Draven's POV
I am on the stairs when the lights go out.
Not the underground stairs. The main staircase in the east wing, moving between floors to get back to the conference room after leaving Maya her hour. The darkness is total and immediate and the quality of it is wrong in the specific way of a darkness that is not caused by a power failure.
Power failures have a sound. Electrical systems winding down, the particular hum of a building losing its current, something dying in increments. This has no sound. It has a presence, the same kind of presence the corridor feels like late at night when I am the only one awake and the building is doing something it does not do during the day.
The academy is not failing. It is listening.
I am already moving before the forty seconds are up. Down t
