The residential wing had already gone quiet by the time Lin Yue left his room, the corridor holding nothing but the low hush of white walls and the distant murmur of someone's laughter three doors down. He didn't linger over closing the door. There was no reason to.
He'd made it four steps before Bai Wuyin's voice caught him from behind.
"You're going somewhere?"
He turned, found the boy standing half in the doorway of his own room, sketchbook already tucked under one arm as though he'd anticipated needing both hands free for something. His posture hadn't folded yet. No one else was in sight.
"I want to verify something," Lin Yue said.
Bai Wuyin studied him for a moment, the particular stillness he wore only when it was just the two of them, the flat black of his right eye tracking Lin Yue's face with an attention that had nothing childlike in it at all. Something moved behind that stillness—the beginning of a question, maybe, or an objection, or something closer to both.
