Chapter 7: What the East Tower Door Feels Like

The door was not where Drift said it would be.

That was the first thing — the small wrongness that should have been a warning and wasn't, because by then Elliot had been at Ashenmoor long enough to understand that small wrongnesses were the building's version of ordinary. The East Tower was visible from the main courtyard, visible from his dormitory window, visible from the library's upper landing if you stood at the right angle and the sky was clear enough. It was not, as architectural features went, subtle. And yet the path to its base turned out to be a thing the building kept adjusting, the way a person with a secret adjusts their posture when you walk into the room.

Drift had said: after breakfast, Saturday, meet me at the refectory's east-facing door. He'd said it on Friday evening in the low voice he used when he was saying something the corridor shouldn't overhear, which Elliot had already learned to distinguish from his regular speaking voice — softer, less inflected, words placed with the care of a man navigating around a sleeping thing. Elliot had said all right and not asked why Saturday, though the answer was obvious enough: weekends were the closest Ashenmoor came to unmonitored, the faculty retreating to whatever faculty did when they weren't being deliberately visible, the building's human population contracting to students who slept late and moved slowly and paid attention to nothing very much.