Daylight took him without asking questions. Heat lay on the concrete like a lazy dog. Air smelled of hot tar, cut grass, fryer oil drifting from somewhere disreputable, and the faint mineral bite of an HVAC unit doing penance. He stepped out onto a service court bounded by blank back walls and dumpsters. A delivery ramp ran down into shade. Over the parapet, campus rooftops cut the sky into rectangles.
Behind him, the white corridor slid its panel closed with a low, deliberate hush and forgot it had ever been a door.
He put the card down from his chest to his side in one motion that read as casual to people and as doctrine to the rectangle. Matte kissed palm, ring turned outward to no one. He found the plainest pocket he owned and slid the card in. The pocket did not get heavier. He felt like a person wearing a secret under a T-shirt.
"Hey!" someone called.
A custodial cart idled by the loading dock, blue plastic bins stacked with liners and sprays. A woman in a green work polo shaded her eyes with the back of her wrist. "Where'd you come from?"
"Wrong door," he said, voice ordinary. "Won't happen again."
It earned him the universal grunt reserved for students and their creative geography. She hit the cart's throttle and motored away, squeaking.
Footfalls clipped on concrete behind the parapet. Tires hissed. A black sedan shouldered into the mouth of the service lane, unhurried because people who can be in a hurry don't need to act like it. The driver's window angled down.
Detective Stone leaned across the wheel. The open rectangle showed him from collarbone to eyes: tie loosened half an inch, jaw set at the line where patience lives. "Mr. White," he said, more greeting than surprise.
Officer Brooks took the passenger side, door already open, sunglasses up so her eyes could do their work. Her hand rested near the holster in that neutral way that said she liked the hand there.
Ms. Parker appeared small and determined in the backseat, fingers kneading the strap of a leather tote like it owed rent.
Caleb kept his hands where calm lived. Palms away from pockets. He moved toward the passenger side at the pace of a person deciding to be reasonable.
Stone rolled the sedan forward three feet and killed the engine. He opened his door but didn't get out. "You left a room without using the door," he said, not a question.
"The building owed me a new exit," Caleb said.
Brooks slid out and met him at the hood line, body angled so her hips didn't print the weapon. "Hands," she said. "Please."
He lifted them. "Detective," he said, because the word buckled nerves into useful shapes, "don't touch me when the timer starts."
"Is it starting," Stone asked.
"Probably," Caleb said, and his jaw did him the small kindness of not tightening visibly.
Card heat hummed faintly against thigh through denim. The day had sound: a lawn crew two buildings over, a delivery truck beeping in reverse, distant laughter like a memory with bad acoustics. Near the dumpsters, a vending machine gleamed black behind glass. In its reflection, the service court looked normal, which was how you knew when it wasn't. His reflection had a halo of wrong around one shoulder, the kind the eye edits unless asked not to.
Brooks tracked his gaze. "What," she said, just that.
"Nothing I want to introduce you to," he said.
Stone got out of the car. Hands visible. No hurry. He set his palm on the roof as if the vehicle were a dog he trusted with children. "Explain the thing with timers," he said. He said it to the air between them, not to Caleb's face. It was kinder that way.
"I go away. I come back," Caleb said. "The room stays the same and loses a second of dignity."
"What happens if I hold on," Stone asked.
"My understanding is that hands retain their opinions," Caleb said. "Bodies sometimes don't."
Ms. Parker opened the rear door and put both feet on the gravel. "Please don't do experiments," she said, voice almost level. "We can— We can go to the station—"
"We can do five minutes right here," Stone said, not unkind. "Then we move."
The vending machine glass collected sunlight like a bargain mirror. In the composite reflection, motion thickened at the edge of sight—the suggestion of a person walking out of a photograph. The angle would put that body exactly between the dumpster and the yellow bollard.
Caleb shifted twenty inches left so the angle died.
"Don't do that," Brooks said.
"Would you prefer I do nothing," he asked.
"I prefer predictable," she said.
