The library's upper mezzanine was quieter in December.
The lower levels still had the study-group noise of students working toward midterms, but up here the sound thinned into the hush of people who had been using this floor long enough to understand it required something different. The suspended astrolabe turned slowly in the atrium below. The mana-lamps burned at their reading frequency — warmer than the session-hall setting, calibrated for hours rather than minutes.
Vane had been at the corner table for forty minutes when Isole arrived.
She came around the archive shelf with her books under one arm and the research folder under the other, sat down across from him with the composed precision she brought to all formal spaces, and arranged everything with the efficiency of someone who had been setting up this table for two years. She opened the archive folder. She found the section she had been working on. She settled.
"Thorne?" she said, without looking up.
"Yes," he said.
