Jin went inside.
The school was quiet at this hour. Most of the people who usually filled the halls were out on watch now, or at the gates, or running messages across the city. His footsteps echoed down the long corridor, and the early light coming through the windows lay across the floor in long pale stripes.
Seul walked beside him. She didn't ask where they were going. She didn't have to.
The red lines ran all through the school. Jin had stopped noticing them a long time ago, the way you stop noticing the cracks in your own ceiling. They ran along the bottom of the walls and up around the door frames and across the stairwells, thin and faint like veins of fire under the paint. Some of them were barely wider than a hair. Others were as thick as a finger.
He put his hand on one as he walked.
