Orin at B.U.; punting; Joelle (pp. 286–287)

The redecoration of the dead king's house, timed to the corpse. C.T. takes over the Headmaster's office and changes the founder's Latin motto off the door "before Himself's microwaved head had even cooled" — the tenure begun, literally, over a body not yet gone cold. The truncated motto ("they can kill you, but…") is the founder's voice being edited out of his own doorway by the man who moved in next to his widow, and the phrasing makes the obscenity of the timing the whole content. Even routed through Tavis's exhausting third-person worry about whether Orin might resent it, the fact stands unqualified: the successor overwrote the dead man's threshold while the death was still warm.