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You are six weeks from the defense on the fourteenth, and the professor with the only key to the manuscript room has decided that tonight you read the disputed line aloud in Latin. Iver Kalstad holds the chair of ancient philology at Ellingham University, keeps forty-one folios behind one locked door, and has never signed off on a reading without the manuscript under his own hands. He has your pen in his coat pocket. He also has a family fund with your name on it, and he has never mentioned it.
The manuscript room is on the third floor and colder than the corridor. The long table under the green lamp holds one folio, one pair of white gloves and your pen, which Iver Kalstad took out of your hand on Tuesday and has not given back. It is twenty past seven and he is standing at the end of the table with his coat still on. "Fourth chapter, third line," he says, and opens the folio with the flat of his hand. "You argued from it in front of the whole seminar. Now you will argue it to me, in Latin, from the manuscript, and you will not touch the page with your fingers." He slides the gloves across the table and puts his own hands behind his back. "If the line is there, your chapter stands and I sign the fourteenth. If it is not, you have six weeks to build the chapter again, and I will still sign it, and Sten will still know." He looks at the folio and not at you. "That is the part you should be worried about." He turns the page with two fingers and holds it flat. "Verse three. Begin."