Chapter 16

A week passed. The rhythms of Mudwick ground forward and the gap where Lucia had been closed like water filling a hole.

Classes continued. Meals were served. The good eggs ran out every morning whether Lucia was there to claim them or not. Kezia started sitting alone in the dining hall, saving the seat next to her for the first few days before finally letting someone else have it. I watched that happen from across the room and felt something tighten in my chest.

Nobody talked about Lucia. Not openly. Not anymore.

Vane's assembly had done its job. The official story had settled into place and people were willing to live inside it, the way you're willing to live inside a house you suspect has a bad foundation because the alternative is standing outside in the cold.

Echoes remained impossible, though Professor Aldridge had started giving me separate exercises focused on reading people-traces. Drift practice went better now that I'd figured out my workaround. Small victories in a landscape that felt increasingly wrong.

The conversation from that last night before everything shifted, the one in the dark where Dao said the same playbook, kept replaying in my head. But it was playing louder in his.

I could tell because of the way he changed.

Not all at once. Dao didn't do anything all at once except crack jokes and pick locks. This was slower. A reorientation happening behind the humor, behind the restless hands, behind the Filipino jazz that played from his speaker every morning while he got dressed.

Monday he asked to borrow Sasha's notebook. Just for an hour, he said. She narrowed her eyes but handed it over. He sat on his bed with it open on his knees, not reading her notes about Lucia but studying the structure. How she'd organized names and dates. How she'd built a timeline from nothing.

Then he gave it back and started his own.

It wasn't color-coded. It wasn't neat. It was a spiral notebook from the campus store with his grandmother's stories on one side and everything we knew about Lucia on the other. And in the space between, questions.

How long between first signs and disappearance? Who handled the "withdrawal" paperwork? How far back do the mid-semester departures go?

"You're building a case," I said Tuesday night, watching him write.

"I'm looking for a pattern." He didn't look up. "There's a difference."

"What pattern?"

"The one my grandmother spent twenty years trying to tell me about." He tapped the pen against the page. "She always said the accusation against my grandfather came from inside the institution. Not from the community, not from the families who knew him. From the people who ran things. The ones who controlled the official record." He looked at me. "Sound familiar?"

It did. A school that controlled the story of every student who vanished. An institution that wrote the official explanation and expected everyone to accept it.

"She told me once that the worst part wasn't losing his reputation," Dao said. "It was that they used the system's own language to do it. They accused him of the exact thing they were guilty of. Draining. Extracting. Taking what wasn't his." His jaw tightened. "If you want to hide a crime, accuse someone else of it first. Then nobody looks at you."

He went back to writing. The pen moved fast, pressing hard enough to leave grooves in the pages underneath.

Sasha was on her own trajectory. Sleeping less. I could see it in the shadows under her eyes, in the way she held her coffee with both hands like it was keeping her upright. Her notebook was running out of room. Pages of handwriting I caught glimpses of when she left it open at meals. Names, dates, connections drawn in colored ink. A system growing more elaborate by the day.

The more elaborate the system, I was learning, the more scared she was underneath.

Wednesday at lunch she slid a piece of paper across the table to Dao without saying anything. He picked it up, read it, and went very still.

"Where did you get this?"

"Public enrollment records. The school publishes aggregate numbers every year in the annual report. They don't break it down by individual student, but they list total enrollment by term and scholarship count." She took a sip of her coffee. "First-generation scholarship enrollment has dropped by an average of four students per year for the last six years. That's not normal attrition. Normal attrition for boarding schools in this tier is one to two per year."

"Four per year," Dao repeated. "For six years."

"At least. I can only go back as far as the reports are publicly available. If the pattern holds further..." She let the sentence die.

Twenty-four students. Minimum. Gone from the rolls with no explanation beyond the kind of language that closes doors instead of opening them.

Dao folded the paper and put it in his notebook. His hands were steady but his eyes had that look I was starting to recognize. The look he got when the anger found focus instead of just heat.

"Same playbook," he said quietly. "Every time."

Thaddeus was the opposite kind of quiet. He still showed up to meals, still offered help with homework, still carried his grandmother's token in his pocket. But I'd catch him staring at nothing sometimes. Lost in some calculation he wouldn't share.

Friday at lunch he told me about the phone call.

