Chapter Text
Inej sticks her fingers under her glasses to rub her eyes and then walks out into the hall. The light’s on in his office. She feels like it must be against University regulations to hold office hours that start at 8PM, but Kaz gets away with it. He gets away with a lot of things.
She gives the door a little shove, and peers through the crack. The hinges don’t squeak and he’s got earbuds in, but he looks up anyway. “Hello, Inej,” he says, and winds the wire around his fingers. Sometimes when she finds him late at night, he’s loosened his tie and opened the top buttons of his shirt. Not tonight. “The argument is sound but your conclusions are too vague.”
“I’m fine, thank you; how are you?” she says, and comes into the office.
She tries to keep her space — not an office but a quarter of an office, shared with Wylan, Pim, and Anika — tidy, but it will never be as clean as this. Her desk will never be this spotless. Certainly her books will never be this alarmingly regimented, carefully divided into literature and criticism, subdivided by publishing house, alphabetical by author within those lines. She perches on the edge of the very clean and very unwelcoming guest chair. She’s honestly a little surprised he doesn’t just make the students stand.
(rateuokprofs.com says:
NIGHTMARE
KLL10 - Introduction to Kerch Literature
Genuinely the worst experience of my college career and maybe my entire life?!?1 He assigns the entire library in readings and lectures from behind a desk like an evil newscaster, and the news is THAT YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING FAIL MY FRIEND BECAUSE HIS GRADING RUBRIC IS FROM HELL)
“You can stick with the broader conclusion for a narrower set of works, or you can apply a narrower conclusion to the whole range.”
She tucks her hands under her legs. “Bollinger’s going to be furious either way, though, isn’t he?”
“Only if he reads it.” Kaz smiles. It is not a kind or a pleasant smile, but like the light spilling into the hall from under his door, she’s so glad to see it.
“Oh, you don’t think he clicks all the links in the faculty digest?”
He raises an eyebrow at her, and she winces. She’s not in the faculty digest. Adjuncts aren’t faculty.
Kaz is. Not even an assistant professor, not just tenure-track, which would be incredible by itself. He’s a full professor, though he can’t be forty and Inej thinks he might not even be thirty-five. It’s absurd. Impossible. But there’s his name on the nameplate, in the course catalogue, on the UoK website.
It’s something to do with the unbelievable four — four! — books that loom on the shelf over his shoulder, his name in austere typeface on each spine. But even then. It’s impossible. Jesper has shared various lurid theories.
You never know, with Kaz.
“Still,” he says, “personally I’d recommend a slightly more confrontational approach. At this stage in your career you need to be known.”
“And you think I should be known for being a bitch?”
“It worked for me,” he says, unblinking. “Don’t say you’re contradicting anyone, don’t mention any names or works. Just pick out some key phrases and invert them. ‘The exhilaration of the narrative derives from Ryllart’s construction of the sense of individual achievement,’ right, that’s the line from Bollinger’s wretched book. So, ‘the exhilaration of the narrative derives from Ryllart’s construction of the sense of successful exploitation.’ Only don’t say ‘exploitation.’ Too boiler-plate Marzhakian.”
“‘The exhilaration of the narrative derives from Ryllart’s destruction of the sense of duty,’” Inej says.
He turns away, types something. “Yes, that would work nicely.”
She bites her lip to stop her smile. Not that he’s looking. But it’s pathetic, the way she basks in his approval of her work, his interest in her comments on his work. He never tries to mentor her like Haskell does, with a hand on her shoulder and a too-earnest invitation to have coffee with him sometimes. He just asks her opinion on things, and tells her his. (His is usually vicious. She likes that too, and isn’t always happy with herself for it.)
He cited her once, in a paper he published in Journal of Literature and Urban Studies, and she’d walked on air all day. All fucking day. Ghafa, Inej, “No Escape: Obligation as Incarceration in the Writings of L. Roskaya,” Devoorst Modernist Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, 2023, pp. 27-30.
She tries to be cynical. Maybe it buffs his cosmopolitan credentials, to have more Suli names in his bibliographies. When she saw him, all she’d said was, “Kaz, I’ll give you a kruge if you can write a paper without the word geographies in it.”
He’d eyed her cooly. “I’d never want to deprive you of your entire wardrobe budget like that.”
Which was a low fucking blow. He does that sometimes.
If he weren’t cutthroat, he wouldn’t be where he is, and if she had any sense, she’d be worried he was stealing her work. But she does not, apparently, have sense. Especially when he looks at her very evenly under his sharp black brows. Or drums his long fingers on the desk.
“There’s a departmental faculty meeting tomorrow,” he says.
