Chapter 107: The First Lead

Reed

The apartment emptied out once everyone had their assignments, and Xander and I stayed behind for a few minutes longer, going over everything we knew before splitting off ourselves. I needed to reconstruct her final hours properly rather than simply chase after whatever lead came first.

"We keep circling the same problem," I said, spreading what little we had across the table. "She disappeared from the east wing without leaving a physical trail. No blood, no struggle marks, nothing security caught on the way out."

"So either someone’s covering their tracks perfectly," Xander said, "or she didn’t walk out the normal way at all."

I went through the timeline again, piece by piece. Astrid had received messages that appeared to come from Ivy. She’d gone to the east wing believing her friend needed help. Ivy herself had already been missing by that point, though Astrid hadn’t known it. And the phrasing in those messages, according to Ivy herself, hadn’t sounded quite right, off in some way she couldn’t fully articulate.

"Whoever sent those messages knew Ivy well enough to make them believable," I said. "Not perfectly, but well enough that Astrid didn’t question it until it was too late."

That told me something important. This wasn’t opportunistic. Whoever had done this had studied both of them long enough to know exactly which lever to pull.

I found Criston in the corridor outside, and he looked up when I approached.

"Anything?" I asked.

"Nothing clean," he said. "I can usually pick up something from a place where strong emotion happened recently, but her trail feels wrong. Interrupted. Like something got in the way of it on purpose."

"Obscured," I said.

"That’s one word for it," he said. "I don’t get a face. I don’t get a location. I get static where there should be something clearer."

That matched my own suspicion closely enough that it settled uncomfortably in my chest. Supernatural interference, deliberate and skilled enough to disrupt even Criston’s ability.

I met Eliza at the sealed east wing next, watching as she moved slowly along the corridor with her hand hovering just above the walls.

"There’s nothing leading out," she said eventually. "Whatever happened here, it didn’t leave the kind of trail I’d expect from someone dragging an unwilling person down a hallway."

"Could an illusion do this?" I asked. "Something convincing enough to make her walk somewhere on her own, believing it was real?"

She considered that for a long moment. "It’s possible. I can’t confirm it yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Illusion work sophisticated enough to fool someone completely, and then clean up after itself this well, that’s not something a student does casually."

I filed that away too. Another piece, not an answer.

Camilla and Martha found me not long after, both of them looking exhausted from retracing every inch of Ivy’s routine they could remember.

"She had no reason to run off," Camilla said firmly. "None. Ivy wouldn’t disappear with Astrid, and she definitely wouldn’t send those messages herself."

"We already suspected that," I said.

"I know," Martha said, "but it matters. If Ivy had nothing to do with any of it, then whoever used her name did it deliberately, knowing exactly how Astrid would react to it."

That confirmed something I’d already started separating in my head. These weren’t two students who happened to vanish together. Ivy had likely been taken first, specifically because she could be used as bait. A means to an end, not a target in her own right, or at least not the primary one.

Xander’s patience wore thin faster than mine did. "We’re wasting time standing around comparing notes," he said, pacing near the window. "We should be searching every building on this campus right now."

"We need to know what we’re looking for before we go running through corridors," I said.

"We know she’s gone, Reed. That should be enough."

"It’s not," I said, sharper than I meant to. "If we chase every lead at once without direction, we accomplish nothing."

He turned on me. "So we just sit here and think?"

"We think first," I said, "so that when we move, we move toward something real."

Neither of us was actually arguing about strategy, not really. He wanted to act because standing still made the helplessness worse, made the silence in that apartment louder than either of us could stand. I understood that better than I let on, because the same restlessness sat under my own skin, and the only thing holding it down was the discipline I’d forced myself into years ago.

It was Roshan who brought us the first genuinely physical lead, a small section near the east wing that hadn’t drawn much attention initially. A section of stone slightly warped, not damaged exactly, but altered in a way that didn’t match the rest of the corridor’s architecture.

"It’s subtle," Roshan admitted, "but it’s not natural wear. Something touched this that shouldn’t have been able to."

I crouched beside it and felt the same faint, wrong residue I’d noticed the night we first searched the east wing, still lingering despite everything that had happened since. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a doorway to wherever she’d been taken. But it confirmed, beyond any reasonable doubt now, that Astrid hadn’t left the academy through any ordinary means.

I sat with that for a moment, letting it settle alongside everything else we’d gathered, and my mind drifted back to the messages Astrid had hidden from us before any of this started.

You shouldn’t have gone back there.

Some places only feel safe until they aren’t.

You should have told them.

Those messages had felt, at the time, like intimidation aimed at frightening her into silence. Now, laid alongside everything we’d learned tonight, they read differently. Less like a warning meant to scare her off, and more like the observations of someone who’d been watching her closely enough to know exactly which fears would land.

"They were watching her," I said aloud, more to myself than to anyone still in the room.

Xander stopped pacing. "For how long?"

"Longer than we realized," I said. "This wasn’t a decision made overnight. Someone studied her patterns, her friendships, everything about her life here, long before they ever sent that first message."

I looked at everything spread across the table again. We still didn’t know where she was. We didn’t know who had taken her, or why, or what they wanted from her specifically. But we understood one thing now with absolute certainty.

Someone had planned this, carefully, for a long time.

"We need to find out who’s been watching her," I said, "before any of this started."

Xander looked at me, and for the first time that night, some of the restless anger in his expression settled into something steadier, something closer to purpose.

"Then let’s find them," he said.