It started with the shadows getting the angle wrong.
Not dramatically. That was what made it so effective. A railing's shadow lying to the left of where the sun put it. A doorway's dark leaning uphill. Small errors, everywhere, all morning, and every single person who noticed one assumed they'd misread it.
By noon nobody was assuming.
By evening the campus had stopped believing in its own light fixtures.
Soren watched it from the housing block window with Dani beside him.
"Third floor of the science hall," she said. "Lamps are on. Room's dark."
"Not dim."
"Dark. Full output, no illumination." She scrolled. "Sixty-one reports since this morning. I've stopped logging individual instances and started logging the percentage of campus surfaces where light behaves."
"What is it."
"Yesterday, a hundred. Right now, seventy-eight."
Soren looked out at the yard, where a lamp post stood burning brightly over a circle of nothing.
"She's not here yet," he said.
