Setting the folder down — temporarily out of Ness’s reach — Petrana busies herself with unfolding the metal contraption she’d carried in alongside it, producing something once secure that’s rather like a sturdier music stand, designed to hold not pages but books open in place. It will certainly more than serve for the sheaf of busy-work reports that are, admittedly, largely rather dull in their particulars,

“Familiarising yourself with these will not, I think, tax you so that anyone feels the need to scold for it,” she says, setting them up in the stand; she has already organised them by chronology (and priority, where appropriate). “But so as you might not feel quite so apart from what’s done in your absence, or lost when you return from it.”

A long-standing habit of her own, even if sometimes she’s asking Julius to read them to her so she can fall asleep.