Three months later, the smell of stale coffee and ozone had replaced the smell of sandalwood and rain, and Emily Anne Baker had almost, almost convinced herself the two smells belonged to two different women.
She was slumped over a workbench in the Cambridge robotics lab when the error alarm went off, a shrill, insistent beeping that jolted her upright before her brain had fully caught up with her body. She rubbed her eyes, slid her oversized round glasses back onto her nose, and caught her own reflection in the black monitor across from her: hair held up by a pencil in a bun that had given up trying to look intentional, skin pale from too many nights like this one, wearing a university sweatshirt gone soft and frayed at the cuffs. The London siren was gone. This was Emily in survival mode, and survival mode did not have time for sandalwood or the memory of a stranger's hands in her hair.
Good, she told herself, for perhaps the four hundredth time in three months. Forget him. He was a mistake with good cheekbones.
In front of her sat the Arm, a naked metal skeleton of a robotic limb, wires spilling out of its casing like exposed guts. She typed a command line, voice raspy from disuse.
"Attempt four-oh-two. Grip it. Gently."
The Arm shuddered. Its motor whirred, metal fingers contracting around a yellow stress ball, and for one hopeful second there was contact, real contact, and then the fingers constricted, violent, and the ball exploded with a pop that made her flinch. The arm spasmed, then dropped, dead weight, mocking her the way it had mocked her every night for a week.
Emily groaned, throwing her head back to stare at the water stained ceiling. Why won't you just work. Why does everything I build have to crush what it's trying to hold.
The door swung open. Professor Henderson, tweed jacket, sixty-something, and permanently severe, checked his watch before he even looked at her.
"Do you intend to take up residence here, Baker?"
"I have to fix the force feedback error," she said. "It's too aggressive. It crushes everything it touches."
Henderson approached the wreckage and picked up a piece of destroyed rubber, turning it over in his fingers like evidence at a crime scene. "The problem isn't the code. It's the system architecture. The Review Board isn't impressed. Theory is fine. But practice, you're hitting a wall."
"I can fix it. I just need more time."
"You don't have more time. You need ten Advanced Credits this term." He paused, the way people pause when they know the next sentence will land badly. "Without them, you won't qualify to submit your Thesis Proposal in March. Let alone find a suitable Supervisor."
He dropped a course flyer onto her desk.
"Register for this. Autonomous Systems and Machine Ethics. The new Visiting Fellow is running it. Supposed to be a star in the industry."
Emily picked up the paper, too exhausted to read past the header. "This module is notorious. The fail rate is forty percent."
"Correct. But if you survive it, you might actually learn enough to fix that metal Frankenstein of yours."
He left without waiting for an answer, the door clicking shut behind him, and Emily looked at the flyer, then at her dead robot, and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who has run out of other options, that she had no choice at all.
❦
At lunch, in the engineering canteen, she sat alone in a corner, chewing aggressively through a dry sandwich while typing on her laptop, half listening to the two girls at the next table dissolve into giggles over a photo on someone's phone.
"Did you see the car?" Sophie was saying. "Aston Martin DB11. Parked in the Fellow's court. It has to be him."
"Is he actually coming here?" Priya asked. "I thought it was just a rumour."
"It's official, on the portal! Look. His profile. Jesus."
"Wait." Priya's voice had gone reverent. "He took the company public a few months ago. The IPO was valued at seven billion pounds. So he's retired?"
"No. He's still the Chairman. Rumour is, he stepped down as CEO because he hates people. He hired a suit to run the board meetings just so he could come back to the lab. He's not just rich. He's... god."
"God or not, look at that jawline. I'd happily fail the module just to retake it."
Emily rolled her eyes without looking up. Hopeless romantics. She hit F5 on the registration page for the fifth time in as many minutes.
"Oi, Em!" Priya called over. "Are you signing up for the Billionaire's class?"
"I don't care about his bank balance," Emily said. "I need credits."
She navigated to the module selection page, fingers flying, and there it was: ENG-M-402. Advanced Autonomous Systems. Status: Registration opens in 00:05. Her heart rate spiked. Her index finger hovered over the mouse. This was her last chance, the only module with slots left, and the Professor running it was apparently the only person qualified to save her robot.
"Come on," she muttered.
"There are only twelve spots!" Priya shouted from the next table. "The whole department is camping out for this!"
Emily hovered the cursor over Register. Her finger trembled, then clicked.
