WRONG
It was Finn who noticed first.
He always did.
It was the ninth day after Calvert's departure, early morning, the kind of hour where the eastern district's formation caught the first light along its ridge and threw long shadows across the academy's outer courtyard. Kai was in the survey room with the notation framework — expanding it, refining it, building the bridge between old language and new that the council's special committee would eventually need — when Finn appeared in the doorway.
He did not say anything.
He did not need to.
Kai had learned, in four years, to read Finn's silences the way he read threading patterns — by their shape, by what they were organized around. This silence was organized around something outside the window.
Kai looked.
