Every Lesson He Taught

Ada Reyes came to the Halcyon Institute to finish a dissertation. She stayed because somebody erased her family from the archive. Three months in, she learns three things: Her supervisor, Dr. Elias Varn, has been teaching here for two hundred years. The visiting lecturer, Mikhail Sorin, is listed as deceased in a book she can hold in her hand. And the friendly postdoc in acquisitions, Peter Crane, drinks only coffee that Ada never actually pours. Ada has no interest in being protected by three professors with fangs. She has an interest in the sealed stacks, where her great-grandmother's missing year is buried under two centuries of quiet. The Institute has an exit clause. Nobody has used it in two hundred years. At her dissertation defense, in front of the whole faculty, Ada is going to read it.