She frowns. “Oh?”
“I want to talk to some people about it beforehand.”
“Who?”
Instead of answering, Kaz picks up his phone and sends a text. Her phone buzzes in response, alerting her to a message in the encrypted channel he added her to a few months back. He named it Tolerated Colleagues.
When she looks up he’s holding out two twenties. “Step out to the student place by the bridge, would you?”
“You can’t send me for coffee, Kaz.”
“I’m supposed to be holding office hours here. I can’t go. And Nina will leave if there isn’t coffee.”
“Nina’s probably halfway back to our apartment by now. It’s three transfers on the KTB.”
He snorts. “Nina’s in international student housing with her Fjerdan postdoc. And Wylan is watching Jesper play pool in a downtown bar with a deliberately seedy aesthetic.”
She crosses her arms. “You still can’t send me for coffee. What was that you said to me about being mistaken for the help?”
“This is not a status-based division of labor, Inej,” he says impatiently, and gestures to the cane hooked on the bookshelf beside him. “There’s going to be six of us, and four cups is my limit. And I am, in deference to your pathetic salary, offering to pay.”
“You could say please,” she mutters, and takes the twenties.
“The courtesy phrase is a linguistic flourish designed to give ordinary speech an aristocratic aura,” he says. “I thought you’d appreciate my working class bluntness.”
Over her shoulder, she says, “I bet you could carry six cups if you wanted to.”
Once, after a departmental function, she’d lingered to help the caterer clean up; the mess was enormous, and they’d only hired one waiter to handle it all. Collecting wine glasses, she’d looked up and seen Kaz frowning at her.
“Don’t do that. If you don’t separate yourself from the hired help, they won’t either. They don’t see your solidarity with the workers. They just see you knowing your place.” He’d picked an unopened wine bottle out of a box. “Charge it to the department,” he told the caterer, and handed it to her, still frowning. “Go home.”
She went home, and when Nina wasn’t there, she drank the entire bottle of sweet-tart Zemeni white by herself, and sent Nina a text.
And then when Nina didn’t answer she typed out:
But she didn’t send it. She carefully deleted it all and sent a text to Kaz instead.
Twenty minutes later, Nina came home, and told Inej a very long and very relatable story about being cornered by a visiting prof for what seemed like an ordinarily bloviating, tone-deaf conversation that turned, after forty minutes, into a bloviating, tone-deaf proposition. When Inej looked back at her phone, her text had rated a reply from Professor Brekker:
She had halfway assumed that, after what Heleen so unwaveringly referred to as the encounter, that her interest in sex would be shut down for good. No such luck.
When she gets back from the coffee shop, the narrow office is noisy and warm with voices, the hook on the back of the door overburdened with coats. Wylan has taken the uncomfortable guest chair, Jesper is perched on its arm, and Nina is sitting on Kaz’s desk with her big blond postdoc at her feet, looking surly despite the caressing hand Nina has on his cheek.
“What is the purpose of a university?” Kaz asks the room, as she shuts the door behind her.
“The expansion of knowledge,” Nina says. “Research, debate. Oh my god, coffee. Inej, you’re the agent of the Saints.”
“Isn’t it the transmission of knowledge? Teaching and learning. Sugar in the bottom of the tray,” Inej says, and accepts a kiss on each cheek.
“Thank you, beautiful,” Jesper says, and takes two cups, handing one to Wylan. “And I’d say ‘the circulation of knowledge’ covers all of that.”
“Why are we letting Brekker lead a seminar?” asks Matthias from the floor. He declines coffee with a frown.
“Students come here so that we can certify that they know certain things, and those certificates grant them leverage in the market. We, by our research, by our reputations with our peers, by our — crudely speaking — being known to know things, assert our right to certify them. What is adds up to,” Kaz says, as he takes both his own and Matthias’s coffee, “is the overt translation of knowledge into power. And like any process of refinement and conversion, it’s worth something to the economy. Which you’d think would be reflected in the budget.”
“The way you play into your national stereotype would be funny,” Nina says,“if I didn’t think it was your actual personality.”
(rateuokprofs.com says:
Fixed my hangover!!!
KLL440/TS205 - Unusual Abilities in Fiction
She has like no accent but she’s a real-deal-trained-in-Ravka grisha and her lectures are GREAT. Assigns a lot of reading, but it’s mostly pretty interesting, and she’s really nice. Talks hilarious shit about Brekker. PS do NOT use tovenaar in your papers she will knock a point off so make sure you say grisha instead.)
“It’s nearly ten at night,” Matthias says. “And you are all drinking coffee?”