He looked at Stone. "Last time, your hand was on my wrist when the floor decided to be elsewhere."
"Did it go with you," Stone asked.
"My wrist did," Caleb said. "Your hand didn't."
"Noted," Stone said, and put both hands in the air at shoulder height, the way you do with skittish horses. "Okay. We're not touching."
A blue campus security golf cart zipped past the mouth of the lane, two students in polos riding shotgun like mascots. One of them looked in, did the math on badges and postures, and kept driving into someone else's afternoon.
[ENTRY SCHEDULED][T—00:30]
The text slid at the edge of Caleb's vision with the politeness of a maître d' who knows your table is almost ready. He didn't look at it directly. He watched Stone instead.
"Thirty," he said.
"Copy," Brooks said, easing a half-step to the side to give him air and her angles options.
Ms. Parker put her tote on the gravel and stood, drying her palms on her skirt like nerves were a spill. "Caleb," she said, more breath than sound.
"We're fine," he said. "Nobody get clever."
"Define clever," Stone said, quiet.
"Anything that involves hands," Caleb said.
Stone tilted his head at the sedan's hood. "Can you put the thing down and back away."
"It doesn't like tables," Caleb said. "Or gravity when it's not mine."
"So no," Stone said.
"Correct," Caleb said.
He lowered his hands just enough to look human and not like a billboard for fear. The vending machine reflection had stopped being wrong because it had decided to be nothing. That was worse. He focused on heat stacking off asphalt, on the smell of cut grass, on the click of Brooks's thumbnail against the frame of her sunglasses. His body collected details the way hoarders collect paper.
[T—00:20]
"Talk to me," Stone said, steady as eaves.
"Interlock," Caleb said. "Dock. Handover. Daylight."
"I love nouns," Stone said. "What are the verbs."
"Hold," Caleb said.
"That we can do," Brooks said.
"Detective," Ms. Parker said, breath hitching, "just— just let him—"
"Stand still," Stone finished for her. "That's the plan."
A breeze came through the service court and did nothing useful. The card's edge flexed cool against his thigh, a small certainty among stupid air. Caleb took a shallow breath and let it ride the top of his lungs so his chest didn't look like a flag. He looked at Brooks.
"If I don't come back through the same hole," he said, "I go back to the last room I owed time to. That might be—"
"Your dorm," she said.
"Or somewhere I haven't met yet," he said.
"Super," Stone said. "We'll follow the screaming."
"No screaming," Caleb said.
"It was a joke," Stone said.
"Bad one," Brooks said.
Stone's mouth did the smallest thing that might become a smile when it has permission.
[T—00:10]
"Hands," Brooks said softly, and it took him a second to realize she meant hers. She spread them a little wider, fingers open. "No touching," she added, to herself as much as to him.
The vending machine ticked once as its compressor switched loyalties. The tick sounded like a knuckle under glass.
"Caleb," Ms. Parker whispered.
He didn't look at her. "Please step back from the black car," he said.
She obeyed before she knew she had.
Stone drew a breath like a diver who has made peace with the water. "See you in thirty," he said.
"I'll sell you a better clock," Caleb said.
"Make it a watch," Stone said.
[T—00:03]
Pressure pricked his ears. The hot air in the court learned about another temperature. The white panel that had forgotten being a door remembered what forgetting feels like.
He didn't bend his knees. He didn't lift his hands. He let the world rehearse its trick and refused to give it posture.
Somewhere a leaf blower started, loud and cheerful and useless. The service court shivered its reflections. The sedan's windshield poured the sky down into a dark rectangle. Stone's tie moved a quarter inch in a wind nobody else got.
Caleb watched the line where shadow met sun creep over the hood and then the hood wasn't the same hood. The paint went a shade flatter; the roofline shifted by a geometry no mechanic could invoice, and the yellow bollard's scrape became a clean bruise with the same shape.
He took one step toward the passenger door as the concrete under his shoe slid a fraction sideways like a rug someone had tugged. He kept walking into that wrongness before it could become a rule.