Chapter 505: Special Guest of the Black Soil River

The re-examination was scheduled for the afternoon of September 27th, and the location was moved to the materials laboratory of the School of Engineering.

Two rows of electric lamps hung from the ceiling, and the testing table in the very center was made of a single slab of solid granite, with a circle of brass rings embedded into its surface. It was a mystical-industrial hybrid apparatus rarely seen by the outside world.

Greer stood behind the table, hoisting a machine onto it.

The machine stood waist-high, encased in a cast-iron shell with a row of scale windows cut into its side. A total of seventeen needles protruded from the back.

"What's this big fellow?" Pendleton poked his head in at the door.

"This is called a continuous spectrum analyzer." Greer tightened a bolt, straightened up, and began explaining.

"The clinic's machine is for measuring living people's ether reserves; it only takes one needle."

"Here in the School of Engineering, we use this to determine alloy compositions. With all seventeen needles, we can get a much clearer picture—this, too, is a miracle of engineering."

He gave a thumbs-up as he spoke, but aside from Richard, no one present reacted, which left him looking somewhat deflated.

Croft followed Pendleton inside. "Greer, why are you so enthusiastic today?"

The bearded man fished a vernier caliper out of his pocket and arched an eyebrow.

"Actually, I've had my eye on that kid for a long time."

Professor Wyndham arrived last, asking before he even stepped through the door, "Is Williams here?"

"Professor, I'm right here."

Richard stepped out from behind Greer, who had completely blocked him from view.

Following Mortimer's prior instructions, he had left the Sphinx Lamp back in his dorm, and locked the Silver Ring and that Eagle Hook away in his hidden compartment.

He retained only his core attributes—[Perception; Reflexes]—keeping his true trump cards concealed.

"Sit." Greer pointed to the high stool in front of the testing table.

"Put both hands in the brass rings, and don't touch the edges."

Richard sat down as instructed and placed his hands inside.

A faint knot of unease tightened in his chest; it felt rather like strapping himself into an electric chair.

Greer pulled the lever. The machine's gears immediately began to whir, and all seventeen needles dropped straight to the bottom.

"All right, begin."

The first needle lifted, steady and slow, coming to a complete halt midway.

Greer glanced at it. "His initial breathing method was the Golden Path, framed within the Fourfold Breathing structure."

Wyndham stood at the side of the table and nodded.

"Normal. Nine out of ten Scholars in the Empire start with that."

The second needle rose as well, trembling quite violently.

"This..." Greer brought his face close to the scale window.

"Waveform, with fluctuations."

"That's Tide-Shifting Breathing." Pendleton was flipping through his ledger nearby.

"He reported it when he advanced to Practitioner last year; it's a general-purpose advanced breathing method, an old collection from the Ashford House."

"Compliant." Wyndham nodded.

When the third needle lifted, its movement was steadier than the first two.

Once it reached its position, it remained completely still, not trembling by even a fraction of a millimeter.

"The Condensed Mirror Method," Croft added.

"He obtained the materials from his maternal aunt this year, and the department has a record of it."

"Also compliant." But Wyndham's brow was already furrowing.

"That's three. Most people only have two."

The fourth needle shot up with a decisive snap, displaying an entirely different temperament from the previous three.

Greer stared at it for a long moment. "This segment... doesn't look like a breathing method."

He turned the dial a notch, and the needle wavered before steadying.

"This is an engraved trace left by a Spell Formula. It should be Moon-Hunting."

Richard sat on the high stool, his hands still resting within the brass rings.

He had his story prepared long in advance, and answered immediately:

"Professor MacFie took me out on field duty this May, and when we returned, he gave me an assignment."

"What assignment?"

"The Severed Branch Spell Formula."

Wyndham's expression shifted slightly.

"He taught you that?"

"Yes, I wrote five drafts of the paper, and the fifth one just passed his approval last week."

Pendleton looked down and flipped through his ledger.

"... Manuscript received on August 26th, personally delivered to the department by Professor MacFie, but the specific materials were sealed under joint signature by him and Professor Mortimer."

Wyndham asked no further questions.

The fifth needle rose as well, exceptionally slowly.

Thinking it was broken, Greer reached out and tapped the iron shell.

"This section is silk-like—very thin, with numerous strands intertwined."

He moved his face away from the scale window.

"Web Weaving."

