Chapter 10: What the Lake Sounds Like at Three in the Morning

The thing that woke him did not announce itself.

Callum came up from sleep the way he always did — not all at once, but in layers, his mind arriving at wakefulness before his body admitted to it. The dormitory was dark. The particular dark of two in the morning, he thought automatically, then looked at the quality of the ceiling and revised: three. Something about the density of three AM was different from two AM in a way he had never been able to articulate but had always been able to distinguish, the way some people could tell rain before the smell of it arrived.

He lay still and listened to the room.