But the summer semester drew to a close with no significant breakthrough, no answers, no nothing—and he could no longer ignore the world on fire around him. America was not yet in the war, but they’d heard the sirens blaring. They’d seen the ships of refugees hovering at their shore, only to be turned away—America is full, New York’s English and Irish and Dutch families claimed.

It was all so useless, and there was nothing Liam could do to change it. Men like his father, with their red armbands and translated copies of Mein Kampf, were everywhere, angrier than ever about immigrants, Communists, heathens. Liam joined a student protest when Lindbergh and his America First goons came to campus, and shouted against the xenophobic monsters until his voice burned out, but it was as useless as sending a signal from inside a Faraday cage. No one cared. Nothing would change.

There had to be a way.

Liam tried to temper his excitement over his and Pitr’s research, eager to have something to show when Pitr returned, but all through his summer classes, he found himself shoving formulas around like building blocks in want of a cornerstone. What was the key to opening up those neighboring realms? Based on energy observations, he was sure frequencies were involved—he needed to find the right vibration, the gap in waves. Professor Einstein spoke of bending space to cross distances and time, but that said nothing about worlds that existed parallel to their own. If they were two pages of a book pressed together, then there had to be some seam, some sentence that ran across them both.

Then fall came, and when the term started up again, Liam spied Pitr across campus a few times, but always with his friends, his sharp gaze scraping over Liam like he wasn’t there—except for that once, that tantalizing day, when it was apologetic, hungry, wistful. That one time was enough to keep Liam’s hope alive, a flickering ember hidden away.

He kept working nights at the library through the fall. Afternoons. Early mornings, too. He knew where Pitr lived, but if he showed up uninvited, he would never be forgiven. He knew too well the sting of Pitr’s disapproval, a deliberate absence that pierced him through.

Finally, a shadow fell across the circulation desk, and Liam looked up from his lab notes to find Pitr watching him with a curiosity, a sorrow, that lodged Liam’s heart high in his throat.

“We’re having a small gathering tonight.” Pitr gave him a scrap of paper with the address for the house he rented with two other history students. “You should come by.”

“I—I’m working tonight,” Liam stammered, but Pitr was already gone.