Chapter 25: After the Sword

The campus was quiet in the way that buildings go quiet on Sundays — not empty so much as resting, the particular stillness of a place accustomed to noise that has been left alone with itself for a morning. Arthur walked from the parking structure with his hands in his jacket pockets and no coffee, having forgotten to make any. It was early enough that the marine layer was still thick over the hills to the west, and the light had that flat, diffuse quality that made everything look slightly provisional, as though the day had not yet committed to its own existence.

He had not planned to come in. He had stood in his kitchen for a long time looking at nothing in particular — at the window over the sink, at the counter where Guinevere used to leave her design notebooks open to whatever she was working on — and then he had taken his keys from the hook and driven here without deciding to. The body remembers its habits even when the mind is trying to figure out what comes next.

Six weeks since the press conference. Four weeks since the board had formally accepted Merlin's resignation, effective in seven days rather than thirty because Merlin had completed the transition document in three weeks, working at a pace that Vivian said later suggested a man not sleeping but not distressed about it either — a man with a specific thing to finish and the intention to finish it correctly. The document ran to sixty-three pages. Vivian had read it once through and then sat with it for two days before telling Arthur it was complete. She had not elaborated on what she meant by complete, and Arthur had not asked.