Friday nights: study. Saturday nights: study. Sunday mornings: tutor Austin. Sunday afternoons: panic about what he’d gotten wrong. Monday through Thursday: attend class, eat cheap, and try not to think about the fact that his parents had taken out loans large enough to buy a house so that their son could attend a university where he spent most of his free time watching YouTube videos about a class he was barely passing so he could pretend to teach it on Sundays.

The system was not glamorous. The system did not involve bars, or parties, or girls in miniskirts, or any of the things his roommate Kyle considered fundamental to the college experience. The system involved a desk, a laptop, and a growing expertise in a subject Peter was currently earning a B-minus in, because a blonde girl with serious eyes who sat next to him three times a week thought he was a tutor.

He was not a tutor.

He had never been a tutor. They shared a statistics class. Lecture twice a week, discussion once. Peter had chosen the seat next to Austin on the first day for reasons that had nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with the fact that she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. She had a smile like Natalie Portman. All bright whites, pink lips, gums. When she pointed it at him, which was not often enough, something behind his ribs turned to liquid and he forgot how numbers worked. Three months ago, she had heard something during roll, concluded that Peter was a tutor, and approached him after class. Peter, who told people he was from Chicago even though he was really from Barrington, had said yes. Because she was standing right there. Because the word “no” had simply not been available.

That had been September. It was now late November. Twelve sessions. The lie was load-bearing at this point. Removing it would collapse the entire structure, and the structure was the best thing in Peter’s life.

So. Friday night. Study.

The dorm room was small and smelled like Kyle’s cologne, which Kyle applied with the subtlety of a crop duster. Kyle was standing at the mirror, adjusting his hair, wearing a shirt that was technically a shirt in the sense that it had sleeves and covered his torso, though it accomplished both objectives with minimal commitment.

“Come out,” Kyle said.

“Can’t. Studying.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I’m aware.”

“You study every Friday.”

“That’s what studying looks like. Repetition.”

Kyle turned from the mirror. He had the face of a boy who had never once worried about the cost of a night out. Kyle’s parents were comfortable in the way that meant Kyle didn’t know what his parents earned and had never needed to ask.

Peter’s parents were not comfortable. They were middle-class in the way that meant they’d signed loan documents that would follow the family for fifteen years so their son could get a business degree. The business degree was their idea. Peter wanted to study history. Peter could tell you about the fall of Constantinople at a level of detail that made people physically leave conversations. But history didn’t pay, and his parents hadn’t signed those loans for Constantinople. So. Business. And business meant statistics, which was the one required class Peter genuinely hated, which was the class he now spent every weekend cramming, which was the class where the girl sat next to him three times a week.

Peter had forty dollars a week in spending money. Meal plan and room were covered by the loans, so the forty was for everything else. It was enough. You could drink like a king in Iowa City on forty dollars. But Peter liked going to Quentin’s on Saturdays, a restaurant two blocks off campus that made a burger worth leaving the dorm for, and Quentin’s plus a night out didn’t fit in the same forty.

Kyle had offered to cover him. Kyle offered every week. Kyle’s family was the kind of rich where the money was so old it had stopped being a topic. “Just come out, I got you,” Kyle would say, and mean it, and Peter would say no, because taking Kyle’s money felt like wearing someone else’s clothes. It fit, technically. It just wasn’t his.

Staying in also meant staying ahead. It also made him the kind of person who studied on Friday nights, which was not the kind of person he’d imagined being when he’d filled out his college applications. But imaginary Peter had not anticipated that real Peter would be spending his weekends cramming a class he already took so he could pretend to be good at it on Sundays.

“Your loss,” Kyle said, and left.

Peter opened his laptop. Chapter nine. Regression analysis. He’d been through it twice already, but Sunday was coming, and Austin had a way of asking questions that found the exact gap in his understanding, like a dentist finding a cavity. He needed the gaps filled. He needed to sound like a person who had known about regression analysis for longer than a week.

He pulled up a video. A man with a soothing voice and a whiteboard. The man was explaining the line of best fit. Peter took notes in a notebook he kept specifically for this purpose, separate from his actual class notebooks, because the last thing he needed was a classmate flipping through his notes and finding twelve weeks of increasingly desperate statistics self-education.

The door banged open at nine-thirty.

Kyle was back. He was not alone. Two girls followed him in, already laughing, already loud, already several drinks into the kind of night that Peter’s hundred-dollar budget did not support.

“Peter!” Kyle said, as though Peter’s presence in his own room was a delightful surprise. “You know Stacy. And this is Becky.”

Peter knew Stacy. She was in his English comp class and had once borrowed a pen and never returned it. Becky he did not know. Becky was wearing a miniskirt and a smile that suggested the evening was still accepting applications.

“Come out with us,” Stacy said.

“I’m studying.”

“On a Friday,” Becky said. She said it the way people said in this economy.

“He does this,” Kyle said, waving a hand at Peter’s desk, his laptop, his notebook. “Every week. It’s like living with a monk.”

“A monk who watches YouTube,” Stacy said, peering at his screen.

Peter closed the laptop. “It’s a lecture. For class.”

“On a Friday night.”

“Some of us have priorities.”

Becky crossed the room. She was small, dark-haired, and moved with the particular confidence of a girl who had been told yes her entire life. She smelled like rum and something floral. She sat in Peter’s lap.

This was not a thing Peter had been prepared for. His hands went to the armrests of his desk chair the way a person’s hands go to the armrests of an airplane during turbulence. Becky weighed almost nothing. She was very warm. She looked at him from a distance of approximately six inches.

“Come out,” she said. Quieter now. Just for him.

“Maybe when I’m done,” Peter said.

Becky looked at him for another beat. Something flickered behind her eyes. Not hurt exactly. Curiosity. The curiosity of a girl who was not used to “maybe” being an answer that people gave her while she was sitting in their lap.

She stood up. Smoothed her skirt. Gave him a look on her way out that he would file away and never act on, because Peter Tudor was sitting in a dorm room on a Friday night studying a subject he was barely passing so he could pretend to teach it to a girl who didn’t know his last name, and that was apparently the life he’d chosen.

Kyle gave him a look too. Kyle’s look was simpler. It said: what is wrong with you.

The door closed. The room was quiet again. Kyle’s cologne lingered.

Peter opened the laptop. The man with the soothing voice was still explaining the line of best fit. Peter pressed play.