Kaz rips open a sugar packet. “There’s work to be done.”
Wylan stops with the cup halfway to his mouth. “The budget. What about the budget?” His blue eyes focus on Kaz. He always looks so young, which gives his intensity an air of teenage passion.
(rateuokprofs.com says:
Absent-Minded Professor
KLL203 - Old Kerch Epics
Not for everybody – both the big exams are having to perform forty lines in Old Kerch, and he grades on pronunciation and scansion, so if you have stage fright or don’t like memorizing things you might want to skip. But you’ll have a party trick for the rest of your life. Hendriks knows all the poems completely by heart and he can do the music too, but I think he forgot his glasses EVERY SINGLE CLASS. But he’s really understanding about personal circumstances.)
“This was in Haskell’s email,” Kaz says pointedly to Jesper.
Jesper, who has an impressive-yet-attainable three-page CV and as an assistant professor is the only other person in the room invited to faculty meetings, rolls his eyes. “He sent that two hours ago. The meeting’s tomorrow. Sorry I’m not eagerly opening the Chair’s emails over dinner.”
“I don’t understand how you plan to get anywhere in this department with that attitude.”
“Well, see, I have this alternative to scheming and backstabbing and writing papers designed to piss off as many people as possible. It’s called ‘being friendly, personable, and collegial,’ and I think you should try it sometime.”
“I think an impartial observer might call your behavior ‘flirting.’”
“And you should try that, too,” Jesper says, and smiles.
(rateuokprofs.com says:
Puts the Queer in Queer
KLL407 - Contemporary Queer Literature
I stg he talks like he’s dated every single author he covers INCLUDING THE LESBIANS SOMEHOW. So I think he’s lying. BUT STILL. Loves to go off on tangents, fiddles with the chalk non-stop and gives bonus points for papers which are exactly the minimum number of pages. I want to slip him my methylphenidate. 10/10 would learn nothing from again)
“The budget,” Wylan says. “What about the budget?”
“Haskell sent the faculty meeting agenda around today. The last item is ‘Projected Budget Shortfall.’”
Her stomach drops.
Adjuncts are always first on the chopping block. If they cut her pay, she’ll have nothing to send home. If they let her go, her visa will expire. Another mouth for her parents to feed, if she can even get back to them. Her research. She’s worked so hard. She’s cost them so much. How can she come back with nothing? She can see the look on her father’s face so clearly. He’ll try not to let her see.
Her mouth is dry. Her mind is racing. Nina will have to find another roommate. When will UoK cut off her benefits? Will Kerch charge her for her deportation? Will Kaz write her a letter of recommendation? Will he miss her when she’s gone?
“What Haskell hasn’t sent around,” Kaz says, “today or anytime this year, is a budget. I know how many professors this department has, how many associate professors, how many visitors, lecturers, and adjuncts. And I know how many wealthy little children come to us looking for an easy degree with a prestigious seal on it. The numbers,” he says, “do not add up.”
Jesper frowns. “Is Haskell paying himself double on the sly?”
“I wouldn’t put some skimming past him,” Kaz says, “but no. That’s not the problem here. The problem is the budget total, which Haskell doesn’t dictate.”
“Who does dictate it?” Nina says. “The University President?”
“Well,” Kaz says, “the general university budget is set by the Board of Regents. They apportion the academic budget by school. Then the schools budget for the departments. If Language and Literature is being singled out to tighten its belt, it’s coming from the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.” He leans back in his chair. “It’s coming from Rollins.”
“Is he siphoning our budget off for his department?” asks Jesper. “Is the Psych research budget eating our lunch?”
Our lunch? Inej thinks. Not yours; you’re tenure track. But that’s ungenerous of her; he cares. She curls her knees to her chest, trying not to panic. Trying not picture herself facing a Ravkan customs agent, having her fingerprints roughly taken by an official in rubber gloves, presenting her card day after day after day for the privilege of sitting in the grimy plastic chairs at the Office of Minority Employment.
“It doesn’t seem impossible,” Kaz says. His eyes are on Wylan, and Wylan is as white as paper. “Perhaps some more… detailed oversight would reveal something like that.”
“No,” Wylan says. His voice is thin and high. “I mean, maybe. Maybe he’s taking money for his department. But if he’s targeting Lit, I think he’s being told to do it. The Regents told him to.”
Kaz leans forward. “The Regents told him?”
“Jan Van Eck told him to.”
“And why would he do that?”
Wylan looks at his hands, twined together in his lap. “He’s… he wants to go into higher office again. The Council. It looks good, hitting the humanities. ‘Trimming the fat.’ All that… all that bullshit they love to boast they’re doing.”
