Garrett noticed the quiet on the walk over, the way you notice a sound has stopped rather than started.
The System hadn’t said anything in days. No progress lines, no dry commentary, not even one of the pointless little jabs it usually couldn’t resist. He caught himself checking his phone once, out of habit more than expectation, and found nothing waiting on the screen.
"Still alive, system?"
[SYSTEM STATUS: ACTIVE.]
He stared at that for a second.
You could’ve just said nothing.
[THAT WAS THE INTENTION.]
He put the phone away and let the thought go. It wasn’t ominous, just strange, the way an empty room is strange after you’ve gotten used to someone else being in it.
She was already there when he reached the courtyard, sat at the far end of a bench with a folder balanced on her knee, looking like she’d been early on purpose rather than by accident.
"You made it."
"It’s a courtyard. Hard to miss."
She almost smiled at that.
It occurred to both of them roughly at the same time, somewhere in the pause after he sat down, that they’d never actually done this properly.
"We’ve met twice," she said, "and I don’t think either of us has technically introduced ourselves."
"Once involved a spider. I’m not sure that counts as a proper meeting."
"It absolutely doesn’t. Which is my point." She held out a hand with the specific, faintly ridiculous formality of someone doing a bit.
"Emiliana."
He shook it. "Garrett."
"There. Now we’ve met like normal people."
"Feels a bit late for it."
"Better late than continuing to just call you ’Daniel’s friend’ in my head."
She handed over the folder. Inside was more paper than he’d expected, several pages, dense with a language he recognised well enough to place but not well enough to have read comfortably at speed.
"It’s more than I said, sorry. I didn’t realise how much of it there’d be until I actually printed it."
He flicked through the first couple of pages. "This is fine. Give me a bit."
He worked through it carefully rather than skimming, cross-referencing a term against the module notes still sitting somewhere in his memory, slower on a few sections than he’d have liked, but steady. She sat with him through most of it, not hovering, occasionally leaning over to read a line he’d flagged as ambiguous and offering an opinion he mostly ignored, correctly as it turned out on two occasions.
"Your lecturers any good?" she asked, somewhere around the third page, apparently having decided the silence had gone on long enough.
"One of them reads directly off the slides. Word for word. I’ve genuinely considered whether I could just read the module myself and skip the lecture entirely."
"You could."
"I could. I still go though, because apparently I hate myself."
"That tracks." She tucked a leg up under her.
"Mine’s better, mostly. Except the seminar leader who thinks cold-calling builds character."
"Does it?"
"No. It builds a specific kind of dread I now associate with Tuesday mornings."
He glanced up from the page. "You get cold-called? I’d have assumed you’d have a system for avoiding that."
"There’s no system for avoiding Dr. Pryce. Believe me, I’ve looked."
He noticed, without meaning to, that she’d chosen the end of the bench with her back angled slightly toward the wall behind it, not facing the main path, not facing the building entrance, a seat that put fewer people in a position to clock her from across the courtyard.
"You always sit like that?"
"Like what?"
"Facing away from everyone. Back to the wall."
She glanced down at her own position like she hadn’t fully clocked it herself. "Habit, I suppose."
"Hiding?"
"I prefer ’strategic.’" She said it lightly, but there was something underneath it that wasn’t entirely a joke. "It’s exhausting, being looked at constantly. You stop noticing you’re doing it, picking seats, routes, which door to use, until someone points it out."
"Sorry for pointing it out."
"No, it’s fine. It’s actually sort of nice that you noticed. Most people don’t."
"It’s not just strangers, either," she went on, apparently deciding the conversation had earned a bit more than she’d usually give it. "My dad’s exactly the same, if I’m honest. Worse, probably. Everything’s a room he has to manage the second he walks into it."
"Sounds tiring."
"It is. He’s better at it than I am though, makes it look effortless. Comes with the territory, I suppose, when your name’s the kind people already have opinions about before they’ve met you."
"Whose name isn’t."
"Fair point." She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach the rest of the sentence. "Alexander Vane. You’d think I’d have gotten used to walking into rooms where people already know who my dad is before they know anything about me, but..."
Garrett’s pen stopped moving.
Alexander Vane.
The words landed somewhere underneath the sentence he’d been about to say, and for a second he lost the thread of it entirely, some specific, unplaceable certainty that he’d seen that exact name before, not on a screen, not on campus, somewhere flatter and quieter than either of those. A page. A drawer he hadn’t been meant to open. His father’s handwriting or someone else’s, he couldn’t get the memory to hold still long enough to be sure.
"...which is a whole other conversation nobody actually wants to have," Emiliana finished, apparently unaware that Garrett had stopped listening three words earlier.
He looked back down at the page in his hands.
"Right."
He didn’t ask. Whatever question was forming underneath that single word wasn’t one he could ask her without either sounding mad or giving away that something had just shifted, and he wasn’t ready to do either.
He kept his face doing what it usually did, mildly unbothered, half-focused on the translation, while somewhere underneath that a much less settled part of him tried and failed to place exactly where he’d seen the name, and why the answer felt like it belonged to his dad rather than to him.
"You’ve gone quiet," she said.
"Concentrating." That wasn’t entirely a lie.
They finished the last two pages without either of them mentioning her father again.
The conversation drifted back to something smaller, a complaint about the printer in the library, a joke about Dr. Sonia that made her laugh properly for the second time that afternoon, and on the surface, nothing about the rest of the meeting looked any different than the beginning of it had.
"That’s everything," she said eventually, gathering the pages back into the folder.
"Thank you. Genuinely, this would’ve taken me three times as long with an app."
"Don’t mention it."
"I mean it,though."
"I know. I still won’t mention it."
She laughed, stood, folder tucked under her arm the way it had been the first time he’d properly seen her across a corridor. "I
Guess I’d see you around, Garrett."
"Guess so."
He watched her walk off across the courtyard, back toward whatever the rest of her afternoon held, and didn’t move from the bench for a while after she’d gone.
Alexander Vane.
He turned the name over again, waiting for it to settle into something concrete and getting nothing but the same flat, insistent certainty he’d started with.
He’d seen it before. He was sure of that much.
He had no idea, yet, why it had been sitting somewhere in his own house.