Wednesday passed in a kind of haze.
Adrián attended his classes. Took notes. Passed the statistics notes to Ishtar, who snatched them from his hands.
"How did you do this?" Adrián asked her, pointing to a correction on the formula for exercise three.
"Instinct," said Ishtar, lollipop in her mouth.
"That’s a specific correction. Your instinct doesn’t tell you dispersion formulas."
"My instinct is very well-educated. It had a privileged childhood."
"Ishtar."
"Vega."
"...forget it."
"Good choice."
She handed the notes back and kept walking down the hall, waving her lollipop at three different people as she passed.
He had lunch with Yuki at the usual bench. She had, indeed, brought a bigger container. Adrián ate more than he needed because refusing would be an insult, and because every time Yuki watched him eat, her face lit up with such honest satisfaction that it was almost impossible to look at directly.
"Adri."
"Yeah?"
"You look like you didn’t sleep."
"I slept eight hours."
"Eight hours of bad quality. It shows. You have bags under your eyes. And that little wrinkle between your eyebrows you get when you’re thinking about something. And you’re chewing slower, which is what you do when something’s distracting you while you eat."
Adrián stopped chewing.
Started chewing again, faster, deliberately.
"I’m very relaxed," he said, mouth full.
"Uh-huh."
"Very calm."
"Uh-huh."
"Can you stop looking at me like a doctor examining a patient?"
"No."
"Yuki."
"Adri."
"I’m just thinking about classes."
Yuki didn’t believe him. It was obvious she didn’t believe him. But she didn’t push either. She focused on stabbing a piece of sautéed carrot with her chopsticks, very concentrated, and then, very casually, without looking at him:
"I saw you coming out of the convenience store yesterday with a tall girl."
Adrián almost choked on his rice.
Another one who saw me coming out of the store. Does this neighborhood have invisible cameras or what?
"Were you spying on me?"
"I was walking back from the bakery. I went to take bread to Mrs. Walls, who lives two blocks past there. And on the way back I passed by your street. And I saw you coming out. With a girl. Tall."
"She’s a library partner. We’re studying together."
"At seven in the evening. At a convenience store."
"University students do weird things, Yuki."
"Uh-huh."
"Yuki."
"It’s fine, Adri. It’s your life."
Silence.
Yuki stabbed three pieces of carrot at once and shoved them into her mouth with a contained violence that made Adrián wonder if the container would survive the rest of lunch.
At the end of the day, at the exit, she gave him a hug that was too short and too tight and said "take care of yourself, okay?" in a tone that wasn’t a question but an order, and walked half a block ahead without turning around.
Adrián went up to his apartment thinking two things:
One, there were too many women in his life all of a sudden.
Two, Kenji’s bracelet was still warm against his wrist, and he still hadn’t taken it off.
Thursday came slowly and quickly at the same time, the way it does when you’re waiting for something but don’t want to admit you’re waiting for it.
Adrián finished his last class at 4:30. Walked up the stairs to the third floor of the library with studied calm. Pushed open the double doors of the archive section. Registered his name with the gray-bunned librarian—who greeted him with a small gesture of recognition this time—and walked down the aisle toward the restricted area.
Sariel was already there.
She was sitting at the same table by the window where he’d sat on the first day. She had three folders spread open in a fan in front of her and a printed spreadsheet. She wore her hair loose this time, falling down her back, and a white button-up shirt rolled up to her elbows. No coat. She was more her—or more what Adrián was starting to assume was her—than the night before.
She looked up. Smiled a small, toothless smile, the smile of someone who’s been waiting and knows they’ve been waiting.
"Vega."
"Corvax."
"You’re late."
"It’s 4:42."
"I said 4:30."
"You didn’t give an exact time."
"It’s implied."
"It’s not implied."
"In my world it’s implied."
"Prague is a tyrannical world."
She let out a very short laugh through her nose and gestured for him to sit across from her.
Adrián took out his notebook, his laptop, and a pen. Arranged them with more care than necessary while trying not to notice that Sariel smelled different today—like burnt incense and something citrusy, lighter than the dark perfume from the night before—and that the first button of her shirt was open, revealing the edge of a thin silver chain hidden beneath the fabric.
"Focus, Vega," she said without looking at him, turning a page of the folder.
"I’m focused."
"You’re looking at my neck."
"I’m looking at your chain. It’s an interesting chain."
"It’s a normal chain."
"It’s interesting."
"Vega."
"Corvax."
She looked up. Her amber eyes settled on his with that total, calm attention that was already becoming familiar, and for a moment—just a moment—he could have sworn she was going to say something different, something important, something she’d been holding back since Monday at the library.
But she just said:
"Work."
And looked down again.
Adrián breathed.
Okay. Let’s work.
Sariel had prepared the material with a meticulousness that reminded him of police boards in TV shows, just without the drama. Everything was organized by variables. Dates. Times. Demographic profiles. Last known location. Case status. Declared witnesses. Personal objects found or not found. Presence or absence of cameras within a three-block radius.
