Chapter 4: Drift, and the Castle's Resting Pulse

The practical application classroom was in the west corridor, which was the part of the school that felt most like a school — lockers that actually functioned, fluorescent strips overhead instead of the iron-bracketed wall sconces that threw everything else into amber and shadow. Elliot had been navigating by the map Paige gave him, though he'd noticed three days in that the map and the building had a complicated relationship, like a portrait and its subject taken twenty years apart. The bones were right. The details had shifted.

He was walking the west corridor on the ninth day, after the dinner bell and before the monitored study period that ran from seven to nine, because he had found that the forty minutes between these two things were the period in which he was least likely to be observed walking in a direction that was not his dormitory. He wasn't walking toward anything in particular. This was the part he would think about later: he genuinely wasn't. He was just walking in the way you walk when you are trying to look like you are walking somewhere, which is different from walking somewhere, which is different again from walking toward something that is pulling at the edge of your attention like a thread caught on a nail.

The corridor bent left ahead.