She found the answer by accident, on a rainy Thursday in her sixth week.

The library had a computer section—rows of machines with glowing screens that she had been afraid to touch for the first month, associating them with the strange hum of electricity that she had not yet learned to ignore. But Elena had shown her how to use one, patiently, typing on the keyboard while Mira watched, and now she came to the library three or four times a week to use the computer, learning to search, to navigate, to find things. She had learned to type with two fingers, hunt-and-peck, the way children learned, and she had learned to read the results the machine returned—not the words themselves, which she understood well enough by now, but the structure of the results, the way the machine organized information into lists and categories and hierarchies that were, she was beginning to realize, a kind of magic of their own.

She did not yet understand the full scope of what she was looking for. She typed words at random: magic, witch, portal, dimensional travel, other worlds. The machine returned results—thousands of results, millions, a flood of information that she could not process fast enough. Most of it was nonsense: fiction, fantasy, games, the imaginings of a species that had never actually encountered the supernatural and so invented it constantly, compulsively, the way a person who had never seen the ocean might imagine it from hearing about it in stories. There were books about witches and worlds and magic that had nothing to do with what she knew to be true. There were movies with the same themes, rendered in moving pictures that she found both thrilling and vaguely upsetting, as though watching a child's drawing of something real was somehow more disturbing than seeing the real thing itself.

But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—she found something real.

She found it in an obscure academic journal, a paper written by a physicist named Dr. Eleanor Vance at a university in California. The paper was titled "Speculative Framework for Non-Local Consciousness Transfer Across Parallel Substrate Manifolds," and it was dense with mathematics that Mira could not follow, full of symbols and equations that looked like a language from a dimension she had not yet visited. But buried in the abstract, in a paragraph that seemed almost reluctant to exist, was something that made her stop breathing:

"If consciousness is not emergent solely from physical substrate but constitutes a fundamental field—analogous to electromagnetic radiation—that permeates all spacetime, then it follows that consciousness may be capable of surviving the dissolution of its physical vehicle, and of locating and bonding with compatible field structures in adjacent substrate manifolds. In practical terms: a sufficiently developed consciousness might, under conditions of extreme dimensional stress, be ejected from its native manifold and require a mechanism of return that depends not on the physical traversal of space but on the establishment of a resonance bond with a compatible consciousness in the target manifold."

Mira read the paragraph three times. Then she read it again. Then she sat very still in the chair, staring at the screen, feeling the rain outside the library windows, feeling the particular quality of silence that exists in libraries where people are reading, and she thought: This is real. This is about me. Someone has already thought about this, already tried to understand it, already almost figured it out.

She searched for Dr. Eleanor Vance and found an email address—vance DOT research AT caltech DOT edu—and she wrote a message, carefully, the way she had learned to write in English: polite, clear, not too long. She asked about the theoretical framework. She asked about the conditions under which consciousness might be ejected from its native manifold and how it might find its way back. She did not say she was a witch. She did not say she was from another dimension. She simply asked the questions a curious person might ask, the questions anyone might ask if they had read the paper and wanted to know more.

The reply came three days later, and it was not from Dr. Vance.

The reply was from someone named Caleb Chen, who was Dr. Vance's former research assistant and who explained, in careful and somewhat apologetic terms, that Dr. Vance had passed away eight years ago—cancer, he wrote, the ordinary kind, the kind that did not care about brilliance or ambition or the important work still left to do. But Caleb was still working on the framework. Caleb had been working on it since Dr. Vance's death, trying to finish what she had started, and he was still trying to figure it out. The paper Mira had found was one of Dr. Vance's last unpublished works, left behind in a folder on her computer with a dozen others, all of them too speculative, too strange, too far from what the physics community would accept to ever make it through peer review. Dr. Vance had called them her "impossible papers," and she had kept them in a folder labeled MAYBE, which Caleb thought was either very sad or very funny, depending on the day.

Mira wrote back immediately. She told Caleb she was a displaced person from a dimension where the rules were different, asking questions that his science could not yet answer but was beginning to suspect might be real. She did this in stages, carefully, testing each message before sending the next, watching for signs that he thought she was delusional. He did not seem to think she was delusional. He seemed, in fact, to be fascinated.

It was Caleb who told her about the resonance bond.

"The theory suggests," he wrote, in one of his longer messages, "that consciousness transfer between manifolds requires a kind of anchor—a connection to a consciousness in the target manifold strong enough to provide a return vector. Think of it like a rope thrown across a chasm. You can't cross on your own, but if someone on the other side holds the rope, you can pull yourself across."

"An emotional bond?" Mira typed back.

"More than emotional. The paper uses the term 'complementary resonance structure.' It's not just love—it's a specific kind of love, the kind that involves genuine happiness. The consciousness on this side has to generate a particular frequency of positive emotion, and that frequency has to match something in the displaced consciousness. When the match is complete, the bond forms, and the return becomes possible."

