Ren Lockwood hummed when afraid.
That should not have mattered.
In a rational world, the important details after a dungeon irregularity would have been threat classification, surveillance failure, witness reliability, injury count, and whether Professor Malcris had planted anything inside the safety system. A rational survivor would have focused on academy politics, not the trembling servant boy standing behind a witness chair and humming under his breath because silence had become too large for him.
Unfortunately, survival and humanity had begun negotiating without my permission.
The debrief chamber smelled of ink, healing salve, damp stone, and institutional embarrassment.
