The Old Library had never been loud, not in five weeks of visits, not even during the worst of the ghost-student hours when the shelves rearranged themselves and the lights guttered one at a time. But tonight it was quiet in a different way. Quiet the way a room got quiet after someone had finished crying in it and simply had nothing left to spend on sound.
Seven of them sat around the reading table.
Lin Yue counted without meaning to. It had become a habit somewhere around the third death, the kind of habit that didn't ask permission before it started running — a small, automatic tally that ticked over every time the group gathered. Seven chairs occupied. Five empty, if you counted the ones that should have been here and weren't, though only two of those chairs were physically in this room. The others existed only as a felt absence, a weight where a person used to sit.
Mo Jun wasn't cracking a joke about the dust on the shelves.
