Chapter Text
⁂
The model went wrong.
The predictions were converging beautifully, the margin of error narrowing with every run as though the uncertainty inherent to living things had finally surrendered and agreed to submit to their algorithmic model. Screwllum had reorganized the architecture twice; Stephen had found three ways to make it run faster and, in the process, successfully convinced the university servers that he had done nothing at all; the output was elegant enough to make even Polka Kakamond bow before it, and another round of funding should have followed as a matter of course. The only problem was that Herta herself did not believe the result was real.
Herta did not mind failure. Ugly failure confessed the moment you looked at it; this one was trying far too hard to look respectable, about as convincingly as a haunted house advertising itself as PRIME RETAIL SPACE FOR LEASE.
“Residuals,” she said coldly.
On the wall display, the same deviation kept recurring across several datasets from entirely different sources, small but stable, like background noise that had lived in a room long enough for anyone with less sensitive perception to begin dismissing it without thought.
“Could it just be individual variation?” Stephen asked quietly from the sofa, most of his face hidden behind an upright laptop.
“That’s a label, not an explanation.”
Screwllum folded his hands. “Question: you believe the organism is responding to a condition the model has classified as noise.”
“I believe the model is asking the wrong question and congratulating itself for the answer.”
For the first time, they were stuck. The signal was clear enough: nobody in that room could tame the algorithm any further, which meant the team did not merely need someone from biology; they needed someone with enough expertise, and enough instinct, to notice when the model had begun asking the wrong question in the first place and force it to ask a better one.
Herta spent the night reading papers.
Most candidates cleaned, standardized, established controls, then pruned whatever refused to fit expectations back into an acceptable shape. Ruan Mei did not. In one paper with a title vague enough to feel deliberate, she had kept a set of anomalous data almost anyone else would have deleted and then spent six pages arguing that the anomaly represented a new mechanism. Herta reread the methods and appendix, moved on to two more of her papers and an abstract so cautious it became irritating, and came away with the impression of someone almost excessively rigorous, as if rigor itself were being used to hold something back.
From there, Herta followed every visible trace Ruan Mei had left online, which turned out to be almost offensively few: enough to establish that she was twenty-four, a doctoral student in biology, happened to attend the same university as Herta, and was the eighty-first person in the university’s history to receive Nous’s special scholarship. Herta was the eighty-third. Personal information was nearly nonexistent; the biology department website offered only an ID-style photo so emotionally neutral that Herta could not even infer what the photographer had thought of taking it. She looked at it for two seconds, then downloaded it into a folder called Possibly Useful.
By two in the morning, the empty position on the team was no longer called someone in biology.
Herta had named it Ruan Mei.
Nous approved the request for an additional member almost immediately. Polka waited until the following morning to reply in the flattest possible tone, attaching a form that required joint approval from several departments, a dozen budget applications, and no more than four hundred words clarifying the project’s “anticipated interdisciplinary outcomes.” Herta wrote exactly four hundred words, as concisely as humanly possible and with every punctuation mark counted in case Polka tried to seize on that too, then sent Ruan Mei her first email.
The first was polite and included every bureaucratic nicety Herta had deliberately discarded while replying to Polka. The second explained the project and its members and offered several possible meeting times, because Asta had tactfully pointed out that one introductory email from Herta might not be sufficient to make Ruan Mei fall at her feet. The third attached a summary of their latest results. The fourth corrected a citation error in one of Ruan Mei’s older papers, as though Herta had not obviously read everything she had published closely enough to find the flaw. The fifth laid out full access privileges and came with a suspiciously generous promise of resources. By the sixth, the tone had become needlessly dramatic; its subject line read, WHY THIS URGENTLY, EARNESTLY, IMMEDIATELY REQUIRES YOUR FULL ATTENTION. Asta gently pointed out that it looked like a phishing email.
After eight messages vanished into the void, Herta switched among three different accounts and concluded that the biology department’s email filter had about as much teeth as Screwllum had hair. Screwllum possessed a scalp polished enough to serve as a mirror, an application Herta had briefly considered testing.
“Have you considered that maybe…” Asta began, in the careful tone of someone with long experience standing inside the blast radius of Herta’s moods, “…the problem is the person?”
