Chapter 111: What Was Hidden

Reed

Eliza found me the next morning, and the look on her face told me she’d found something before she even said a word.

"It’s not just an illusion," she said, setting a small notebook down on the table between us. "I went back over the residue near the east wing stairway last night. Illusion magic distorts perception, but it doesn’t move a person physically. What’s left behind there is different. There’s a signature that suggests something transported her, or concealed the process of her being moved."

"Concealed how?"

"I can’t tell you where it led," she admitted. "The trace stops entirely, like whatever carried it through simply closed the door behind itself. But I can tell you it wasn’t a simple trick of the eyes. Someone with real power did this deliberately."

That confirmed what Xander and I had already started to suspect, though hearing it laid out so plainly made it settle heavier in my chest than the suspicion alone had.

Criston came by not long after, looking more drained than usual. "I tried again," he said. "Her mental trace. I got something this time, but it’s not going to give you what you want."

"Tell me anyway."

"It’s not a face. It’s not a place I can point to on a map." He rubbed at his temple like the memory of trying still ached somewhere behind his eyes. "It’s a feeling. Enclosed. Tight, like walls pressing in from every direction. And there’s something else, a kind of gap where a memory should sit and doesn’t."

"A gap?"

"Like something got erased," he said. "Not just hidden from her perception in the moment. Actually removed afterward."

I sat with that for a long moment. Someone hadn’t just tricked Astrid into walking somewhere she shouldn’t have gone. They’d interfered with her mind well enough to erase part of what happened to her once she got there. I didn’t know what that gap contained, and neither did Criston, but the implication alone was enough to turn my stomach.

All of this was getting too fucked up too quickly.

Josh arrived later that afternoon with something smaller but still useful. "A couple of the students who live near that side of the dorms mentioned seeing people around the east wing before all this happened," he said. "Not students. Not staff either, as far as anyone could tell. They said it was late, a few nights before Astrid disappeared, and they didn’t think much of it at the time."

"Did anyone get a good look?"

"No faces," Josh said. "Just movement in a section that’s supposed to be empty."

It wasn’t much. But it told me the same thing everything else had started telling me. Whoever had done this hadn’t shown up on impulse the night Astrid walked into that hallway. They’d been there before, scouting, preparing, watching the area long enough to know exactly how to use it.

Camilla and Martha brought their piece of it that evening, laying out everything they’d reconstructed about Ivy’s final hours before she vanished. The timing lined up in a way that made my stomach turn cold. Ivy had gone missing before the messages were ever sent to Astrid, not after. Which meant the sequence wasn’t what I’d assumed at first.

Ivy hadn’t disappeared alongside Astrid.

Ivy had been taken first, and then used, her identity and her trust weaponized to lure Astrid to exactly the place they needed her.

I laid it all out on the table that night, piecing the timeline together properly for the first time. The anonymous messages Astrid had been hiding from us had started before any of this, which meant someone had been watching her for weeks, gathering whatever they needed to know before making a single move. They’d known Ivy well enough to imitate her convincingly. They’d known exactly how to isolate Astrid in a place with no witnesses. And once she was there, they’d had a method sophisticated enough to conceal both her disappearance and part of her own memory of what happened.

This wasn’t opportunistic. It couldn’t have been. Too many pieces had to be in place before that first message was ever sent.

Xander sat across from me, arms crossed, watching the pieces spread out between us. "So what do we actually do with all this?"

I thought about it for a long moment. "The east wing has been officially restricted for years. That means access lists exist somewhere, whoever had legitimate reason to be in that section, staff, maintenance, security personnel doing rounds. If someone unauthorized got in there enough times to plan this properly, they either bypassed the restriction entirely or they had help getting past it."

"You want to go through every name on that list," Xander said.

"I want to know who had access to that building before Astrid ever set foot in it," I said. "Somebody either let them in, or somebody looked the other way. Either way, that’s a thread we can actually pull."

It wasn’t the answer either of us wanted. It wasn’t Astrid’s location, wasn’t a name, wasn’t anything that let us walk out that door and bring her home tonight. But it was something real, something concrete enough to chase instead of standing still and waiting for another fragment to surface on its own.

I looked over everything we’d gathered, the residue Eliza had found, the gap in Astrid’s memory Criston had described, the unfamiliar figures Josh’s contacts had noticed near the east wing, the reframed timeline with Ivy taken first. None of it told us where Astrid was right now. None of it gave us a name or a direction to run in.

But it told us something else, something that settled into me with a weight I hadn’t fully carried until that moment.

They hadn’t taken her because they happened to find her alone in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They’d been waiting for exactly the right opportunity, patient enough to build one out of nothing until it arrived.