Chapter 5: Priya's Notebook and the First Fourteen Anomalies

The common room smelled of cold stone and someone else's candle, the particular combination that Callum would come to associate with the hour before dinner — that thin, suspended interval when the castle was technically occupied but had not yet committed to the fact.

He found it by accident. He had been looking for the lavatory, which Mr. Fallow had gestured toward in a direction that turned out to contain a linen cupboard, another linen cupboard, a door that did not open, and then a short corridor bending left that opened into a room with a fireplace and three low chairs and a window seat and a girl who did not look up when he entered.

She was writing. That was the first thing. Not the notebook — the writing itself, the quality of it, her pen moving with the decisive regularity of someone transcribing something that was arriving faster than she could comfortably catch it. Her handwriting, visible from where he stood, was extremely small and extremely even, which was the kind of handwriting that took a long time to develop and required a specific kind of person: someone who had decided early that precision was a virtue you could practice until it became a character trait.