Monday arrived the way Mondays did after significant events — slightly unreal, the ordinary schedule reasserting itself over the weekend's residue with the blunt indifference of institutional time.
The dining hall at seven in the morning had a different quality than any morning of the previous week.
The competition was over. The visiting academies had gone. The grounds were back to their standard configuration, the temporary venue structures already partially dismantled by the overnight crew, the essence-monitoring infrastructure at the entrance points returned to baseline.
Four academies had been here. Now there was one again.
The students who filled the dining hall carried the specific aftermath energy of people who had been through something collectively and were now individually processing what it meant.
