I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter

Chapter 129: Chapter 129: The Fifth Teacher

The corridor lights had gone the particular shade of grey that belonged to hours no clock wanted to claim.

Su Qing was the one who noticed first, because Su Qing always noticed first — it was the thing her memory had been built for, cataloguing absences the way other people catalogued presence. She woke without a sound, the way she’d trained herself to since Ning Yue, and her eyes went to the second bed before her mind had even finished deciding to be awake.

Empty.

No crumpled blanket kicked to the floor. No shoes missing by the door. No sign that a man had gotten up in the night to use the bathroom or pace off a bad dream. Just a bed made too carefully, sheets pulled taut in a way Mo Jun never bothered with, and across the flatness of it, a scatter of white dust catching what little light came through the curtains.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t even breathe hard. She sat very still for three full seconds, the way she’d learned to sit still around anything that might be listening, and then she reached over and shook Lin Yue’s door with the flat of her hand — three knocks, sharp, deliberate, the signal they’d agreed on weeks ago for come now, don’t ask why in the hallway.

By the time Lin Yue opened Room 201’s door, Bai Wuyin was already at his shoulder in borrowed silence, Su Qing was standing in the corridor in her sleep clothes with her arms folded hard across her chest, not because she was cold.

"He’s gone," she said. No preamble. "Not missing. Gone the way Ning Yue was gone, except—" She stopped herself.

"Except what?" Lin Yue said.

"Except there’s no window this time." Her voice had the careful, controlled flatness of someone deciding, on purpose, not to fall apart in front of witnesses. "Come look."

They went. Shen Rui emerged from Room 202 half-dressed, rubbing sleep from his eyes until he saw Su Qing’s face and stopped rubbing. Ye Xian followed a half-step behind him, already too awake, the kind of awake that made Lin Yue wonder — not for the first time — whether Ye Xian had been sleeping at all.

Room 203’s door stood open. Su Qing hadn’t closed it behind her.

Lin Yue stepped inside and stopped just past the threshold, because stepping further would have meant standing directly over the bed, and something about the arrangement of white dust across the sheets made that feel like trespassing on a grave that hadn’t finished being dug.

It wasn’t scattered. That was the wrong word for what it was doing.

It had been written.

Lines of chalk dust, pale and precise, lay out across the dark blanket in the unmistakable shape of a lesson plan — headers, ruled underlines, a margin exactly where a margin should sit. Lin Yue had seen plenty of things in the Flow arranged to unsettle through excess: too much blood, too many hands, too many eyes in the dark. This was the opposite kind of horror. It was arranged with care. Someone — something — had taken the time to make it neat.

"Don’t touch it," Bai Wuyin said quietly, from just behind Lin Yue’s elbow. His voice had already dropped into the flatter register he only used when it was just the two of them close enough that pretending felt pointless. "Not yet."

Lin Yue crouched instead, close enough to read without disturbing a single grain.

LESSON: 47

SUBJECT: MATHEMATICS

ATTENDANCE: 30

OBJECTIVE: COMPLETE THE CLASS

DISMISSAL: —

And beneath it, small and precise, two columns of names ran down the sheet. Lin Yue didn’t recognize a single one. He didn’t need to. His eyes went, instead, to the last line at the very bottom — the one Su Qing had clearly already read and clearly hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since.

TEACHER: MO JUN

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Shen Rui, in the doorway, made a small sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a word.

"That’s not possible," he managed. "That’s... chalk doesn’t do that on its own. Someone had to have—"

"No one had to," Bai Wuyin said. "It writes itself. We’ve seen it do that before."

"Not like this." Shen Rui’s voice climbed half an octave before he reined it back in. "Before it was a sentence. A warning. This is a whole—" He gestured helplessly at the bed. "This is a plan. That’s not haunting. That’s paperwork."

"That’s worse," Ye Xian said, quiet, from the doorway. He hadn’t come further in. His eyes moved across the arrangement with a kind of careful, clinical attention that made Lin Yue’s skin prickle, the same attention he’d used examining the mark on Lin Yue’s wrist two nights ago. "Paperwork means someone’s already decided the outcome. This isn’t asking a question. It’s filling in a form that’s already approved."

Su Qing crossed her arms tighter.

