He looked at the cracked step for a moment.
It was a clean break. Not a chip or a surface fracture—a structural split that ran from the edge of the stone all the way to the wall mounting, as if someone had pressed a blade through it slowly and deliberately. The kind of damage that took real force. He had not used any force. He had been standing still.
He looked at Mira.
She was looking at the step too. Her lines had returned to their resting arrangement, but something in the quality of her stillness had changed. She was carrying new information about the thing she had watched happen, and the weight of it showed.
He stepped over the cracked stone and held the door.
She went in first.
***
The common room was empty at this hour. He sat across from her at the corner table and listened.
She did not pace or pause often. She had been organising this since the director's office and she told it the way she had organised it: in order, plainly, without decoration.