Herta drew in a deep breath and scoffed.
⁂
At first, silence had been acceptable. People got too busy to check messages; who hadn’t? That was what automatic replies were for. Yet out of the dozens of possible responses available to her, Ruan Mei had somehow chosen the one most perfectly calibrated to test Herta’s patience:
No. Response. At. All.
After twelve consecutive emails returned nothing, even Herta’s pride was forced to admit that Ruan Mei knew exactly what she was doing and was ignoring her on purpose.
Herta moved the ID photo into a folder called Unfortunately Very Useful and started with Ruan Mei’s schedule, because if someone seemed determined to disappear from the internet, the obvious solution was to catch her in the physical world instead. Public email address? No reply. Personal contact information? Herta searched her entire address book and was forced to concede that not one of the fortunate people with access to her private contact details also possessed Ruan Mei’s, which made her consider reducing the number of people entitled to that good fortune. Any social media at all? Absurd. Herta excavated both the internet and Asta’s sprawling network of campus Instagram mutuals and found only half of Ruan Mei’s face in profile, caught in the background of a club photo Tingyun had taken as she happened to walk past; Herta grudgingly admired her determination to opt out of the most attention-devouring malignancy modern life had to offer.
Schedules were more promising, so Herta began with Ruan Mei’s course list. It was the obvious point of entry: fixed time, fixed location, theoretically attached to a physical body required to appear on schedule. There was an elective on Wednesday afternoons with five students enrolled, nearly perfect conditions—few enough that the target could not disappear into a crowd, an accessible building, and, most importantly, a Wednesday afternoon Herta happened to have free. Near the end of class, she passed the rear door on reconnaissance and counted four people inside. Exactly four. Her stare nearly burned through the glass.
On the spot, she pulled up the syllabus and discovered that complete recordings were provided, attendance did not count toward the grade, and students were only required to appear for discussion sections and group presentations. Herta deleted COURSE SCHEDULE from her list of usable variables and, for the first time, felt a flicker of resentment toward the modern university system for abolishing the obligation to exist physically inside a classroom, while declining to mention that this was the same system that had allowed her to knock out all her undergraduate credits in a year and a half and move on to graduate-level courses.
Seminars were no better: Ruan Mei’s attendance was unpredictable and, when she did appear, there were too many people. Lab access was tightly controlled; her dorm offered too much uncertainty. One by one, every obvious location failed until there was nowhere Herta could reliably expect to see her.
By then, the situation had become increasingly ridiculous, and Herta responded to the unprecedented disaster of her invitation with remarkable grace; beneath the irritation of being thwarted, she was even beginning to have fun. Most people never made it this far. Usually, their resistance collapsed about as quickly as Herta could crumple a blank sheet of paper—Polka excepted, because talking to that woman occasionally gave Herta the impression that she was the one being dissected. Ruan Mei was the first person stubborn enough to make the process somehow interesting.
Despite being exceptionally busy, Herta generously sacrificed two precious hours to writing a program called CATCH RM. Its primary function, according to its creator, was to push any information related to Ruan Mei directly to her phone; if the program suspected Ruan Mei was nearby, it would produce a red alert while a chubby teal bird, personally drawn by Herta to represent Ruan Mei, occupied most of the screen. Stephen heard the explanation, swallowed the suggestion that Herta might actually enjoy Pokémon GO, and turned instead to stare with Screwllum at the two chubby birds representing them. Then he sent Screwllum a helpless look: Do we have to have these too?
After several rounds of investigation, Ruan Mei’s sparse in-person classes, TA assignments, lab access logs, and seminar attendance assembled themselves into a pattern almost aggressively regular, with one exception: after four in the afternoon every Tuesday and Friday, every visible trace of her in the university’s systems stopped. No library bookings, no departmental lecture check-ins, no recurring discussion-room reservations. The gap had repeated for at least six weeks; anything further back was no longer available.
Herta disliked blanks that provided no information. When every visible exit in a room had been ruled out, the only rational move was to start looking for the invisible one, and this particular blank had begun to smell like something usable.
“Where does she go?” she asked one afternoon, distractedly addressing the little green bird bouncing on her phone screen.