The loading wheel spun. A green banner bloomed across the screen. Enrollment confirmed.
She exhaled, a long, shuddering breath, and slumped back in her chair.
"Bollocks!" Sophie said. "It's full! The site's crashed!"
Emily allowed herself a small, private smirk. A tiny victory in a sea of defeats. She had no idea, closing her laptop and gathering her books, that the click hadn't been a lifeline at all. It had been her own signing of her death warrant.
On the wall, a muted television scrolled campus news. Department welcomes new visiting professor... The image flickered too fast to make out. Something in it looked vaguely familiar, and she shook her head. Probably just some rich old bloke.
She turned and walked away, head down, marching toward her doom without knowing it had a name.
❦
The seminar room in the William Gates Building was nothing like the vast lecture halls she was used to, an intimate, high tech space with twelve seats arranged in a steep semi circle, built for the elite rather than the masses. The air held a heavy, expectant hush, the kind that settles over a room in the moments before a concert begins.
Emily ignored the empty seats at the back and squeezed into the front row, pushing her thick glasses up her nose, tucking a loose strand of hair back into her chaotic bun. She was ready to devour every word.
Next to her, a male student, James, twenty-four, eager, posh accent, leaned in.
"Heard he eats post-grads for breakfast," he whispered. "Reckon we'll survive?"
Emily didn't look at him. She opened a fresh page in her notebook. "I'm not here to survive," she said. "I'm here to pass."
The heavy oak door opened with a crack that seemed to freeze the whole room. Twelve pairs of eyes locked onto the entrance. Emily dropped her pen cap and bent to retrieve it, and from her low angle she saw a pair of black, hand polished Oxford shoes step onto the floor. Expensive. Immaculate. She grabbed the cap and straightened up just as the man walked past her desk, not looking at any of the students, heading straight for the podium.
He wore a crisp white shirt, no tie, top button undone, sleeves rolled to the elbows to reveal forearms corded with muscle. Bespoke charcoal trousers. No briefcase, no notes, just a silver stylus, and a commanding, icy presence that filled the room the moment he plugged it into the console.
He is not the dusty academic they expected, Emily thought, watching him without quite letting herself watch him. On the screen behind him, letters resolved into a title: *ENG-M-402: The Moral Code.*
Sebastian leaned forward, both hands braced on the podium, his slate grey eyes scanning the twelve faces like a laser. Cold. Detached. His gaze passed over Emily and did not stop. To him, she was just another dowdy student in a grey hoodie. Invisible.
"I am not here to teach you how to write code," he said, voice deep, RP accent cutting through the silence like a blade. "Any monkey can learn Python in a week."
Emily froze. That voice. It traveled down her spine like something remembered from a dream she'd been trying, for three months, not to have.
"I am here to teach you how to think," Sebastian went on. "About control. About consequences."
The class held its breath. Emily trembled, pushing her glasses up, squinting at the man now fully in focus. The angular jaw. The grey eyes. The realization hit her like a physical blow, and behind her eyes, unbidden, came flashes she'd spent three months burying: red light in a bar. A man jumping fully clothed into a hotel pool. Rainwater dripping from dark hair. His hands, gentle, unbearably gentle, drying hers.
Blood drained from her face. She stopped breathing. Her hand spasmed, and her pen rolled off the desk and hit the floor, and in the dead silence of the seminar room it sounded, to her ringing ears, exactly like a gunshot.
Sebastian stopped mid sentence. He looked down, right at the source of the noise. Right at the front row.
Contact. His eyes landed on her.
At first there was nothing there but annoyance. Then he really looked. Behind the thick glasses. Behind the messy hair. He saw her eyes, and time seemed to freeze around them both, a micro beat of pure shock, his pupils dilating as some old and careful mask cracked clean down the middle. M?
Emily's heart hammered against her ribs, thump, thump, thump. She wanted to slide under the desk. She wanted to dissolve into the floor and never be found.
Sebastian blinked. Once. He swallowed dryly, tore his gaze away to focus on the back wall, and when he spoke again his voice wavered, a tiny, almost imperceptible glitch that only she, perhaps, would have caught.
"About the consequences of poor decisions," he finished.
He turned his back on the class to write on the digital board, gripping the stylus so hard his knuckles turned white, and Emily sat paralyzed, staring at the broad line of his shoulders, understanding, in the space of one breath, that the last three months of forgetting had bought her exactly nothing.
