The email lands in my inbox at 7:42 a.m., right between a rejection from a mid-tier journal and a reminder that the departmental coffee machine is "for faculty use only."
Subject: URGENT: Academic Integrity Review – Mercer / Rowan
For a second I honestly think it's spam. The combination of our names looks wrong, like a simulation glitch.
Then my eye catches the sender.
Professor Malcolm Wells.
My stomach does that slow, nauseous tilt I associate with roller coasters and conference Q&As. I click.
Ava,
We require your presence at an emergency review meeting at 9:00 a.m. regarding concerns raised about your recent project (IRB #C-4739). Eli Rowan has also been summoned. This is a confidential matter.
Attendance is mandatory.
– M. Wells
I stare at the screen until the text goes slightly double.
"No," I say out loud to my empty office. My voice sounds too calm. "Absolutely not."
The monitor hums back at me, unhelpfully objective.
A plagiarism review.
Concern.
Eli Rowan.
My mouse hand twitches, enough to send a tremor through the stack of printed drafts beside the keyboard. I spent the last three months buried in this project, sleeping under my desk twice, eating instant noodles over a fMRI console. I know every line of code, every footnote.
If anyone plagiarized, it wasn't me.
I check the time—7:45. My first instinct is to forward the email to Dr. Carver, with a twelve-paragraph breakdown of why this is insane. My second instinct is to throw my laptop out the window.
I do neither. Instead, I open my project folder for IRB #C-4739 and scroll through file names: preprocessing scripts, anonymized datasets, pilot study logs. They look suddenly flimsy, like props instead of the spine of my life.
"It's fine," I tell myself, because no one else will. "Honesty is falsifiable. They can test it."
The joke falls flat even in my own head.
By 8:55 I'm outside the small conference room on the third floor, the one only used for dissertation defenses and interventions. The frosted glass panel is supposed to be soundproof, but I can hear a low murmur inside—Wells' smooth baritone and the sharper, bureaucratic clip of Dean Ellery.
Of course.
I adjust my grip on my notebook, then realize my knuckles have gone white and loosen my fingers. The corridor smells faintly of burned coffee and dry-erase markers. My reflection in the glass door looks like an undercaffeinated ghost: dark hair scraped into what I'm generously calling a bun, black turtleneck, the same noise-canceling headphones hanging around my neck like a stress necklace.
Behind me, footsteps.
Everything in me wants to ignore them. I have a law about this.
I formulated it my second semester, after he showed up late to Wells' seminar with a smile and no notes, improvised an entire critique of a paper I'd been dissecting for weeks, and still managed to make Wells laugh.
The Law of Rowan: Do not look directly at Eli. Do not think about Eli. And under no circumstances, ever, talk to Eli.
My body, traitor that it is, starts to turn anyway.
"Morning, Mercer."
Of course. Of course he sounds like he slept eight hours and did yoga.
I look at him because apparently self-preservation is a myth.
He's in a navy button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, messenger bag slung cross-body, hair slightly damp and pushed back like he ran a hand through it on his way over. There's a coffee cup balanced in one hand and an edge in his jaw that doesn't match his voice.
