Chapter 4: The Ratchet

The June board meeting lasted four hours. Josip found her in the analysis lab afterward. His collar was dark with sweat and he dropped into the chair across from her desk without asking.

"Kassar gets the east wing," he said. "Sixty-subject expansion, five-year timeline, full lab build-out."

Maren waited.

"Davorka gets a letter of support. She can pursue external funding independently." He rubbed his face. "That's the meaning of the quote, translated from bureaucratic into human."

"So they chose."

"They chose by not choosing. They funded the thing that fits in the existing building and wished the other thing good luck." He rubbed his face. "Pavle tried. He genuinely tried. But you can't build a forge in an east wing that's being converted to a clean room, and the board looked at two proposals and picked the one that didn't require buying land in another country."

The analysis lab was quiet. Saturday. The ventilation cycled. The clock on the wall ticked — analog, never replaced, the kind of thing that survived at this institution through gentle neglect. From somewhere below, the intermittent clang of the maintenance team.

"How did the vote split?" Maren asked.

"Seven to three. Kassar abstained."

"She abstained?"

"She said it would be inappropriate to vote on her own proposal." He let that sit. "Technically true."

Maren reached for a pen, turned it in her fingers. The board had picked the option that was already shaped like the building.

"What's Davorka going to do?" she said instead.

"What Davorka always does. She has a plan. She had a plan before the meeting. She probably had a plan before the proposal." He paused. "She's already talking to a land trust in Primorska. Coastal site, south-facing, good solar exposure. There's a decommissioned agricultural station with existing water rights."

"How do you know this?"

"Because she told me. Before the meeting. She told me before the meeting, Maren."

Maren wasn't sure whether this was strategic brilliance or the kind of certainty that made her nervous.

In July, the east wing renovations began. Construction barriers went up in the corridor connecting the east wing to the main building. The noise of drilling and sawing replaced the old quiet of the hallway where Maren had spent nine years walking to the analysis lab. The clean room specifications required sealed air systems, which meant the east wing's ventilation was disconnected from the main building's. The air on either side of the construction barrier began to smell different: the main building still carried the old scent of limestone and floor polish and coffee, while the east wing started to smell like fresh drywall and electrical insulation and something chemical that Maren couldn't identify.

Nobody decided to stop eating together. It just happened. The construction schedule shifted the east wing team's work hours, which shifted their meal times, which meant they started eating at the second seating instead of the first. Within two weeks, the refectory had a first-seating population (the main building) and a second-seating population (the east wing), and the social dynamics of shared meals dissolved without anyone noticing.

Maren noticed. She started eating at both seatings — her main meal with the first group, then tea with the second. The east wing team made room for her with the careful politeness of people who understood the gesture and didn't believe it would change anything. She drank a lot of tea that month.

Tomas ate at the second seating. He did not ask her to join him there. She went anyway, most days, and they sat together and talked about things that weren't the expansion and weren't the settlement and weren't the growing list of subjects they had silently agreed to avoid, which was getting long enough that their conversations were developing odd gaps, like a path that keeps routing around obstacles.

In the third week of July, Maren wrote a proposal. She spent a weekend on it, sitting on the flat limestone ledge behind the west annex. The lizard was gone. She wrote a shared analytical framework — same data protocols, same statistical methods, same reporting standards for both Kassar's trial and the Velden monitoring. The results could be compared directly.

She sent it on a Monday morning. Pavle replied within an hour: thoughtful, would circulate. Nobody else replied. She checked the access log after two weeks. Kassar's team had opened it three times. Davorka's team once. Nobody commented.

She did not write another proposal.

In August, Kassar's team requested dedicated access to the primary sequencing platform. Sixty subjects needed significant sequencing time. Fair enough. What it meant in practice was that Josip's microbiome work and Davorka's Velden analysis both lost half their scheduled hours.

Maren sat on the allocation committee. The argument wasn't about philosophy anymore. It was about Tuesday afternoons on the sequencer. You could hold two philosophical positions in productive tension. You could not run two protocols on the same machine at the same time. She sat through the meeting with her jaw tight, gripping her pen hard enough that her thumbnail went white.

"Not with a speech," Josip said afterward, walking with her through the courtyard. The bicycle was gone from the oak tree. "With a scheduling conflict."

Maren laughed. It wasn't funny. Josip shrugged.

Davorka's office was being packed when Maren found her in September. The pine resin diffuser was still running — the last thing on the desk that wasn't in a box. The letter knife was already packed. Journals in stacks on the floor. The room smelled like packing tape and pine and the dust that comes off old paper when you move it.

"I'm not leaving yet," Davorka said, without looking up. She was wrapping something in newspaper. "The land trust finalized last week. We have the site. Construction starts in October. I'm moving the fieldwork office to Koper, which is ninety minutes from the coast site and cheaper than shipping journals twice." She set the wrapped object in a box. "I'll commute to the Institute for the analysis work until the settlement has its own capacity."

"When will that be?"

"Two years. Maybe three. Depends on how fast we can build the analytical engines."

"Analytical engines?"

Davorka looked up. "We can't depend on the Institute's computing indefinitely. The sequencer allocation proved that."

"You're talking about mechanical computation."

"I'm talking about building machines that can do population-scale statistical analysis without electricity. Gear-driven calculating engines. Analog, single-purpose, human-powered. Machines that can only do what we wind them to do." She picked up another object. "It's been done. Babbage designed it. The tide-prediction machines worked. Fire-control computers in the second war were entirely mechanical. The question isn't whether it's possible. The question is whether it's practical at the scale we need."

"Is it?"

"I don't know yet. That's one of the things we'll find out." She paused. "I notice you're still standing in the doorway."

"I'm processing."

"You've been processing for a year, Maren. At some point the processing has to produce an output."

That was sharper than Davorka usually was with her. Maren's throat tightened. She looked at the boxes, the journals, the diffuser still running in the half-empty room.

"Who's going with you?" she asked.

"Twenty-seven people have committed so far. We need fifty for the first phase." She set a box on the floor and straightened. Her knees cracked. "Lenka was going to be one of them. She changed her mind last week. Said she couldn't justify leaving a funded position for something that might not have running water by December." Davorka's jaw tightened. "She's not wrong about the water. But I had her slotted for the analytical work, and now I need someone else, and the list of people who can do population-scale biostatistics without electronic computation is not long."

Her cheekbones were sharper than Maren remembered. She moved her neck like something in it was stiff. "The question you're actually asking is whether I want you to come."

"That's the question I'm actually asking."

"I want you to come. I've wanted you to come since before this started. You know that."

"I know that."

"But I won't ask. You have to decide this without me asking, because if I ask, you'll say yes out of loyalty instead of conviction, and I need people who are there because they believe the premise, not because they love the teacher." She picked up the pine resin diffuser and turned it off. "Go home. Think about it. Don't think about it for too long."

Maren went home. The apartment smelled like garlic and rosemary. Tomas was cooking. She set her bag on the chair and sat at the kitchen table and didn't say anything for a while. The knife on the cutting board. The oil in the pan. Pine resin still in her nose from Davorka's office.

Tomas turned from the stove. "You're quiet."

"Davorka's packing her office."

He was still for a moment. "When does she leave?"

"October. The site work starts then."

He turned back to the stove. Adjusted the flame. The gas hissed. A pot lid clinked where he'd set it down too close to the edge. He did not ask the next question. They ate dinner in the sound of forks on ceramic and nothing else.

After dinner she washed the dishes. The water was warm. The window was open. The cicadas were back.