Ari wasn't in a good mood.  The smile was bright enough, a broad grin, a second or two in duration, and then it was gone.  She went over paper printout with a forced concentration that just wasn't up to its usual enthusiasm.

Justin Warrick didn't ask why.  It wasn't profitable to ask, but her mood was bothersome.  Ari wasn't sulking. nothing to do with him, he sensed.  She was just trying hard not to be elsewhere this afternoon, and didn't volunteer the information that anything was wrong, but there was, somewhere in her universe.

Which, if it wasn't his doing, he had to take as not his business.  Her universe in one sense had widened when Denys had died: in another, in the weeks after, it had gotten a lot more focused, more down to the task at hand, and he was fairly sure she was dropping weight. He saw it in the hand that gripped the stylus, in the angle of the back - backbones showed under the silk jersey.  She had a few people on her domestic staff, people who were supposed to be seeing to her welfare and making sure she got meals.  She certainly had Florian and Catlin to look out for her and serve as confidants.  But something wasn't right, and he'd begun to suspect it was a troublingly unusual complaint in an eighteen-year-old genius-level CIT: far too much study, obsessive study.  Too little real sleep.  Taking the cataphoric drug too often, trying to let deepstudy hours sub for sleep, and giving herself no time for dream-function.  That could lead to some real eetee behavior.  Ari didn't say so, but the signs of that were increasingly there, in the weight loss, the slight rawness of nerves.

"I don't see it," she said, after scanning page after page.  "Justin, I don't see it."

"Maybe a little sleep would be a good thing."

"I sleep just fine."

"Sure you do," he said.  "Ari, do me a personal favor.  Have a little more of it."

Now he got the frown, full-force and directed at him.  "There's nothing wrong with my sleep pattern.  I'm just not seeing this problem, is all."

"Well, possibly I'm wrong."  Not likely.  He knew the psychset represented in that printout very well, and he knew the particular case in question, and the right answer was obvious to a much lesser operator.  On the other hand, he was dealing with a mind that was capable of taking a new approach to a classic problem, and capable of not pinning the solution where every other operator thought it was.  It was an interesting point, whether the obviousness of the answer would make her miss the question... or whether she had rejected the classic answer and was after something else which no other examiner had ever caught.

They weren't going to find it out in five minutes.

"I want you to take this home," he said.  It was near the end of their regular session.  "Don't look at it again until tomorrow morning.  And, young sera -"

"Don't call me that!"

"Ari.  Get some sleep.  No study tonight.  That's your assignment."

A quick flash of dark, sullen eyes.  "I'm fine."

"Sure you are.  Take the evening off.  Take the night off.  Think about it."