“And you wish, no doubt, to free them.”

Kaylin nodded. “They’ve gotten used to being invisible, and they sleep—but not the way the rest of us do.”

“Those who need sleep,” Serralyn added.

“But I think they’ve been trapped there for a long time, and yes, I’d like to figure out how and why, because if we know that, we might be able to open their cage door.”

Killian cleared his throat.

“Please,” the chancellor said, voice edged in very familiar sarcasm. “Do join us.”

Killian immediately materialized. “I believe that what was done to your humans was not what was done to the Academia. Our survival was linked to the Towers. In some fashion, the entirety of the Academia resided in the small corridors of the outlands in which those Towers are partially rooted.

“The survival of the students was linked to the Academia; they were caught in the time frame of the Academia itself. But the Academia, and the strength of it, resides in those students. You think I am a sentient building, like unto your Helen.”

Kaylin nodded.

“It is more complex than that. I am not a Tower, but the chancellor is the captain of whatever it is I am. His power in your world and my power in mine is dependent on the interest, on the frisson of intellectual possibility, the students bring. I believe our students were preserved because they were, in some basic way, part of me.

“That will not be the case with your displaced or out-of-phase humans. There is a risk.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you attempt to break the enchantment that imprisons them, you may open the door to death—for them. There is no guarantee that the time that has been suspended will remain in abeyance. That is not, to my mind, a great concern.

“But in doing so, with no understanding of the actual spell, you may also open the door to things that were not meant to exist in your world at all.”

08

Kaylin had always had difficulty seeing different worlds as separate. If she could see something with her own eyes, it was part of reality. The fact that others couldn’t—or the fact that she couldn’t without Hope’s intervention—didn’t change that reaction.

She attempted to disentangle it now.

“It is less difficult for those of us who were removed from what you consider reality,” Killian said, a smidgen of sympathy in the observation.