The offer came not in a shadowy alcove or a sealed letter, but in the most mundane of places: the Academy's vast botanical conservatory. It was a jungle under glass, humid and lush, a deliberate fantasy of the south that always made my skin prickle with the memory of dry, frozen air. I was there under the thin pretext of studying a specimen of frost-fern, a hardy northern plant kept in a chilled case, a pathetic scrap of home I could pretend to analyze.
"It's struggling, isn't it?"
