“Well, you couldn’t have known what we’d planned,” Palamedes quips, pretending to hear an apology in her answer where there is none at all. To be fair, her assumption about the fate of his ghost had been entirely reasonable; the Contingency had been entirely unprecedented. A pity, really, that he'd never had the chance to write a paper about it.

He follows her into the apartment and perches on the edge of the sofa across from her. “It looked like the drawing room where Dul— Cytherea was camped out, I presume? Given the lack of time to plan, I’d meant to make the surroundings as simple as possible. Nothing that required imagination.” He takes a gulp of his tea, and then he’s on his feet again, unable to sit still for very long.

“Did I show you anything I'd been working on?" Surely he would have made some progress on the Lyctoral theorem--and hopefully he'd shared something with Harrow.