Chapter 11: The Dining Hall's Second Frequency

The Applied Silence classroom had a specific smell — old stone and something underneath it, mineral and cold, the way water smells when it has been underground for a very long time — and Callum had spent forty minutes that morning learning to ignore it.

Not ignore. That was the wrong word. Farrow was precise about words in the way that suggested words mattered here more than most places, that calling a thing by its approximate name was not close enough, was in fact dangerous in the way that almost-maps are dangerous when the terrain is serious. You did not ignore the smell. You held it at the correct distance. You allowed it to exist without granting it priority.

The distinction was, he understood now, significant.