said. "Just now you said care."
"It held eighty thousand people and it's still standing." I kept my eyes on the arches. "I've watched younger empires than this one go down in an afternoon."
She looked at the arches for a moment.
"Then feed me, Chairman, and finish the answer."
I stopped a man walking a small bad-tempered dog and asked him in Italian where a person eats around here. He looked at Evelyn, then at me, and gave me the name of his cousin's place and the three turns to get there, and told me twice not to sit inside.
The place was three streets back from the avenue, up a cobbled lane, four tables in red-checked cloth out on the cobbles under a red awning and a wood oven going inside. We sat outside.
The waiter was sixty and built heavy through the shoulders. I ordered in Roman-flavored Italian, two margheritas, the supplì, the house red, and whatever his mother would be insulted if we skipped. He laughed, answered in dialect, and I answered that too, and he went away shouting toward the kitchen.
Evelyn watched the whole exchange with her chin on her hand. Ori came down off my shoulder and sat on the far side of the bread basket, facing Evelyn, in the court dress, and waited.
"He thinks you're from here."
"He thinks I'm from two neighborhoods over, and I didn't argue, because he'll bring us better food believing it. Understanding came with the first door, the first hour, every language on the chain. Sounding like I'm from two neighborhoods over is a different thing and I had to go earn that one."
"How many is all of Earth's?"
"About seven thousand. Nobody agrees where a dialect stops and a language starts, so the number moves."
"That is showing off."
"You asked." I put my hand over the page before she could reach it. "Put the pen down. You asked me for something you could hold, and a tally in a notebook isn't it."
She put the pen down.
I put two fingers on the table beside her hand and opened the skill to her.
[ SKILL — SOJOURNER'S TONGUE — EXTENDED ]
One guest. Meaning passes in every language on the chain, for as long as the host holds it open.
Nothing happened. Then the kitchen shouted something and the waiter shouted back, and two men at the next table settled an argument about a cousin, and Evelyn's head came up. The pen was uncapped in her hand and going nowhere, and her lips parted and stayed parted.
"I understand them."
"All of them. The waiter's Roman, the kitchen's Neapolitan, and the pair at the window are Sardinian, which isn't a dialect of anything."
"How long."
"As long as I hold it. It goes when we leave the table."
She listened to the room for a while and wrote nothing.
Ori had not moved off the bread basket. She was watching Evelyn hear a room she could not have heard an hour ago. Ori had not had a screen of her own since the day we crossed onto this world. I had been back for weeks and had not once thought about that, and I finally knew what the mourning was for.
The wine came, and the supplì, hot enough that she burned her fingers and refused to slow down.
"Careful, they're molten. Rice, cheese, and hot oil, and I want to be clear about something. I have eaten on ten worlds. I have never once found anything that beats a fried rice ball. I have thought about it more than you would believe."
"It is a rice ball." She had two fingers in her mouth and was not embarrassed about it.
"It's a rice ball that ended a hundred-year search, and you're eating it over a paper napkin in a lane, and I'm glad nobody told you otherwise." I pushed the plate an inch toward her. "Now tell me something that isn't about me. What does a Sunday look like? You've been in this country a month, I've watched you work six days out of seven, and I've got a theory about the seventh that I'd like to be wrong about."
"I read filings."
"I'd like to be wrong about that."
"You are not." The corner of her mouth moved, and she caught it, mostly, and reached for the last supplì instead.
I did not say anything else until she had finished it.
"You said I would have the condition at the table." She turned to a clean page. "We are at the table."