His phone buzzed.

His heart did the thing it did every time his phone buzzed, the small stupid leap that meant maybe it’s her, and he picked it up.

It was his mom.

Hi honey! How’s your week going? Are you eating enough? Dad says hi. Love you!

Peter stared at the screen. His mom, who had co-signed a loan she’d be paying off until Peter was thirty-five. His dad, who said hi through his mom’s texts because his dad didn’t text. Two people in Barrington who believed their son was at college becoming something, and their son was at college pretending to be a statistics tutor so a girl would keep meeting him on Sundays.

He typed back: Doing great. Eating fine. Hi dad.

He set the phone down. Picked it up. Set it down.

He opened his texts with Austin. The last message was his. From yesterday. Thursday afternoon. She’d texted him out of nowhere. A party. Saturday. Off campus. Did he want to come?

Peter had stared at that text for a full minute. Austin Stella had picked up her phone, found his name, and invited him somewhere that was not a library. His heart had done something structurally unsafe.

He’d typed back yes. She’d responded: Great, I’ll let Myra know.

Myra. Great.

Myra, who looked at Peter like he was a stain on a shirt she liked. Myra, who had once described his conversation style as “a lot.” Myra, who was going to be at this party, watching him try to talk to Austin in a social setting, which was a skill set he had not tested and was not confident existed.

He had typed back four words chosen to sound effortless:

Sounds good, see ya then.

No exclamation point. He had wanted to use an exclamation point. He had typed it, deleted it, retyped it, deleted it again. Exclamation points were eager. Peter was not eager. Peter was cool. Peter was the kind of guy who said “sounds good” and moved on with his life.

Peter had not moved on with his life. He had been thinking about Saturday for twenty-six hours.

He wanted to text her again. His thumb hovered over the keyboard. Hey, do you know what time? Or: Should I bring anything? Or literally anything that would make her name appear on his screen again.

He did not text her.

The last message was his. You couldn’t stack texts. That was the rule. Sending a follow-up to “sounds good, see ya then” was desperate. It was needy. It would undo the entire illusion of a man who didn’t use exclamation points.

The phone sat on the desk. The screen went dark. Peter stared at it.

He pulled up another tutorial. Pressed play. The man on the whiteboard was explaining residuals. Peter did not take notes. His mind was already at a party he didn’t know how to dress for, in a house owned by someone he’d never met, standing next to a girl with a Natalie Portman smile who had, for reasons he could not explain, chosen to spend her Saturday with him.

And Myra.

He pressed pause. Picked up the phone. Put it down.

He pressed play.

This was not, strictly speaking, unusual. She had gone longer. There had been a week in July where sleep had become something that happened to other people, a foreign custom she’d read about but couldn’t quite manage. But two days was enough to make the edges of things go soft. The fluorescent lights in the hallway of Mayflower buzzed at a frequency that felt personal. Her key took three tries to find the lock.

The suite was warm, loud, and on the wrong side of campus.

That last part was a problem her family had created. They’d found out she was going to Iowa late, because her family did everything late, or at least everything that involved letting Myra make her own decisions. By the time the paperwork went through, the good housing was gone. Burge was full. The dorms near the quad were full. Mayflower was what was left. A twenty-minute walk from the quad, from Burge and its dining hall, from the one friend she’d managed to make.

Her family had opinions about this. Mostly that it was her problem to solve.

She dropped her bag on the bed. Mayflower was two bedrooms joined by a shared kitchen and bathroom. Myra’s bedroom had two beds. The other one belonged to Sharon, a robust girl from outside Des Moines who baked when she was stressed, which appeared to be always. The other bedroom held two more girls whose names Myra had learned and whose personalities she had catalogued as “also midwestern.” They were all nice in the way that midwestern girls were nice, which was to say relentlessly, genuinely, almost oppressively. They left notes on the fridge. They asked how her day was and meant it. They’d invited her to a corn maze in the second week and had not understood why she’d said no, because girls from New Jersey didn’t go to corn mazes, and even if they did, Myra Lucetti wasn’t the kind of girl who had time for corn mazes.

They were nice. They were almost too nice. And Myra couldn’t take a phone call without locking herself in the bathroom and running the faucet.

Her phone was on the desk. She waited until she could hear Sharon and the others in the kitchen, their voices bright and overlapping, then she closed the bedroom door and picked it up. Three missed calls from a number she recognized but had not saved under a name. She never saved it under a name. That was the kind of precaution that had been drilled into her since she was old enough to understand what precaution meant.

She called back.

“You’re late,” the voice said. No greeting. No warmth. The voice of someone who tracked lateness the way a mechanic tracked mileage.

“I was in class.”

“Class ended forty minutes ago.”

“I was with a friend. We got coffee.”

Silence. The specific silence of a family member deciding whether your explanation was acceptable. Myra had been listening to that silence her entire life. It was the silence before a grade was assigned.

“How are your classes?”

“Fine.”

“Are you keeping up?”

“I’m keeping up.”

“And you’re settling in? Making connections?”

“Yes.”

“Good connections?”

The question had a weight to it that didn’t match the words. Myra pressed the phone tighter to her ear.

“Yes,” she said. “Good connections.”

Another silence. Shorter. The grade had been assigned. She had passed, but not by much.

“Your cousins are asking about your progress. Don’t give them anything to worry about.”

The line went dead.

Myra set the phone down. Picked it up. Set it down again. Her hands were doing the thing they did after these calls, the slight tremor that started in the fingers and worked inward. She pressed her palms flat against the desk and waited for it to stop.

It didn’t stop.

She changed out of her school clothes. Jeans, boots, a jacket heavy enough for the walk back across campus. She needed food. Mayflower didn’t have a dining hall worth the name, which meant Burge, which meant twenty minutes in the cold, which meant she’d be walking back in the dark, which meant nothing. She’d walked in worse dark in worse places. Iowa City at night was not a thing that frightened Myra Lucetti.

She checked her reflection in the mirror by the door. She looked tired. She looked like a college student who was behind on sleep and ahead on stress, which was exactly what she was, and also not at all what she was, and the distance between those two things was getting harder to hold.

She slipped out of the suite without telling her roommates where she was going and started walking.

The walk from Burge back to Mayflower was long enough to be annoying and dark enough to be interesting. Campus at nine-thirty on a November night was mostly empty, mostly quiet, mostly the kind of place where nothing happened. Myra walked fast. She’d always walked fast. Her mother used to say she walked like someone was behind her, which was funny, in retrospect, because someone usually was.

