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This time she was seconds away from learning who was coming inside.
Big belly. Chapped hands. Short hair
that brushed against his collar as he sorted through the drawer. Who was he?
    â€œIt’s almost afternoon, actually,” Fenn apologized. “That’s why I had to wake you. We’ll be there soon. I was shaking you for almost a minute. Exhausted?”
    Ex-hau-sted. She heard the words as a rhythm, and it took her a moment to realize why. The train. They were on a train; his voice matched the rattle of the cars going over the track. They were visiting a college. She wasn’t searching through a messy desk; she was on a train, visiting a college. “I guess so,” she said. “I must just be really tired. How soon will we be there?”
    â€œTen minutes. The stop after this one.”
    Ten minutes. She couldn’t help but feel annoyed. If Fenn had let her sleep for two more minutes, she could have figured out who was coming to get the man, and why, and what he was trying to find. She felt sure this dream had a definitive end, one she just couldn’t get to.
    â€œDo you have your transcripts?” he asked.
    She groped for the vinyl bag beneath her seat. The hard plastic folder was in the outside pocket. She’d known it would be there – checking was unnecessary. But it was reassuring to have something tangible to moor her, even if the tangible thing was just a sheath of her grades.
    â€œNext stop, Thirtieth Street Station,” the conductor’s voice blared over the tinny speakers. “Thirtieth Street Station, next stop.”
    â€œHey.” Fenn took his hand in hers, drawing circles in her palm with his thumb. “Hey. Are you nervous? It’s just an informal interview. We don’t have to go to this school. We don’t even have to go on this tour if you don’t want to. We can just go home.”
    She was being ridiculous. About all of it – wanting to get off the train, and about her dream.
Dream,
she repeated to herself. That’s all it was. A dream. Not a message. Not a program. Not a Path. It was just her own mind, trying to make sense of everything that had happened to her in the past six months.
    â€œI’m just jumpy,” she assured him. “I want to be here. Of course I want to be here.”
    It was a beautiful campus. Lona could tell, even in the brown cold of December. It had archways made of stone, classrooms with old wood floors and unworking fireplaces. The tour guide, Jessa, told them the architectural style was called “American Gothic”, modeled after the oldest universities in Britain. The buildings surrounded a green, which, Jessa giggled, might be dead and brown now, but really was green in the spring, with grass that students spread blankets on. Today was the last day of finals, and most of the campus had already emptied out.
    Fenn squeezed her wrist. She could see him imagining them there, sprawled on the grass with a Frisbee and their textbooks and a bag of potato chips.
    â€œWhat should we see next?” Jessa asked. She was from a town called Jessup. That’s how she introduced herself. Jessa from Jessup, Maryland. She wore a puffy coat with the crest of the university on it, and a black outline of the dead president it was named after. Her cheeks were round and pinchable; Lona bet you could look at pictures of Jessa as a baby and know exactly what she looked like now. She liked to smile a lot. Especially at Fenn, Lona noticed – she smiled and looked for excuses to grab him by the sleeve as she pointed out campus landmarks. She didn’t notice the barely perceptible way he recoiled – Pathers generally didn’t like to be touched.
    â€œLet’s see.” Jessa counted off the tour stops on her fingers. “We saw a dorm. We saw the green. We saw the student union, and the duck pond with the running trail. We saw a lecture hall. We saw the humanities library – did you