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I type back quickly as I walk downstairs.

Me: I’m here in a sec.

I replay the conversation as I reach her dorm and I want to go back and slap him for how frustrating he is.

I don’t know if I want to scream at you, or kiss you.

I should be mad, I am. But my brain had decided that one sentence it wanted to replay over and over again was the one I had no business remembering.

This, him, whatever my mind is trying to convince myself to be true is unfair and impossible.

It’s unfair. I can’t even leave angry without thinking that he looked at me like he was trying not to do something he wanted more than he should.

57

Mireya

Play - Talk by Hozier

Rehearsed patterns

It’s been a few days since I realized that the file was missing.

Three days of buried-in-paper, rewound VHS, scratched CDs, and spreadsheets full of scribbles and arrows that make sense only to me.

Do they really, Reya ?

Judging by the need to scream of exasperation I feel in my head, nothing makes sense.

Everything is digital enough to search, but not automated enough to do the thinking for me. I like doing the thinking part. I need to. Because if I don’t, I’ll think about something else, like the eyes of that young girl, the way she looked empty, the way her body felt cold.

I’m hunched over the desk in the lab, sleeves rolled up, papers already crumpled from hours of shoving my arms into them. My fingers are stained from highlighter ink, and I miss drawing. Why am I even thinking about this now?

The screens are flickering as I click between files, crime reports, and archived footage. Every detail I’ve collected over the past days is here. Every crime scene and report, every witness statement has the same missing piece.

Something that was deliberately erased, or left corrupted. Some footage that are conveniently unavailable. Witnesses giving the same story: a man waiting in a car, the victim walking toward him willingly, no one ever seeing his face. And all the victims, young, beautiful, often from broken families. All chosen carefully.

I lean back in my chair and spin slowly, staring at the ceiling.

Doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting the same results is stupid, Reya.

I mutter the phrase to myself, sticking my fingertips at the root of my hair.

When working alone, I notice the same things he would notice, parallel lines of deduction all converging at the same spot. I’ve been here since five in the morning and I feel like the same question is creeping back.

Why exactly did he stop for so long?

Years passed with nothing. Then now… he’s active again. I cross-reference the old victims’ ages, dates, and locations, scribbling notes on a pad that’s practically glued to my hand.

And then it clicks.

He probably…had a child, or discovered he had a family. That’s why he had a hiatus. That’s why there have been no new victims for years.

And now, with the academy reopening and new students arriving, it’s the perfect opportunity. The perfect target pool.

The most recent victim was selected to begin training here. She never even set foot on the island and the headmaster…covered it up. There’s no information about her murder here. They never mentioned her, or anything.

I run a hand over my face, exhaling. My third coffee has gone cold again. My notebooks are a mess of arrows, question marks, and underlined names. By the time I realize, the clock’s already screaming at me.