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she smiled at him. He looked the same.
    Tobe picked up the empty breakfast dish and handed it to Metoo. Then he left the kitchen, and Metoo heard the door of the flat close behind him as he went to work in his office.
    The bowl still in her hands, Metoo walked around to the other side of the counter, and sat down on Tobe’s stool. She stared into the space where she had just been standing. She sat there for several seconds before she took another breath. Her shoulders slumped slightly as she stared into the space on the other side of the kitchen counter. There was nothing very much to see, certainly nothing new. Everything was the same as it had been since she’d moved into the flat.
    She sat on the stool, the dish in her hand, for several minutes. Of course it was the same; that was the point. Tobe didn’t like change. He liked routine. He liked to know what was coming next. He liked the familiar. He obsessed about anything new that came into his life. The garden room had been running for several years, and still he had never entered it, not until today. He had never even opened the door, before. What was going on?

 

    Chapter Five
     
     
    S ERVICE DECIDED THAT , on the third day after Tobe took up his interest in probability, the Schedule would replicate that of the first, fateful day. Anomalies had occurred during the intervening period, and there was an ebb and flow to them that might become a pattern. Strazinsky maintained the Code Green throughout that period, and all the relevant Schedules were re-set.
     
     
    P ITU 3 ARRIVED for his 08:30 tutorial early, and was waiting outside Tobe’s office door when the Master arrived. Tobe did not acknowledge Pitu; he simply opened the door, and allowed his student to follow him into the room.
    Pitu stopped on the threshold to the office, watching as Tobe tiptoed across the floor, weaving his way to the centre of the room in tiny increments, as he avoided standing on chalked workings, and ragged pages of script, apparently torn out of books and stuck to the linopro. Pitu looked around the door to the wipe-wall. It was covered in maths, formulae and equations weaving across the wall, and, often, across each other. At least two different pens had been used, one of which had obviously failed halfway through an equation, which petered out before being picked up again in another colour, so that the middle of the thought faded, and then disappeared, leaving a solitary white space on the wall.
    Pitu stood on the threshold to the office for several seconds, his mouth open. This was wrong, all wrong. Pitu was thrust back into his distant past to a time when disorder meant pain, to a time when he had been too young to understand the cruelty that was meted out to him. He wanted to cry out, as he remembered, for the first time in years, the beatings, the hunger and the neglect. Then he came-to, as if out of a trance.
    He took hold of the button on the cord around his neck, and pressed, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, and not letting go.

 

    Chapter Six
     
     
    T OBE LEFT THE flat and made his way to his office, a wet patch still visible on the back of his robe from his dripping hair.
    He let himself into his room and set to work. His hands flew as he crossed out equations on his wipe-wall, or linked them to others. Some equations got new brackets, or were swept away altogether with the swinging of the rag he held in his left hand.
    Periodically, Tobe picked up On Probability , thumbed through it, and lighted on a page that seemed useful. He tore out the page, leaving more ink-smudged fingerprints on it, and licked the back of it, using his spit to stick the page to the wipe-wall.
    Two hours later, the office shelves were beginning to look like a crone’s toothless grin, with volumes pulled out, apparently at random, and the remaining books leaning into each other, leaving black, triangular gaps.
    An hour after that, the wipe-wall was full of cross-referenced