Back on Wednesday morning, the day after the man died outside the bakery, Mara skipped Hydraulics to get her eyes checked.
She hoped the eye doctor would find something wrong with them. Sick eyes could be treated. If her eyes were fine, then the numbers were real, and sooner or later she would see them again, over somebody else.
When she got to the student clinic on Polytechnic Hill, there was a line outside. Forty people stood along the railings under umbrellas, and for a second she thought they were all there for their eyes.
They weren't. A Medical Service nurse was walking down the line with a tablet, taking names and district codes. It was the line for the autumn booster.
A man near the front was complaining to the woman behind him.
"The line gets longer every year," he said. "And the needle never gets any shorter!"
Mara walked past all of them to the side door, the one with the picture of glasses on it.
***
The eye doctor was a quick, busy woman with a lanyard full of pens. She had Mara read the letters on the wall, puffed air into her eyes, and brought a bright lamp in close.
"Any flashes, zigzag lines, patches missing? Headaches?"
"No."
The eye doctor sat back on her stool. "So what brought you in? Your eyes are better than mine."
Mara had worked out a sentence for this on the tram. Every word of it was true.
"Yesterday I saw numbers," she said. "White numbers, in a reflection in a tram window. They weren't on anything. They lasted about six minutes."
"Once?"
"Once."
The eye doctor asked how long she'd slept. Five hours. She asked about breakfast. There hadn't been any. She wrote for a bit and tore the sheet off her pad.
"Your eyes are healthy. Pressure normal. Everything normal. If I had to bet, I'd bet on a final-year student who's short on sleep and iron. You saw a screen reflected at a strange angle. That's what it usually is."
She held out the sheet.
"But if it happens again, you see your doctor that same week. You don't wait to see if it happens a third time. All right?"
"All right."
"And eat breakfast," the eye doctor said, and opened the door for the next patient.
Mara walked up the hill to the faculty with the sheet folded in her coat pocket. The eye doctor was wrong about the screen. But the sheet had the one fact Mara had come for, in writing. Whatever she'd seen on Tuesday, she'd seen it with working eyes.
***
For the rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday, Mara checked every shiny surface in the city.
Tram windows, on the way in and on the way home. The glass of the faculty doors. The computer screens in the drawing room before anyone switched them on. The side of the kettle in the student kitchen, which made her look like a potato.
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In every reflection, there were people. Some upside down, some stretched, some perfectly normal. And above every one of them... ceiling. Or sky. Nothing else.
On Thursday at lunch, she caught herself turning a spoon over to see who was in the back of it.
"That's the fourth time you've done that to a spoon."
Dina Ashby, her project partner, put her tray down on the table. Mara hadn't even seen her cross the canteen.
Dina was wearing her site boots and her good earrings. That meant she'd come straight from her uncle's building yard, and she was going somewhere later that she hadn't told Mara about yet. She would. Dina told people things about four seconds after she found them out.
"It's a spoon," Mara said.
"It was a spoon the first three times." Dina sat down. "The form. Friday. I left the topic box empty for you, out of love, and because I can't spell 'egress.' What are we doing?"
"Stairs."
"Stairs."
"Shelter stairs. Why crowds jam on them." Mara had her notebook out before she meant to. "Everything written about it is thirty years old. The rules still pretend people walk down in single file! On Tuesday I measured a staircase that's one meter ten wide, for four hundred people."
She turned the notebook so Dina could see.
"We could model it. You do the model, I do the surveys. We'd need about twenty shelters of different ages. The Section has the drawings for all of them, and Mr. Barrett owes me for the four wrong shelter signs I reported."
Dina ate a fry and stared at her.
"That's a real topic," she said. She sounded a little betrayed. "I came here ready to fight you about drains."
She ate another fry. "Fine. Stairs. But I'm writing 'Evacuation Dynamics' on the form, because I want a job afterward. And when we present, you're not allowed to say 'jam.'"
She pointed a fry at Mara, like that settled it.
"Now. What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing's wrong with me."
"You weren't in Hydraulics. You are never not in Hydraulics. And you look like you haven't slept."
Mara closed the notebook.
If Mara told her everything, Dina would get her coat and walk her to a clinic herself. She'd sit in the waiting room with old magazines, and Mara would lose a whole day to doctors.
'Not until I know what it is... Give her the part that's true.'
"I saw a man collapse on Tuesday," she said. "On the bridge road. I did first aid until a nurse came. He died."
Dina's whole face changed. "Mara..."
"I'm all right. I didn't sleep well after."
"Why didn't you say?" Dina put her hand flat on Mara's notebook, right on top of the stairs. "You absolute lunatic. You texted me about a form!"
"You texted me about a form."
"That's different. I'm shallow."
Mara still walked into her four o'clock class feeling guilty about the part she'd left out.
***
Professor Nash taught Foundations, the class about what holds buildings up. His room was built for sixty. On a wet Thursday afternoon, there were six of them.
He didn't mind. He taught six the same way he taught sixty. He walked up and down at the front and tapped his marker on his wedding ring when he was thinking. He was sixty-two. He had a daughter who lived up north, and her photo was his screen saver. He also believed that any engineer who ignored drainage should go to prison.
Since four, he'd been telling them about a building down by the harbor that sank eleven centimeters on one side. Somebody had trusted a bad survey.
At seventeen minutes past four, Mara glanced up from her notes to copy a number off the board.
There were numbers over his head.
[00:11:03]
There was no window behind him, and no glass. There was only the whiteboard, and the professor, and above him, in the empty air, thin white numbers with clean edges. The same as on the tram.
[00:11:01]
Mara's pen stopped.
'No... no. Please, not him.'
Professor Nash tapped his marker on his ring and wrote 11 cm on the board. He was telling them never to trust a survey they hadn't checked themselves. The numbers moved along above him while he walked.
[00:10:52]
She checked her page. She checked the air again. Still there.
Dina was two seats along, drawing a settlement curve. The boy in front of Mara was asleep with his eyes open. Nobody else was staring at the air above Professor Nash's head. Mara checked every one of them, to be sure.
She stood up. Her chair scraped loudly on the floor.
"Miss Vance?"
"Sorry. Bathroom."
In the corridor, she put both hands flat on the wall. Cold painted block. She counted to ten, slowly and evenly.
This was the second time. The eye doctor had been very clear about the second time. But no doctor could do anything about this in eleven minutes.
She knew what happened at zero. She had sat on a wet curb on Tuesday and watched it happen.
'Professor Nash has eleven minutes. Ten, now.'