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“You look well,” she says. “This flu must have been less serious than we heard.”

“I heal quickly,” I say.

“So I see.” She turns under my hand, her mask’s long beak angling away and back. “I heard you were in the library this morning.”

I cock my brow. So what?

“I’m often in the library.”

“Reading my paper, I understand.” She says it pleasantly, as if this is a natural thing to know, as if faculty members routinely track each other’s reading habits in real time. “I hope you found it interesting.”

My brows come together, my steps slowing. “Your paper?”

“Yes. On the Formation of Corrupted Returns: A Historical and Theoretical Framework, by Professor R. Achterberg. That’s me.”

I try to keep my face still. “Your surname is Achterberg? I thought it was Renata.”

“No, silly boy. Renata is my first name.”

She wrote the paper. Not a he, she.

Professor Renata, the archivist.

“It’s the work I’m most proud of,” she goes on. “My colleagues found the historical framing too speculative. They prefer their horror safely in the past.” A small pause, timed precisely with the music. “Did you believe it?”

“Believe which part?”

“The gods,” she says. “The nameless ones. The ones that exist beyond our sight, that have always been there, the ones that we’ve simply chosen not to see.” She tilts her head and her eyes through the mask are beady and cold. “Do you believe in them, Sebastian?”

“I believe in evidence,” I manage to say. I’m starting to get dizzy from this whole interaction, the lilac smell of her permeating my nose.

“Yes,” she says. “I thought you might say that.”

We turn again. I keep my expression neutral and my attention moving, scanning the room the way I always do now by habit. Across the floor I see Saturna at the punch table with Avelene, the emerald of her gown a fixed point in the silver room. She is a beacon of safety for me.

I look back at Renata only to find her still staring at me with those focused, hard eyes.

Then I notice the server.

One of the attendants in formal black livery, carrying a large tray of champagne glasses, is crossing the floor at a steady pace. He reaches the middle of the dance floor—couples moving around him, the music continuing—and he crouches down and sets the tray on the floor. Not on a table. Not on a surface. He just puts the whole tray of champagne on the floor, in the middle of the ballroom, the crystal glasses rattling slightly as he places it with the careful deliberation of someone following an instruction to the letter.

Then the server stands. He turns and walks to the far wall and stops there with his face to the stone and stands completely still, his back to the room, his hands at his sides.

Nobody looks at him.

It’s like I’m the only one who has seen this.

I look at Renata.

She’s watching me watch him and the smile hasn’t moved. Suddenly my mind is making the connection, one that would normally be too far-fetched to make but now I know it, I know it and I see it. I just witnessed an act of puppetry. I’m dancing with a woman with her hand inside a person the way you put your hand inside a glove.

The server is not the server anymore.

He is a direction Renata has pointed at a wall.

“Fascinating, isn’t it,” she says, “what the body will do when properly directed.”

The room has gone slightly unreal and hazy at the edges. The music is still playing. The candles are still burning. The students are still dancing in their elegant masks and nothing has visibly changed.