“But Rollins is singling out Literature.” Kaz’s eyes are narrow. “Out of all the humanities. That’s coming from Jan Van Eck?”
In a very, very faint voice, Wylan says, “He wants them to let me go.”
“Let you go?” Matthias rumbles from his seat on the floor. “Why should he care about one adjunct teaching Old Kerch?”
“He doesn’t want people to find out.”
“Find out what?” Nina demands.
Wylan squeezes his eyes shut and drives his fingers into his red-blond hair. “I’m his son.”
“Oh my god,” Nina gasps. “Jan Van Eck has a child out of wedlock?”
Wylan digs into his pocket for his wallet. Looking at the floor, he holds up his national ID card for her to see. “Not – not out of wedlock. Hendriks is my… I prefer to work as Wylan Hendriks.”
Nina peers at the ID, looking flummoxed. “He’s worried… people will think you’re underqualified? That he exerted pressure to have you hired?”
Wylan fumbles putting the card away. “My disability,” he says. His voice is still thin and shrill with misery. “The press would have a field day. Can you imagine the headlines? ‘UoK Hired Regent’s Illiterate Son to Teach Literature.’”
“Illiterate?” Matthias demands. “What do you mean, illiterate? I thought you were — what is the word — over-sighted?”
“Hyperopic, is the technical term in Kerch,” Nina says with authority. “Idiomatic, far-sighted.”
“It’s not my vision,” Wylan says. His eyes are shut. “It’s my brain. I can’t read.”
Matthias frowns. “But how can you teach? How can you study?”
“Old Kerch literature is an oral tradition,” Jesper says sharply. “He probably appreciates it better than any other scholar alive.”
“I use a screen reader, if I have to read text,” Wylan says. “It’s not perfect but — and the Office of Disability Management knows. All it takes is one unprincipled clerk looking for a payday from the Beurs-Nieuws. But if he can get me laid off — and get credit for trimming the budget while he’s at it —“
“And so we’re fucked,” Kaz says.
“So Wylan’s fucked, you mean,” Jesper says. “Wylan and Inej and probably Matthias, too.”
“My fellowship is endowed by the Fjerdan government,” Matthias says. “They cannot just get rid of me.”
(rateuokprofs.com says:
Like the fucking navy
KLL210 - Kerch Literature in the Early Royal Period
Takes off participation points if your late and expects you to know all this fjerdan history I could not give a fuck about. Its kerch lit, dude. Chill or go back to your ice flow.)
Kaz says, “His job is probably the safest one here.”
“They’ll deport Inej if she hasn’t got a job on the first of the year,” Nina says, steely.
He doesn’t look at her. “I am aware.”
“What about you?” Matthias says.
“My appointment’s for the academic year,” Nina says. “And there’s a post waiting for me in Os Alta if I want it. Never mind about me. Inej. Sweetheart. Don’t worry. We’ll hide you under the bed if we have to.”
Inej, who has almost stopped listening, half-drowned in the arithmetic of tickets and travel pass fees and bribes, manages a smile, and when Nina holds out her arm, Inej leans into her shoulder. It is comforting. She doesn’t want to hide under the bed, either. But Nina cares for her, too.
“If I quit,” Wylan says. “If I quit right now. Maybe — maybe he’ll reconsider. Redistribute the funds.”
“Fuck your dad,” Jesper mutters. Matthias shifts to give him a look which very plainly says you can’t just say that about other people’s fathers, which Jesper ignores.
In a neutral tone, Kaz says, “Do you genuinely think that would work? If you resigned, do you think Haskell could appeal the budget decision?”
Inej’s heart is in her throat. She can’t ask that of Wylan. But she can’t go back, either. Not now and not like this.
“I don’t know,” Wylan says miserably. “If someone told him. That he trusted. And he was in the right mood. But also he might think it would look weak to change his mind. It’s not as though he actually cares about the department at all.”
“Right,” Kaz says. “If your resignation is what he wants, we don’t improve our strategic position by giving it to him.”
“Are you planning to use his job as a bargaining chip?” Jesper demands.
“He’s Jan Van Eck’s son; you think he needs the money?”
“He cut me off when I went for my PhD, actually,” Wylan says. She wonders if she looks as dazed and ashen as he does.
“Your resignation isn’t our first move, is what I’m saying. The first thing we can do is play for time. Jesper, if I go on the offensive against Rojakke’s pet crossover program, you’ll back me?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s Rojakke’s attempt to bolster his pathetic CV by making it look like he hasn’t been publishing because he’s been engaging in innovative interdisciplinary pedagogy. Really it’s three computers, six TAs scanning undergrad papers, and Rojakke recording a podcast with his friend in Market Technologies. So let Market Technologies pay for it.”