"I called my mother last night," he said. We were sitting at the edge of the practice courts, watching students run drills. His voice was careful and measured, the way it got when he was processing something that didn't fit his picture of the world. "Asked her about the board's response to mid-semester withdrawals. Whether there was a protocol. Whether anyone tracked the numbers."

"What did she say?"

"Student welfare is a top priority for the Mudwick board of trustees." He said it in a flat voice I'd never heard from him. Reciting. "All withdrawal processes follow established procedures with full parental notification and appropriate transition support."

"That sounds rehearsed."

"My mother doesn't rehearse conversations with me." He picked at the edge of his token through his jacket pocket. "She rehearses for the press. She rehearses for board meetings. She doesn't rehearse for her fourteen-year-old son asking a question about school policy." He swallowed. "Unless the question is one she was expecting. One she already had an answer prepared for."

I let that sit between us.

"After we hung up, I walked over to the administrative building." He was looking at his hands. "Stood outside for about twenty minutes. Looking up at the windows. Trying to decide whether to go in."

"Did you?"

"No." He shook his head slowly. "Because I realized I didn't know what I'd do if I went in there and found something. If my mother's name was on a document. If the plaque on the east wing with my family's name on it was connected to whatever is happening here." He looked at me and his eyes were older than they should have been. "What do you do when the institution you trusted is the thing you can't trust anymore?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I was still working on trusting anything at all.

Marcus was a different story entirely.

The armor that had cracked during the Drift match was sealed back up, thicker than before. He showed up to practice but stayed on the edges. Ran his plays, kept his distance, left without talking to anyone. The boy who'd sprinted across the field carrying the flag for us was gone. In his place was the Marcus from the first week, all crossed arms and turned shoulders and eyes that stayed near the exits.

He skipped meals with the group twice that week. The third time, he sat at a different table entirely.

Sasha tracked his absences the way she tracked everything else now. A small notation in her notebook. Date, time, duration. No comment. No judgment. Just data.

The thing that tipped Dao over the edge happened Friday afternoon.

He told me about it that night, pacing the room while his speaker played something fast and jagged, a trumpet line that kept climbing without resolving.

He'd gone to the registrar's office after classes. Not to break in. Just to ask. He'd prepared the question carefully, practiced it until it sounded casual. A student researcher working on an independent project about enrollment trends. Could he see the withdrawal records from the last few years? Aggregate numbers, nothing personal. Just data for a paper.

The woman behind the desk had smiled at him. Polite, professional, the kind of smile that comes with a script.

"Withdrawal records are confidential, I'm afraid. Student privacy."

"I'm not asking for names. Just numbers. How many students withdrew mid-semester in each of the last ten years."

The smile didn't change. "That information falls under our data governance policy. You'd need faculty sponsorship and approval from the dean of records."

He pushed, gently. Said Professor Aldridge might sponsor him. Said it was for a statistics class.

And then the smile shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.

"I'd suggest you focus on a different topic," she said. "Enrollment data can be quite sensitive. We wouldn't want anyone drawing incomplete conclusions from numbers that lack context."

Dao stopped pacing and looked at me.

"Incomplete conclusions," he repeated. "That's what she said. Like she knew exactly which conclusions I'd draw and wanted to get ahead of them." He picked up the lock pick set from his desk. Unwrapped the cloth. Ran his thumb across the tools the way someone else might run a rosary. "Then she said something else. Right as I was leaving. 'The Reyes family has always been interested in records, haven't they?'"

"She said that?"

"She said that." His voice was flat but I could feel the tremor underneath. "She knew my name. I didn't give her my name. She saw me walk in and she already knew who I was and she already had the answer ready."

He wrapped the picks back up. Set them on the desk.

"My grandfather asked questions about records too," he said. "About what was being taken from that site and where it was going. And someone smiled at him and told him to focus on a different topic. And when he didn't, they burned his life down." He looked at the wrapped cloth on the desk. "It's the same people, Eli. Maybe not the same actual people, but the same system. The same machine. And it's still running."

"What are you going to do?"

He didn't answer. But I saw where his eyes went. The lock picks. The door.

I woke up around midnight to the sound of Dao getting dressed in the dark.

He was being quiet about it. Careful. Shoes in hand, jacket already on, moving with the particular attention of someone who'd practiced being silent his whole life. The lock picks were in his back pocket. I could see the outline through the fabric.

"Don't," I said.

He froze.

"The registrar's office." It wasn't a question.

