Trinity was college. A magical word to the child, a place she’d seen on TV, where people gathered in large numbers, smack bang in the middle of the craic-filled city, and learned fascinating things, fell in love, broke up, fought and played and worked. Had lives.

Jada moved across the campus, deciding if Dancer tried to feed her, she would go back to the abbey. She’d had her fill of people behaving abnormally today.

She found him in one of the lecture halls that either had already housed an inordinate amount of musical equipment, including a baby grand piano, and an entire computing lab, or he’d moved everything in there to consolidate efforts and save time walking from building to building on campus.

He wasn’t alone. When Jada dropped down from the slipstream and walked in, he was sitting on the piano bench, close to a pretty woman, one hand on her shoulder, as they laughed together about something.

She stopped. Nearly backed out. They looked good together. How had she failed to see what a grown man he was when she’d been fourteen? She was struck again by the idea that he’d downplayed himself for her, to hang out with the child she’d been. And now that she was grown up, he wasn’t doing it anymore.

Were he and the woman lovers? The woman looked like she wanted to be, leaning into Dancer’s tall, athletic body, smiling up at him. His dark, thick hair had gotten long again, falling forward into his face, and she curled her hands into fists. Years ago she used to wash it for him, drape a towel around his shoulders and cut it. He’d take his glasses off and close his eyes and she’d used the privacy to stare unabashedly at his face. They’d nurtured each other in small ways. In the back of her mind, she’d harbored the vague idea that maybe one day she’d be a woman and he’d be a man and there might be something magic between them. Dancer had been the only truly good, uncomplicated person in her life.

She must have made some small noise because he suddenly glanced over his shoulder and his face lit up.

“Jada, come in. I want you to meet everyone.”

She moved forward, wondering what was going on. They’d always been a team. Just the two of them. She’d never seen him with anyone else. Ever. She hadn’t even known he had friends.

He was striding toward her, long-legged, good-looking, full of youthful enthusiasm and energy. The pretty woman wasn’t far behind him, hurrying to catch up. Glancing between Dancer and Jada with a guarded expression.

“Good to see you,” he said, smiling.

“You have no intention of feeding me, do you?” She thought she’d better get that out of the way first.

He raised a brow. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Okay then, no. Jada, this,” he swept an arm around the woman’s shoulders and pulled her forward, “is Caoimhe Gallagher. She was working on her doctorate in music theory before the walls fell. She and”—he gestured toward the bay of computers where a young man with brilliantly colored hair was hunched before a screen—“Duncan, were living in one of the dorms.”

Jada studied the woman he’d called “Keeva,” wondering if she was one of the O’Gallagher clan endowed with sidhe-seer blood. If so, she belonged at the abbey.

“Aye, and there’s Squig and Doolin,” Caoimhe said, offering her a hesitant smile and pointing down the line of screens. “Brilliant with math, not much for the talking. We’d no clue they’d taken up in the old library. More than a few of us managed to survive, hiding here on campus.”

Dancer said, “I found them shortly after I started working in the labs. Apparently I was making a lot of noise.” He grinned. “Caoimhe’s been helping me refine some of my theories about the black holes, what made them, what might fix them. Wait till you hear some of her ideas about music and what it really does. She’s got perfect pitch and her ear is bloody unreal!”

Jada looked at the woman’s ears but saw nothing of note.

“I hum it, she can play it,” Dancer clarified. “I give her frequencies to work with, and she makes songs out of them.”

“I hadn’t realized others were working with us,” she said coolly.

“Unless someone drops the bloody Song of Making in our lap, Jada, we can’t do it alone,” he said. “C’mon. Let me show you around.”

—

She left Trinity half an hour later, seeking solitude.

In the past, Dancer had a way of subtly recharging her, making her feel pretty much perfect. But today she’d realized he made a lot of people feel that way.

His “crew” saw him the same way she did: superbrainy, unpredictable, funny, high-energy, attractive.

She’d liked having him all to herself. It was confusing to watch him interact with people he’d known for a while, realizing he had a life that hadn’t included her.

While she’d a life that hadn’t included him, she’d believed she was his entire world.

Today she’d wondered if it had been Caoimhe he’d watched Scream with, that night she wasn’t around. Wondered if, when he’d disappeared for days in the past, he was off with these friends she hadn’t known he’d had, laughing and working and implementing plans.

Back then she’d appreciated that he hadn’t held on to her too tightly. But she’d also assumed his life had kind of stopped happening when she wasn’t around. That he’d gone—alone—to one of his labs, where he thought about her the entire time and invented things to help her. Her self-preoccupation had been so intense, she’d believed when she wasn’t present in certain parts of the world, those parts of the world were put in a jar on a shelf until she returned.

Not so. His life had gone on while she’d kept him at bay, determinedly dodging anything that hinted at a restraint.

She remembered Mac telling her once that the reason grown-ups mystified her was because she wasn’t factoring their emotions into her equations. She’d never understood how careful Dancer had been around her so she wouldn’t startle and run. Apparently so cautious he’d kept their friendship completely separate from the rest of his life and friends.

There’d been nine in all that she’d met, working on various matters related to their problem. Some were studying the hard science of the holes, others searching for the softer Fae lore, and those, like Caoimhe, working with Dancer one on one, teaching him everything they knew about music, speculating with him as she once had. It was jarring to an extreme, but then the whole day had been.