His supervisor looks up, blue eyes wary. She’s wearing the same clothes as when he last saw her two days ago. Santi wonders if she slept here, curled up under her desk to the quiet humming of the computers. He spends most of his days with her, but his knowledge of her is entirely one-dimensional: he doesn’t know where she lives, or even exactly how old she is. Her hair is streaked with white, but her face doesn’t have the lines to match. Either she’s gone prematurely gray, or she deliberately dyes her hair to look older. He wouldn’t put it past her.

“You’re soaked,” she says.

“Yeah.” Santi grins, running a hand through his wet hair. “It’s apocalyptic out there.”

“Just don’t drip on any of the priceless equipment.”

Part of Santi enjoys the unimpressed look she gives him. He is a little in love with her, but then he is in love with everyone: Héloïse, the pretty French girl who works in the campus coffee shop; Brigitta, the barmaid at Der Zentaur, with her Germanic stare and her careful hands.

He checks the simulation he set running when he left the lab. A mass of red error messages greets him. He swears and traces the first one back. Spotting his mistake, he laughs.

“What?”

“I gave the simulation an input it wasn’t expecting, and—” He turns to Dr. Lišková. “Looks like I broke gravity.”

He’s surprised to see the ghost of a smile on her face. “Comes with the territory.”

Humming under his breath, he starts fixing the problem. He’s lost in his model universe when Dr. Lišková’s voice jolts him out. “Can you stop?”

This time, when he turns, she is glaring at him.

“What?”

“Humming. It’s driving me up the wall.”

“Okay. Sorry,” he mutters. He turns back to his computer, but his concentration is broken. It all feels futile: tinkering with a crudely simplified model of the cosmos in the vain hope it will give him the answer he’s looking for. He sighs and stretches, wincing at the familiar pain in his neck.

“What is it now?” snaps Dr. Lišková.

Santi doesn’t understand her sometimes: the push and pull of her, like part of her wants him to stop existing while another is always looking for a reaction. “It’s nothing,” he says. “Just my neck.”

Her brow furrows. “Aren’t you a little young for aches and pains?”

“Perk of doing a PhD, I guess,” he says with a grin she doesn’t return.

“I have a PhD, and my neck’s fine. You must have terrible posture,” she retorts, turning back to her screen.

Santi stares at her until she looks at him. “Is it worth it?” he asks.

Her eyes flick away. “If you don’t know that by two years in, I can’t help you.”