The next morning, Lucas noticed the gaps before he noticed the people.
It started in the dorm corridor. A door on the far end stayed shut longer than usual. Another room that normally opened early enough for a wave of sleepy complaints stayed quiet. When he reached the stairwell, he passed two first-years whispering over a tablet, stopping the moment they saw him.
He didn't ask.
He didn't need to.
By the time he pushed into the dining hall, the pattern had sharpened enough to stop pretending it was in his head. The room wasn't empty. It was full enough that no one would call it strange at first glance. But once he started looking, he couldn't stop.
A chair missing from one table.
A whole cluster reduced by two at another.
The loud guy from B-tier who always argued about timing over breakfast wasn't there.
Neither was the girl who had spent the last week obsessively replaying projection logs like she could bully them into making sense.