Pendleton began flipping his ledger again.

"Mr. Williams has held a formal position at the Briston Branch Office since 1913."

"Recorder and accompanying Scholar for three seal maintenance missions: Whitcom, the Western Suburbs Mining Area, and the Black Trench."

"His Spirit Vision and stone-reading were taught by an examiner under Marie Viktorova; that was also reported."

"... That explains it, then," Pollock muttered softly by the door.

The brief relaxation in the laboratory lasted less than ten seconds.

The sixth needle rose. The moment it lifted, the first five needles began to tremble simultaneously.

Greer patted the machine with his large hand.

"This one's wrong. It's not aligning with the scale marks."

The bearded man turned the dial from the first gear to the third, then back again.

Yet no matter which gear it was dialed to, the sixth needle remained stuck right in the space between two divisions.

"The seventeen needles on this machine correspond to seventeen known modes of ether operation."

Greer pulled his hand back from the dial.

"But the ether trace represented by this needle is not in our database."

Wyndham walked to the front of the table.

"The School of Engineering's machine can't read an established Practitioner's ether traces?"

Richard blinked as well, guessing that this must be the manifestation of the Tradition of Change series—such as Shadow Inversion.

Mirror and Star Map were existing minor traditions, each likely occupying a slot of their own.

The Tradition of Change served as their common matrix, landing precisely between the two.

Coupled with Stone Armor transitioning to Shadow Armor, Moon Nail to Reflection, Silence to Unsealing, and the mask to the Inverting Mask—all of them its products—it made sense that the first five needles trembled when the sixth one lifted.

He only wondered why the Quill of the Recorder hadn't detected it.

While Richard was still letting his thoughts wander, the machine had already automatically printed out the paper tape of the test results, recording the operational trajectories of the six ether traces.

Wyndham leaned over to inspect it for a long time, then shook his head.

"Everyone, this is Hutton's old path."

"I still remember the clinic's evaluation of him: three sources running in parallel, refusing to yield to one another."

"His ether was like three cords twisted together, none of them willing to give way. The tighter they twisted, the less able he was to advance upward."

"And this boy has a full six strands!"

With that, he sighed. In truth, the professor harbored no hostility toward Richard.

He genuinely felt a sense of regret, thinking that such a fine young Scholar couldn't even touch Minor Adept now...

While Wyndham hung his head in quiet lament, Richard sat on the high stool and gave Croft a subtle wink.

Croft signaled his assent, cleared his throat, and spoke up.

"Professor Wyndham."

"Hm?"

"I pulled up Hutton's curve yesterday to take a look."

Croft fished a roll of paper from his coat and unfolded it beside Richard's test results.

"Everyone can compare them."

On the old report, three ink lines had been fighting each other right from the start, until by the end the three lines had tangled into a dead knot.

In contrast, the six lines on Richard's report had been intertwined right from the beginning.

The six lines wound all the way to the end of the paper tape, growing so dense toward the back that one could scarcely tell there were six lines at all.

"Hutton's three strands conflicted with each other, but his student's strands are mutually entangled instead."

Greer bounced the vernier caliper in his hand and suddenly spoke up as well.

"I figure, the older generation always treats mixed ether traces as impurities, but things still need to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis."

"To use an example from our School of Engineering, pure iron is soft; it only turns into steel when you mix carbon into it."

"Mix in manganese, chromium, tungsten—the more you mix, the more impure it gets."

He slapped the caliper down onto the testing table.

"The rails of the railway you walk on, the girders on those bridges, and the cannon barrels on the front lines that don't burst their rifling... pure iron can't make any of them."

The bearded man reached out and clapped Richard heavily on the shoulder.

"So what this kid has isn't impurities at all. It's an alloy!"

Wyndham looked somewhat surprised to see these two associate professors—one robust, one lean—standing so firmly on Richard's side.

He opened his mouth, as if about to say something, when a hunchbacked figure drifted in from somewhere.

Professor Mortimer was carrying his chipped teacup, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

"I'm not late, am I?"

"Professor." Pendleton hurriedly stood up.

The old professor waved a hand and spoke in a leisurely tone.

"In the past, everyone said there had to be a single, deep resonance. The old gentleman who laid down that standard spent his entire life in the monastery library and never traveled far."

"Everyone he ever saw walked down a single path to the dark."