The lecture continued. Sebastian paced the room like a panther, charismatic and sharp and, to her alone, absolutely terrifying.
❦
He moved with predatory grace, dissecting a complex algorithm on the smartboard in handwriting too sharp and precise to belong to anyone with an ounce of softness left in him.
"In computer vision," he said, "a false positive is an annoyance. But a false negative? That is a fatality. The system fails to recognize the threat because the data doesn't fit the expected model."
He turned, pacing down the aisle, eyes sweeping the room with professional detachment, and every single time he turned, his gaze flicked, unconsciously, back to the front row. Back to her.
She was looking down, scribbling aimlessly in the margins of her notebook. He studied the curve of her neck, the pale skin, the way a loose strand of hair fell over her ear. It was familiar. Too familiar. But then his eyes caught the frayed hoodie. The thick, unstylish glasses.
No, he told himself. Impossible. He shook his head slightly, a micro movement meant to clear the static, and forced himself to look away.
"We teach the machine to doubt its own sensors," he said. "To verify. To cross reference."
Emily heard the words as though they were coming from underwater. Her pen hovered over her notebook. She wrote one word, DROP, then crossed it out with violent strokes, and wrote instead, STAY. She looked at the exit door, five meters away. Freedom. Then she looked back at the board. This was the knowledge she needed, whatever the cost of getting it. She bit her lip.
Sebastian turned back from the board and caught her zoning out. Irritation flared, sharp and welcome, so much easier than the alternative. He stopped pacing.
"This brings us to the Trolley Problem in autonomous driving," he said. "The car must choose. Hit the child crossing the street, or swerve and kill the passenger." He turned to the class. "The AI has zero point zero two seconds to decide. What is the correct variable to prioritize?"
He scanned the room. Most students scribbled furiously. Emily stared blankly at her open notebook, lost somewhere far from moral philosophy, picking at her fingernail.
His eyes narrowed. He walked slowly toward her desk, the rhythmic clack of his shoes stopping right in front of her.
She didn't look up. She was drowning in her own private panic.
"Am I boring you?" he asked.
She jumped, snapping her head up. He was looming over her now, one hand braced on her desk, leaning down, invading the small territory of her personal space with an ease that felt, to her, like violence.
"I... No. Sorry. I was just..."
"Just what?" he said. "Daydreaming? What's your name?"
"B, Baker."
"Well, Miss Baker. This is a Master's seminar, not a daycare. If the moral weight of manslaughter is too trivial for you, perhaps you should leave."
Her face burned crimson. Snickers drifted from the back row. He leaned closer, waiting for an answer, and his eyes drifted, almost against his will, from her terrified gaze down to her nose.
There, on the left side, was a tiny, distinct red mole.
The memory struck him like a physical thing. Her face close to his. That same red mole. He stiffened. It was her. A flicker of feeling crossed his face before he killed it, ruthlessly, and straightened up, his expression settling back into a mask of pure disdain.
"Well?" he said. "The variable. What does the machine prioritize?"
"I... I don't..." She was stammering now, and hating herself for it.
"You don't know," he said, sneering. "Of course. Wasting a seat that a qualified student would kill for. Pathetic."
He turned his back on her and walked away, and Emily sat frozen, humiliation washing over her like acid. But underneath it, confusion was beginning to stir. She stared at his cold, arrogant back. He's a monster. The man in London was gentle. Kind. This man is a prick. He doesn't know me. He didn't recognise me.
A strange sense of relief flooded through her. If he didn't know who she was, she was safe. She straightened her spine.
Sebastian circled the room, voice carrying easily over the silence he'd created. "Let's make it harder. If the passenger is the owner of the car, does the algorithm owe them a higher duty of care than the pedestrian? Is protection a purchased commodity?"
Silence stretched. The class was stumped, and Sebastian smirked, clearly enjoying their incompetence.
James raised a hesitant hand. "Well, legally, the manufacturer is liable, so..."
"I didn't ask about liability," Sebastian said, cutting him off. "I asked about duty."
"It's a false dichotomy," Emily said.
Sebastian stopped. He turned slowly to face the front row. Emily was looking straight at him now, chin up, glasses pushed back into place.
"The algorithm doesn't prioritize the passenger or the pedestrian," she said, voice steady, interrupting him without apology. "It prioritizes the predictability of the outcome. Saving the passenger is a controlled variable. Swerving is chaotic. The machine chooses certainty over morality. That's why it's dangerous."
