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for the refreshments for the meeting she was about to chair. She seemed to have accepted that something had gone badly wrong in the TTE lab, and her anger had been replaced by a certain grimness. She cleared her throat and opened the meeting. “I am sorry this sad occurrence has brought us here. But,” she added, wasting no time in dispensing with the formalities, “let’s face it, we’ve always known that something like this could happen. It was only a matter of—uh, time.”
    Dr. Steven Little, the second of our two junior TTE professors, was seated on her right, across the table from Kamal, Abigail, and me. He grunted in agreement without looking up from his laptop. The clean-shaven professor was striking keys with astonishing speed, his fingers moving almost independently of the rest of him, his thickset shoulders hunched forward under the argyle vest. The newest of the four TTE professors—the others being Dr. Mooney, Dr. Rojas, and Dr. Baumgartner—Dr. Little had recently been wooed over from a postdoc position at Berkeley with promises of funding, plentiful STEWie roster slots, and tenure down the road. His first months at St. Sunniva had already shown me that he’d have to be goaded into doing his share of chairing meetings—he clearly felt that stuff was for minds less brilliant than his own.
    “I’ve canceled all runs indefinitely,” Dr. Rojas said from the other end of the table. Framed between an unruly mop of gray hair and equally gray and unruly eyebrows, his brow was deeply furrowed. He ran a hand through his hair, disheveling it further. “For as long as it takes to figure out what went wrong.”
    “Indefinitely? Let’s not be hasty,” Dr. Baumgartner said, her face falling. “This could still turn out to be a glitch in the computer log. I mean—are we absolutely sure that Xavier is gone?”
    In a few clipped sentences, Chief Kirkland summarized for the room what we knew so far. Oscar, the doorman, had seen Dr. Mooney arrive on his bicycle, wheel it into the bike bay, and enter the TTE building at about an hour before midnight. He had not seen the professor leave. Anyone else might have been suspected of dozing off on the job, but not Oscar, who was a well-known insomniac. According to him, the chief said, after Kamal had left for the evening, no one else had gone in or out till morning, when the usual crowd of professors, postdocs, and students had started trickling in, everyone a bit late due to the snow.
    The subject of Kamal having been the one signed up to oversee last night’s calibration came up.
    As Kamal opened his mouth to explain, Dr. Baumgartner clarified the process for Chief Kirkland’s benefit. “The equipment must be calibrated for the next day’s run. It’s a sensitive undertaking, so the graduate students take turns babysitting STEWie overnight.” I saw Officer Van Underberg, who was leaning against the wall next to me, pencil this down.
    All eyes in the room turned to Kamal. He squared his shoulders and sat up, his earnest young face pulling at my heartstrings for some reason. He gave his explanation unapologetically and with honesty, or at least he began to. “Dr. Mooney was kind enough to offer to take over my shift so that I could get in some last-minute studying for my Spacetime Warping: Theory and Practice exam. I mean, your Spacetime Warping exam, Dr. Little—I’ve just come back from it—”
    “Ah, my teaching assistant brought the exam papers to my office. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet.” Dr. Little looked up from the laptop and reached around it to spread a lavish layer of goat cheese onto a cracker. “And how did you find the test? Too easy? Not long enough?” He popped the cracker into his mouth.
    “Uh—well, I wouldn’t say it was too easy, no,” Kamal said. “As to last night’s calibration, it was kind of Dr. Mooney to offer to take over. I had no idea what would happen… If I had known…”
    “No one is blaming you,