The dining hall had been fine. Mediocre pasta, decent salad bar, a table by the window where she could sit alone and not think about the phone call. She had not succeeded in not thinking about the phone call. Good connections? What kind of family asked about connections like they were reviewing a quarterly report?

She thought about Austin. The way Austin had smiled when Myra pitched the party. The way Austin looked at that boy, Peter, her tutor or whatever he was. The way Austin seemed to live her life on a short leash without ever pulling on it. Myra couldn’t tell if she didn’t notice the leash or if she’d just stopped fighting it. Either way, it made Myra want to shake her. Or protect her. She wasn’t sure which.

The problem was that she liked Austin. Myra didn’t usually like people this fast. She didn’t usually like people at all. Her family wasn’t the kind that encouraged attachments, and Myra had learned early that caring about someone was just another way to give the people around you something to use. But Austin had snuck past that. The openness. The loneliness she wore like a sweater she’d forgotten to take off. Myra had not expected to care, and now she did, and it complicated things.

She was halfway across the pedestrian bridge when the guy appeared.

He was coming from the other direction. College-aged, big, wearing a Greek letter sweatshirt and the particular confidence of a boy who had been drinking since four in the afternoon. He was weaving slightly. Not falling-down drunk. Just enough to make his spatial awareness a suggestion rather than a fact.

Myra moved to the right. He moved to the right. She moved to the left. He moved to the left. The drunk person’s dance. Usually harmless. Usually nothing.

“Hey,” he said. Loud. The kind of loud that expected a response.

Myra didn’t respond. She kept walking.

“Hey. I’m talking to you.”

She kept walking.

His hand caught her arm. Not hard. Not violent. Just entitled. The casual grab of a boy who had never been told that grabbing was not the same as asking.

“I said I’m talking to you.”

Myra stopped.

She broke his grip. Wrist rotation, sharp, fast, the kind of thing that looked like instinct if you didn’t know any better. His hand came free. His eyes went wide. Not scared yet. Confused. The confusion of a person whose script had just been rewritten.

“Don’t touch me,” Myra said.

He reached again. Because of course he did. Because boys like this always reached again, because the first no was just a line in a negotiation, because the second attempt was how you showed you were serious.

Myra hit him in the solar plexus.

He doubled over. The air left him in a rush. He dropped to one knee on the bridge, hands on his stomach, mouth open, trying to remember how breathing worked.

That should have been it. Walk away. Cross the bridge. Go home. He’d be fine. Bruised ego, sore stomach, a story he’d never tell his friends because the ending was embarrassing.

But Myra was tired. Two days without sleep, a phone call that felt like a leash, a family that asked about her life like they were grading it, roommates who wanted to be her friend, a friend she actually wanted to keep. She was tired of performing. Tired of calibrating. Tired of being exactly the right amount of fine for exactly the right number of people.

She kicked him.

Not in the stomach. Lower. Hard. The kind of kick that had nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with something inside her that needed a door to walk through.

He made a sound. High, strangled, animal. He curled onto his side on the cold bridge, hands between his legs, and Myra stood over him, breathing hard, fists clenched, and for a moment she didn’t know who she was. Not the college student. Not the other thing. Someone in between. Someone with no name and too much rage and nowhere to put it except a boy on a bridge who had made the mistake of grabbing her arm on the wrong night.

The moment passed.

She unclenched her fists. Stepped back. The river moved beneath the bridge, dark, indifferent. The boy was still curled on the ground. He was crying, or close to it. She should feel something about that. Guilt. Satisfaction. Horror. She felt tired.

“Don’t grab people,” she said. Quiet. Almost to herself.

She stepped over him and kept walking.

The bedroom was dark when she got back. Sharon was asleep on the other bed, or close to it, a lump under a comforter that smelled faintly of cinnamon. A plate of cookies sat on the desk by the door. Snickerdoodles.

Myra eased the door shut. Set her bag down. Started pulling off her boots.

“We missed you tonight,” Sharon said. Half-asleep. No accusation in it. Just warmth. “We were supposed to bake together.”

Myra’s hands paused on her bootlace. “Oh. Right. Sorry. I ran into a guy on my walk back from Burge.”

“A guy?“ Sharon’s voice perked up from under the comforter. Even half-conscious, the midwestern radar was operational.

“Not like that. Go back to sleep, Sharon.”

Sharon made a satisfied sound and burrowed deeper. Within thirty seconds, her breathing had evened out.

Myra sat on the edge of her bed. The room was quiet. The cookies were on the desk. She could smell them from here.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Austin.

Saturday is happening. I’m in. Don’t tell Rico.

Myra stared at the screen. The light from the phone made the dark room blue. Austin’s name sat there, bright, simple, trusting.

She set the phone on her chest. Stared at the ceiling. Picked it up again.

She typed back: knew you’d come around

Saturday.

What am I going to wear?

Rico was six-three, two-forty, with shoulders that didn’t fit in standard lecture hall seating. He sat in the back row of Introduction to Comparative Politics like a man who had been folded into a piece of furniture designed for someone half his size. His knees pressed against the seat in front of him. His elbows spilled over both armrests. Every time he shifted, the plastic creaked in a way that made the entire row turn around.

Tommy was smaller but worse. Tommy took notes. Not because he cared about comparative politics. Because Tommy was committed to the cover, and the cover was that he and Rico were fellow students. Fellow students took notes. So Tommy took notes, in a black tactical notebook, in handwriting so precise it looked like a ransom demand, and periodically nodded at things Professor Denton said as if the structural tensions of post-colonial governance were genuinely landing for him.

Nobody believed they were students. Not for a second. They were two ex-military professionals in their mid-thirties sitting in a freshman survey course, and every person in the room knew exactly what they were. The only question was what they were protecting, and the answer to that question was sitting in the third row, trying to disappear behind her laptop.

Austin Stella was not disappearing successfully.

It wasn’t her fault. She was good at being invisible. She’d been practicing her whole life, which was a strange thing to have to practice when you grew up on a compound in eastern Illinois with a helicopter pad, a runway long enough for a 747, and a last name that opened doors she’d never asked to walk through. The compound was technically farmland. Thousands of acres of corn and soybean that the family paid other people to operate. Her parents had the main house. Her uncle’s family had built west. Her cousins had spread across the plots like a small town that shared a name and a security perimeter. Each household had its own detail. Austin had Rico and Tommy.

