Chapter 25: The Lake at Its True Depth

He went in the morning, before the castle had fully committed to being awake.

This was a deliberate choice. The corridors between five and six held a particular quality of inattention — the building running its maintenance routines, whatever those were, the ones that smoothed beds and erased names and adjusted the handwriting in notebooks while their owners slept. He had learned to move in this window the way he had learned to move through his uncle's house: not quickly, which attracted attention, but with the specific weight of someone who belonged to the furniture.

He did not tell Priya. He did not tell Søren. He had spent twenty minutes in the dark before his alarm considering whether this made him Fletcher, and had concluded, with the particular coldness he kept for arguments he needed to lose, that it did not. Fletcher had gone toward the doors because the doors interested him. Callum was going toward the lake because Søren had marked the spot and Søren did not mark things carelessly, and because the alternative was waiting for the school to bring the information to him, which he had decided he was done doing.