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.
