When the shooter appeared again, Ezra finally confirmed with certainty his suspicion that he had somehow gone into the past, which at first he took as a blessing. He tried several times to save his mother, thinking it his divinely appointed task. Each time things repeated as they had before, the situation altering like puzzle pieces to form the prophetic picture on the box. Exhausted, he eventually fell through the little vacancy in time for the thirteenth round and stayed there, and then, for the first time, he tried to open a new crevice for himself, something to lead him elsewhere. When he stepped out, he was three weeks beyond his mother’s funeral—the furthest he could take himself at the time.
Social services soon arrived to gather him into custody. Perhaps because he had already watched his mother die twelve times, Ezra numbly went.
It’s not a secret that the foster care system leaves much to be desired. Ezra had vowed never to run away again, never to tell a soul about what he’d seen and done, but life has a way of breaking its promises to children. Within a year, he was learning to use the doors with some regularity, securing control over their outcome. He did not age as time passed if he didn’t choose to, moving fluidly through it instead, and by his sixteenth birthday he was only fifteen and one day, having skipped through any instances of the time he couldn’t otherwise abide.
At seventeen （or so）， Ezra was offered a scholarship to the New York University of Magical Arts, which was the first time he fully understood that he was not alone in what he could do. True, he was the only one who had access to the doors specifically, but for the first time, he understood that he was not the only magician in the world—no, medeian, they told him. It was a new word, unfamiliar on his tongue.
So what was he? Not a physicist, not exactly. He was definitely opening and closing tiny, Ezra-sized wormholes to navigate through time, that much seemed clear, but his magic was limited and self-concentrated. It was a unique power, dangerous.
Keep it quiet, his professors advised. You never know what sort of people will try to mess with time. Never the kind with good intentions.
Dutifully, Ezra kept his abilities a secret, or tried to. Eventually, though, the Alexandrian Society found him out.
It was a tempting offer. （It was always tempting; power always is.） What was particularly interesting to Ezra, though, were the others, his fellow initiates, or the four who would become his fellow initiates after one of them had been eliminated. Ezra was introverted by nature—a combination of poverty, inexplicable power, and his mother’s untimely death had combined to make him relatively standoffish—but there was one other initiate with whom he instantly shared a bond.
Atlas Blakely was a rakish vagrant with wild natural hair and an insuppressible grin. A “bi’ o’ London rough,” as he called himself, who laughed so loudly it regularly frightened pigeons. He was wolfish and lively and so sharp it sometimes made others uneasy, but Ezra warmed to him immediately, and Atlas to him. They shared something they gradually deduced was hunger, though for what was initially unclear. Ezra’s theory was that they were merely cut from the same indigent cloth, the easy cast-offs of a dying earth. The other four candidates were educated, well-born, and therefore bred with a comfortable cynicism, a posh sort of gloom. Ezra and Atlas, on the other hand were sunspots. They were stars who refused to die out.
It was Atlas who first sorted out the death clause of the Society’s initiation, reading it somewhere in someone’s thoughts or whatever he did that Atlas insisted was not actually mind reading. “It’s good and rightly fucked, innit?” he said to Ezra, his accent thickly unintelligible at times. “We’re supposed to kill someone? Thanks, mate, no thanks.” （No fanks, as it sounded to Ezra.）
“The books, though,” Ezra said, quietly buzzing. The two of them shared a fondness for intoxicants, mortal drugs when they could get it. It made the doors easier to access for Ezra, and Atlas got tired of hearing the sound of other people’s thoughts. Gave him a bleedin’ migraine, he said.
“The damn books. A whole library. All those books.”
“Books ain’t enough, bruv,” grunted Atlas sagely.
But fundamentally, Ezra disagreed. “This Society is something,” he said. “It’s not just the books, it’s the questions, the answers. It’s all something more than nothing.” （Drugs made this theory difficult to communicate.） “What we need is to get ourselves in, but then get on top somehow. Power begets power and all that.”