Tav said nothing.
Something hummed in the air between them — awareness pulling taut — and then, from the other room, from directly under the bed: A phone buzzed.
Both of them turned their heads at exactly the same moment.
Then looked back at each other. Neither spoke.
• • •
• • •
The architecture seminar met on Tuesdays at two o'clock in the building at the west end of the university's main precinct — an irony that Tav did not miss, given that the architecture building was
the one operational location in the university that he had personally prepared for its alternative function, and he was now sitting in its main lecture room as a student.
The fiction required maintenance. This was a fact he'd accepted at the assignment's outset: a cover identity wasn't static. It degraded without input. He needed to be seen by the right people in the right contexts, and he needed those appearances to be consistent and unremarkable.
Tav Prescott, finance postgraduate, attended two seminars per week. He sat in the third row and took adequate notes and did not distinguish himself.
What he did not do was expect to find Alistair Keaton in the adjacent seat.
"Finance students don't normally attend architecture seminars," Alistair said, without looking at him.
"I have an interest in structural systems," Tav said.
"So do I." Alistair opened his notebook — the sketchbook, Tav noted, rather than a separate notebook — and uncapped his pen. "This is a public lecture."
"Yes."
"Anyone can attend." "Yes."
The lecturer arrived and the room settled and they did not speak again for forty minutes.
The lecture was on load distribution in large-span structures — the engineering problem of how weight was transferred across a space too wide for conventional support intervals. The lecturer was genuinely good: he moved through the mathematics without losing the intuition behind them, sothat the numbers were always connected to the physical reality they described.
Tav listened.
He also watched Alistair's notebook.
Alistair did not take notes in any conventional sense. He drew. His pen moved continuously and produced, over the course of the lecture, a series of structural sketches that translated the mathematical examples into visual form — arches and trusses and the geometry of load paths, rendered with the quick confident line of someone who had been drawing since before they knew what they were drawing.
And then, in the lower corner of the page: a small figure sitting at a desk. Profile. Looking forward.
Not at anything certain — just a person attending to something.
It was not a portrait. It was a sketch — quick, incomplete, done without full awareness, the hand moving while the attention was elsewhere.
But it was recognizable.
The figure in the corner of the page was Tav.
He noted this the way he noted everything: with the complete attention he understood that this was information only. He filed it and continued listening to the lecture and did not look at Alistair's notebook again.
When the lecture ended and the room began to shuffle toward the exits, Alistair remained in his seat — reviewing what he'd drawn, apparently, with the mild self-assessment of an artist checking their work.
He flipped the page before he stood.
Tav had already committed the sketch to memory.
