Chapter 21: The Shape of What Is Being Taken

Breakfast was porridge and a particular silence.

The dining hall had its ordinary morning texture — scrape of spoons, low conversation, the smell of something overcooked in the direction of the kitchens — and Callum sat in the middle of it and ate without tasting and watched the second-years the way he had been watching them for three weeks now, which was to say: carefully, and with a growing understanding that he had initially been watching for the wrong thing.

He had been looking for absence. Missing information. Gaps where knowledge had been.