The ship came in low and fast.
It crossed the sky above the east campus in a long silver arc, navigation lights blinking in the sequence that meant New Star registry, and descended toward the landing pad on the far side of the grounds — the one that had been installed three years ago when the program's backers decided that certain people needed a faster way in and out.
Marcus saw it first. He grabbed Ethan's arm without looking.
"That's Serena's ship," he said.
"You recognize the ship."
"I recognize the trajectory. She always comes in from the northwest." He was already moving. "Come on. Last chance. After this week—"
"She's your goddess," Ethan said. "Not mine."
"She's objectively — look, everyone acknowledges she's—" Marcus gave up trying to make the case logically and just pulled harder. "Four years. You've been in the same program for four years. You've never once gone out of your way to say hello. This is your last opportunity before she goes back to New Star and you never see her again. That's the framing. That's what I need you to hold in your head."
Ethan was already thinking about Professor Lin's residence — a small courtyard a few hundred meters past the landing pad. The professor had called him earlier in the week, asking him to come by when he had time. He'd been putting it off, not because he didn't want to go, but because he knew what the visit would contain: a conversation about what the professor had tried to do on his behalf, and why it hadn't worked, and Ethan would have to sit there and be grateful for the attempt and careful not to let the old man feel worse about failing than he already did.
"I'm going to see the professor," Ethan said. "His residence is in that direction anyway."
Marcus accepted this. He walked alongside him, satisfied enough.
The landing pad was quiet by the time they reached it — the ship already grounded, the crew vanished into whatever logistics attended New Star arrivals. The ship itself sat in the lit circle of the pad: matte silver, compact, the kind of vessel that was expensive in the way of things designed for private use rather than commercial scale.
"Another week," Marcus said quietly, looking at it. "Then they're all gone."
"Then they're all gone," Ethan agreed.
---
They were twenty meters from Professor Lin's courtyard gate when they found her.
Serena Zhao was standing in the pool of light from the nearest lamp, holding a wrapped parcel in one hand, and she was — Marcus's brain appeared to briefly stop functioning, which Ethan noted with mild interest. She wore a white shirt with the top button undone, casual trousers, the kind of clothes that someone puts on when they are dressing for their own comfort rather than an audience. She did not appear to be dressing for an audience. The effect was the same regardless.
"Is that you two?" She smiled — the specific, easy smile of someone who is genuinely pleased by a coincidence rather than performing pleasure at it. "I just dropped something off for the professor. New Star specialty foods, he hasn't been back in years."
"Did you bring extras?" Marcus said immediately.
The two men in dark clothing appeared from the shadows flanking her — quickly, without sound, in the precise way of people whose entire professional value is in how fast they can be somewhere they weren't a moment ago. They assessed Marcus, then Ethan, then settled into a state of watchful stillness.
Marcus went very slightly still.
Serena looked at her guards and made a small gesture — *down.* "They're classmates," she said. "It's fine."
The men relaxed by approximately two degrees.
"I just got in," Serena said, turning back to Ethan and Marcus. "I'm exhausted. I'll see you before we leave." And then she was walking away — unhurried, the guards falling into step around her — and Marcus watched her go with the expression of someone watching a sunset he hadn't expected.
Ethan watched the guards.
---
One of them glanced back. Just once — a professional habit, checking the perimeter. Ethan caught the moment when the man's gaze crossed his, and caught something else too: a very slight recalibration. The guards had assessed him as a student, which was accurate, and then reassessed him as something else, which was also accurate, and the gap between those two assessments had taken less than a second and had registered in the man's posture as a quiet increase in attention.
He filed this away.
---
"The guards weren't watching me," Marcus said, once Serena's group had disappeared around the far corner of the path.
"No."
"They were watching you."
"More or less."
Marcus turned to look at him. "What did you do?"
"Nothing. I was looking at them."
"*Why* were you looking at them?"
"I wanted to see if they were practicing the old arts or something from New Star."
A pause.
"And?"
Ethan thought about it. "Old arts, mostly. The body mechanics. But the responses are cleaner than pure old arts would produce — there's something else mixed in. I don't know what."
Marcus stared at him for a moment. Then: "You spent our last encounter with Serena Zhao conducting a threat assessment of her security detail."
"I conducted an observation," Ethan said. "I wasn't threatened."
"That's—" Marcus stopped. Started again. "You know, sometimes I look at you and I think I understand you, and then you say something like that and I realize I have absolutely no idea what's happening inside your head."
"She's also better than you'd expect," Ethan added. "In a fight. I'd guess significantly."
Marcus made a sound.
"You asked," Ethan said.
The courtyard gate opened.
---
Professor Lin had clearly heard them talking outside — he emerged with the slightly amused expression of a man who has been listening to a conversation through a gate and has decided not to mention it.
"I just sent Serena off," he said. "And now here you are. The universe has a sense of timing."
He was smaller than Ethan remembered from the early years of the program. Not shorter — shorter was something you measured. This was something else: the particular contraction that happened in some people as they aged, as if the body was slowly reconsidering how much space it needed. His hair was white at the temples and grey through the rest, and there was stiffness in the way he moved his right side — the injuries, the ones he'd never fully described, that had ended his practical work and redirected him entirely to theory and translation.
"You've been avoiding me," the professor said to Ethan. Not accusingly. Just noting it.
"I didn't want to put you in a difficult position."
"I put myself in a difficult position. That was my choice." He pushed the gate open wider. "Come in."
---
The courtyard was small and carefully tended — flower beds along the walls, a koi pond to one side with lotus pads drifting on the surface. The living room's lamp threw a warm light through the open door. On the low table, a photo album lay open, slightly worn, the kind of object that had been handled so many times its original purpose had deepened into something else.
Marcus leaned over to look. On the open page: a young woman, some indeterminate number of decades ago, extraordinarily beautiful in the specific way of people who had been both talented and photographed well.
"Who is she?"
"A painter," Professor Lin said. "She sang too. Very well. She was famous for a long time — people my age all knew her." He settled into the chair across the table. "I had a — particular appreciation for her work."
"Since when?"
"Third year of high school." The professor glanced at Marcus with the mild satisfaction of someone about to deliver a line they've been waiting to use. "I was eighteen then. I'm sixty-three now."
A silence.
"You've liked her for forty-five years," Marcus said.
"Give or take."
Marcus leaned back. "That's — that's commitment."
"Mm."
Ethan looked more closely at the album. The professor had not been looking at the woman's photograph — he had been looking at the page beside it. A second photograph, older, more worn, the image badly lit and slightly blurred: the inside of a space that appeared to be underground, a stone table, and on the table a collection of bamboo slips.
The kind of bamboo slips that came from pre-Qin tombs.
He looked up. The professor was watching him.
"You had a question," Ethan said.
The professor's expression didn't change, but something in it settled — the look of someone who has been waiting to have this particular conversation and is now having it.
"Two questions," Professor Lin said.
He looked at them both.
"Do you think immortals ever existed?" he asked. "Not the mythology — the actual practitioners. The people the texts were written about."
Neither of them answered immediately.
"And," the professor continued, looking at neither of them in particular, looking instead somewhere in the direction of the open courtyard door, the night, the empty campus beyond it:
"What do you think New Star actually found?"
---
*The lamp on the table was the kind that didn't flicker. The koi moved in their slow circles in the pond outside. Marcus was sitting very still, which was unusual for Marcus.*
*Ethan looked at the blurred photograph — the stone table, the bamboo slips, the darkness of the underground space surrounding them.*
*He had seventeen pages of translated text under his mattress. He had read them eleven times.*
*He didn't think the professor was asking him to speculate.*