Nobody moved.
That was the strangest part of it, Lin Yue would think later — not that Zhou Mu had appeared without a sound, without a door, without so much as a shift in the air to announce him, but that seven people who had spent five weeks flinching at every wrong noise this school made suddenly found themselves sitting perfectly still, as if some instinct older than fear had told them, correctly, that stillness was the only sane response to a boy who looked exactly like he always had.
Zhou Mu's uniform was neat. Not a wrinkle in it, not a thread out of place, the collar buttoned all the way as if he'd just stepped out of a mirror rather than out of nowhere. His posture was straight — too straight, the kind of straight a body held when it had stopped needing to compensate for anything. His expression was calm. Composed. The same patient, faintly pleasant look he'd worn on the very first day, welcoming them all to homeroom like a class president born to the job.
