Penelope walked me back from the Administrative Wing.
She did not offer.
She did not announce it.
She simply fell into step beside me when I came out of that room, and slowed to a pace that I recognized, several minutes too late, as mine.
We did not talk.
The courtyard was full.
Late morning, classes changing over, one hundred and eighty-seven people going about a day that had continued happening while nine of us sat in a bright room deciding things.
Some of them looked at me.
Most of them looked at me.
I discovered I did not have the energy to care, which was novel, and which I suspect is what people mean when they say someone is not themselves.
At the Sanctuary door she stopped.
"Go to sleep."
"That's the plan."
"That's never the plan. That's your excuse. Today it's the plan." She looked at me properly, and something in her face was doing a thing I did not want to examine. "How long?"
"Twenty-seven hours."
Penelope closed her eyes briefly.
"You're an idiot."
