Chapter 11: Drift Hears Something New

The days after the archive had a particular texture to them.

Elliot noticed it first in small ways, the way he always noticed things — not all at once, but accumulatively, detail by detail until the details assembled themselves into something that had a shape. Drift was eating his meals but not finishing them. Drift was arriving to the classes they shared twelve minutes early and sitting in the back corner nearest the door, which was not where he usually sat. Drift was not, as far as Elliot could observe across three days and considerable attention, sleeping.

His eyes had taken on a quality Elliot associated with people who had been staring at a fixed point for too long. Not absent. The opposite of absent, actually — too present, hypervigilant in a way that was burning through him visibly, the way a lamp burns through its oil faster when you turn it all the way up.