Shae walked it with the specific, forward quality of a person whose body has decided to keep moving while the rest of her figures out what just happened. Her heels were quiet on the floor — the particular, muffled sound of them in a school building at ten o'clock on a Friday night, the overhead lights on their evening timer, half of them out, the corridor dim and specific in the way of spaces not designed to be occupied at this hour.
She did not look back.
She took the stairs. She moved through the ground floor with the automatic, navigating quality of four months of the same building every day, the specific, incorporated knowledge of which turns to take without thinking about them. The main doors. The cold.
The December air hit her bare shoulders and arms with the specific, honest seve