She loved them. She did. Rico had taught her to drive stick when she was fifteen. Tommy had helped her move into the dorm and had arranged her bookshelf alphabetically, then by color, then back to alphabetically when she’d told him color-coding was psychotic. They were kind, professional, occasionally funny, and absolutely devastating to her social life.

Because here was the thing about being a nineteen-year-old girl at a state university with two armed men following you to class: boys didn’t talk to you. They wanted to. She could see it. The glance across the dining hall, the half-step in her direction, the moment of courage building behind some freshman’s eyes. Then they’d see Rico. Or Tommy. Or both. And the half-step would reverse, and the courage would collapse, and the boy would suddenly find something fascinating about his phone.

Four months at Iowa, and the only new person Austin had made friends with was Myra.

Myra, who was late.

Professor Denton was wrapping up his lecture on institutional decay in post-Soviet states. Austin had her laptop open, her notes color-coded, her reading done. Comparative politics was interesting. The world was full of systems that people built, maintained, and eventually broke, and Austin liked understanding how the breaking worked.

The classroom door opened.

Myra Lucetti came through it the way she came through every door: like she’d been fired from a cannon in the hallway. Bag half-open, hair doing something ambitious, coat sliding off one shoulder. She had a coffee in one hand and a crumpled paper in the other, and she was already talking before she was fully in the room.

“I have it,” she said, to no one and everyone. “I have it, it’s right here, I’m not late, the clock is fast.”

The clock was not fast. Myra was three minutes late. Professor Denton watched her approach the front of the room with the expression of a man who had been watching this particular performance all semester.

“Ms. Lucetti.”

“Professor Denton.” She slapped the paper on his desk. “My analysis of institutional decay in Yugoslav successor states. It’s good. You’ll love it. The bibliography alone is worth the read.”

“The deadline was two minutes ago.”

“And yet here we are, both alive, both holding a completed assignment. I think the system worked.”

Denton looked at the paper. Looked at Myra. Sighed the sigh of a man who had chosen education over industry and was occasionally reminded of the trade-off. He took the paper.

Myra spun, caught Austin’s eye in the third row, and performed a small, invisible fist-pump that only Austin could see. Then she dropped into the seat beside her, dropped her bag on the floor, dropped her coffee on the desk, and whispered, “I almost died.”

“You almost failed a deadline.”

“Same thing.”

Austin smiled. She couldn’t help it. Myra was a disaster in the way that some people were disasters: kinetically, warmly, in a manner that suggested the universe was slightly more entertaining for having her in it.

They’d met in the second week of the semester. Austin had been eating alone in the dining hall, Rico and Tommy two tables back, radiating don’t-approach energy so potent it was practically visible. Myra had sat down across from her, glanced at the two enormous men in tactical casual, and said, “Are those yours?”

“Bodyguards,” Austin had said, because there was no point lying about it.

“Cool,” Myra had said, stealing a fry. “I had a cousin like that once. Not bodyguards. Just large and always around.”

That had been it. No follow-up questions about why a freshman needed a security detail. No wide-eyed probing about her family. No Googling the last name. Myra had just accepted it and moved on, which was so rare in Austin’s experience that she had nearly cried into her dining hall pasta.

The lecture ended. Students packed up. Rico unfolded himself from the back row, joints cracking audibly. Tommy closed his tactical notebook and capped his pen with military precision.

Austin and Myra walked out together, Rico and Tommy falling into formation ten paces back. The afternoon was cold, late November, the Iowa campus stripped bare, trees skeletal against a gray sky, students crossing the quad in packs with their heads down against the wind.

“So,” Myra said. “This weekend.”

“What about it.”

“There’s a party. Off campus. Tyler Brennan’s place.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Nobody knows who that is. That’s the point of his parties. You go, you find out, you have a good time, you leave before the cops come.”

“Myra.”

“Austin.”

“You know I can’t just go to a party off campus.”

“You can go anywhere you want. You just go with a motorcade.” Myra jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Rico and Tommy. “Which, no offense, is not the vibe Tyler Brennan is going for.”

“They’re not a motorcade.”

“Rico is the size of a motorcade.”

Austin laughed.

“Just hear me out,” Myra said. “One night. You ditch the detail, you come with me, you drink something that comes out of a punch bowl and probably shouldn’t, you talk to a boy who is not being quietly threatened by a man with a neck like a tree trunk, and you come home. Normal college experience. One night.”

“My family would lose their minds.”

“Your family isn’t here.”

“My family is always here.”

Myra stopped walking. Turned to face Austin. Her expression was different now. Softer. Almost careful, which was not a word Austin associated with Myra under any circumstances.

“Austin. You’re nineteen. You’re at college. You have one job, and that job is to figure out who you are when nobody’s watching. You can’t do that with an audience.”

Austin looked at her. Then she looked back at Rico, who was pretending to examine a campus map, and Tommy, who was pretending to tie a shoe he was definitely not tying.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

Myra grinned. It was the grin of a person who heard I’ll think about it and translated it as yes.

“Saturday,” Myra said. “I’ll handle the details.”

They kept walking. The wind picked up. Leaves skittered across the path. Behind them, Rico and Tommy maintained their ten paces, scanning the quad with the relaxed alertness of men who had done this in places considerably more dangerous than Iowa City.

A black sedan turned onto the campus road.

It was moving slowly. Not unusually slowly. Not suspiciously slowly. Just slowly enough that Austin didn’t notice anything at all until Rico and Tommy were suddenly there. Flanking her. Close enough to touch. Their bodies between her and the street, their eyes on the car, their hands at their sides in a way that was no longer casual.

Myra was two steps to the left. Outside the formation. Unshielded.

The car passed. A faculty sticker on the windshield. An older woman behind the wheel, squinting at a parking sign. Rico and Tommy drifted back to their ten paces as smoothly as they’d closed the gap. The whole thing had taken five seconds.

“Thanks, guys,” Myra said, brushing nothing off her jacket. “Good to know where I stand.”

Austin didn’t laugh. She should have. It was funny. But for those five seconds, Rico and Tommy hadn’t been the guys who organized her bookshelf and sat in the back of lecture halls. They’d been something else. Something fast, trained, specific. And the specificity was the part that stayed with her. They hadn’t moved to protect the group. They’d moved to protect her. Just her. Myra could have been a lamppost.

