The classroom was empty in a way Lin Yue had never seen a room be empty before.
Not the taut, waiting emptiness the desk had worn for fifty years, the kind that made a person's skin prickle just from standing near it. Not even the ordinary emptiness of the desk itself, resolved now, sitting there scarred and worn and asking nothing of anyone. This was simpler than that. Thirty-one chairs pushed back from thirty-one desks. No pencils scratching. No whispered attendance answering itself in the walls. No Rule left standing between them and the door.
A minute ago this room had held fifty years of trapped memory. Now it looked like any classroom after the last bell of the day — quiet, a little dusty, waiting for a janitor who was never coming and didn't need to.
Ye Xian hadn't moved from the doorway.
"What isn't supposed to happen?" Lin Yue asked again.
