By five o'clock.
The Institute's front became a canvas for projected images.
Adrian's equations ghosted over stone, his handwriting magnified until each letter looked like a path.
Someone played a recording of him speaking and the crowd closed its eyes in unison, a muscle contracted.
Maya stood with the other graduate students near the front.
She had slept for forty minutes on a couch in the lab and woken to the smell of his cologne in the fabric, a stupid, human thing that undid her.
Now, as a dean with a voice like gravel tried to speak without breaking, she stared at the steps where she had watched him stride past a thousand times as if the world had given him a personal green light.
Aditi arrived late, out of breath, carrying nothing.
She felt ridiculous for it, as if grief had an entry fee.
A woman pressed a spare candle into her hand and squeezed her fingers, a kindness that surprised her.
Aditi thought of arsenic and membranes and the way he had said.
Your vector, like a map she could follow.
She promised the air that she would.
Sasha stood back, notebook closed.
She did not need quotes.
She watched faces.
A boy fiddled with a pair of sleek prosthetic hands and then placed them on the railing as if laying down a sword.
A man in a suit cried the way clergymen cry.
The senator was there, his smile calibrated to solemn, and for once the cameras caught him at a loss for the right shape of his mouth.
When the dean finished, Maya stepped forward.
She had not planned to speak.
Her voice came out hoarse, and then steadied.
"He told us being tired was a form of stupidity," she said, and there were small, rueful laughs because people remembered the line.
"He was not gentle with us. He was kind, which is harder. He wanted us to be better than our limits, and he assumed we could be. I don't know what to do with the space where his voice used to be. I expect I will try to fill it with work and fail and try again."
She looked down at the candle, watched the flame bend away from the wind.
"He used to say that the universe yields to questions asked correctly. I have a new one how do we keep going without him? I think the answer is together."
Applause felt wrong but happened anyway, the human body's impulse to mark a moment with sound.
Above them, the projections shifted.
A photo appeared Adrian laughing at something unseen, head thrown back, hands mid-gesture.
The crowd breathed in as if to memorize it.
Elsewhere, remembering took different shapes.
In a classroom in Seoul, a robotics team assembled a hand and then took it apart and then assembled it again, saying his name every time a piece fit.
In Nairobi, a doctor in a clinic that ran on solar panels he had funded told a mother that her child's fever would break by morning and believed it a little harder than usual.
In a small house on a quiet street, his mother sat with the curtains open and the TV off.
Neighbors knocked, left food, left and came back, afraid of leaving her alone with the silence.
She touched each dish as if heat were a language she could still speak to her son.
At a launch site where cold makes metal philosophical, a team of engineers paused tests for a minute of silence that stretched to five because no one wanted to be the person who ended it.
An astronaut on the International Space Station taped his photo to a wall next to a floating pen and said into the camera.
"We stand on his shoulders," and immediately winced at the cliché because it felt insufficient.
He left it anyway.
In a cramped dorm, Donovan wrote a note and then tore it up.
He picked up his phone and recorded a video addressed to no one that said.
"You didn't save me. You taught me not to wait for someone to."
He did not post it.
He kept it.
As night deepened, the City turned itself into a collection of small fires.
Candles in windows.
Screens playing the same montage.
The official statement from the family arrived late and simple.
We are heartbroken. We thank you for your love. Please give us space to grieve. He belonged to the world but he was ours first.
It did not mention funeral arrangements.
It did not pretend to have an explanation that would make anyone feel better.
It did not use the phrase passed away.
It said died, and some people cried harder because of the honesty.
In the lab, after the crowd drifted toward trains and cars.
A security guard made a slow round.
He paused in the doorway of Adrian's office, turned off the lamp, and hesitated, then turned it back on.
He left it burning.
He did not know why.
He walked on, whistling under his breath a tune he could not place until he realized it was from a video of a boy with electric hands missing a note and laughing.
On someone's screen, the graph of mentions crested like a wave and broke.
On someone else's, a draft obituary found its final cadence.
The child from the second row of yesterday's keynote sat on his bed and drew a rocket with a stick figure on top and wrote ME under it and then scratched it out and wrote US.
Grief has a way of deciding who people are.
Some became spokespeople, some became volunteers, some turned the ache into money for scholarships, some turned it into anger at a world that eats its best too young.
Some went to work with sharper pencils.
At three a.m., when the heart is loneliest, Maya returned to the lab.
She sat in his chair without permission and opened the German notebook, even though some pious part of her said don't.
She traced the last half-sentence with a finger.
What is the thing behind the thin—
"Veil," she said aloud, supplying the word he might have reached for.
"The thing behind the thin veil."
It was the kind of sentiment he would have mocked in daylight and chased down at night.
She closed the notebook and, after a moment, placed it in the drawer where he had kept a spare pair of glasses.
She did not lock it.
She turned off the lamp.
Then she turned it on again.
Morning would come.
People would ask what to do now.
The answers would be clumsy at first.
Then they would be better.
Then they would be work.
Tonight, the world kept watch, and in its keeping there was a kind of promise.