The room went deadly silent. Sebastian stared at her, and for the first time since he'd walked in, something like joy flickered in his eyes before he buried it.
"Predictability over morality," he said dryly. A beat. "Not entirely stupid. But you interrupted me. Don't do it again."
He turned back to the board, but the corner of his mouth twitched, just slightly, and neither of them acknowledged it.
❦
The clock hit noon.
"Dismissed," Sebastian said. "Read Chapter Four for next week. Or don't. I'll know."
The students scrambled to pack up. Emily was the fastest, shoving her laptop into her bag like she was defusing a bomb, refusing to look at him, wanting only to be out, gone, anywhere else.
"Hey!" James called after her. "Want to grab coffee?"
She ignored him, pushed through the heavy oak door, and vanished into the corridor.
Behind her, the room emptied. Sebastian stood alone at the podium, slowly unplugging his stylus, looking at the empty seat in the front row. He touched his own left hand, the spot where a phone number had once been written in Sharpie ink.
"Baker," he whispered to himself. "Emily Baker. M."
❦
The Graduate Common Room smelled of cheap filter coffee and quiet despair, worn leather sofas absorbing three generations of academic anxiety, rain lashing against the gothic windows outside. Emily sat alone in a corner booth, staring into a black coffee, hands still shaking. She pulled out her phone, opened the university app, and hovered her thumb over *DROP MODULE.*
James flopped onto the sofa opposite her, uninvited, holding a ham sandwich.
"That was proper mental," he said.
She jumped, nearly dropping her phone, and locked the screen quickly. "James. Personal space."
"Don't worry." He took a bite. "I think I peed myself a little when he looked at me. The man is a psychopath. A well dressed psychopath."
Sophie and Priya spotted them and rushed over, dragging chairs, looking at Emily like she was a zoo exhibit.
"There she is!" Sophie said. "The Chosen One. The Group Chat is blowing up, Em. You're trending."
"Please tell me you're joking," Emily groaned.
"We heard everything," Priya said, laughing. "Tony in the third year said he basically called you an idiot in front of the whole class?"
"He called me pathetic," Emily said. "And a waste of a seat."
"God, imagine being insulted by that voice," Sophie said, dreamy. "I'd take pathetic over a compliment from Henderson any day. At least he looked at you. We didn't even get into the room!"
"He humiliated me, Sophie."
She grabbed her phone again, finger poised over the screen. "I'm dropping the module."
James choked on his sandwich. "You can't! Are you mad? You're the only one who actually shut him up. Predictability over morality." He pointed a crust at her. "He hates us because we're boring. He hates you because you're right. There's a difference."
"Careful, Em," Sophie said. "He might eat you alive."
"Don't," Emily said, cutting her off. "Just don't."
She felt nauseous, the banter sitting far too close to a truth none of them could possibly guess. She grabbed her bag and stood.
"If anyone asks," she said, "I dropped out and moved to a farm in Scotland."
She pushed past them toward the exit. James watched her go, then turned to Priya.
"Ten quid says she stays."
"Twenty says he makes her cry by week three."
❦
The robotics lab was humming with activity when she slipped back in, trying, and failing, to be invisible. A cluster of undergraduates gathered around Professor Henderson at a nearby bench, watching him demonstrate a soldering technique, the air thick with the smell of burning rosin and intense concentration.
Emily went straight to her corner, threw her bag down, and looked at the Arm. It hung limp. Mocking her.
She grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the casing of the robot's wrist, movements jagged, angry, until the screwdriver slipped with a screech that scratched the metal.
"You'll strip the screw head if you force it, Baker," Henderson said, without turning around.
Emily froze. Henderson dismissed the undergraduates with a wave of his hand, and they scattered, and he walked over to her station, leaning against the bench, watching her shaking hands.
"News travels fast in this department," he said. "I heard your first encounter with our Golden Boy was... eventful."
Emily dropped the screwdriver. It clattered loudly, and she slumped onto her stool, burying her face in her hands.
"It was a disaster, Professor. He humiliated me. He called me a waste of space." She looked up. "I'm withdrawing. I'll do extra coursework next term."
Henderson looked at her. No pity. Just calculation. He picked up the fallen screwdriver.
"You know why I approved your project, Emily? When everyone else said Bio Feedback Haptics was impossible for an MPhil?"
