Chapter 109: What We Missed

Xander Ashwood

I hadn’t slept, not really, not in any way that counted. Reed kept working through everything methodically, laying out theories and cross-checking details like the answer was going to appear if he just stared at it long enough. I couldn’t do that. Sitting still made the fear worse, not better, so somewhere around two in the morning I left the apartment and headed straight for the east wing, sealed doors or not.

Nobody stopped me. The guards Aldric had posted recognized me on sight and didn’t bother arguing when I told them I needed five minutes. I didn’t need five minutes. I needed to see it again, to walk the exact path Astrid had walked, because something in that corridor had to explain where she’d gone.

I traced the route in my head as I moved, the same one she must have taken after getting those messages. Down this hallway, past the old lecture rooms, up the narrow stairway that led toward the abandoned section nobody used anymore. Every step of it made my jaw tighten harder. She’d trusted those messages because they looked like Ivy’s. Because Ivy was her friend, and friends didn’t lie about needing help. Whoever had done this had understood that completely and used it like a weapon.

I stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked around properly this time, forcing myself to actually study it instead of just walking through on instinct. No overturned furniture. No signs of a struggle. If someone had grabbed her here, she would have fought, and there was nothing here that suggested a fight had happened at all. No forced exit either, no window pried open, no door that looked tampered with.

Which meant whoever took her hadn’t needed a normal way out. Or they’d covered their tracks well enough that a normal way out didn’t exist to find.

I called Criston an hour later and dragged him back to the same spot. He walked the corridor slower than I had, running his hand along the wall in a few places, closing his eyes at others.

"Anything?" I asked.

"Give me a second," he said, and I forced myself to wait instead of pushing him.

Eventually he opened his eyes and shook his head slightly. "It’s not clean. I can usually get something, an emotion, a flash of what someone was thinking right before something happened to them. Here it’s like static. Like something got between me and her."

"Interference," I said.

"Something like that," he said. "I can’t tell you who did it. But something happened here that isn’t ordinary. Someone with real skill was involved."

That matched everything Reed had already suspected, and hearing it confirmed a second time didn’t make it any easier to sit with.

I went back to the messages next, pulling them up on my phone again even though I’d read them a dozen times already. You shouldn’t have gone back there. Some places only feel safe until they aren’t. You should have told them. The wording kept snagging on something in my head, and it took me a while to figure out what.

Whoever sent these knew Astrid wouldn’t tell us. Not just knew it was possible, knew it well enough to count on it, to build an entire plan around her staying quiet. That meant they understood something real about her, about the way she’d rather carry things alone than risk making us worry. That wasn’t a stranger’s guess. That was someone who’d studied her closely enough to predict exactly how she’d react.

I found Camilla and Martha the next morning, both of them looking as exhausted as I felt.

"Walk me through everything again," I said. "Everything about how Ivy normally talks to Astrid."

Camilla rubbed her eyes. "We already told Reed—"

"I know. Tell me again."

They did, patiently, describing the way Ivy texted, the phrases she used, how she never called Astrid by anything but her name, never abbreviated things the way the messages had. I compared it against the screenshots in my head as they talked, and the mismatch got clearer the longer I listened.

"It doesn’t sound like her," Martha said finally. "Not exactly. I don’t know how to explain it better than that."

I already had. Whoever sent those messages had studied Ivy closely enough to imitate her convincingly, but not perfectly. Which meant Ivy hadn’t chosen to disappear alongside Astrid at all. She’d been taken first, deliberately, specifically because she was someone Astrid trusted completely. Bait, not a target in her own right.

I went back to the east wing a third time that day, and this time I noticed something I’d walked past twice already without registering it properly. A section of the wall near the base of the old stairway, slightly discolored in a way that didn’t match the surrounding stone. I crouched down and ran my fingers over it. It felt wrong, warmer than it should have been, though there was nothing visibly burned or damaged about it.

I called Eliza over, and she knelt beside me, frowning at the same spot.

"This isn’t normal wear," she said after a moment. "Something touched this. Something with actual power behind it."

"What kind of power?"

"I don’t know yet," she admitted. "But it’s not academy magic. It’s something else."

I stared at that small, unremarkable discoloration on the wall and felt something cold settle in my chest that had nothing to do with relief. I’d wanted a lead. I’d wanted something concrete, something we could actually chase. But now that I had it, all it told me was that whoever had done this had known exactly what they were doing, down to the smallest detail, careful enough to leave almost nothing behind except this one faint trace neither of us had noticed until the third pass through the same hallway.

For a second I let myself think about her, actually think about her, wherever she was, without me, without Reed, surrounded by people who’d planned every part of this in advance. My chest tightened hard enough that I had to stand up and walk a few steps away before I said something I couldn’t take back to Eliza standing there watching me.

I forced it down. Fear wasn’t going to help her. Careless mistakes born out of panic wouldn’t either.

I sent everything to Reed the second I had my thoughts together enough to explain it properly. He called back within minutes.

"This confirms it," he said, his voice tighter than usual despite the control he was clearly working to hold onto. "She was lured there deliberately, and whatever took her afterward wasn’t ordinary. We’re dealing with something supernatural."

"We still don’t know where she is," I said.

"No," he agreed. "But now we know what we’re looking for."

I hung up and looked back down the empty corridor, the same one Astrid had walked through believing she was about to help her friend. Whoever had planned this had watched her long enough to know exactly which string to pull, exactly which fear would move her faster than caution could stop her.

We just had to figure out who.