Asta looked up from a thick stack of budget documents. “Who?”
“Ruan Mei. Our resident missing person. After four on Tuesdays and Fridays, her entire trajectory disappears from the campus systems. She’s evolved from Miss I Objectively Exist on This Campus but You Still Cannot Contact Me into Miss I May Be a Campus Cryptid or a Collective Hallucination.”
For a moment, the room went still.
“Maybe she goes swimming?” Asta ventured.
Herta turned her head at a speed she would later refuse to acknowledge. “What?”
“I’ve happened to see her at the university pool. Maybe twice?”
It was not an answer, merely a hypothesis produced by a perspective Herta had failed to include. She checked the recreation center reservation system, where the publicly accessible records showed entry windows tied to university IDs, and found Ruan Mei listed from four to six every Tuesday and Friday for six consecutive weeks, with only one missing entry during spring break.
The hypothesis held, and more importantly, it held regularly enough to be useful. Asta quietly sneaked a peek over Herta’s shoulder at the screen covered in annotations, where the little green bird was now circling the newly confirmed block in Ruan Mei’s schedule. “I have to admit, you know her timetable… very thoroughly.”
“Obviously. How else was I supposed to find her?”
“If someone who didn’t know the context saw this,” Asta said, choosing her words a little too carefully, “they might describe you as…”
Herta cut her off. “That only proves their vocabulary is inadequate to describe Herta-grade preparedness.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
Herta closed the schedule page, but before taking it offline she poked the little green bird twice more and watched its round body waddle away from her finger.
⁂
At four on Friday afternoon, Herta stood in the public lobby outside the pool and sent Ruan Mei a thirteenth email. Subject: I’M OUTSIDE. No body text.
It was the briefest email she had sent her yet, and Ruan Mei, exactly as predicted, did not answer. After a month and a half of perfect indifference, why would Herta expect her to break character while literally in the water just because this particular message was, in Herta’s assessment, unusually urgent and entirely necessary?
The lobby had been renovated recently enough that the smell of chlorine still seemed to escape from every seam between the tiles before sinking into the weave of Herta’s black-violet coat. The nearest bench bore several suspicious damp patches visible only when the light shifted, and after one look Herta decided she had no interest in investigating whether the other benches were innocent by comparison. She remained standing. Whoever maintained the lobby had clearly decided that dryness, in this particular context, was an unnecessary luxury.
Through a narrow interior window, part of the pool was visible: several lanes in the deep end, half a wall, and the white churn of water each time one of the few swimmers turned. Herta’s phone had one miserable bar of reception, and after several failed attempts to refresh the same page she gave up. With nothing better to do, she turned toward the only thing in the lobby remotely worth looking at besides damp benches, mold stains on the ceiling, and cotton swabs abandoned on the floor: the window.
Within two minutes, every visible swimmer had been roughly classified. Herta’s response time was too efficient for its own good; before she had decided any of this was necessary, her mind had already assigned each person a stroke, speed, and general build, and Ruan Mei briefly fell out of immediate focus. In the nearest lane, someone was approaching the wall.
What Herta noticed first was the complete absence of wasted motion. The swimmer did not shorten her final stroke or lift her head to check the distance; she folded at precisely the right moment, planted both feet against the wall, and pushed off before the disturbed surface had fully settled, with no correction and no unnecessary hesitation between decision and execution, as if she were repeating something she had already repeated hundreds or thousands of times. Herta watched the next full lap to make sure the first turn had not been luck.
Obviously, it had not.
The swimmer favored the same side when she breathed, regular without becoming mechanical. When someone in the neighboring lane drifted toward the lane marker at the same time, she delayed by half a beat and altered the angle of one hand entering the water without losing rhythm. Adaptation happened so naturally that it contained no trace of performance. The ability to change was common enough to be boring; the ability to decide and execute immediately, with that degree of clean certainty, was considerably rarer.
That was all, Herta told herself after another glance around failed to produce any sign of Ruan Mei.
