I do not hear about the meeting.
No runner comes for me, no message is passed along the corridors, and no one slips and mentions it by accident, which is how I know it is happening, because silence in a pack this dense only settles when people are actively holding it in place rather than letting it form on its own. I feel it instead, not as a sharp wrongness but as an absence of friction, in the way the morning unfolds too smoothly, too cleanly, like gears already locked into position before I ever touch them.
I wake earlier than usual and sit on the edge of the bed for a long moment, feet planted on the cold floor, listening for something that feels off enough to name, some small disruption I can point to and say this is where it changed, and when nothing does, that is what finally regi