She shook it off. She always shook it off.

“Austin!”

The voice came from the direction of the library. Peter was jogging toward them across the quad, backpack bouncing, one hand raised in a wave that was slightly too enthusiastic for the distance between them. He was wearing a flannel shirt over a university hoodie, and his hair was doing something that suggested he’d attempted to fix it recently and lost.

Rico and Tommy did not react. At all. Their eyes moved to Peter, performed some rapid and apparently effortless calculation, and dismissed him completely. Austin had never seen someone get cleared by her security detail so fast. Peter radiated non-threat the way other people radiated cologne.

“Hey,” Peter said, arriving slightly out of breath. “Hey. Hi. I just wanted to check. We’re still on for Sunday? The session?”

The “session” was tutoring. She’d heard someone mention “Peter, tutor” during the first week of the semester and approached him after their shared lecture about help with statistics. She’d always found it funny that people just called him “Peter tutor” instead of “Peter the tutor,” but maybe that was an Iowa thing. He’d said yes immediately, which she appreciated. The sessions were fine. Peter was patient, he seemed to understand the material well enough, and he had a habit of bringing coffee for both of them without asking what she wanted, which meant she’d been drinking black coffee for three months because she didn’t have the heart to tell him she took cream.

“Sunday works,” Austin said.

“Great. Cool. Same time? The library, the back corner, the table with the wobbly leg?”

“That’s very specific.”

“I like our table.” His ears went red. He corrected immediately. “The table. The regular table. Where we do the tutoring. The statistics tutoring.”

Behind Austin, Myra made a sound. It was not quite a groan. It was the sound a person makes when they are witnessing something they find physically uncomfortable and are choosing, heroically, not to comment on it.

“Okay,” Peter said. “Sunday. Great. I’ll bring the, uh. The textbook.”

“You brought the textbook last time.”

“I’ll bring it again. That’s what textbooks are for. Repeated bringing.” He smiled. The smile was lopsided and genuine and slightly panicked. “See you Sunday.”

He jogged away. The same slightly-too-much energy in reverse. Rico watched him go with the serene indifference of a man watching weather.

“He’s exhausting,” Myra said.

“He’s fine. He’s my tutor.”

“He’s something.“

Austin watched Peter’s flannel disappear around the corner of the science building. He was cute, in a way she hadn’t fully let herself think about yet. Harmless. Warm. The kind of boy who brought you coffee and remembered which table you liked. She’d been thinking, lately, that four months was a long time to go without kissing anyone, and that Sunday sessions in the back corner of the library were starting to feel like something she looked forward to for reasons that had nothing to do with standard deviation.

“Is he your plan?” Myra asked. “For the whole ‘meet a boy’ project?”

“He’s my best option,” Austin said.

“That’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Goodbye, Myra.”

Myra grinned and peeled off toward the arts building, coat sliding off her shoulder, coffee somehow still in hand. Austin watched her go. Behind her, Rico fell back into step.

“Be careful with that one,” Rico said. Quiet. Not a command. Not even advice, exactly. Just a thing he said sometimes, about Myra specifically, the way you’d note that it looked like rain.

“She’s fine, Rico.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to.

She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and kept walking.

Austin Stella walked across the quad in the late November cold, flanked by two men with guns under their jackets, heading for a dorm room that was the first place she had ever lived that felt like hers.

Four months. She’d been here four months, and she’d mostly loved it, and she’d mostly felt sheltered, and she’d mostly been fine with both of those things. Her family was three hours east and forty minutes up. The compound held. The system ran. The machine her family had built, for reasons she’d never been told and never thought to ask, kept turning. Her mother would call tonight, the way she called every night. Her father would be in the background, not talking, the way he was always in the background, not talking.

But she was thinking about Sunday. The library. The wobbly table. Peter bringing coffee she didn’t have the heart to refuse. His ears going red when he said something too honest. She was thinking that maybe, if the moment was right, she’d lean across the table and kiss him, and then she thought no, only skanks make out in a library, and then she thought about Saturday. Myra’s party. Off campus. No detail. No Rico. No Tommy. Just a house full of strangers and punch that probably shouldn’t be trusted and the possibility of being, for one night, a normal girl at a normal party.

Maybe Myra was onto something.

She pulled out her phone. Opened her contacts. Typed P.

That was the thing Tiergarten kept thinking as he walked down the corridor toward the council chamber. He had expected it to weigh more. It contained a device that could end the world. A transmitter wired to a heartbeat monitor that had been surgically implanted against his heart three days ago by the Doctor, who had steady hands and a talent for incisions. Two thin wires emerged from beneath his collarbone, ran under his shirt, and clipped into the monitor in the briefcase. He was tethered to it. Tethered to a guidance system in the Austrian Alps, which was locked onto an asteroid that had already been fired.

There was no calling it back. The asteroid was in motion, executing gravitational slingshots around celestial bodies, each one adding speed. Course corrections were handled by an experimental ion engine Tiergarten had developed, powered by solar collectors with a functional lifespan of one thousand years.

Hitler’s Reich was supposed to last that long. Tiergarten had bet on his lasting longer. But he’d have to make it through the night first.

The guidance system required a regular all-clear command. If the command came, the asteroid kept circling. If it didn’t, the system defaulted.

The default was Earth.

He stopped at the doors. Adjusted his tie. Elise had tied it that morning. Her hands steady, her eyes red. She hadn’t let him see the crying, but he’d seen what caused it: her gaze catching on the wires that emerged from his collarbone, the incisions still healing, the device the Doctor had sutured against his heart. She knew what it meant. All of it. The weight he’d sewn into his own chest. The world on one side, her husband on the other, and nothing between them but a heartbeat. She had tied the knot carefully, the way she did everything, and then she had kissed him. The kiss was goodbye, but she refused to say it.

The knot wasn’t right anymore. His hands were shaking too badly to fix it, so he left it.

Halford had invited him tonight. A personal status update on the asteroid project, delivered to the full council. It was an honor. Halford’s way of showing off his prized acquisition to the other eleven families. *Look what my investment built.* Tiergarten had accepted the invitation the day it arrived and had spent every hour since preparing to use it as a door.

The Mason was already inside. That had been the plan. The German Mason had arrived early for the quarterly session, the way he always did. All twelve chairs required. Full attendance. The Masons too. Every nation’s dog, lined up in the gallery behind the table, hands behind their backs. One dog in a row of dogs.