A few laps later, she had begun predicting the swimmer’s turns. The lane had lost one person, and on the next lap the swimmer reached the wall one stroke earlier than before, prompting Herta to revise her estimate of the pace. Two laps after that, while changing the selfie on her phone wallpaper, she looked up before the teal swim cap entered the half of the pool she could see and found it appearing exactly where she had expected. Not long afterward, the swimmer returned to the wall on this side for the last time, rested there for a few breaths with both arms over the edge, then vanished into the section of the pool hidden from Herta’s view. Herta looked back toward the exit.
Several minutes passed. Two students came out with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, arguing about dinner. A man in slides crossed the lobby with a towel around his neck. A child kicked a vending machine in an attempt to free a trapped bottle of soda and was sharply corrected by an exhausted parent. The swimmer had already finished and left, while the person Herta had actually come for remained nowhere in sight. Where, exactly, was Ruan Mei?
A little after five, the exit gate opened again.
The first fact was that she was gorgeous.
The judgment arrived complete and useless, like an obnoxious pop-up window that could not be closed and had decided to occupy the center of Herta’s vision. Wet black hair spilled messily over one shoulder like seaweed, the ends curling outward with a faint wash of teal. Her white shirt looked as though it had been buttoned in haste, the top button left undone to reveal a glimpse of collarbone; the collar, meant to stand neatly, had curled slightly out of place against damp skin. Without the frame of her glasses, her eyes were not merely “green,” as the biology department’s mediocre photograph had lazily summarized them. They were a cool blue-green, the outer edge of the iris clear and yellowish, while near the upper curve the dim lobby lights caught a small rose-colored flare that shifted when she narrowed her eyes against the brightness. The association came instantly, carrying with it the pool from a few minutes earlier: blue-green water ruffled by fine lines of light, warm reflections breaking across the surface into brief pink sparks.
Herta lost the opening line she had prepared.
The second fact arrived half a beat later: this was Ruan Mei herself, the woman Herta had spent a month and a half hunting across campus without managing to catch so much as the end of her shadow.
The woman in question, blissfully unaware of Herta’s internal emergency, was looking down as she adjusted the strap of a dark swim bag; a teal swim cap hung from one hand. Herta had spent at least half an hour watching that exact cap from dozens of meters away.
The third fact struck with irritating precision: the stranger whose turn timing Herta could already predict and the woman currently disabling her language system were the same person.
Ruan Mei looked up and met Herta’s stare directly. Recognition crossed her face—not as passive as alarm, Herta was disappointed to note, and certainly not warm enough to qualify as welcome, but closer to the focused curiosity of someone realizing that the live specimen in front of her matched an illustration she had previously seen in a textbook. It was exactly the sort of expression Herta should have expected, provided one ignored the fact that Herta was the one who had spent six weeks carrying Ruan Mei’s ID photo around campus in pursuit of her. Ruan Mei, after all, had every reason to recognize Herta. Who on campus didn’t?
Before the silence could become evidence of anything, Herta lifted her chin. “Ruan Mei.”
Ruan Mei’s gaze traveled downward first, taking in the structured beret pinned with a black iron key, the elaborate dark-violet coat and skirt, the knee-high boots burdened with more decorative fastenings than strictly necessary, before returning to Herta’s face.
“Herta.” Her voice, Herta noticed, resembled a layer of soft fungal hyphae: easy to overlook, until you realized it had already spread everywhere.
“Oh? You know who I am?”
“Of course.” Ruan Mei’s gaze rested on her face for another moment. “The university likes using your photo in its promotional material.”
She said it evenly, without a trace of mockery, and Herta nevertheless heard the implication at once—as though her face appearing in those materials were merely the university’s unilateral aesthetic decision rather than a choice made in the public interest.
“Surely my thirteen emails contributed something.”
“To an extent,” Ruan Mei admitted without changing expression. “Especially the attachments.”
Herta narrowed her eyes. Those attachments were, in her view, perfectly respectable examples of professional communication: the project proposal, preliminary results, and an appendix detailed enough to make Polka herself regret ever imposing a word limit. The signature also linked automatically to Herta’s university profile; if her face happened to occupy the most visible position on the page, that only proved someone involved understood visual hierarchy. “So you read my proposal.”
“You made it difficult to ignore.”