The old professor lifted his gaze, sweeping it across the circle of people present.

"He didn't live in this brand-new era, and his views may not necessarily still apply accurately to today's circumstances."

Wyndham stood directly in front of the table, his hands clasped behind his back.

"... Senior Mortimer, are you vouching for him?"

"I am not vouching." The old professor raised his teacup again.

"To vouch is to shoulder his future, and I know nothing of the future."

"I speak only of the present..."

Mortimer turned his head and glanced at Richard.

"This boy has done quite a few things for people lately, though I cannot go into the details."

"Yet in this past year, he has not once slipped up at a critical moment."

The two rows of electric lamps in the laboratory were still humming.

Wyndham lowered his head, glanced twice more at the two parallel yet completely different paper tapes, and then turned and walked out.

Before leaving, he dropped a sentence: "As for the recorder column, I pass him."

Pendleton let out a long breath, his pen scratching rapidly across the paper.

"However, I still maintain reservations regarding his future..."

With those words spoken, the door closed behind him.

Clara's advancement site was set at the vulnerable point of the veil behind the silver-inlaid artificial narrow door in the basement of the Petrie Building—the most stable location there (originally used for exchanging Gerard's roster and seeing the lord of the hunt).

Mortimer brought a team down to carry out preliminary reinforcement.

Richard followed them through the passage once more. This time, standing within the door, the scene he beheld was entirely different from the last.

Last time he had been entirely occupied with reciting the honorific names; this time he had the leisure to sweep his gaze across the entire expanse of the shallows.

Imperial University was built upon an active ether zone; rather, this region existed first, and only later did the university come to be built upon it.

Across the muddy flats, Greer had already opened his tool chest.

The old inscription master squatted along the boundary line, tracing it stroke by stroke with an ultra-fine engraving tool.

Pendleton held the light for him, his hands trembling.

Two on-duty associate professors whom Richard didn't know very well stood to the side, waiting with nothing to do, and began chatting idly.

"This place is still the most stable," one of them remarked.

"I looked for a site for a friend outside the Academy last year, and out of seven locations I scouted, not one of them was safe to use."

"What about that pillar on Flower Moon Street?"

"That pillar is fine; the fire there hasn't gone out in all these years."

That associate professor let out a dry laugh.

"But without that person's consent, it's completely impossible to use."

"What about the western suburbs of Briston?"

"The Unresponsive Pit?"

"Right."

"That's the Branch Office's turf. They inspect it twice every spring and autumn, and any unregistered person who enters without permission is cleared out on the spot."

"And besides, it was penetrated once this March, and nobody's dared open it since."

"What about those twelve standing stones in Covered Fire Village? I heard they were just reinforced this May."

"Those belong to Professor MacFie's family, and moreover, they fall a bit short for making an advancement declaration."

"What about the old ancestral halls of the various families?"

"The Montagu Family's place would be qualified."

That associate professor spread his hands.

"But once you borrow their grounds, you're completely at their mercy from then on."

"Never mind Adepts; the Major Adepts worshipped by these hereditary noble families are nothing to scoff at either."

"Still, Scholars like us don't need to worry about such things. We have the Academy and our mentors to back us up, so we don't have to go running all over the place looking for sites to advance like those Hunters and the hidden ones outside."

Standing on the flats and listening in, Richard gathered that any place within the Empire capable of hosting such a ritual already had an owner.

Within this rigorously structured, modernized occult system, there appeared to be no soil whatsoever for rogue Practitioners to survive in; every advancement path was tightly locked down by the major states and the families of masters.

Mortimer strolled over to his side at some point.

"What are you thinking about?"

"... I was thinking that all these relatively stable vulnerable points already have owners."

"True."

"Are there any without owners?"

The old professor tapped his cane against the ground. "There are, but not a single person who has performed a ritual there has ever come back."

On the other side, the most crucial declaration for the advancement—Clara's—had not yet been finalized.

Isabella had not offered a single hint, simply taking out the draft of her own declaration from back in the day, letting Clara take a single look at it before putting it away.

Clara had written six drafts, all of which had been rejected, and the speed of rejection grew faster each time:

"Too pretty."

"This line is mine."

"This line is Haldane's."

"This line is true, but it's not your most important one."

Fifth draft: "Empty."

