He repeated the release a dozen times before the room around him started sounding different. Traces that had gone up clean an hour ago were coming apart now — not from carelessness, but from students no longer smoothing them on the way to the plate. The polish was leaving the room on purpose. Two stations over, the girl who had traced a route narrowing near her elbow let three rough attempts through in a row and did not apologize for any of them.
His own control still moved before he asked it to. He could feel the pressure gather now, a fraction of a second he hadn't been able to isolate that morning — but locating where noticing ended and obeying began remained like trying to mark the exact point a struck bell stopped ringing.
He tried again, deliberately.