That should have been good news. Over the past month Herta had constructed an entire taxonomy of explanations for Ruan Mei’s silence, and she had seen it was at least preferable to server failure, a complete loss of signal, or Ruan Mei spontaneously deciding to abandon civilization. Yet Ruan Mei stood there looking unmistakably like a much more troublesome category: she had read everything and remained unmoved. Herta had assumed that presenting the live, in-person version of herself would be sufficient to correct any previous failure of communication. This was not arrogance; the statistical record supported the expectation. Ruan Mei, apparently, had other ideas.
She tugged the slipping strap of her swim bag back into place. A bead of water slid from the end of her hair and disappeared beneath the collar of her shirt. She did not smile, did not become more persuadable, and gave no indication that thirteen emails and Herta standing physically in front of her represented any meaningful difference at all.
Before Herta could produce a sufficiently sharp response, the pool gate behind Ruan Mei opened.
A silver-haired woman carrying a mesh bag stepped through, saw first Ruan Mei’s still-wet hair and then Herta’s entire aggressively Herta, unmistakably I-am-not-here-to-swim outfit, and immediately brightened. Herta vaguely remembered her as Yaoguang from the mathematics department, one of Lan’s students; the research niche was narrow enough that Herta had never developed much interest in the rest of the group.
“阮师姐，” she said in crisp Mandarin, “看来我上回算你红鸾星动，倒也不算错？早知如此，合该找你讨个彩头。”
Herta understood exactly none of it. She did, however, understand perfectly that Ruan Mei had gone completely still.
“承蒙戎韬关心……比起这件事，上回我见到停云，她还问起你的近况，说是要报你一路相送之恩？”
Yaoguang’s smile froze for a beat. Then she laughed, drifted one step toward the lobby exit with exaggerated casualness, and waved a hand.
“哎呀，小狐狸太客气了。不必不必，你们慢聊。”
Before Herta could demand an explanation for the inside joke that was very obviously about her, Yaoguang had already turned and escaped.
“What did you two just say?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m not blind, deaf, or stupid.”
“That isn’t what I meant… Never mind.”
Ruan Mei frowned toward the direction Yaoguang had fled, then looked down at the damp patch spreading over her shoulder. For the first time, an expression appeared on her face that Herta could read without effort: I do not want to keep standing here.
“I live nearby,” she said, already starting toward the exit. “If you still want to talk about the project, we can talk while we walk.”
The progress was nowhere near what Herta had originally expected, but after six weeks of every attempt at communication disappearing into a biological black hole with an elegant exterior, it was unquestionably progress.
Herta followed, her boots striking the tile with a belligerent clack.
“You still haven’t explained what she said.”
“I know.”
“That wasn’t permission to ignore the question.”
“No.” Ruan Mei continued in that soft, almost frictionless voice. “Can we leave that for later? I’m tired.”
Herta magnanimously decided to postpone the interrogation.
Outside, the evening temperature had dropped without consulting Herta’s wardrobe. Students crossed the campus in twos and threes, backpacks over their shoulders and drinks in hand, drifting along the paths like sheep that had misplaced their shepherd. Herta fell half a step behind Ruan Mei and joined the flow.
She began with the shortest version of the project, which required some restraint. Over the past month she had prepared several pitches for exactly this occasion: one for people who cared about prestige, one for people who cared about resources and access, one for administrators, in which every genuinely interesting part had to be translated into “anticipated outcomes,” and, naturally, one designed specifically for Ruan Mei.
That last version turned out to be useless. The person beside her had already read the proposal and elected to remain unmoved, so Herta discarded every decorative piece of nonsense and went directly to the point. They were building a self-updating system: the model revised itself in response to experimental results, altered the conditions of the next round accordingly, then observed what happened. Their central problem was that the algorithm behaved more obediently than the organisms did and had even begun taking it upon itself to decide what counted as noise and what did not.
Ruan Mei showed almost no reaction as they walked, enough that Herta briefly wondered how much of the explanation had actually gone in. Then Ruan Mei asked her first question, in the same level tone as before: “If the system changes the next round of conditions based on the result, how do you know it’s still observing what happens rather than manufacturing what you want to see?”
