The folder was back on the desk where Dani had left it, and Soren read the column of marks again in the gray light before Selah came back from training.
Soren stood at the window and counted.
He counted the exits the reading room had, three including the one nobody used, and which of them Voss favored when she left.
He counted the windows her moth could reach and the angle each one gave her on the desk where the folder usually sat.
He counted the people in his pack the form had named and the one it had failed to name, Joan, the elective line that came back empty because the framework had never built it.
That gap was still a gap.
It was also the only part of him the Council could not photograph.
He inventoried the rest the way a man walks his own house at night, checking that the doors are where he left them.
Selah in the dorm.
Maren walked away.
Yara in the dark behind his ribs.