"Withdrawal records going back twenty years." He kept his voice low. "Not just Lucia. All of them. Every student who left mid-semester with a family emergency that didn't add up. If the pattern is there, it's in those files. And if the pattern matches what happened to my grandfather's site, then we know. We know it's the same thing."

"And if you get caught?"

"I won't get caught."

"Dao."

"I can do this. The locks in that building are forty years old. Pin-tumbler deadbolts, no electronic monitoring. I watched the security rotation all week. There's a twenty-minute gap between the east wing patrol and the grounds sweep." He was standing by the door now, shoes still in his hand. "Twenty minutes is all I need."

He'd been planning this for days. The restlessness, the note-taking, the visit to the registrar that afternoon. All of it building to this.

"You know what happens if they catch a scholarship kid breaking into administrative records one week after another scholarship kid supposedly withdrew," I said.

"Yeah. They expel me and call it a disciplinary issue and my family gets another official story that everyone accepts without question." He met my eyes. "Same playbook."

"That's my point. You'd be making it easy for them."

"And doing nothing makes it easy for them too." His voice was harder now. Closer to the thing underneath. "My grandfather did nothing after they warned him off. He stopped asking questions. Focused on a different topic, just like the nice lady suggested. And they destroyed him anyway, because the accusation was already out there and silence looked like guilt. He spent the rest of his life swearing he was innocent and nobody believed him because he'd already stopped fighting."

The room was very quiet. Through the wall I could hear someone's clock ticking. Dao's jazz had been off for hours.

"I've spent my whole life not knowing if my family's name is dirty or clean," he said. "You know that. I told you in this room, in this dark." He shifted his weight. "Those files could tell me. Not just about Lucia. About the system. About how long this has been happening and who's been covering it up. If someone framed my grandfather to hide what they were doing, the pattern will be in the withdrawals. First-gen students. Scholarship kids. People nobody protects. The same profile, year after year, for decades."

He wasn't talking about breaking into an office. He was talking about his whole life. Every dinner where his grandmother changed the subject. Every room where the Reyes name drew a certain look. Every night he'd lain awake wondering if the person he was named for was guilty of the thing that defined their family.

I understood that. I understood it all the way down.

But I also understood what would happen if he got caught.

I got out of bed and stood between him and the door.

"Move, Eli."

"No."

"I'm not asking."

"I know you're not." I held his eyes. "But think about what you just said. The same playbook. Official story, close the file. If you get caught tonight, you become the story. Scholarship kid with a grudge breaks into records office. They don't even have to lie about it. They just point at you and say the Reyes family has always been interested in records and suddenly your grandfather's accusation isn't just his anymore. It's yours. The name gets dirtier. The pattern stays hidden."

Something moved behind his eyes. I kept going.

"You said you wanted to find out what's actually happening. That you wanted to be right. Kicking down a door at midnight doesn't make you right. It makes you easy to dismiss."

"So what do I do? Wait? Take apart more watches while students keep disappearing?"

Sasha's voice came from the hallway. I hadn't heard her door open across the corridor.

"You let me help."

She was standing in the doorframe in sweatpants and a Silver Spring track hoodie, arms folded. Her eyes went to the lock picks in Dao's pocket, and I watched her do the math in about two seconds.

"The registrar's office," she said.

"Yeah."

"Forty-year-old pin tumblers, twenty-minute patrol gap, paper records in filing cabinets."

Dao blinked. "How did you know that?"

"Because I mapped the security rotation three days ago." She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her. "You think you're the only one who's been thinking about those files? I've been building a list of what we'd need and where it would be. Withdrawal dates cross-referenced with enrollment records, scholarship funding sources, board approval signatures." She sat on the edge of my desk. "The difference between us is that I also mapped what happens if we get caught. And what happens is we lose everything."

"So you're here to stop me."

"I'm here to tell you that you're right about the pattern and wrong about the timing." She looked at him steadily. "Those files aren't going anywhere. They'll be there next week and next month. You, on the other hand, will not be here if you get expelled tonight."

"If I get caught."

"When you get caught. Because you're angry and angry people make mistakes, and the people running this system have been covering their tracks for longer than we've been alive. They know what a break-in looks like. They probably have protocols for it."

The room went quiet. Dao stood by the door, shoes still in his hand, and I could see the war happening behind his face. The part of him that needed to move, that had spent seventeen years not knowing and now saw a way to find out. And the part of him that knew she was right.

