“Alright, Gavin. I’ll check the car. Can you check the roads ahead to see if you find anything while I do that?”
“Of course, man. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
He jogs ahead as I look in the car. Any amount of hope I had vanishes when I find that her keys are still in the ignition, and her belongings are still in the car. Everything she always brings with her is here, but she is nowhere to be found.
Where the fuck can she be?
There isn’t anything here to make me assume she was injured. Not a single trace of blood can be found. Snapping my head in each direction, I look for any signs of her.
Nothing.
It’s a dead end.
While I’m glad I didn’t find her lying in the fucking ditch or bleeding out somewhere, that doesn’t ease my mind. There aren’t even footprints leading away from the car.
Gavin runs back to me, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Atlas, I think it’s time we head back to the office and try to find out more. There’s nothing we can do here; there are no leads.”
While it pains me to agree, I know he is right. I let my silence say everything that I currently can’t. No matter how bad I want to keep looking, we have no leads, so I agree, and we head back to the office.
The only thing left to do was to call hospitals to see if she was at any of them. I called twelve hospitals. Fucking twelve, and every single hospital said the same thing.
She wasn’t there. Twelve different calls just to be told that she wasn’t at any of them.
There’s no way she can just vanish. She has to be somewhere, so I hacked into the city cameras trying to find any trace of her. I was able to codein an alert that would ping my phone anytime facial recognition came across someone fitting her description.
Before I noticed, the sun had gone down and was currently rising again. She had officially been gone for over 24 hours, and the longer it took to find her, the worse I felt. I wouldn’t give up until I found her.
All the files on my desk blur together at this point. I know what they all say. I could probably recite the papers word for word without even looking at them. It doesn’t matter how many times I reread them; they still won’t lead me to her.
I run my hands over my face before tugging at my hair in frustration. There has to be something I missed.
Suddenly, I remember the voicemail didn’t come from her number.
Whose phone did she call from?
I scramble for my phone I threw across the room earlier in anger. I click on the voicemail, calling the number. On the sixth ring, a woman’s voice came on the phone. “We won’t be taking any calls while we’re mourning our loss,” then the line disconnects.
My phone fell from my grasp.
My thoughts start to spiral, making it difficult to keep up with them.
She said mourning.
Maze used this phone and now they are mourning someone.
Is that what happened to her?
When she said she was leaving, I thought she meant me, not this world.
It felt like I was just shot in the heart. I can’t breathe, my ears ringing. I clutch my chest as I try to squeeze the pieces back together, but it is no use. All I manage to do is bloody my hands as I watch the sharp fractures fall through my fingers and scatter to the floor at my feet.
My vision goes blurry and I panic when I can no longer see anything in front of me. I think I’m going blind until warm droplets run down my cheeks, and realize I’m crying… I didn’t know I could even do that.
I didn’t know what to do.
I want to tell Maze I was sorry for everything.
She was the only good thing in my life… I know that now.
