2 Barnett House

Oxford University — Barnett House (One Month Later)

Oxford’s spires refused the century. Sun skated along slate and honey stone; undergrads flowed across the quad with books pinned to ribs, laughter ricocheting under arches. Clouds drifted slow and ceremonial over lawns manicured within an inch of theology.

Barnett House hid behind ivy and good manners. Down a narrow corridor, an office wore its life honestly: scratched desk, filing cabinets that groaned when coaxed, a cupboard crowded with plaques—linguistics, peace studies, even faculty sport, because someone had needed a goalkeeper and she’d been it.

Marie Richards sat amid a low mountain of theses and half-finished applications. A laptop purred beside a cooling tea. Forty-seven, though she’d deny the arithmetic, she wore her grey streak like a choice, not a surrender.

A soft knock.

The door edged open. Jessica leaned in—eyes cautious, still lit from within. “Aunt Marie? You called?”

Marie slid off her glasses and waved her inside. “Come in, love. Sit.”

Jessica scooped a pile of folders off the visitor’s chair and lowered herself. The shadow of the day-that-wasn’t still lived on her face, faint as a bruise under makeup. Beneath it, something harder had set: bone-deep resolve.

Marie opened a folder. “I’ve been through your proposal.”

Jessica leaned forward. “And?”

“‘And’…” Marie tapped the page, hunted the gentle version, discarded it. “A computer program to translate a three-thousand-year-old language. After—”

“The lecture in China,” Jessica supplied, wince and smile fighting for the same space. “I know. I didn’t mean to call their government simple.”

“You called the Chinese government simple in front of their scholars,” Marie said, a reluctant twitch at her mouth. “Very fast way to get disinvited from half of Asia.”

“I was talking about the model,” Jessica said, heat blooming. “Not the people. Not the country. I was angry and—sloppy.”

Marie came around the desk and perched on its edge, close enough to take her niece’s hand. “You’re brilliant. Idealistic. Driven. Occasionally reckless. Auto-translation for an undeciphered language is… ambitious.”

“Ambitious isn’t impossible.” Jessica held her gaze, steady. “I can do this.”

Marie sighed—heavier than air should allow—and smiled anyway. “One last grant.”

Jessica’s joy was unguarded, immediate. She stood, kissed Marie’s cheek. “Thank you. Seriously. You’re saving me.”

“Out before I change my mind,” Marie said, shooing.

Jessica laughed, shouldered her bag, and stepped into the corridor. Dr. Albert Warren passed going the other way, his glance sharp enough to nick. She gave him a courtesy smile. He didn’t return it.

He stormed in a beat later without the formality of a knock. Short, square, academic in the way of a doorframe—permanent, unavoidable.

“What was that?” he demanded.

Marie sat, put her glasses back on with the calm of someone choosing her battles. “A student.”

“You’re hiding something.” Warren sniffed the air as if academia had a scent he could track. “As head of the board, I do not appreciate surprises.”

“Albert.”

He was already leaning over the desk, predator’s grin edging into her space. “I expect students to bullshit me, not colleagues.”

She removed her glasses again—ritual, reset. “Fine. I gave her the grant.”

Colour rose under his skin, ugly and quick. “You didn’t. Not again.”

“She’s been through hell,” Marie said, temper flattening to steel. “Her wedding—”

“Spare me the soap opera.” He snatched the file, flipped it open, let the pages slap the desk. “Three grants. Nothing to show. Now an algorithm to conjure meaning from an undeciphered script? Saint Jude’s Department of Lost Causes. My God, Marie.”

“She’s trying. What do you want me to do—kick her into the road?”

“I want you to stop enabling her delusions. She is a waste of funding, time, and oxygen.”

“You’re obsessed with money,” Marie shot back. “You don’t care about students or ideas, only whether your name lands on the next cheque.”

“Damn right,” he said, unembarrassed. “Because I produce results.” He leaned closer, breath sour with coffee. “Listen carefully. One more grant to your pet project and it’s not just her career in the shredder. It’s yours.”

Silence slid between them and settled. Marie looked down at the proposal—Jessica’s margins busy with arrows and a kind of desperate hope you can’t fake.

Warren straightened; smugness reasserted itself like posture. “Good. Get your head out of your idealistic arse before it costs us both.”

He left, slamming the door as if volume could write policy.

The room went still. Outside, a student laughed at something that wouldn’t matter tomorrow. The laptop fan ticked, the tea cooled into resignation.

Marie pressed her fingers to her brow, then let the hand fall. On the desk, the title stared back:

Adaptive Phoneme Mapping for Proto-Scripts Using Multimodal Corpus Synthesis.

Mad. Beautiful. Possibly both.

She thought of Jessica in the hall—chin lifted, eyes bright around the hurt she refused to weaponize. She thought of Warren’s warning, hammers in the head dressed as advice.

Maybe she’d made a mistake.

Or maybe—just once—the department would be wrong and Jessica would be right. Maybe a girl left at the altar could build a machine that refused to leave meaning on the floor. Maybe grief, properly wired, could read the dead.

Marie slid the file to the top of the stack where decisions live and consequences follow, uncapped her pen, and signed the grant release.

Outside, Oxford kept its centuries. Inside, two women chose a future the memo wouldn’t approve. And somewhere far from the spires, in a bunker that pretended to be an office, a weapon no one was supposed to find kept its own counsel in the dark—waiting for the first name in its new ledger to be written.