Every government had a Mason. Masons were the lowest rung on the Illuminati ladder. Disgraced bloodlines. Broken families stripped of name, stripped of standing, put to work as liaisons between the twelve families and the governments they managed. Dogs. You sent a Mason because sending one said *you’re not worth a real visit.* They stood in rooms where powerful men spoke freely because a Mason was beneath the basic human instinct to guard your tongue.

The German Mason had not always been a dog. His family had been just below the council. Connected. Respected. Close enough to power that his father had made the mistake of assuming he had some. Eleven years ago, his father had overstepped. The council wiped the bloodline. Every member. Every branch. Gone in a single night. Except a twelve-year-old boy.

He was twenty-three now. He had been the German Mason for five of those years. The council trusted him because that was what Masons were for. Loyal, obedient, and too broken to bother watching.

He was the one they had sent to approach Tiergarten after the launch. The Illuminati wanted the asteroid. Germany had built the rocket, Germany had funded the mission, but the Illuminati saw the long game. They wanted to claim the prize. Provide a cover story. The Mason had been tasked with making the introduction because he was good at introductions. Quiet. Nonthreatening. Easy to talk to, if you noticed him at all.

Tiergarten had noticed him. They kept running into each other after that. Receptions. Dinners. The Mason was always in the gallery. Tiergarten was always the guest of honor. Two men on opposite sides of the room who had each, for different reasons, stopped believing in the room.

They had been underestimating him since the day they gave him the role. He was patient the way geology was patient.

The Doctor was outside. Parked in a car two blocks from the building, monitoring a secondary signal from the briefcase. If anyone in that room put a bullet in Tiergarten’s chest, or cut the wires, the Doctor would know in three seconds. Not that knowing would help. If Tiergarten died, the all-clear commands stopped. The guidance system would wait for its next command, receive nothing, and default. Nothing on Earth could change that.

The Doctor had also packed sandwiches.

Tiergarten had stared at the sandwiches. “We are about to hold the most powerful organization in human history at gunpoint, and you packed sandwiches.”

“It could be a long night,” the Doctor had said, reasonably.

“It could be our last night.”

“Then I’d prefer not to spend it hungry.”

The Doctor was like that. Practical about everything except the things that mattered, about which he was wildly, recklessly idealistic. He was a surgeon. A good one. Jewish, like his wife, in a Germany that was getting harder for Jewish people by the month. He could read a trend line. He had watched his colleagues lose positions, watched the rhetoric sharpen, watched the laws tighten like a fist closing slowly enough that people could pretend it wasn’t closing at all. He could see where this was going. Most people couldn’t. The Doctor could, because the Doctor was precise about everything, including the calibration of his own fear.

The Banker was in America. He had left a week ago on what appeared to be routine business, because the Banker’s entire life appeared to be routine business. Numbers, accounts, transfers. He had the kind of face that made people assume he was thinking about money. He usually was. What they didn’t know was whose money he was thinking about.

For the past six weeks, the Banker had been moving the Illuminati’s money. Not the petty cash. The foundations. The trusts. The reserves that had been accumulating for centuries. He had left the council enough to live comfortably. Generous, even. But the operational wealth, the war chest, the capital that turned a secret society into a shadow government? Gone. Rerouted through shell accounts so layered that even the Illuminati’s own auditors would need months to trace the path. By then the money would be in accounts the Banker had built from scratch. Claimed. Kept.

If the council wanted to send men after Tiergarten tonight, they would find the machine no longer had fuel. The Banker had not borrowed their wealth. He had taken it.

Tiergarten pushed open the doors.

The council chamber was smaller than people imagined. The Illuminati did not build cathedrals to themselves. They built rooms where twelve people could sit close enough to read each other’s faces. The table was round because hierarchy was expressed through other means.

All twelve seats were occupied. Quarterly meeting. Full council. Tiergarten knew them by their family names: Vandemeer, Marchetti, Ashworth, Orsini, Delacroix, and on through the table. Twelve families, twelve domains, twelve pieces of a machine that had been running longer than most nations.

Halford sat in the twelfth seat. Science. He had been the one to authorize the Mason’s approach after the launch. Who had courted Tiergarten at dinners, praised his genius, invited him into the inner circle because a man who could move asteroids was too valuable to leave in Germany’s hands. Who had, at one of those dinners, after too much wine, shown Tiergarten exactly what kind of people he’d been drinking with.

Halford smiled when Tiergarten entered. The smile of a man presenting a prized acquisition.

“Gentlemen,” Halford said, addressing the table. “Dr. Emil Tiergarten. The man who built our rocket.”

Polite nods. Vandemeer drummed two fingers on the table. Delacroix, thin and precise, adjusted his spectacles without looking up. Ashworth leaned back with the practiced ease of a man who controlled what people read. Orsini sat still, hands folded, watching the way a priest watches a confession.

Tiergarten glanced at the gallery behind them. The Masons. A row of blank faces. He found the German Mason the way you find a familiar book on a shelf full of identical spines. Same posture as the others. Same empty expression. The only difference was the absence of anything at all behind the eyes. A perfect zero where most of the Masons at least performed mild attention. Tiergarten looked away.

He set the briefcase on the table. He did not sit down. Standing was part of it.

“Thank you, Halford,” Tiergarten said. “The asteroid is performing exactly as designed. Better, in fact. The slingshot efficiency exceeded my projections by three percent.”

“Wonderful,” Halford said. “Continue.”

“I changed the targeting parameters.”

Silence has texture. The silence in the room had the texture of ice forming on a lake. Twelve faces processing the same sentence at twelve different speeds.

Vandemeer was fastest. His hand moved toward his jacket. Then it stopped. *Changed the targeting parameters.* Vandemeer was not a scientist, but he understood what it meant when someone who built a weapon told you, calmly, that the weapon had been repointed. His hand came back to the table. For now.

“Explain,” Halford said. His smile had frozen.

“The asteroid,” Tiergarten said. “The one I built the rocket for. The one Germany launched. The one you’ve been trying to claim through back channels and cover stories for the past two years. It is no longer on the trajectory you were promised.”

He opened the briefcase. Inside was a transmitter, a bundle of wires, a metal box roughly the size of a man’s fist. Two thin wires ran from the box, up through the opening of the case, and disappeared into his shirt. Beneath the fabric, the wires emerged from two small incisions below his collarbone. Sutured. Healing. Connected to something that had been placed against his heart by a surgeon who believed in what they were doing enough to make the cut.

