The light kept blinking.
It didn't speed up. It didn't fade. It sat above the door to Room 310 with the patience of something that had never once needed to hurry, and thirteen people stood at the mouth of the corridor and watched it do that, and none of them moved.
Zhao Feng had the rotation board turned sideways under the hall light, finger tracing the rows for the third time. "Three-ten," he said. "Nobody's on it. Not us, not the day list, not even a name Su Yun mentioned in passing." He looked up. "Nobody goes near that room."
"Obviously," Xia Lian said.
Nobody argued. For a moment, it was, as Lin Yue would think later, the first time the group had faced a rule in which doing absolutely nothing was so plainly the correct answer that it hardly felt like a choice at all.
Then the sound came.
