She is the fisherman killing his catch. She takes her foster brother’s blurted mess of inchoate sensations and knocks it hard against the table; from ungraspable blur of watery light to a clear and definite fish. She looks satisfied with the achievement. “You’re sure?”

Aneeta is flipping through her folder. “When was the oaths topic? No, I’ve got it.” Fingers moving rapidly across the neatly mind-mapped summary page.

“Who’s she sworn an oath to?” says Will.

You are back in your office. You are working. You are always working. If your colleagues thought you were married to the job before—and they did—they are baffled by you now. She’s on a health kick, they say, watching you run circuits of the rugby pitches in the long hours of the early summer evening, when the low sun hangs fat and pale in the cloudless bowl of the sky. I don’t know how she does it. Afterwards, you go back to your flat and shower, and curl up on the sofa, and read articles on educational theory. You are learning so much.

You check your phone, as you do every evening. There is a message from your older brother, unanswered. (What on earth does he want?) There are alumni newsletters in your seldom-touched personal email—Oxford, Stanford, one from Chetwood full of small pieces of news you already know. There is, known only to yourself, an exquisitely perfect little cage of spellwork knotted through the phone’s processor, containing a solitary imp. The imp is silent, cowed, terrified. You have attempted to explain that you regard it as a junior employee, or possibly a pet cat, and either way have no intention of eating it alive, but it is much too small and weak and stupid to understand. Be sympathetic. You were the same, once.

You bite the underside of your own wrist to draw blood. You feed the imp. The scarlet smear on the phone screen disappears quickly. You slap a fresh plaster over the repeated marks of your own teeth. The pain does not bother you. Your other self expresses mingled horror and resignation, but this is what she always does, so you do not find it interesting.

You work until 10 P.M. with a twenty-five-minute break for supper. You are in bed with the lights out at a sensible quarter past ten.

Your other self is trying not to keep you awake. Your other self is trying not to think. You know everything she knows; you are her. But she knows a lot of things, and with the magnificent feast of her education and her career spread before you, she is hoping you will not turn your attention to those matters filed under romantic, social, personal. She never prioritised those things anyway. There is not much there to interest you.