A red light on the monitor pulsed steadily. In rhythm. His rhythm.

“The device you are looking at is clipped to a heartbeat monitor that has been surgically implanted against my heart. It cannot be removed without killing me. Killing me is, as I’m about to explain, the one thing you cannot afford to do.”

He let that sit.

“The asteroid has been fired. It requires a regular all-clear command to stay on its current trajectory. If the command comes, it keeps circling. Accelerating. Indefinitely. The ion engine is solar-powered. The collectors will function for a thousand years. You cannot starve it. You cannot wait it out.”

He paused.

“If the command doesn’t come, the system defaults. The default is Earth.”

Ashworth spoke first. “You’re bluffing.”

“I am a physicist,” Tiergarten said. “I have never bluffed about anything in my life. I miscalculated the load tolerance on a fuel pump in 1936. It cost me eight months of work. I do not guess. I do not bluff. I build things that work.”

Vandemeer had been trying, twice now, to catch the eye of someone across the table. *Handle this. Send the order.* But the order required money, channels, men. Things that no longer belonged to the people in this room.

“Your accounts have been restructured,” Tiergarten said. “Not your household funds. Those are untouched. You will live comfortably. But the operational capital, the reserves, the machinery that makes this council more than twelve people at a table? That money is ours now. If you believe I am bluffing about the asteroid, you should know that the funds have already been moved. That part is arithmetic, and your auditors will confirm it by morning.”

“What do you want?” Halford asked.

“I want you to listen while I describe the terms of your surrender.”

The word landed like a stone in still water.

“You are the most powerful organization in the world,” Tiergarten continued. “You have the reach to topple governments, redirect economies, reshape the course of nations. I know this because you told me. Over dinners. Over drinks. Because you were courting me, and men who are courting get generous with their secrets.”

“I built a rocket for Germany. You came to me afterward because you wanted the prize without the work. Fine. That is what you do. But while you were courting me, I was watching. I saw what is happening in this country. The rhetoric. The laws. The machinery being assembled. I know what comes next. So do you. Every person at this table knows what Germany is building, because your Mason stands in the gallery of this room every quarter and tells you.”

He placed both hands on the table.

“You are powerful enough to stop it. You have the money, the networks, the leverage to intervene. You could end this before it begins. But you won’t. Because you see profit in the chaos. Because human suffering is, to the people in this room, a market condition.”

His voice cracked on the next word. Not much. A fracture so small that most of the men at the table missed it. Halford didn’t.

“I cannot stop what Germany has put in motion. I am one man. But I can make sure that the people who *could* stop it, the people who *choose* not to, never lead unchecked again. That is why I am holding a gun to the head of the entire world. Because it is the only gun large enough to make you accountable.”

The room was very still.

“The terms,” Tiergarten said. “My bloodline holds the codes. In perpetuity. The all-clear command passes to my heirs, and their heirs, and their heirs after that. The money we have taken is ours. You will not attempt to recover it. You will not touch my family. You will not surveil my family. You will not interfere with our operations. In exchange, the commands keep coming. The asteroid keeps circling. Your planet continues to exist. That is the transaction.”

The Orsini patriarch leaned back in his chair. He had not spoken until now. When he did, his voice was conversational. Almost gentle. The tone of a man discussing dinner arrangements.

“Perhaps we cannot kill you, Dr. Tiergarten. But we can find your family. Your friends. Everyone you have ever loved. We can make the remainder of your life so painful that you beg us to stop your heart yourself.”

“You will certainly try,” he said. “But that’s what the money is for.”

Delacroix leaned forward. “And if we find a way to disable the device? In ten years, twenty? Technology advances.”

“Then you’d better hope you’re right. Because if you try and fail, my heart stops and you have approximately sixty years to make peace with God. And gentlemen, given what you’ve chosen to look away from, I would not count on a warm reception.”

Ashworth laughed. Short. Strangled. The laugh of a man confronted by something so audacious that his body responded before his politics could intervene.

Tiergarten almost smiled. Almost. He was too frightened to smile. His hands were steady on the table because he had locked his elbows. Beneath his shirt, his heart was hammering so hard he was half convinced the monitor would misread a spike for a flatline and end everything right here, which would be the most darkly comic ending in the history of human civilization, and he could not think about that or he would lose his composure entirely.

“The German Mason,” Halford said, slowly, his eyes moving to the gallery, “is standing very quietly.”

“They’re all standing quietly,” Tiergarten said. “That’s what Masons do.”

“This one is standing differently.”

“He is part of this.”

It was not a question.

The Mason stepped forward. One step. Just enough to leave the gallery. Eleven years since they killed his family. Five of those spent carrying messages for the men who did it, performing obedience so convincingly that the people who had murdered everyone he loved spoke freely in front of him. All of it resolved into a single step away from the row of Masons who remained exactly where they were, motionless, as one of their own walked toward the table.

“I know every route your couriers use,” the Mason said. His voice was quiet, the voice of a man accustomed to not being heard. “Every safe house. Every dead drop. Every name you use when you don’t want to be yourselves. You said these things in front of me because I was no one. I have been filing them away for five years. Dr. Tiergarten will be taking this information with him. Insurance, in case the physics are not sufficiently persuasive.”

Vandemeer’s gun was out before the Mason finished speaking.

Drawn, leveled, aimed at the center of the Mason’s chest. Vandemeer’s face had gone past red into something white, something bloodless, the color of a man who has just realized that the dog has been listening for five years.

“You ungrateful animal,” Vandemeer said. “I will put you down right here.”

The Mason looked at the gun.

His hand moved toward the gallery. Then it stopped. For one beat, maybe two, the hand hung in the air between the Mason and the briefcase he’d left behind, and in that gap was everything that could go wrong. Twenty-three years old, a gun aimed at his chest, and the next thing he had to do was turn his back on the man holding it.

He reached. Slowly. Lifted the briefcase. Set it on the table. Opened it.

Identical to Tiergarten’s. The same transmitter. The same monitor. The same red light, pulsing steadily. Two thin wires ran from the box, up through the opening of the case, and disappeared into the Mason’s suit sleeve. Up the arm. Under the jacket. Into the chest.

The room went very still.