"I found two more," she said, pulling an additional sheet from the bottom of the fan.
"Two more what?"
"Cases. With the same pattern. One from 2021, one from 2018. Both on a new moon, both within the time range, both with victims of the same profile, both closed as voluntary disappearances."
Adrián stared at the sheet.
Two more. Two more on top of the three. Five cases total. Five.
And none of them were connected in any official report.
"...how did you find them?"
"Cross-referenced search in the library database. There’s an academic section of criminological cases used by professors. Any second-year or above student has access."
"I’m a first-year."
"That’s why you have me."
Adrián looked up.
Sariel was smiling. Not condescendingly. With something warmer. Almost conspiratorial.
And Adrián felt, with a small jolt in the pit of his stomach, that he liked that smile very much.
"Yeah," he said. "That’s why I have you."
Sariel looked down at her notebook and her cheeks turned very slightly paler than normal—which, for someone with her porcelain skin, was the equivalent of blushing. Adrián noticed but said nothing.
They worked for four hours.
Four hours of cross-referencing data, marking maps, writing hypotheses, discarding them, writing new ones. Four hours of taking notes in silence next to each other, heads bent over the same folder, arms brushing accidentally when they both reached for the same pen and neither pulled away as quickly as would have been appropriate.
Four hours of cold coffee, orange light coming through the window and shifting to blue and then to nothing.
Four hours.
At 8:30, the librarian passed through the restricted section to announce they were closing in twenty minutes.
Sariel looked up like someone waking from a trance.
"...it’s already 8:30?"
"Forty minutes," Adrián corrected, checking his computer clock. "It’s actually 8:38."
"We lost track of time."
"We lost track of time."
They looked at each other. And for a moment, neither moved.
Adrián could see now, with them so close to the window, that Sariel’s amber eyes had tiny darker spots near the pupil. He hadn’t noticed them before.
"Vega," she said.
"Yeah?"
"You’re very close."
"So are you."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"We should pack up."
"We should."
Neither moved.
And then—and it took Adrián a fraction of a second to process this—Sariel moved first, but not to pull away. She moved half a centimeter toward him, her breathing slightly different, her eyes dropping very briefly to his mouth before coming back up.
Adrián felt his own heart pound once, hard, against his ribs.
Ah. Oh, okay. This is happening.
And just as his brain finally decided it was going to lean in those last centimeters, the bracelet on his left wrist gave a pulse of heat.
Not metaphorical.
Literal.
The dark wooden bead, resting against his pulse, suddenly warmed to an almost uncomfortable point, and then returned to its normal temperature, all in less than a second.
Adrián pulled back by reflex.
Sariel also pulled back, faster than natural, her eyes very wide.
"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice slightly different than half a second ago.
"Yeah. Yeah, it’s just... a cramp. In my arm. I was leaning on it wrong."
"...ah."
"Yeah."
"Okay."
Sariel looked down. Started closing folders with more noise than necessary. Her black hair fell over her face and she didn’t push it away.
Adrián put away his notebook. Closed his laptop. Noticed his pulse was very fast and that the bracelet had gone back to being warm as always, like nothing had happened.
What the hell was that?
Did the bracelet just... warn me?
Kenji, what did you give me?
"Walk you to the exit?" he asked, forcing his tone back to normal.
Sariel looked up. Smiled. The smile was almost the same as five minutes ago, but there was a small tension at the corners that hadn’t been there before.
"Sure."
They walked down the three flights in silence.
An awkward, charged silence that neither knew how to break and neither fully wanted to break because breaking it would mean talking about what had—or hadn’t—happened.
At the main entrance of the library, they stopped.
"Saturday," she said. "8 PM."
"Mercier and Toledo."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Vega," she said, looking at him. "About what almost..." she hesitated. "What almost."
"Yeah."
"I didn’t mean to."
Adrián went very still.
"Okay."
"It’s not that..." she closed her eyes for a moment, like she was searching for the right phrase. "It’s not that I didn’t want to. It’s that I shouldn’t. It’s not a good time for me. It’s complicated."
"It’s fine."
"It’s not fine. You’re putting on the ’it’s fine’ face and I know that means it’s not fine."
"Corvax."
"Vega."
"I don’t know what you want me to say."
Sariel looked down. Laughed, very short, very sad.
"Nothing. I don’t want you to say anything. I just wanted to tell you this so you know it wasn’t..." she made a vague gesture with her hand. "Rejection. It’s not that. It’s something else. Something else that’s already happening in my life that I can’t mix with this."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"I’ll see you Saturday."
"I’ll see you Saturday."
She hesitated a fraction of a second longer. Then she squeezed his arm briefly—just like the night before, a contact of a second or less—and walked away along the garden path toward the campus’s main exit.
Adrián stood at the library entrance.
He watched her walk away.
She didn’t turn around.