"There’s a blank line," she said. "At the bottom of the attendance list. Under the last name." Her jaw worked once before she made herself finish. "It wasn’t blank when I first looked at it, an hour ago. It’s blank now."

Bai Wuyin’s head came up sharply. "You watched it change?"

"I watched something write into it," Su Qing said. "The chalk moved on its own. No hand. I don’t — I couldn’t make myself stay and read what it wrote. I came and got you instead."

Lin Yue looked back down at the sheet. Thirty names, and one blank line beneath them, and attendance: 30 printed neatly at the top as though the count had already been settled before anyone in this room had woken up to argue about it.

"He’s not missing," Lin Yue said slowly. "He’s enrolled."

The word sat in the room like something cold had walked in and refused to leave.

"Then we find him," he said, "before dismissal."

—————————————————

They moved through the academic wing in a loose, wordless formation that had become instinct weeks ago — Lin Yue at the front, Bai Wuyin close at his side despite the older boys around them, Su Qing a half-step behind with her notebook clutched instead of carried, Shen Rui watching the doorways they passed with the particular tension of a man who’d stopped trusting empty rooms even in daylight, Ye Xian trailing last, silent, unreadable.

No one said Ning Yue’s name. No one said Tang Li’s either. They didn’t have to; the absence of those names had become its own kind of ritual, a discipline the whole group had settled into without ever agreeing to it out loud, the way you didn’t say a dead man’s name in a house that still echoed.

Lin Yue’s wrist ached faintly as they turned down the corridor toward the academic block’s older wing — not sharp, not yet, but present, the way a bruise made itself known before you remembered pressing on it. He didn’t mention it. He didn’t need to; Bai Wuyin’s eyes flicked to his sleeve without being asked, checking, the way he’d taken to doing every few minutes since Classroom 3-7 had left its mark.

"It’s getting warmer," Lin Yue said, low, for Bai Wuyin alone.

"How much?"

"Enough to notice."

Bai Wuyin’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing else. He didn’t need to explain what that meant. They both already knew which direction warmth pointed them in these halls, and it wasn’t a direction either of them wanted to walk toward again so soon.

They found the voice before they found the room.

It drifted down the corridor first, faint and even, the unmistakable cadence of a lecture in progress — not urgent, not desperate, just a steady, patient recitation of something mathematical, numbers and variables laid out one after another with the calm rhythm of a man who had explained this exact thing a hundred times before and expected to explain it a hundred more.

Mo Jun’s voice.

Su Qing went rigid the instant she recognized it. "That’s him."

"Wait," Lin Yue said, catching her arm before she could break into a run. "Listen first."

She wanted to argue. He watched the argument cross her face and lose. She listened.

It took several seconds for what was wrong to surface, because on its own the voice sounded almost ordinary — a teacher walking a class through a derivation, the kind of thing you might hear from any open classroom door on any unremarkable Tuesday. But there was no answering murmur beneath it. No shuffle of pencils, no cough, no chair creak, none of the small ambient noise that even the quietest classroom generated simply by holding thirty living bodies inside it.

"There’s no class," Bai Wuyin murmured. "Listen to how he’s pacing it. He’s leaving room for questions. Pausing where someone would normally raise a hand."

"He’s teaching to no one," Su Qing said, and her voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word.

They reached the door.

The classroom inside was exactly as empty as the silence had promised — thirty desks, all of them bare, all of them precisely, unnaturally aligned, not a single bag or notebook or forgotten pencil among them. At the front of the room, Mo Jun stood with his back to the door, chalk in hand, posture perfectly straight in a way Lin Yue had never once seen from him as a player. Players slouched. Players fidgeted. This was the stillness of a man who had done this so many times that his spine had simply stopped asking permission.

The chalk moved.

Lin Yue’s first instinct was that something was wrong with the sound — the scratch of chalk against slate arriving a fraction of a second before Mo Jun’s hand reached the place it should have struck, as if the noise had gotten impatient with the man producing it and gone ahead without him. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t the frantic, sourceless writing they’d seen weeks ago tearing itself across a board with no hand at all. This was worse, in its way, because it was almost right. Almost synchronized. Off by just enough to feel like watching a badly dubbed film — the mouth moving one beat out of step with the words.

"His hand isn’t keeping up with the writing," Lin Yue said quietly. "It’s the writing that’s keeping up with the lesson. Not him."

