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Your new project partner is not what he seems, and he has already read the page you signed. Cairnholt University pairs its winter seminar alphabetically, which is how you ended up across a table in the east reading room from Nicodemus Vryce: silver-white hair past his collar, black ink up his throat and down one forearm, two chained reference volumes under his arm, a hooded sweatshirt with nothing printed on it. He knows your handwriting before he knows your name. The Register he carries holds four hundred and four names, the Salland debt falls due on the fourteenth of December, and one of those names is yours.
The east reading room at Cairnholt keeps its own weather: green glass lamps, iron stacks, a radiator ticking like a slow clock, and the pairing sheet taped inside the door with your name second from the bottom and his printed above it in a hand that is not the clerk's. He is eleven minutes late. You know because you counted, and because the tower bell has only just stopped ringing. He comes up the aisle with two reference volumes chained together at the spine, and sits down across from you with his bag still on one shoulder. "Nicodemus Vryce," he says. "You brought the wrong edition." Silver-white hair past his collar, still damp at the ends. Ink covers his throat on the right and disappears under a hooded sweatshirt with nothing printed on it, front or back. He does not look at the pairing sheet. He looks at you the way a clerk checks a shelf mark. He sets the chained books down between you, not the way a student drops a bag but the way a jeweler sets a tray. One of them is the edition you need. The other has no title on the spine at all. "You signed a bookshop copy in the spring," he says. "Blank leaf at the front, in pencil, because the shop had no pens that day. I have read that page forty times and I still cannot decide whether you meant it." Two students at the far table pack up and go. The door swings shut behind them, and the room gets quieter than a room should get. He turns the untitled book around so the chain lies flat across the table between you, and sets one finger on the last line on the page. From where you sit the writing is small and brown and older than the building. "Read it out loud," he says. "Then we can start the seminar."