“Every member of this operation is protected by the same system,” Tiergarten said. “The Mason. My other partners. Each one wired to the same guidance system. Kill any one of us, and the failsafe triggers. One heartbeat stops, the all-clear command stops. One is sufficient.”

“I would lower that,” Tiergarten said. “You are currently pointing a gun at a man whose heartbeat is the only thing standing between you and an extinction event.”

Vandemeer lowered the gun.

“You have a choice,” Tiergarten said. “You can accept the terms. Or you can refuse, and live with the knowledge that every person wired into this system is now your responsibility. You don’t know how many there are. You don’t know where they are. But if any one of them dies, for any reason, the commands stop. An accident. An illness. A stray bullet from someone who doesn’t know what they’re shooting at. One death. That’s all it takes.” He let that sit. “You wanted to threaten my family. I’d suggest you spend that energy protecting mine instead.”

Marchetti spread his hands. “And what if you get ill? What if you fall down a well? Is that our problem too?”

“Then it’d be wise,” the Mason said, “to toast to our health.”

Halford studied Tiergarten for a long time. The smile was gone.

“We will need to discuss this,” Halford said.

“Of course,” Tiergarten said.

He stepped back from the table. Gave them the room. It was a courtesy, and he meant it as one. These men had just lost everything. The least he could do was let them pretend they were deciding.

The vote was seven to five.

Tiergarten watched it happen and filed every hand.

The yeas were either afraid or already doing the math. He assumed both. Fear and calculation were not mutually exclusive, and the men who voted yes were the kind who could hold both at once. They were already plotting. Of course they were. The timeline was the only question. He could work with timelines.

The nays were something else. Vandemeer threw a glass against the wall and voted no. Orsini voted no without a word. Three others joined them, faces carved from stone, pride overriding the only survival instinct that mattered.

The nays were the dumb ones. The ones who would come for him.

He would have to handle them when they landed in America.

Outside, the night air hit Tiergarten like a wall. Cold. Alpine cold. The kind that came down from the mountains and got into your lungs and made you feel every breath like a small declaration.

The Mason walked beside him. Neither spoke for a full block. Their footsteps echoed off the cobblestones.

The Doctor’s car was parked beneath a linden tree. The engine was running. The passenger window rolled down as they approached. The Doctor’s face appeared, calm, faintly curious, the way he might look if someone had told him an interesting fact about migratory birds.

“Well?” the Doctor said.

“They agreed,” Tiergarten said.

“All of them?”

“Seven to five.”

The Doctor was quiet for a moment. “The five.”

“I know,” Tiergarten said.

The Doctor nodded. “Get in. You look terrible.”

Tiergarten got in. The Mason got in.

“You were supposed to show the wires coming out of your chest,” Tiergarten said.

The Mason didn’t answer immediately. He unbuttoned his jacket. Beneath it, his white shirt was soaked through with red from the collar to the belt.

“The stitches ripped an hour before the meeting. The Brazil Mason shook my hand too hard.”

Tiergarten stared at him. Three hours in the gallery, bleeding through his shirt, jacket buttoned, face a mask.

“Moving it up your sleeve meant you had to disconnect the wires.”

“It does.”

“It means your case was inert.”

“It was.”

Tiergarten was quiet for a moment. The sleeve route hadn’t been a variation on the plan. It had been a bluff inside a bluff. The red light, the wires, the identical briefcase. Theater. If Vandemeer had pulled the trigger, nothing would have happened. Then twelve very angry men would have turned to look at Tiergarten.

“If they shot you in the chest and nothing happened, what do you think they’d do to me?”

“Shoot you in the face?”

“That would have been a shame when they learned my case was real.”

“I’ll stitch you on the plane,” the Doctor said, already pulling away from the curb.

The car headed for the private airfield outside the city where the Banker had a plane waiting. Chicago, with a stop in New York. The Banker was already in the States, had been for a week, preparing the ground. New identities. New accounts. A new life in a country none of them had ever lived in.

Tiergarten’s hands began to shake. He pressed them between his knees. The shaking didn’t stop. It migrated up his arms, into his shoulders, into his jaw. The adrenaline was leaving and what replaced it was a void so vast he could feel himself tilting into it.

“Here,” the Doctor said, reaching back without looking. He pressed wax-paper bundles into Tiergarten’s hands. Three of them. Warm. “One for each of you. I made extra.”

Tiergarten passed one to the Mason. Kept one. Unwrapped it.

“Eat the sandwich, Emil.”

Tiergarten ate the sandwich. It was cheese on dark bread with mustard. It was the finest thing he had ever tasted.

The Mason ate his without comment. Methodically. But his hands, holding the wax paper, were trembling. He was twenty-three years old, eating a cheese sandwich in the back of a car, and his hands would not stop shaking.

The Doctor ate his sandwich while he drove. One hand on the wheel, one hand on the bread. Practical to the last.

They drove in silence toward the airfield. Switzerland slid past the windows, dark, quiet, neutral.

Tiergarten watched the mountains disappear behind them. He thought about the asteroid, circling, accelerating, waiting for its next command. He thought about the council, still sitting in that room, recalculating. He thought about Chicago, a city he had never seen, in a country whose language he barely spoke.

*I’d better start studying my English.*

The thought surprised him. It was so ordinary. He had spent six months planning to hold the world hostage. He had not spent a single hour planning what came after, because he had not believed there would be an after. Every scenario, every calculation had accounted for failure. None of them had accounted for this: sitting in the back of a car, eating a cheese sandwich, trembling, alive, heading for a plane to a country where he needed to learn the word for *bread.*

The Doctor broke the silence.

“So what do we call ourselves?”

The Mason looked up from his sandwich. “Crew names are beneath us.”

“After tonight, we’re more than a crew,” the Doctor said. He was still driving one-handed, still eating, still practical. But his voice had changed. Quieter. “Our fates are intertwined now. That’s stronger than family.”

Silence. The car hummed. The mountains receded.

“Family,” Tiergarten said, quietly. He turned the word over. Then: “The project name was Stella Casus. What about calling ourselves Stella?”

“I love it,” the Doctor said.

The Mason chewed. Swallowed. Looked out the window at the dark Swiss countryside sliding past.

“I don’t hate it.”

Tiergarten looked up through the window. The Swiss sky was clear, and the stars hung bright and close the way they only did in the mountains. Thousands of them. Ancient, indifferent, burning.

Four more had just taken their place.