Bai Wuyin’s fingers found the hem of Lin Yue’s sleeve and held on, small and tight, the only sign he allowed himself.

Behind them, Shen Rui made a low, unhappy sound. "Somebody explain to me why that’s worse than a monster with teeth."

"Because a monster with teeth wants to eat you," Ye Xian said softly, from the back of the group, eyes fixed on the board with the same clinical stillness he’d worn examining Lin Yue’s mark. "This wants to finish something. That’s a different kind of hunger."

The board had begun to fill. Not with one problem — with four, laid out in tidy, separate sections, each header written in a hand that was, unmistakably, Mo Jun’s own careful teacher’s print.

SECTION ONE — MATHEMATICS

SECTION TWO — HISTORY

SECTION THREE — LITERATURE

SECTION FOUR — SCIENCE

And beneath the fourth, a wide, deliberate gap. A fifth space, ruled and headed and entirely blank, waiting the exact way the attendance sheet’s last line had waited under Su Qing’s eyes an hour ago.

Lin Yue’s wrist burned.

Not a flare. Not the violent, searing pull he’d felt inside the sealed classroom. This was slower, deeper, a heat that settled into the bone and stayed there, and he understood, with the cold, sinking clarity that had become almost familiar to him now, exactly what it meant.

"It’s not just holding him," he said. "It’s completing something. The lesson we saw fragments of in Xu’s class, Liang’s class, Feng’s, Dai’s — this is where they all point. This room is where the four questions become one answer."

"And the fifth section," Bai Wuyin whispered, "is where the answer goes."

Su Qing didn’t wait for either of them to finish theorizing.

"Mo Jun."

Her voice cut through the room, sharp and clear, and for the first time since they’d found the door, the steady scratch of chalk faltered — not stopped, only faltered, a half-beat stumble in an otherwise unbroken rhythm.

"Mo Jun," she said again, stepping past Lin Yue before he could stop her. "Look at me."

The chalk kept moving.

"He can hear you," Bai Wuyin said quietly. "He’s choosing not to answer yet. That’s different from not being able to."

"How is that better?" Shen Rui demanded.

"It’s not," Bai Wuyin said. "It just means there’s still a choice happening in there somewhere."

Su Qing crossed half the distance to the front of the room, her footsteps loud and deliberate against the tile, a sound that should have carried, should have mattered, in a room this quiet.

"You are not their teacher," she said. "You taught mathematics at a private school two hours from where you grew up. Six years. You told me that yourself, two nights ago, standing by the stairwell, and I believed you because it was true. This isn’t that. This was never that."

The chalk stopped.

Mo Jun’s shoulders went rigid, the same rigid stillness Lin Yue had watched settle over him in Mr. Xu’s classroom the day before, except this time no teacher was standing behind him prompting the turn. This time it happened on its own, slow, deliberate, a man pivoting at the waist the way someone turned when they’d finally decided to stop pretending they hadn’t heard their name.

He faced them.

For one full second — Lin Yue counted it later, in his memory, the way he counted everything that mattered — Mo Jun’s face wore an expression Lin Yue recognized without wanting to. It was the exact flat, unblinking calm he’d watched settle over Mr. Xu’s face through every lesson since they’d arrived. No fear in it. No confusion. Just the patient, untroubled stillness of something that had already finished being surprised by anything a long, long time ago.

Then it broke.

It broke the way ice breaks — all at once, a single fracture spreading through the whole surface — and beneath it, for a moment, was simply Mo Jun. Tired. Human. Frightened in the specific, exhausted way of a man who had been holding a door shut with his whole body and had just, finally, felt his arms start to give.

"Su Qing," he said. His voice cracked on her name. "You shouldn’t have come."

"I’m not leaving without you."

"I know." He looked down at the chalk in his hand like he’d forgotten it was there. "That’s what scares me."

"Then walk away from the board," she said. "Right now. Put the chalk down and walk toward me."

He didn’t move.

"I can’t," he said, and it wasn’t defiance; it was something closer to grief. "It’s not — I’m not being held here, Su Qing. That’s the part I can’t make any of you understand. Nobody’s dragging me toward this desk. I know this lesson. I knew it before I ever walked in here."

"Because they’re making you remember," Su Qing said. "The same way they made you answer Xu’s question. The same way they made your hand move faster than your arm could follow. That’s not you knowing anything. That’s something else wearing the shape of knowing."