On the sixth draft, Isabella didn't even pick up her red pen; she pushed the manuscript straight back across the desk.

"You're afraid."

Clara stood before the writing desk, her hands hanging at her sides, her face frighteningly pale.

"... I can't rewrite it anymore."

Isabella returned her red pen to the pen trough.

"Clara, when you were nineteen, I wouldn't let you sign your name, saying you should wait until you knew what you intended to use it for."

She lifted her eyes.

"I know you must have said something to my nephew."

"Why aren't you writing today?"

Clara stood in place for a long time.

Before her mentor's very eyes, she tore the discarded drafts into tiny fragments, clutching them tightly in her palm.

"I'll give it to you tomorrow morning." With that, she left.

The seventh draft was written at her own home.

When the maid came by the following morning, the living room lights were still on, and the coffee grounds inside the coffee pot on the table had dried out completely.

In the first week of October, the Empire finally settled its accounts for the endless rains of summer.

The leaves of the plane trees along the main road of the Academy District had turned significantly yellow.

On the notice board outside the departmental office, the Debate Week roster had been posted for days, though the number of participants was somewhat higher than the previous year.

With the country facing crisis, everyone harbored a vague sense of impending doom.

Richard had also managed to squeeze some gossip out of Pendleton, who was busy brushing paste to put up notices—the distinct advantage of maintaining good relations with administrative staff.

"There's something new this year," Pendleton teased mysteriously.

"The chief judge has invited a special guest."

"Which one?"

"Can't say."

"Why can't you say?"

"Because Sir Muller said it has to be saved for the opening ceremony speech."

Pendleton spread his hands. "Anyway, I hear it's a Major Adept professor, coming from abroad."

Richard had been busy with other matters at the time, so he let it go in one ear and out the other.

Back then, his mind was entirely occupied with how to talk Sophia down from the windowsill.

The senior fellow student had drawn the first-round number for the graduate student group the day before, and the moment she finished drawing, she sprawled across the windowsill of Room 314 and declared she wanted to jump.

Isabella couldn't be bothered to deal with her from behind her writing desk, coldly tossing out a single sentence:

"Jumping from the third floor will at most break your legs; by then I'll just have Richard push you up in a wheelchair."

Sophia climbed down from the windowsill on the spot.

On the day of the opening ceremony, the interior of Iliad Hall was dimmer than in previous years.

The row of stained-glass windows facing south had been largely boarded up with planks—a special restriction put in place after the air-defense regulations came down—and only three lamps were lit.

Richard took a seat in the fifth row, near the aisle.

Montagu entered through the back door and sat down diagonally behind him.

Edith, hugging her botanical atlas, took the seat closest to the window; she had also signed up this year.

Catherine entered last.

As she walked down the aisle, Richard lifted his eyes.

The red-haired girl was wearing a hair ribbon today, hugging that inseparable little notebook to her chest. Her pace didn't slow as she passed his seat; the two of them had maintained this distance for half a month now.

At a quarter past eight, Sir Muller came to the contestants' seating area alone to speak.

"Gentlemen, last month I was intercepted in a corridor of the War Office by a major general."

"He asked me, 'Sir, the front lines burn through thirty thousand artillery shells a day; what do you expect to come of letting a bunch of kids argue in a hall for seven days?'"

No one in the hall made a sound.

"I didn't have an answer for him at the time."

Sir Muller pressed both hands down on the lectern.

"I thought about it for a long time after I went back, and today I give you the answer."

"We cannot manufacture artillery shells, nor are we the ones who built the railways that transport them."

"Yet every time a seal is recast on the front lines, the verdict used is written right here in this building."

"If half a word is misread during any sleep-return rite, the things beneath grow restless."

"And what comes of that restlessness is something several among you have witnessed with your own eyes on field duty."

Sophia and several other students who had been on field duty shrank their necks slightly at these words.

"This year, the Empire has manufactured many words."

"They are in the newspapers, on the posters, and on the platforms of the railway stations."

"Those words are manufactured quickly—so quickly that no one has time to ask whether they are right."

"The ones who will be willing to ask that question hereafter can only walk out of this building."

The old man paused.

"To speak now of your own affairs."

"You lock yourselves in rooms to write manuscripts, and when you reach a point that pleases you, you read it aloud to yourselves, making yourselves happy."

"But it is different here."

