Suddenly, his desk chair was a wooden cart. His bedroom lamp was a clay oil lamp flickering in a dry wind. He was standing on a dusty track outside the walls of Chang’an (modern-day Xi’an), and a man with a weathered face and a camel was staring at him.
The dust swirled. The lamp flickered.
He was back in his bedroom. The workbook was closed. And in the margin of page 47, Ms. Varma’s red arrow now pointed to a single, perfect sentence—his sentence.
The next day in class, Ms. Varma didn’t ask for the workbook. She asked, “What did you learn, Elias?”
Elias understood. He didn’t need to copy an answer. He needed to live it.
The man laughed. “There is no shortcut to history, boy. Come.”
Elias blinked. The words were gone. But the air in his room had changed. It smelled of sand and horses.
That night, he sat at his desk, the workbook open to Chapter 5: The Rise and Fall of the Han Dynasty . Page 47 was a mess. Question 14: Explain the significance of the Silk Road. He’d written something vague about “trading spices.” Beside it, in red ink, Ms. Varma had drawn a single, tiny arrow pointing to the margin. Not an X. Not a check. An arrow.