Semester at the Junction

About this book:

Dr. Arthur Pendelton expects a quiet semester of research at the Junction Campus—the nation's most advanced high-speed rail facility, where magnetically levitated trains slice through the desert at three hundred miles per hour. Instead, he finds a university with no students, only silent cadres who memorize pre-written syllabi; a predecessor who vanished after documenting a stretch of track that exists on no map; and a Dean who values precision above truth. The friction models Arthur has spent his career studying don't apply here, because at the Junction, the trains don't just run on schedule—they enforce it.

When a notched pencil left in his desk drawer reveals coordinates for a mile marker that shouldn't exist, Arthur is drawn into the campus's hidden curriculum: a physics of disappearance, where velocity erases mass and the timetable rewrites reality. Chapter by chapter, the semester accelerates toward a final exam no one is meant to pass. *Semester at the Junction* is a literary thriller of obsessive precision and creeping dread—*The Secret History* meets *House of Leaves* on a rail line that never ends.