Herta smiled. The woman had spent the entire afternoon looking indifferent and, after only a few sentences, had gone straight to the heart of the problem.
“Exactly. We need to put a leash on it.” She gave the word “we” slightly more weight than necessary.
Ruan Mei glanced at her and offered nothing else, but somewhere in Herta’s head a mechanism that had been stubbornly refusing to move finally clicked into place. She continued walking as if nothing had happened.
For the next few minutes they did not discuss the project directly so much as circle it. Ruan Mei asked another question that began with “if,” then, as though she had suddenly remembered something inconvenient, stopped.
“I still don’t have time for another project on this scale.”
For the past month, Herta had interpreted Ruan Mei’s silence as a negotiating posture: inconvenient, absurd, needlessly laborious, but ultimately solvable. Ruan Mei would agree sooner or later; the only question was how generous the terms had to become. Only now did Herta discover that she had omitted a possibility so unreasonable it had escaped consideration entirely—that Ruan Mei might actually be thinking about refusing.
For one genuine second, Herta was incredulous.
“Then make time.”
Ruan Mei did not immediately dignify that with an answer. Two breaths passed before she spoke again.
“Your confidence is impressive.”
“Why? Of course.”
“Typical.”
Herta turned her head. Ruan Mei’s expression remained calm, but Herta was beginning to understand that beneath that unexpectedly soft manner lay a stubbornness with the density of bedrock, along with rather more hidden edge than her voice suggested. Soft voice, sharp edges; close enough. None of it mattered, provided she agreed to join. By the time they reached the graduate apartments, Ruan Mei had asked more questions than anyone truly determined to stay uninvolved had any reason to ask, enough for Herta to know that her refusal had finally developed a narrow opening she could use.
Ruan Mei’s apartment sat at the end of a hallway quiet enough that each fall of Herta’s heel was clearly audible. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, then paused to look at Herta’s boots.
“You don’t have to take them off.”
Herta glanced down at the polished leather. “I wasn’t going to.”
⁂
The apartment was smaller than Herta’s; most people’s were. A narrow entryway opened into a living room and compact kitchen, with two bedroom doors facing the common space and the bathroom tucked around the corner. Beside the living room’s only window stood a table so small that Herta took one look at it and decided it could not possibly accommodate her.
Ruan Mei poured her tea, politely invited her to sit at that same table, and disappeared into the bathroom with her swim bag. “Give me a minute.”
Herta sat anyway. She was here now; she might as well settle in. The apartment was obviously meant for two people: by the entrance she had already noticed shoes in two unrelated styles, mismatched cups in the kitchenette, tea bags arranged with excessive precision, and, above the refrigerator, a bottle of gin beside a compact set of bar tools. With nowhere else to put her attention, she let it drift toward the area around the table.
One usable outlet, one chair that looked close to structural failure, one geriatric laptop. A draft leaked around the window, and the wireless signal deteriorated noticeably if she moved too close to it. Herta had serious questions about how Ruan Mei managed to work here at all; once she joined the project—Herta stopped the thought before it could finish. If project work required it, she had never been stingy about giving team members the best hardware available, but Ruan Mei had not actually agreed yet.
Water began running behind the bathroom door, and Herta was unsurprised to discover that the soundproofing was equally poor. Beside the laptop sat a scented candle that had not burned all the way down, releasing sandalwood quietly into the room. The moment Herta remained seated long enough for her body to form an opinion, it began objecting to the five hours of sleep she had managed the night before.
Herta overruled it. The proposal was already open on her phone, yet she scrolled through the same passage twice without absorbing a word; something written by Herta herself had somehow degraded into meaningless symbols. Steam rose from the tea at her elbow, the cushion on the chair was unexpectedly comfortable, and a hair dryer hummed with steady indifference in the background until, without warning, consciousness slipped out of her hands.
⁂
Warmth beneath her cheek, soft weight over her body, the measured sound of a keyboard nearby, and one steady source of heat close at her side.
Herta did not open her eyes immediately.
She was folded over the little table with one arm beneath her face, clothes still perfectly in order except for the fact that Herta, when dressing that morning, had plainly not considered their suitability for sleeping in them. An unprompted throw blanket covered her shoulders.
