Her gaze sweeps the room as she makes her way to the front, where she stops, looks at us for a beat, and says, “I always love seeing what kind of degenerates end up in this class.”
The silence stretches. A few confused glances.
“In here, we study everything that can go wrong during fieldwork. Which is, for the record, everything. And since this course isn’t required for any of you, I can only assume you signed up voluntarily. So yes, you’re weirdos. The best kind. My kind.”
A few scattered laughs. She turns and writes her name on the board—half-legible, but unmistakable. I’ve seen it too many times in journal articles not to recognize the sharp slope of herK.
“I’ve never worked on a project that went according to plan. I wish I had. But that would make me a liar—and I assume you get enough of those out there.”
She gestures vaguely toward the door. This time, the laughter is real.
“In this class, you’ll learn how to think on your feet. How to salvage good data from bad situations. How to keep going when your experiment collapses, your dive gear stops working, or your pH meter decides to mutiny.”
There’s a pause, then a smile that feels like an invitation and a challenge all at once.
“Welcome to Field Problems.”
What follows is a brief, unscripted version of her CV—select highlights spoken in fluent scientific brilliance. Coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. A broken desalination pump in the Maldives. Getting heatstroke during a conference in Marseille and still presenting her work on algal symbiosis to a standing ovation.
The room reacts accordingly. Oohs, and aahs and a few impressed murmurs.
I just sit there, quiet and entirely still, with a grin that’s starting to hurt my face, because somehow, impossibly, she’s better than I imagined. Fierce and brilliant, utterly herself.
This is the kind of woman who rewrites the field. The kind who explains complex systems without once oversimplifying them. The kind who assumes we’re capable of keeping up.
And I get to learn from her.
A student near the front raises his hand. Dr. Kymbert acknowledges him with a subtle lift of her chin—the kind of gesture that says,this better be good.
“How are we supposed to learn this kind of stuff in a lecture hall?” he asks. It comes out more combative than intended, though the bead of sweat forming at his temple suggests that it’s simply stress hijacking his social filters.
She doesn’t bristle. Instead, she smirks, leans casually against the podium, and uncaps her marker once, twice, three times.
“Excellent question,” she says, with a kind of relish that makes me suspect she’s been waiting for someone to ask it. “You’re all here for your master’s. Working on theses. Running your own experiments. Spending more hours than is medically advisable in our labs or knee-deep in fieldwork. Statistically—and I say this with affection—something will go wrong.Probably several somethings.”
She lets the silence hang just long enough to make the room shift uncomfortably.
“And that’s where we come in.”
The wordwehangs in the air like a low pressure system. I’m not the only one who tenses—the entire class seems to collectively freeze at her use of the plural.
She laughs. “As you’ve likely guessed, my research keeps me… occupied. And frankly, I’ve earned the right not to personally shepherd each and every one of you through your inevitable disasters.”
A pause.
“That’s what PhD candidates are for.”
Her smile deepens as her gaze lifts to somewhere behind the last row, prompting the entire class to twist around in mild confusion. I follow suit—reluctantly—and that’s when I see him.
There, leaning against the small desk by the entrance, stands what can only be described as an anomaly of the human genome. And I mean that in the most scientifically admiring, completely unhinged way possible.
He’s quiet. Still. Like he was placed there rather than arrived, posture relaxed but impossible to ignore. One ankle crossed over the other, arms folded across a chest that I have no appropriate words for. His sweater, dark and fitted, clings too tightly across his shoulders to be doing it voluntarily, and the sleeves are pushed to his elbows, revealing forearms that frankly belong in a textbook on musculature.
He scans the room, slow and clinical, his expression unreadable. Not cold exactly, just… precise. Efficient. A full-body assessment in a single glance. And then, with no rush at all, he pushes off the desk and walks down the steps toward the front of the lecture hall—the same path Dr. Kymbert took earlier, but entirely different in effect.
When he stops beside her, she looks smaller by comparison. And I know for a fact she’s five-ten.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t smile. Doesn’t fidget or nod or acknowledge any of us with so much as a twitch of the mouth.
