The light outside the window sank a little lower, and a red glow seeped through the frame, darkening the white on the desks. Darkness rose along the walls and slowly spread into the aisle.
Some time had passed since the words fell, but the room still had not recovered.
The papers remained on everyone's desks. No one reached for them, and no one at the front urged them on.
Only the rustle of paper remained behind the lectern. The door stood slightly ajar.
The rows by the windows darkened first. The people sitting there still had their outlines in the gloom.
Kiyoshi's paper lay facedown, its surface turned inward, exactly where it had been since he flipped it over. The small patch of shadow at the desk corner deepened in the red light.
He reached over and turned it back.
The blank side faced up.
There was not a single word on the paper, only clean, unbroken white. From the first line to the last, not one word.
He pushed the paper half an inch toward the center of his desk, then stopped. Its edge lay directly over the strip of light in the aisle.
He squared its corners, aligning it with the desk at the far end of the aisle.
A small patch of white now occupied the center of his desk.
His hand withdrew to the desk edge and lay flat.
The pen still lay across the edge of the paper, its tip pointing toward him, just as it had when he put it down.
Two desks away, Naruto's paper lay open.
There was not a single word on it either.
Naruto held his pen with its tip pointing toward the lectern. Since sitting down, he had never lowered it to the paper.
One paper lay open; the