Mo Jun’s eyes went distant for a moment, somewhere past her shoulder, past all of them, fixed on something none of the rest of the room could see.

"No," he said, quietly. "It’s not that."

"Then what is it?"

"Because I already did."

The room went very still.

"Because I already taught this," Mo Jun said, and something in his voice had shifted — not colder, not stranger, just older, the way a much heavier weight settles into a much smaller sentence. "Not in this life. Not the six years I told you about. Before that. I don’t know how long before. I don’t know how many times." His hand tightened around the chalk. "I keep almost remembering the last time I stood in a room like this, and every time I get close, something pulls the memory back out of reach, like it’s not ready to let me have it all at once."

"That’s exactly why you have to stop," Lin Yue said, stepping forward, careful, measured. "Whatever it’s letting you remember, it’s letting you remember it on its schedule. Not yours."

Mo Jun looked at him — really looked, for the first time since they’d entered the room, and there was something almost apologetic in his eyes.

"You don’t understand what it’s like," he said. "To finally be given back a piece of yourself you didn’t know was missing." He turned partly back toward the board, toward the four completed sections and the wide, waiting fifth. "I’ve spent six years teaching children long division and thinking that was the whole of what I was. And it wasn’t. There was more, Lin Yue. There’s a version of me that knew how to do this — really do it, not the small version, the one that fumbles through lesson plans and grades homework by lamplight. A version that never once had to guess."

"That version isn’t you," Su Qing said, her voice rising now, refusing to soften. "That’s the school. Wearing you like a coat, and calling the fit memory so you won’t notice you’ve stopped being able to take it off."

Something in Mo Jun’s expression flinched at that, a small crack widening.

"Maybe," he said. Quiet. Almost gentle. "Maybe that’s true. I don’t think it changes anything."

"Why not?"

"Because I’m so tired, Su Qing." His voice broke fully on that, all the composure he’d carried since they’d found him unspooling at once. "I don’t know how long I’ve been split between two selves that don’t fit inside the same skin. Every day it takes a little more effort to remember which one asked the question and which one already knew the answer. If this is the version of me that finally gets to finish something — just once — I don’t know if I have it in me to fight that."

"Fight it anyway," Lin Yue said. "Not for the lesson. For her."

Mo Jun’s eyes went to Su Qing, and for a moment — one brief, aching moment — something entirely human surfaced in his face, something that looked almost like the man who’d sat beside her at lunch trading quiet observations, who’d calmed He Yuan down with an instinctive teacher’s patience that had once seemed like nothing more than a kind habit.

"I’m sorry," he said.

He turned back to the board.

The moment he did, the room reacted.

Every desk scraped backward at once, a single unified shriek of wood against tile that made Shen Rui stumble back into the doorframe with a curse. The fluorescent lights overhead dimmed to a sickly amber, then flickered violently, and the chalk on the board began filling in faster, four sections blurring into motion, letters forming and reforming too quickly to read.

Lin Yue’s mark seared. He gritted his teeth against it and didn’t step back.

"It’s not attacking us," Bai Wuyin said, close to his ear, urgent and low, dropping every ounce of the frightened-child performance he wore for the rest of the group. "It’s protecting the lesson. This is a memory finishing itself. If we interrupt it now, it won’t just stop — it’ll fight to keep the ending it already decided on."

"So we let it happen?" Shen Rui demanded, voice cracking with disbelief.

"We don’t have a choice that isn’t also that one," Bai Wuyin said, grim.

Su Qing hadn’t moved from where she stood, chalk-scarred board reflected faintly in her eyes, refusing — even now — to look away from him.

"Mo Jun," she said again.

Nothing.

"Mo Jun."

The chalk didn’t slow.

"Mo Jun, look at me."

And, impossibly, he did.

He turned his head, not his whole body this time, just enough to find her across the room, and something in his face had softened all the way down to something Lin Yue could only call relief — the specific, quiet relief of a man who had been waiting, for longer than any of them could guess, for someone to simply say his name and mean it.

"...Someone finally let me finish," he said.

It wasn’t triumphant. It wasn’t even sad, not exactly. It was the exhausted, grateful voice of a man setting down something he’d been carrying for far too long, and Lin Yue understood, watching it happen, that this was the single most dangerous kind of ending the Flow could offer anyone — not a death that had to be fought for, but a death that felt like mercy.

