Chapter 5: The Conversation

Three more weeks before the question surfaced.

Tomas worked late most nights. Maren ate dinner alone more often than not, washing one plate, one fork, one glass, the apartment quiet in a way she was learning to navigate. She walked past Davorka's empty office without stopping. The corridor smelled like corridor.

October arrived with a cold front that stripped the oaks in two days. The courtyard looked bare and startled.

The conversation happened on a Sunday. Tomas had the day off, which was rare enough to feel like an event. He made breakfast: eggs from the campus chickens, toast with fig jam from the kitchen garden. The coffee was strong. Morning light caught the frost on the limestone shelves. For a few minutes the apartment felt the way it used to feel, before everything, and they ate without talking, and the coffee was good, and the toast was good, and neither of them reached for the word that was sitting between the fig jam and the butter dish.

Tomas put down his coffee. He looked at the table. He looked at the window. He looked at her.

"You're going with Davorka."

It was not a question.

"Yes," she said.

He nodded. He picked up his coffee, drank, set it down. His hands were steady. He had good hands; she had always thought this. The hands of someone who worked with precision instruments, who could hold a micropipette for six hours without tremor. She was looking at his hands because she could not look at his face.

"When?"

"November. The first group leaves in three weeks. Davorka wants me for the analytical setup."

"Because Lenka dropped out."

"Because Lenka dropped out. And because I believe in it." She paused. "I'm good at what I do. That's also true."

"I know they're all true." He turned the coffee cup slowly on the table. There was a chip on the rim that had been there since Koper, since the market, since their second year. She'd dropped it in the parking lot. He'd said things with chips in them were better because they had a history.

"I'm not asking you to explain," he said. "I understand why you're going. I've understood for a while."

"Have you."

"Since the Velden data. Maybe before. You process things with your body, Maren. You always have. You feel the answer before you find the evidence for it. And the Velden data felt right to you in a way my trial didn't, and no amount of eighty-four percent was going to change what your body already knew."

She almost argued. She almost said the word "evidence." She picked at a crumb on the table instead.

"It's not that your trial doesn't work," she said.

"I know."

"It works. Eighty-four percent on the targeted pathways. That's real."

"I know it's real."

"But the sleep data. The microbiome shifts." She stopped. She picked up her coffee, put it down again. "When I look at Velden's numbers, I see a system responding as a whole. Something underneath the data that's doing its own work. When I look at your trial, I see twelve pathways doing what we told them to. Both are real. But one is answering a question nobody asked, and the other is answering exactly the question it was designed to answer. I don't know how to say this better than that."

"And you want to be where the unexplained things are."

"I want to be where — I don't know. Where the system is doing its own work."

Tomas was quiet for a long time. The morning light had shifted; it no longer caught the limestone shelves. The kitchen was just a kitchen. The coffee was getting cold.

"That's Davorka's argument," he said. "Word for word."

"It's my argument. I arrived at it through her data."

"You arrived at it through her framing of her data. There's a difference." He held up a hand before she could respond. "I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that the way you see this is shaped by who taught you to look, and Davorka has been teaching you to look for the unexplained since the day you walked into this Institute. If Kassar had been your mentor, you'd see the same data differently."

She sat with it. He wasn't wrong. She could feel the fig jam going sticky on her plate, the coffee cooling, the morning getting away from them.

"Maybe you're right," she said. "Maybe if Kassar had trained me, I'd see it your way. But she didn't. Davorka did. And I can't unknow the way I see it."

"I'm not asking you to unknow anything."

"What are you asking?"

He got up. Went to the window. His shoulders were high and tight, the way they got when he was holding something back.

"I want to know if this ends us."

Maren looked at the chip on the coffee cup. The frost on the limestone was melting, the shelves darkening as ice gave way to wet stone.

"I don't know," she said. "The site is four hours from here. I'll be building infrastructure, not commuting."

"That's logistics. I asked about us."

"I know what you asked."

She got up. She went to the window and stood next to him. They looked out at the same view together, the view they had shared for nearly ten years, the limestone and the oaks and the sky. His hand was on the sill. She put hers next to it, not touching but close enough that she could feel the warmth of his skin.

"I don't think there's a version where I go and nothing changes," she said. "I think the honest answer is that we'll try, and it will be hard, and we'll find out."

