"That will be all."
Selenne did not raise her voice for it. She lifted her palm from the instructor's plate instead, and the light left the room in stages: first the recording plates, their pale lines dissolving from the center outward, then the pins along each station, then the threads beneath the floor. The stillness of the exercise went with it. Chairs scraped, notebooks closed, and sixteen students who had spent the morning attending to their own wrists began, audibly, to attend to one another.
Elara stayed seated long enough to square her notes. They were written for herself alone: abbreviations, a ratio beside the third trace, one question underlined twice about where her own correction had begun. She capped her pen before she looked up.