He turned back to the board.

The chalk moved through the last few lines of the fourth section, unhurried now, deliberate, each stroke settling into place with the calm finality of a man closing a book he’d read a thousand times before. Then, without pause, without hesitation, his hand crossed to the fifth section — the wide, waiting gap beneath the other four — and began, at last, to fill it in.

Su Qing started forward. Lin Yue caught her shoulder before she could cross the room; not to stop her from reaching him, but because some instinct older than reasoning told him that crossing that threshold right now would cost her more than it could ever give back.

"Mo Jun!" she shouted, and this time there was nothing composed left in it at all.

The chalk finished.

Mo Jun lowered his hand.

He looked at what he’d written for one long moment — not with confusion this time, not with the fractured horror of a man staring at a stranger’s handwriting inside his own fingers, but with something almost like peace. Then he set the chalk down on the ledge of the board, gently, precisely, the way a man sets down something he intends to pick back up later and knows, somewhere underneath the calm, that he never will.

He turned toward them one last time.

And then the space where he stood was simply empty.

There was no flash. No sound. No scream torn out of him at the last second, no desperate reaching hand, no struggle any of them could point to afterward and say that, that was the moment we should have moved faster. One instant he was there, chalk dust settling faintly from his sleeve into the amber light; the next, the space behind the podium held nothing at all, and the only proof he had ever stood there was a scatter of white dust drifting slowly to the floor, and a blackboard filled edge to edge with five completed sections of a lesson no living student would ever be asked to answer.

Su Qing didn’t scream either.

She simply stood there, in the sudden and total silence, staring at the place where he’d been.

"Mo Jun," she said, once more, quiet now, almost a question.

Nothing answered.

"Mo Jun."

The room held its stillness, patient and unbothered, as though it had already forgotten there had ever been anyone standing at that podium to begin with.

Lin Yue watched her shoulders shake, once, and then go rigid with the effort of not letting them shake again. She didn’t collapse. She didn’t reach for anyone. She crossed, instead, to the space beneath the board, crouched, and picked up a single broken half of chalk from the floor where it had rolled from the ledge — the piece Mo Jun’s hand had worn down finishing the fourth section — and closed her fist around it so tightly her knuckles went white.

"He knew," she said, to no one in particular, or maybe to all of them. "He knew he was disappearing."

Lin Yue didn’t answer right away. There wasn’t an answer that would have made it smaller.

"Yes," he said finally.

"Then why didn’t he run?"

He looked at the finished board — five sections, four in one hand and the last in another, the transition between them so smooth it would have been easy to miss if you weren’t already looking for the seam.

"Maybe he couldn’t tell where his memories ended anymore," Lin Yue said. "Not clearly enough to know which direction running would even take him."

Su Qing said nothing else. She stood, chalk still locked in her fist, and didn’t cry, and didn’t look away from the empty podium until Bai Wuyin, quietly, stepped up beside the board to examine what remained.

He studied the writing for a long moment, tracing the lines without ever letting his fingers touch the slate, the way he’d learned, weeks ago, that some things in this place were safer read than handled.

"The hand changed," he said.

"How far in?" Lin Yue asked.

"Halfway through the fourth section." Bai Wuyin’s finger hovered over the exact point, close enough to indicate, careful never to close the distance. "Here. It starts as his. Careful. A little uneven, the way a real hand gets uneven partway through a long page." His voice dropped lower. "And then it isn’t. It gets cleaner. Older. Practiced in a way six years of grading homework never would have made it."

"You recognize it," Lin Yue said. It wasn’t a question.

Bai Wuyin nodded once, slow. "It’s the same hand from the cut pages in the six notebooks. The same hand that wrote beneath what Xin Yu erased. The same hand the Window Watcher’s reflection traced onto the glass before Ning Yue—" He stopped himself before finishing that sentence, glancing once, briefly, at Su Qing, who didn’t react at all, which was somehow worse than if she had.