"Because you like to see students suffer?"
He gave a dry chuckle. "Because you are stubborn. You don't care about polish. You care about making things work." He gestured to the dead robot arm. "Professor Smith is arrogant. He is cruel. And he is likely the most brilliant mind in kinetic systems this country has produced in years. If you withdraw, you are safe. But this arm? It stays dead. And your degree dies with it."
Emily looked at the robot. Then at Henderson.
"He hates me, Professor. It's personal. I don't know why, but it feels like he wants to break me."
"Then let him try," Henderson said, and placed the screwdriver back in her hand.
"You are a scientist, Miss Baker. You don't need him to like you. You need his knowledge. Steal it from him." He straightened his tweed jacket. "Besides, the add drop period ended at noon. You're stuck with him."
He gave her a grim smile and walked away.
Emily sat there, stunned, looking at the clock on the wall. Twelve fifteen. She was trapped.
She looked down at the screwdriver in her hand, then at the Arm.
"Fine," she whispered. "Let's steal."
❦
Sebastian's office had the minimalist furniture and floor to ceiling windows of a man who had never had to justify a single purchase in his life, the view stretching out over the Cam river in the fading afternoon light. He sat in his leather chair, not working, fingers gliding across his laptop's trackpad, and on the screen the Cambridge Student Information System glowed back at him.
He typed Baker. A list appeared. He clicked on *Baker, Emily (MPhil)*, and the file opened.
Her profile photo was a standard university ID shot, younger looking, no makeup, bright smile, hair a mess. He stared at it, taking a slow sip of whisky, the ice clinking softly against the glass, and behind his eyes a different image surfaced entirely: red lips. Smokey eyes. Confidence radiating off her like heat.
He leaned in, zooming into the digital photograph, tracing it with his eyes. The bone structure was the same. The eyes were the same. And the mole.
"Found you," he said softly.
He scrolled down to her academic record. Machine Learning and Algorithms: 85, Distinction. Advanced Control Systems: 81, Distinction. Research Project Supervisor: none assigned. Status: at risk, deadline imminent.
He paused at the red text, reading the departmental note attached. Proposal rejected by Prof. Clark and Dr. Patel due to complexity. Student has until March first to secure a Supervisor or face withdrawal.
Sebastian leaned back, a smirk touching his lips. She was a genius on paper, and nobody wanted her. She was drowning. He could save her right now. Or he could destroy her.
He closed the file.
"Let's see if you can swim, M," he said.
❦
Week Two arrived, and the atmosphere in the seminar room had shifted, though the fear had not. The smartboard was covered in complex equations. Sebastian paced the semi circle, tired, shadows hinting at insomnia under his eyes, his energy manic and intense despite it. Emily sat in the front row, same seat, still in her hoodie, but her hair was pulled back tighter now, like armor.
"Data is a liar," Sebastian said, turning to the class. "Your sensors tell you the wall is solid. Quantum mechanics tells you it is mostly empty space. The machine does not know truth. It only knows probability."
He stopped in front of James. "So, how do we filter the noise? How do we know what is real and what is a ghost in the machine?"
James opened his mouth, but Sebastian had already spun away, hunting bigger game. He walked toward Emily.
"Miss Baker."
Emily straightened her spine and met his gaze.
"We use a prediction model," she said. "We compare the input against what we expect to see. If the deviation is too high, we discard the data as noise."
Sebastian stopped at her desk, leaning in, placing one hand on the edge of her table, inches from her notebook. Emily's eyes caught, before she could stop them, on his ring finger. Bare now. But the skin there was paler than the rest of his hand, a deep, indented tan line where a wedding band had sat for years. Raw. Exposed.
She forced her eyes away, back to his face.
"You discard the data," he said, voice low, intimate. "You assume it is an error. But what if the anomaly is the truth? And your model is wrong?"
The class disappeared. It was just the two of them now. He wasn't talking about sensors anymore. He was talking about London. About the girl who had vanished.
"Sometimes a system aborts a process without warning," he said. "It cuts the connection." A beat. "Why would a functioning system do that, Miss Baker?"
Emily swallowed hard. She wanted to believe he was asking a technical question, but the intensity in his grey eyes suggested otherwise. She felt exposed, stripped down to something she hadn't agreed to show him.
