He Yuan woke because something in the room had changed shape.
He didn't know how to explain it better than that, not even to himself. No sound had done it. No light. His eyes opened in the dark the way they always did in this place now, a half-second before he was ready to be awake, and for a moment he thought it had simply been a bad dream — some leftover echo of the seventh window, the blank gray glass, the word finished still sitting in his chest like a stone he hadn't managed to swallow.
The dormitory was quiet. Properly quiet, the kind of quiet Yinshan Academy wore like a second skin after curfew — the building's faint electrical hum somewhere behind the walls, a pipe ticking as it cooled, rain that made no sound against the glass but somehow still looked wet, still looked like it was falling. He lay there a moment longer, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down to something reasonable.