“Sure, I’ll back you on that, if you want to go after him,” Jesper says with a shrug. “Not like he likes me anyway.”
“If nothing else, we can run down the clock on the meeting fighting with him about it. See if I can’t bait him into getting on Haskell’s bad side.”
“Goody,” Jesper says. “Who doesn’t love a protracted faculty meeting.”
“And in the meantime,” Kaz says. “Keep your ears open for anything we might be able to use against Van Eck. Or Rollins.”
“I don’t think blackmail is the best idea,” Wylan says doubtfully.
“And you think Rollins will go against the Board of Regents?” Matthias asks.
“It never hurts to know things,” is all Kaz says.
The others filter out, exchanging reassurances, promises to meet. Nina promises Inej the apartment to herself tonight, which makes Matthias turn scarlet and mumble to her in Fjerdan.
Inej lingers, waiting until they’re all gone, and takes back the guest chair. “How much of that did you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your face,” she says. “When Wylan was telling us. You knew.”
“I knew he was Wylan Van Eck. I didn’t know the… nature of the relationship. I admit when I called this meeting I assumed Jan would want his son’s department well-funded, and that Rollins was the problem. I was hoping to get Wylan to intercede for us to bring the Regents down on him. But apparently I misread the situation.” He frowns. “Don’t you have a 10A lecture in the morning? Go home.”
“Right,” Inej says, and she can hear how desolate she sounds.
“Don’t let the little shits scare you,” he says. “Fuckers can smell fear.”
Inej tries to smile. KLL10 is Introduction to Kerch Literature, for students who want to take a major. It surveys the foundational works of the Kerch canon, and is taught by the tenured professors, in rotation, to students who want to know that they’re learning from leading scholars. KLL10A is the general education requirement class in Literature. It’s taught by adjuncts, to students who have to tick a humanities box before they get their degrees in Business Science. “Might be a little late for that.”
(rateuokprofs.com says:
Comment removed for language violating the Terms and Conditions.)
“It’s never too late to wake them up a little.”
Inej shuts her eyes. Because it’s all very well for him to make his name antagonizing his colleagues and terrifying his students. Easy for him to tell her to follow his example. Easy for her to let herself dream of doing it. But it’s not so simple. “You know we can’t all afford to grade like you do.”
He looks at her sidelong. The shape of his eyes, the cast of his cheekbones, the black of his hair, all add up to something Kerch literature, from the Roveraar conquest up to about a generation ago, calls peasant features. There are plenty of faces like his in the streets of Ketterdam, plenty in the brochure photographs for the University, some in the halls of power. A handful even on the Council.
But it’s not a Suli face.
So even if he weren’t a man, it’s not the same. And as far as she can tell from his CV — not that she studies it so often — he’s never had to face the hiring market she’s facing now. He doesn’t know what it’s like, to need every possible advantage you can possibly bring to a hiring committee. Including good student evals.
“Hmm,” is all he says.
“They’re not so bad,” she says, and they’re not, really. Most of them don’t do anything worse in class than sleep. Once or twice, she’s even seen that precious, vital spark of recognition in some of their eyes — a girl reading Geerta’s lament in the Distaff Cycle and shrinking back from a future she came here to escape, a boy’s grip crumpling his photocopy of Rejoicing in Diligence as she leads them through it line by line and the irony takes him like a knife in the gut. The ripple of unease that goes through the room when they hear the original context of the quotation carved over the door of the Humanities Library on the Boeksplein.
It’s just that every time some snotty sophomore sitting in an upper row calls out Hey Miss, while her back is turned to write on the board, her blood runs cold and every muscle in her body draws tight and she knows that they see. Like Kaz says, they can smell her fear.
“Regardless,” he says, “you ought to go home.”
She tries to remember where she’d been in her work, before she walked out in the hall and saw the light on in his office. The next paper, of course, after the one which will piss off Bollinger — she hasn’t quite got a title, but maybe something about echoes — but she doesn’t even remember which text she’d been looking at.
“Maybe so,” she says. “Goodnight.”
She wants to climb over the desk and into his lap. She wants to work her fingers into the knot of his tie and rub her cheek against the stubble-prickled line of his jaw. She wants to think about his body and her body and not anything else, and she wants him to kiss her and kiss her until she is comforted. She is an idiot. She is a child.
He doesn’t say goodnight, and he doesn’t turn back to his own work. Just watches her leave, his hands folded on the desk in front of him.