"That sounds like a Davorka answer. 'Provide the conditions and see what happens.'"

She almost laughed. "Maybe."

"I could come with you."

Maren looked at him. His face was open in a way it hadn't been in months.

"You don't believe in the premise," she said.

"I believe in you."

"That's not enough. Davorka said that. She said she needs people who believe the premise, not people who love the teacher."

"You're not my teacher."

"No. I'm worse. I'm the reason you'd be giving up your work."

He turned back to the window. The warmth between their hands on the sill became distance.

"My work is here," he said. "The trial is here. The sixty subjects who volunteered their bodies for this research are here. I can't leave them."

"I know."

"I won't leave them."

"I know that too."

Neither of them said anything about the word "won't."

"When you go," Tomas said, still looking out the window. "Take the blue cups."

"That's your set."

"I know. Take them anyway. The ones at the settlement will be terrible for the first year. Everything's terrible the first year."

She laughed. It came out wet. She leaned into him and he put his arm around her and they stood there.

"The chipped one too?" she said.

"Especially the chipped one."

She packed in the first week of November. It did not take long; the things that mattered fit in two bags and a crate. Books, clothes, her personal data tools, the blue cups wrapped in dish towels. The apartment furniture belonged to the Institute.

Tomas helped her carry the crate to the loading area where Davorka's convoy was assembling. It was a small convoy: three rented trucks and a borrowed flatbed carrying the components of the first cranking station, which Davorka had ordered fabricated to her specifications by a machine shop in Ljubljana. The station looked like nothing in particular when disassembled; a collection of metal parts and steel cable and a flywheel that sat on the flatbed like a large, serious wheel that had lost its vehicle.

Twenty-nine people were leaving. Not fifty. Davorka moved through the loading area with a clipboard, checking manifests, adjusting tie-downs, her jaw set in a way that meant she was not going to talk about the gap between twenty-nine and fifty.

The morning was cold. Breath hung in the air. Someone was having trouble with a ratchet strap on the second truck, and the sound of it; the click and pull, click and pull; cut through the quiet. A cat that lived near the refectory was sitting on the courtyard wall, watching the proceedings with the total disinterest of something that would still be here tomorrow. The Institute's remaining staff watched from the courtyard and the windows, not all of them but enough to make the departure feel witnessed. Kassar was there, standing near the main entrance with a coffee cup, observing. She and Davorka had spoken privately the day before; Maren didn't know what they'd said and hadn't asked.

Josip found Maren by the flatbed. He was carrying a small cooler.

"For the road," he said. "It's mostly cheese. Decent bread. Some of those dried figs from the garden."

"Josip."

"Don't. I'm being practical, not sentimental. You'll be eating camp food by tonight and you'll be grateful for the figs."

"Are you staying?"

"I'm staying." He looked at the convoy, at the trucks, at the flywheel on the flatbed. "Someone needs to keep running the microbiome data on the Velden cohort, and I can do that better from here, with the sequencer. For now. Ask me again in a year."

"I'll ask you again in a year."

He handed her the cooler. His eyes were wet, which she had never seen before.

"The third thermos is yours," he said. "I'll keep bringing it. Force of habit."

Maren took the cooler. She did not hug him because Josip was not a person who hugged, but she held his forearm for a moment and he held hers, and this was enough.

Tomas was by the cab of the first truck. He had carried her crate there and set it down and was standing beside it with his hands in his pockets, the way he stood when he was thinking about something he hadn't finished thinking about.

"Drive safely," he said.

"Davorka's driving. I'm riding."

"Tell Davorka to drive safely."

"I don't tell Davorka anything. You know that."

He smiled. Not a full smile.

She put her hand on his chest. She could feel his heartbeat through his jacket.

"I'll call when we get there," she said.

"Call when you get there."

She got in the truck. Davorka was already in the driver's seat, adjusting the mirrors. The engine started. The diesel rumble filled the cab and vibrated through the seat.

The convoy pulled out of the loading area and onto the access road. Through the side mirror, Maren could see the Institute shrinking: the main building, the east wing with its construction barriers, the courtyard where the oak tree stood bare.

Tomas was standing where she'd left him. He did not wave. He watched, with his hands in his pockets, until the road curved and the mirror lost him.