"Self preservation," she said, voice steady but breathless. "If the system detects a threat to its core architecture, it shuts down external ports. It disconnects to prevent a fatal crash."
Sebastian stared at her. Self preservation. Was that why she'd left him in the hotel room? Because he'd been a threat? Or because she'd been scared? He searched her face for any flicker of recognition, any sign that she remembered the heat of his skin, the smell of rain on both of them. Emily gave him nothing, adjusting her glasses, the perfect picture of a confused student.
Sebastian pushed off the desk and retreated to the safety of the podium.
"A cowardly algorithm," he said coldly. "True intelligence adapts to the threat. It doesn't run away." He picked up his stylus. "Let's discuss the Black Box. Since Miss Baker is so fond of hiding inside one."
He tapped the screen. The assignment list appeared, and a collective gasp went through the class.
Next to James: Linear Pathfinding, Difficulty Two.
Next to Emily: *INVERTED NEURAL NETWORK DECRYPTION, DIFFICULTY FIVE, UNSOLVABLE.*
"Jesus, Em," James whispered. "What did you do to him?"
Emily looked at the screen, then at Sebastian. He was watching her. A challenge. A punishment. A game, and she was only beginning to understand the rules.
She didn't flinch. She didn't complain. She picked up her pen and wrote the assignment title in her notebook, underlined twice.
Sebastian watched her accept it without fear, without begging, and a tiny, imperceptible smirk touched the corner of his mouth. Good girl.
❦
By two in the morning, the Seeley Library had become a glass canyon of silence, rain drumming relentlessly against the vast skylights above, every reading lamp dark except for one solitary island of light in the far corner.
Emily had fallen asleep at her workstation, cheek pressed against a textbook titled Non-Linear Dynamics, glasses askew. Her laptop screen hummed, casting a pale blue ghost light over her face, dozens of terminal windows open, lines of code cascading down the screen like a digital waterfall.
Footsteps echoed softly on the floor. Sebastian walked through the stacks in a black trench coat, a cheap cardboard cup of vending machine coffee steaming in his hand. Insomnia had driven him from his bed, looking, he told himself, for nothing more than a book to kill the hours.
He spotted the light. He approached, then stopped at her desk, looking down at her.
In sleep, the defiance was gone entirely. She looked exhausted, one hand curled loosely around a pen, ink staining her fingers. His gaze drifted to her laptop screen.
PROJECT: BLACK BOX INVERSION. ITERATION: 402.
His eyes narrowed. He leaned in, reading the code she'd been writing before she passed out, expecting garbage, the kind of desperate nonsense students produced at two in the morning under impossible deadlines.
Instead, he saw chaos. But it was structured chaos. She wasn't trying to solve the equation. She was trying to break the container itself. It was risky. Aggressive. It was, he admitted to himself, brilliant.
Sebastian straightened, looking at the sleeping girl with an expression he hadn't expected to feel. Respect. Reluctant, grudging, but there all the same. She wasn't just a pretty face. She was a darker horse than he had realized.
He looked at the coffee in his hand. Black. No sugar. Exactly the way he took it himself. Then he looked back at Emily.
He hesitated. Then, slowly, he placed the steaming paper cup on the desk beside her hand, careful not to make a sound.
He looked at her one last time. His eyes lingered on the mole beside her nose. He wanted to touch her hair. To wake her. To ask her why she'd written line forty five the way she had. Why do you fight like something's chasing you.
He didn't. He turned and walked away instead, disappearing into the shadows between the stacks.
Emily stirred some time later, groaning, her neck stiff, pushing her glasses up her nose and blinking against the bright glow of her own screen, bracing herself for another hour of misery.
Then she smelled it. Coffee.
She froze. There, sitting in a halo of steam, was a cardboard cup. She touched it. Still hot.
She looked around wildly. The library was empty. Just the rain, and the silence, and the particular quality of quiet that comes after someone has just left a room.
She picked up the cup, took a tentative sip. Black. Strong. Bitter. Exactly what she needed, in a way that made no sense at all, because she had never told anyone how she took her coffee.
She looked back at her screen. Her cursor blinked at the end of a line of code she didn't remember leaving it at. She frowned. She hadn't left the cursor there.
She looked into the darkness of the library, and a shiver ran down her spine, not of fear, but of something else entirely. Someone was here. Someone saw my work.
She shook her head, took another sip, eyes hardening with determination, and started typing again, refusing, for now, to ask herself who.