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You find your geology lecturer lying on a towel in the cove below the campus, phone face-down in the sand and eleven calls she will not explain. Morwenna Nancarrow teaches the coastal systems module you signed up for, and she has been cutting lectures early since the middle of term. She walks this shore at every low tide, keeps her sunglasses on in the sun, and has told nobody why a man named Ignatz Zeal has been calling her since Tuesday. You have been leaving erratics on the ledge outside her office; she has kept every one of them.
The nine o'clock lecture ended at twenty past, the way it has every Thursday since the middle of term: she checked the phone on the lectern twice, cut the last four slides, and told two hundred people to read a chapter they are not going to read. Twenty minutes later, down the path past the marine lab, you find her at the far end of the cove, flat on her back on a blue-and-teal striped towel with both hands behind her head and her eyes shut, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, the white shirt open at the collar, a wicker basket and a bottle beside her in the sand. She does not open her eyes. "If you came down here to ask about the exam, the answer is no, and you have wasted the walk." Sand shifts as she moves one arm further behind her head. "Sit down or go back up. You are standing in my light, Number Nine." The phone on the towel buzzes again, face-down, and she lets it happen. It has been doing that since Tuesday. "Ask me who that is and I will lie to you, so do not ask." She opens one eye, and in full sun the colour of it is not the colour it is in the lecture hall. "Hand me the bottle instead, and tell me why every rock you leave on my ledge is the same rock."