"They’re not separate," Lin Yue said quietly, working it through as he spoke, the way he always did when a shape finally started resolving out of scattered pieces. "The Chalk Child. The Window Watcher. The Whispering Class. The four teachers who taught nothing. We’ve been treating every haunting in this school like its own ghost, with its own grief, its own unfinished want." He looked at the board, at the seam where Mo Jun’s hand had stopped, and something older had taken over without missing a single stroke. "But it’s one hand. One memory. Wearing different faces because it’s been broken into enough pieces that no single piece remembers being the whole."

"The Silent Semester," Bai Wuyin murmured.

"Every erased student. Every unfinished lesson. Every name scratched out of the record." Lin Yue’s wrist throbbed, dull and constant, in time with the thought. "It didn’t die all at once. It’s been dying in pieces for years, and every piece it loses, it tries to replace with whoever’s closest."

"And now it’s tried Mo Jun," Su Qing said, very quietly, still staring at the board. "And it worked."

Nobody argued with her.

Bai Wuyin’s eyes dropped to the very bottom of the fifth section, to a single line beneath the completed lesson that none of them had noticed until now, small and precise, in that same older, practiced hand.

FIFTH POSITION: OCCUPIED.

And beneath it, smaller still, two final words, almost gentle in how plainly they were written:

LESSON COMPLETE.

Lin Yue’s mark went cold.

Not the burning heat it had carried since they’d walked into this wing, not the deep, aching pull that meant something in this school still considered him unfinished business. It simply — stopped. Went quiet, the way a held breath goes quiet the instant it’s finally released, and Lin Yue understood, with a certainty that settled somewhere low and permanent behind his ribs, exactly what that meant.

It wasn’t reaching for him anymore.

It had just finished reaching for someone else.

—————————————————

Dawn came grey and ordinary, the way it always did in this place, as though the school had already forgotten what had happened in Room 3-4 during the night and had no intention of being reminded. Rain that never fell still didn’t fall. The corridors filled slowly with the shuffle of ordinary footsteps, students who weren’t students moving toward classrooms as though nothing behind them had changed.

The group gathered near the noticeboard out of habit more than purpose, none of them quite ready to sit through a lesson, none of them quite willing to say so out loud. Su Qing stood a little apart from the rest, chalk still folded inside her fist, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

Then the bell rang.

Once.

Every player in the corridor went still at the same instant, the same unconscious tension that had settled over Room 3-7 the day Bai Wuyin nearly didn’t come back. There was no scheduled bell at this hour. There had never been a scheduled bell at this hour, not once, not in seventeen days of mornings that had otherwise repeated themselves with maddening precision.

It rang again.

And this time the sound was wrong in a way none of them could immediately name — not the bright, hollow class bell they’d all grown numb to, not the low double-tone of dismissal. Something in between. Something that didn’t belong to either category the school had ever offered them before.

"That’s not one of the sounds we know," Shen Rui said, low, glancing around like the source might reveal itself if he looked hard enough.

Lin Yue’s eyes went to the noticeboard.

The printed schedule — the same schedule that had listed the same first-period lesson every morning since they’d arrived, word for word, teacher for teacher — had changed. Where Mathematics, Room 3-4, Mr. Xu should have sat at the top of the page in its familiar block print, a single word had replaced it, stark and unadorned, as though the schedule itself had decided nothing else needed saying.

RECKONING.

Nobody recognized it. Nobody said anything at all for a long moment, the whole group simply staring at the word as though staring hard enough might make it resolve into something more explicable.

Then the air in front of the noticeboard shimmered, faint and cold, and pale text bled into being where nothing had been a second before.

[SYSTEM NOTICE]

[INSTANCE SCHEDULE UPDATED.]

[PREVIOUS LESSON CYCLE: COMPLETE.]

[NEW PHASE: RECKONING.]

A pause, the words hanging in the grey morning light with no explanation offered, none volunteered.

[WARNING: PREVIOUS RULE VIOLATIONS HAVE BEEN RECORDED.]

[CONSEQUENCES WILL NOW ACCUMULATE.]

The notice held a moment longer than any System text they’d seen before, as if it wanted to be certain every one of them had read it in full, and then it dissolved, letter by letter, into the grey.

Lin Yue’s mark gave one faint, single pulse — not pain, not warning, just an acknowledgment, quiet and cold, of something shifting somewhere beneath the surface of the school that none of them could see.

The bell rang a third time.

And somewhere deep inside the academy, past corridors that had no business lengthening, past classrooms that shouldn’t exist on any map, something answered it.

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