"If it cannot stand, it collapses, and under several hundred pairs of eyes, it is deeply embarrassing."

"Yet if you collapse here today, you can revise it tomorrow and come up again."

"When you go out on field duty in the future, standing before a genuine vulnerable point, what collapses then will not be a manuscript."

The old man gripped his stack of papers, no longer looking at them.

"There will come a day when you must speak for others."

"Speak for the dead, for those who have no voice, for those whose very names have been stripped away."

"Today, speak for yourselves first."

He deliberately stopped and waited for a moment after finishing, but no applause arose in the hall.

Some people were checking their watches; others were looking down, calculating the competitors in their respective brackets.

Richard opened his Spirit Vision; behind the veil, only the thinnest layer floated up, failing even to form a shape.

Every word Sir Muller had spoken just now was correct, but not a single one stood upright; he was demonstrating it through his own actions.

The old man folded his manuscript and tucked it into his inner pocket.

"Therefore, we proceed as usual this year."

Applause finally broke out, sparse and lacking any real momentum.

"Additionally."

Sir Muller waited for the applause to die down, then nodded toward the eastern side door.

"This year, we have invited a distinguished guest who has come from afar."

Richard was still holding his water cup, but his intuition had already begun sounding alarm bells.

The very first thing he did was compress his Condensed Mirror Method down to its absolute flattest state.

Complete convergence would leave a trace; for a person's water surface to be rippling one moment and suddenly sucked dry the next would be glaringly obvious to anyone of a higher Rank than himself.

The eastern side door opened, and a man of about forty entered, of medium build.

His skin bore the color of decades under the sun, and his temples were grizzled with grey.

He walked without a sound.

Sir Muller made the introduction: "Gentlemen, this is Professor Youssef Halaf, Director of the Cairo Museum."

Applause rang through the hall, much warmer than before. Everyone was quite interested to see a foreign professor with a fresh face.

Richard held his water cup, not moving an inch.

With his peripheral vision, he swept the judges' bench from left to right.

MacFie was sitting in the third seat, arms crossed over his chest, looking elsewhere.

Mortimer was on the far right, his eyelids half-drooped, retaining every bit of his habitual, feigned ignorance.

Moving further down—Croft, Hollis, Greer, his aunt... he looked at them one by one, and not a single person looked surprised.

Richard set his water cup back down on the edge of the bench.

It seemed this person had indeed been formally invited by the Empire; the associate professors of standing and above knew at least something about it.

Yet if this man was the same person seated at that table in the Black Soil River, as a Major Adept of the Abyss Tradition, logically everyone ought to be terrified of him. Why, then, could he walk so openly onto this most conspicuous lectern?

That doubt clung persistently to his mind.

Up on the stage, Professor Halaf walked up beside the lectern and gave a slight bow to the hall.

"Gentlemen, ladies."

His Albion Language was excellent, belonging to that old aristocratic accent of the Imperial Capital—the very same accent worn by the reigning king.

"I am forty-three years old. The first time I came to your country was sixteen years ago."

"I spent nineteen days on the ship back then, vomiting everything in my stomach until I was entirely hollowed out."

The students in the hall all chuckled.

"The first thing I did after getting off the ship was go to the museum to look at the things from our Black Soil River."

His tone shifted abruptly, and the atmosphere plummeted.

"After looking at them, I sat on the steps for an entire afternoon."

The faint laughter in the hall was instantly cut short.

"Standing here today is by Sir Muller's invitation, and also of my own accord."

"Regarding this matter of debate, we have an older name for it back home."

"The dead stand before forty-two jurors, answering question by question, and once the answers are given, they are weighed and recorded."

"That is what I have done my entire life."

He bowed slightly once more and stepped down from the stage.

Another round of applause filled the hall, and Richard joined in for two claps.

On the third clap, that man was walking down the aisle toward the judges' bench, passing right in front of his row.

That distance was less than six paces long, but Richard had never felt six paces to be so long in his life.

His water surface reflected nothing at all—only a file so mundane and boring that it lay there waiting for someone to glance at it, and then turn away in disgust.

The man did not stop.

Richard lowered his head to look at his debate number slip, reading the serial number on it from start to finish.

"Williams." Fischer poked him.

"... Hm?"

"You look terrible."

"Didn't sleep well yesterday."