Ruan Mei had squeezed herself into the space beside her. Apparently Herta maintained the same territorial instincts asleep as awake and had claimed most of the table, while Ruan Mei had simply fitted herself into what remained. There was something almost offensive about the domesticity of the scene: it did not look like Herta had tracked a near-stranger through public records and forcibly inserted herself into the woman’s afternoon; for one absurd moment, it looked more as though she had simply fallen asleep somewhere that already belonged to her.
Before sentiment could develop any further, Herta opened her eyes.
Ruan Mei’s hair was dry now, loosely tied behind her. The glasses from the department photograph and the pearl necklace had both returned to their proper places, and through the lenses her blue-green eyes watched Herta from what suddenly felt like very little distance.
“Awake?”
Herta sat up, and the blanket slid into her lap. “A brief system restart.”
“You snored twice.”
Herta met her gaze with sharp, unapologetic disbelief until Ruan Mei looked away.
“I may have heard wrong.”
“You did.”
The air held for a moment, then the laptop fan abruptly rose in volume and gave Herta a more convenient target.
“What is wrong with your computer?”
“Nothing.”
“It sounds like a terminal patient.”
“It does that sometimes.”
Herta leaned closer. The fan was wheezing out hot air with the unmistakable desperation of a machine already giving everything it had.
“Where did you dig up this antique?”
“I bought it as an undergraduate. It still works.”
“I didn’t know torturing historical artifacts was one of your hobbies. Its ideal destination is a museum.”
Ruan Mei’s fingers paused above the keyboard. Herta gave the machine a final look from top to bottom. “Replace it. I’ll put it through the project budget.”
“If I remember correctly, I still haven’t agreed to join your project.”
Herta leaned back, the blanket still lying loosely across her knees. “So after all that circling, you’re finally willing to talk about the actual subject?”
Ruan Mei did not answer. Instead, she turned the laptop screen toward Herta.
Herta recognized the project proposal at once; what caught her attention were the comments newly added along the margins. An overambitious hypothesis had acquired a question mark. A result with no significant correlation had been flagged. Beside one model whose elegance bordered on the implausible sat a judgment as concise as it was merciless: hallucination. The comments proved that Ruan Mei had read the proposal closely enough to disagree with it correctly, which meant the past month and a half of silence had never indicated that Herta had failed to get her attention. Ruan Mei simply appeared to regard attention and agreement as two entirely separate things, a distinction Herta considered highly unnecessary.
“You read the entire thing, left comments, and still decided not to answer me?”
Ruan Mei took a sip of tea, steam misting her glasses. “I didn’t think a reply was necessary.”
Herta gave her a thin, humorless smile. “But comments were?”
Silence again. So when the question became inconvenient, she simply stopped speaking—the same strategy as thirteen unanswered emails. After the laptop was closed, the fan gradually quieted and the room seemed larger for it. This was the first time since leaving the pool that Ruan Mei had not looked eager to get rid of her, and Herta noticed, with some irritation, that details of this kind—things that would ordinarily never have entered her field of attention at all—had begun occupying it without permission.
She was sitting in Ruan Mei’s apartment with Ruan Mei’s blanket still across her knees and Ruan Mei’s comments preserved on the computer in front of them. None of those facts, taken alone, proved what Herta wanted them to prove; taken together, however, they had begun to tip the scale in her direction. Herta had always preferred mysteries that did not hand over their answers to her in the first second anyway.
Ruan Mei turned fully toward her.
“I’m not the only person who could do this. Why do you want me?”
Herta had prepared plenty of answers for this exact moment: the paper proving that an anomaly could itself be a mechanism, the experimental choices that were bold without becoming careless, the unusually sharp scientific instinct, the ability to identify the central problem in a handful of sentences. Every answer was logical. Every answer had evidence behind it.
What surfaced first, however, was the precisely timed turn in the lane, the clean fold and push away from the wall; wet black hair still dripping, a bead of water slipping down the side of her neck, a glimpse of collarbone disappearing beneath the collar of her shirt.
The professional answer was complete and impeccable. It was also half a second late, queued behind a reason Herta would never, under any circumstances, say out loud.