dream of motion they shared.
Soon sorry she had asked, Kaela made noncommittal noises in response. She thought Teris spent too much time trying to impress the technician. Still, she enjoyed watching her roomsister’s lithe motions, although the topic of conversation had stifled her desire to join in the stretches.
Reluctantly, Kaela looked away and reviewed the last two days of notes, even if it was restday. She lost herself in her research problem. The shadow postulates, although they dated from an earlier era, extended the Vorief framework. Like those before her, Kaela suspected that the third of the three postulates, which dealt with incorporeal consequences, could be derived from the rest of the extended framework.
As a magistrate-aspirant, Kaela could have submitted a less abstruse, more practical research topic. The point was to prove herself capable of basic research methods, no more. Many scholars had lost years in the postulates’ intricacies only to peel away into related studies. Kaela was too stubborn to admit that this might happen to her.
Last week, her sponsor, the senior scholar Roz Roven, had reminded her that she needed to submit a draft of her thesis by the end of this term. “I know you’ve sworn yourself to this,” he said, “but you’re running short of time. You may have to settle for a less ambitious problem. You won’t be the first.” The words belied the regret in his gaze, that the student he had taken in on account of her early promise should fall short, as he had decades ago.
Kaela found the prospect of his disappointment unbearable, even if the third shadow postulate was one of the outstanding problems in entelechy theory. Stymied, she wondered what had prompted the magistrate Brien, several hundred years dead, to append the postulates to a mundane schedule roster. Records from that time, according to Teris, spoke of war between nations now united. Of Brien, they said little concerning mathematics. In his time, he had befriended a traitor and the traitor’s innocent lover, herself a magistrate. Beyond that, Kaela had never been able to follow the intricacies of intrigue.
If more of Brien’s writings had survived, the shadow postulates might not have become such an enduring puzzle. Kaela shook her head. Too bad the magistrates’ shades communicated through cryptic gestures and never in words, or she—and generations of mathematicians before her—would have asked Brien’s faceless shade the everlasting why?
Although Teris invited her to a festhall dance after dinner, Kaela refused. “I might head out before dinner and eat there,” Teris said, disappointed but forgiving, as always. “Don’t worry about me, sister-mine.”
Kaela could no more stop worrying about her roomsister than she could stop fidgeting. Since she delighted in symmetry, she saved tea and riceballs from dinner just in case. They grew cold as she hunched over her notes.
When the equations started to blur, she conceded that this was doing her no good. In a fit of recklessness, she shrugged on a shabby wool coat, located her boots, and ventured out of the room. Shadows clung to her footsteps. She shivered.
Fear of shadows was a common student phobia. During curfew hour, wherever light lived, shades paced along the college’s walls and through its gardens. They were instantiations of past magistrates, a phenomenon from the Black College’s earliest days. New students received the curfew-bell schedule upon arrival so they knew when to be wary. Rumors abounded of students losing parts of their reflections, or speaking in voices of dust and smoke, or getting lost on paths they had walked a hundred times, ending up on rooftops or behind doors that, once exited, were never to be seen again. According to the college, the curfew hours were the outgrowth of a religious practice to honor the shades. Teris had opined, when they first met, that it was really to keep revelers from irritating the shades into starting a second mirror-war.
Kaela, startled out of being intimidated by her new roomsister’s confident bearing, asked, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have an all-night curfew, then? And aren’t the shades only abroad during those particular hours?”
“Nothing ruins a judgment like the facts,” said Teris, and they both laughed. That was when Kaela decided she might be able to share a room with Teris without stammering every time Teris glanced her way.
In any case, none of the shades troubled Kaela as she threaded her way from campus to city. The quarter that surrounded the Black College had its share of street lights, hazing the stars’ distant shine. Kaela coughed