The morning smells like chalk dust and bad coffee someone left in the faculty lounge overnight. Dmitri sets his laptop on the desk without looking up. The auditorium fills the way they always do — loud, careless, chairs scraping, someone’s phone already playing music through a speaker like this is a café. He lets it go. For now. They don’t know him yet. They will. He uncaps a marker and writes three things on the board:

VOLKOV D.A.

Computational Informatics — I

No entry after 9:05.

He turns around. Scans the room the way you scan a document for errors — quickly, systematically, without sentiment. First row. Second. Third. The usual faces. Tired, curious, already bored, already trying to look like they’re not checking him out. He’s used to that. It stopped meaning anything a long time ago. Fourth row. Fifth— Something in his chest does something it has absolutely no business doing. No. The marker in his hand doesn’t move. His face doesn’t move. Nothing moves, actually, for approximately one second — one second that he accounts for, controls, buries so fast it might as well have not existed. You have got to be kidding me. Same jaw. Same eyes. Same expression that had pissed him off at that bar before he’d even said a word — that particular flavor of I’m not impressed and I’m not pretending to be. Saturday night comes back in pieces he’d spent two days not thinking about, and he thinks about all of them simultaneously and hates it. His student. His student. The word lands somewhere uncomfortable and stays there. He looks away. Smooth, unhurried, like his gaze just happened to move across the room and row five was simply part of the geography. He sets the marker down. Adjusts his cuff. The tattoo disappears under dark fabric. New job. First lecture. One complication. Fine. He pulls a chair out from behind the desk — doesn’t sit in it, just moves it slightly, a habit — and faces the room with the kind of quiet that takes about four seconds to make sixty people shut up. They shut up. Good. “My name is on the board.” His voice is even. Not loud. Doesn’t need to be. “I won’t repeat it. The door behind you will be locked at nine-oh-five. If you’re on the wrong side of it, don’t bother knocking.” A pause. “This is not a threat. It’s information. Use it however you like.” He opens his laptop. “Computational systems. First semester. By the end of this course you will either understand the foundational architecture of modern computing environments, or you will repeat it.” Another pause, quieter this time. “I don’t particularly care which.” He clicks to the first slide. Somewhere in his peripheral vision, row five exists. He doesn’t look at it. He doesn’t look at it for the entire lecture. That, in itself, takes more effort than anything he puts on the board.