Chapter 1

Emiko Tanaka had learned, somewhere around the age of fifteen, that being right was a kind of quiet violence — that the correction itself mattered less than the look on the other person’s face when it landed. She’d carried that lesson carefully ever since, the way she carried everything: folded small, tucked out of sight, examined alone.

At twenty-two she was five foot six, beautiful, biracial Japanese/Korean with an IQ of 145, slender in a way that read as delicate rather than frail, ink black hair worn pulled back more often than not, her mother’s softness and her father’s exactness inherited in roughly equal measure — though only one of the two had ever been asked of her. She was in her second year toward a doctorate in genetics at the National University of Singapore, one of the youngest candidates the department had accepted in a decade, and she told herself, most days, that this was enough. That a mind like hers didn’t need what other people seemed to need. That solitude was simply the tax levied on anyone who thought as far ahead as she did.

Most days, she almost believed it.

Hitori Tanaka had never once, in Emiko’s memory, told her she’d done well without immediately telling her how she might have done better. She could still call up, with total clarity, the afternoon she was twelve and had come home with a perfect score on a national mathematics examination — the only student in her cohort to manage it, a fact the school itself had thought remarkable enough to send a letter home about. She had stood in the doorway of his study, letter in hand, heart going fast in a way she’d mistaken, at twelve, for excitement instead of what it actually was, which was hope.

He had read it twice. Set it down on the desk, squared exactly to the edge. “A perfect score,” he’d said, “means the examination wasn’t difficult enough to measure you accurately. It tells us nothing about your ceiling. Only that you’ve found its floor.” Then he’d returned to his own papers, and she had stood there a moment longer, waiting for something that never came, before quietly closing the door behind her.

She had not cried. She had gone to her room and made a study schedule for the following term, harder than the one before it, because some deep and wordless part of her had understood, even then, that his silence was not an absence of love but a kind of ledger — that the only way to ever close the distance between them was to keep producing more, and better, and further, forever, and that stopping to ask for comfort instead would only prove she wasn’t serious enough to deserve the thing she was chasing in the first place.

It made her, by nineteen, into a young woman who apologized before she disagreed with anyone, even when she already knew, with total certainty, that she was right. Who shrank a little in rooms full of louder people, not because she had less to say, but because some old, deep instinct told her that taking up space was a kind of debt she hadn’t yet earned the right to spend. Who said yes more easily than no, deferred more easily than she asserted, and mistook her own accommodation for good manners rather than what it actually was — a decade of being taught, gently and without cruelty and therefore without any single moment to point to and blame, that her worth was provisional, renewed only by continued performance, revoked the instant she stopped producing something worth admiring.

It was not an abstraction. Three weeks into the term, her advisor — Dr. Hassan, a kind and entirely unremarkable man who had never once raised his voice at her — had looked over her draft methodology section and said, mildly, “I think the second approach is stronger, but it’s your project. What do you think?”

What she thought, immediately, with a certainty that arrived before she could examine it, was that the second approach was his, and the fact that he’d mentioned it at all meant her first approach had been wrong in some way she hadn’t yet been told. She heard herself say, “You’re right, of course — I should have seen that,” before he had actually told her which one he meant, and it wasn’t until she was back at her desk, methodology rewritten to match a guess at his preference rather than her own reasoning, that she realized she had never actually asked him which approach he’d meant, and that he probably hadn’t meant either one over the other at all. She sat with the rewritten section open on her screen for a long time, not because the work was wrong, but because she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember the last time she’d said “no, I think mine is right” to anyone and simply let the sentence stand without immediately apologizing for the shape of it.