Fischer let out an "oh," then leaned in and lowered his voice. "I'll tell you, when I watched that professor walk by just now, I got goosebumps all over."

Richard's heart sank sharply.

"Why?"

"Because he walks without a sound," Fischer said with a completely serious expression.

"I stared at his feet for six paces, and there wasn't the slightest bit of noise."

"... And then?"

"Then I thought, if he ever plays a ghost in the theater, he definitely won't need any props."

Richard stiffened on the bench for a second, then cooperated by laughing out loud.

As the opening ceremony dispersed, the crowd squeezed toward the two narrow doors.

Richard was walking out with his canvas bag slung over his shoulder when someone called out to him in the lobby.

"Richard!"

Phillips stepped out from behind a pillar.

He was wearing a dark coat today, cradling that repaired teapot to his chest.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came to watch the excitement." Phillips hugged the pot a bit higher, smiling cheerfully.

"I'm still not competing this year; I'm just sitting in the audience eating pastries."

"The Royal Academy isn't keeping tabs on you?"

"They're praying I don't wander around the school."

Richard reached out and gave his shoulder a pat.

The touch felt wrong; his hand met something cold, and he instinctively wanted to pull back.

Richard dropped his hand, letting nothing show on his face.

"How have things been lately?"

"Pretty good."

Phillips gave a yawn.

"I've taken a lot of work off my eldest brother's hands, and he's actually friendlier to me now than he used to be."

"And Constance?"

"She's coming Thursday." Phillips shifted the pot to his other arm.

"She started learning to tie my neckties last month, but every single one of them ends up crooked."

"What did you say to her?"

"I said they looked great."

"Lying to her?"

Phillips grinned. "She knows they're crooked herself; she just wants me to see that she's trying."

Richard asked no further.

Phillips suddenly turned sideways and nodded his chin toward the lobby.

"By the way, let me introduce you to someone."

Richard looked over.

Standing beneath a pillar twenty paces away was a man of modest height, wearing a thoroughly washed woolen coat with his hands shoved in his pockets, staring up at the ring of stone carvings on the lobby ceiling.

Richard recognized the scent on that man instantly; it was of the same origin as the one on Phillips.

The difference was that the well within Phillips was still shallow; whereas this person... Richard merely drifted his water surface slightly toward him and was instantly swallowed down, without even an echo returning.

"Mr. Barnaby." Phillips called out toward that side.

The man turned around and gave a polite nod in their direction.

"He's my guide, star actor at the theater, and the troupe leader as well. You should have seen him on stage when you went to the play last time."

Phillips introduced him.

The slight commotion in the lobby receded far into the distance in Richard's ears as he reached out his hand.

"Mr. Barnaby, long time no see."

Barnaby shook hands first, his grip hitting the exact right balance of firmness. "Likewise. Phillips mentions you often."

"What does he say about me?"

"He mentions that you have a healthy appetite."

Richard smiled. "... He's not wrong about that."

"He also mentioned that penny booklet you wrote."

Barnaby released his hand.

"The doorman at our theater's backstage bought a copy, and nobody dared stand watch alone that night after reading it."

Phillips stood nearby, his shoulders shaking with laughter.

Richard stood there, smiling along with them.

The three of them exchanged a few casual words; Barnaby's diction and manners were completely beyond reproach.

He asked about Richard's debate bracket and how many undergraduates were competing, and finally offered a "Wish you success in the competition" before bowing and taking his leave.

A moment later, Barnaby waited as Professor Halaf, who had just come over from the judges' area, walked out side-by-side with him.

The two of them walked and talked about something, and at a certain remark, Halaf smiled slightly.

Richard did not avoid the gaze cast over from their direction.

"I'm heading off too," Phillips said suddenly beside him.

"Oh, by the way," Richard raised his head.

"I'm treating you to dinner in a couple of days. Montagu and Catherine will both be there."

Phillips didn't break his stride.

"Sure thing, just let me know when."

Richard stood in the lobby and watched him walk away.

He headed toward the stairs, and halfway up, he found Catherine leaning against the railing in the corner, clutching that little notebook of hers, a stray lock of her red hair lifted by the breeze.

There were others about—two graduate students arguing below the stairs about this year's favored champion candidates; someone dragging a chair across the floor on the upper level, its wooden legs scraping the boards the whole way.

Their gazes met, and everything needed was understood without a word.