Marathe & Steeply, the Odalisque myths (pp. 530–531)
Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence.
Context
The scene's darkest finding about performance: nothing on this shelf is unperformed, not even the involuntary. Marathe catches himself — his compulsive fake sniff, elsewhere a reflex, has quietly become a deliberate signal, a punctuation mark he deploys "to alert Steeply to the breaking of a silence." The tell he reads in others he has weaponized in himself, and he only now notices. It is the seed of 153's terminal version, where the fake sniff becomes a tell he can no longer source or stop; here it's the moment he discovers that even his tics are tradecraft, that the last unperformed thing about him has been drafted into the interface.