Mira stared at the screen for a long time after reading this. The rain had stopped. The light in the library had changed, the afternoon giving way to early evening, and she had been sitting in the same chair for so long that her body had begun to feel stiff and strange, as though she had been slowly turning to stone.

She had to find someone who genuinely loved her. Not just liked her, not just felt affection for her, but loved her—loved her in a way that produced happiness, a particular quality of happiness that resonated with her own being. And she had to feel happy in return. Both sides. The bond required reciprocal happiness, mutual joy. Not the happiness of getting something, but the happiness of giving something—the happiness of seeing someone you love and being seen in return, the happiness that did not need to be explained because it was its own explanation.

And she had to do it before her magic ran out. Before she was no longer a witch. Before she became so ordinary that even if the bond formed, she had nothing left to pull through the chasm with.

She closed the laptop and sat very still in the chair, looking at the wall of the library, which was covered in posters about library cards and the summer reading program. A child had drawn a picture in crayon on one of the posters, and the crayon had bled through the paper, leaving a splotch of blue that looked like a small, surprised fish.

She thought about love.

She was thirty-two years old. She had never been in love. In the Veil, witches were not forbidden from love, but they were expected to marry within the coven, to produce children with magical potential, to continue the bloodline. Romance was secondary to duty. Mira had been too focused on her training, too ambitious in her studies, too absorbed in the work of mastering her craft, to spend much time thinking about boys or girls or anyone at all. She had been courted, a few times, by earnest young men from other covens who saw in her a promising match—her family line was strong, her magical reserves above average, her position in the Thornhaven coven prestigious. She had been politely uninterested. She had told herself it was because she was dedicated to her work, which was true, but it was also true that she did not know how to want someone in that way, did not know how to look at another person and feel the specific hunger that her books described and her teachers had hinted at. She had assumed she would learn eventually. She had assumed there would be time.

Now she was in a world without magic, living in a shelter, eating eggs that tasted like rubber and toast that tasted like cardboard, and she had to find someone who would love her. Someone who would love her enough to generate the specific frequency of happiness that would complete a resonance bond she did not fully understand, with a person she barely knew, in a world where she had no status and no connections and no way of explaining what she needed or why.

The problem, she realized, was not finding someone who might love her. The problem was finding someone who might love her genuinely—the kind of love that could not be faked or manufactured or rushed, the kind that had to arise organically from a real connection between two real people who had chosen each other for reasons neither of them could fully explain. She could not go to someone and say please fall in love with me, I need you to generate the correct emotional frequency so I can go home. That was not how it worked. That was not how any of this worked.

She went back to the shelter and sat on her bed and did not tell anyone. There was no one to tell. She did not fully understand the condition herself—the science was beyond her, the mathematics was beyond her, and even the emotional requirements were beyond her, because she did not know what genuine happiness felt like in a form that could be given to someone else. She knew what satisfaction felt like, the satisfaction of a spell working correctly, of a student finally understanding a difficult concept, of a problem solved. But she did not know what it felt like to be happy in the way Caleb was describing—the unselfconscious, unearned, unforced happiness of simply being with someone and feeling that to be enough.

But she understood the deadline.

Five years. Maybe less, if the decay accelerated. Five years to find someone who would love her—not the idea of her, not the version of her that she might become, but her, as she was, in this strange and diminished state. Five years to make them happy enough, and to be happy enough in return, to open a door back to a home she might not even recognize anymore.

She looked at Patricia, who was lying on her bed in the corner, awake and staring at the ceiling, as she always was. At Destiny, who was asleep and dreaming, her hand resting on her growing belly. At June, who was reading a paperback romance novel, the cover of which showed a shirtless man with improbably large muscles embracing a woman whose hair was the kind of blonde that existed only in illustration.

She did not know how to begin. But she knew she had to begin somewhere.

She picked up Destiny's notebook—she had noticed Destiny writing in it sometimes, poetry, Mira thought, or journal entries, the private language of a nineteen-year-old who had too much to say and no one to say it to—and she read the first line that was visible: "I want someone to see me the way the morning sees the field, which is to say, like it's never seen it before."

Mira read the line twice and then put the notebook back.

She did not know what it meant yet. But she thought she might be learning.

That night, she wrote to Caleb again. She told him she understood the condition now. She told him she had five years. She told him she did not know how to find what she needed but that she would learn, because that was what she did, she learned things, she had spent her entire life learning things that seemed impossible until she understood them.

"I am a slow learner," she typed. "But I am persistent. I will figure this out."

She paused, her fingers on the keyboard. Then she added: "Thank you for believing me."

The reply came the next day. Caleb wrote: "I don't know if you're telling me the truth. But I believe you're telling me something true. That's enough for now."

It was not, Mira thought, the same as being believed by someone who knew her, who had known her all her life, who could vouch for her existence in a world where existence was the only credential that mattered. But it was something. It was a rope thrown across a chasm, even if she could not yet see the person holding the other end.

She saved the message. She did not know why, except that it felt like the kind of thing you saved, the kind of thing you kept.

Four years, eleven months. The clock was already running.