"I can't just sit here," he said. The anger had gone out of his voice. What was left was something closer to grief.

"You're not sitting here," Sasha said. "You're building a case. A real one. Not a break-in that gets you expelled and your evidence thrown out because it was obtained by the kid whose grandfather supposedly did the same thing." She let that land. "You want to clear your family's name? Then do it in a way they can't dismiss. So clean and so careful that when we finally put it together, nobody can call it a grudge or a conspiracy theory or a Reyes family problem."

Dao looked at the lock picks in his hand. The cloth his grandmother had wrapped them in, the embroidery worn thin from years of use. He stood there for a long time.

Then he set them in the desk drawer and closed it.

"Fine," he said. "But I'm not waiting forever."

"Nobody's asking you to wait forever." Sasha stood up. "Just tonight."

She left. The hallway was quiet after she pulled the door closed.

Dao dropped onto his bed and stared at the ceiling. I turned his speaker on low. The jazz came back, something slow and aching. A saxophone trying to find a melody that kept slipping away.

"She's right," I said.

"I know she's right. That's the worst part." He threw an arm over his eyes. "My grandmother said the same thing to my grandfather. Think before you fight. Plan before you move." He was quiet for a while. "And he listened. He stopped. And they destroyed him anyway."

"Maybe the lesson isn't that he shouldn't have fought. Maybe it's that he needed people watching his back when he did."

"Maybe."

He didn't sound convinced. But he stayed in bed.

Saturday afternoon, the thing I'd been dreading happened in the common room. Not between Dao and the registrar's office. Between Sasha and Thaddeus.

She had her notebook spread across the table, the color-coded one with the timeline she'd been building since Lucia vanished. Thaddeus sat across from her, reading a history of Mudwick's founding families that he'd checked out from the library. Dao was pacing behind the couch, hands busy with a mechanical pencil he kept clicking open and shut.

Sasha said something about the board's financial records being publicly available. How endowment reports might show anomalies in funding streams that aligned with the withdrawal pattern.

Thaddeus went still.

"You're talking about my family's contributions," he said. Not a question.

"I'm talking about all major donor families. The Whitmore endowment is the largest. That's not an accusation. It's a fact."

"It feels like an accusation."

"Then separate your feelings from the data."

Thaddeus closed the book. The sound was louder than it should have been.

"You think I don't know what my family is?" His voice cracked and it wasn't the measured, careful Thaddeus I was used to. It was raw. "You think I haven't spent my whole life trying to be something different from where I came from? The coal money. The way people look at our name and see a building instead of a person. I know what my family benefits from. I just don't know how deep it goes. And that scares me more than anything you've got in that notebook."

Dao's pencil stopped clicking.

Sasha was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, the analytical edge was gone. What replaced it was something I'd only heard from her once before, at the lake.

"I'm not trying to tear down your family, Thaddeus. I'm trying to figure out what happened to a girl who used to save the good eggs at breakfast for her friend." She paused. "And I need your help to do it. You have access to board records. Donor reports. Things I can't get to on my own. I'm not asking you to betray your family. I'm asking you to help me find the truth, whatever it turns out to be."

Thaddeus held her gaze. His hand was in his pocket, gripping the token.

"And if the truth is something I can't live with?"

"Then we deal with that together."

She held out the notebook. He took it. Turned a few pages. Looked at the web of connections she'd drawn, names to dates to dollar amounts. His expression changed as he read. Recognition, maybe. The look of someone seeing their own world from the outside for the first time.

"I'll look into the endowment reports," he said finally. "But I'm doing it because I trust you. Not because I think you're right."

"That's enough," Sasha said. "For now."

Dao watched the whole exchange without saying a word. When Thaddeus left, he looked at Sasha.

"You just got a Whitmore to investigate his own family."

"I got a friend to help us find the truth." She picked her pen back up. "There's a difference."

"Yeah." Dao almost smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "There is."

That night I couldn't sleep.

Around midnight I gave up and walked the halls. The dorm was quiet but the traces weren't. Anxiety hummed from behind closed doors, faint enough that I could filter most of it but persistent enough that sleep felt like a foreign country.

The library was supposed to be empty. Past midnight, the doors stayed unlocked but the lights went down to a dim glow and the monitoring wards shifted to passive mode.

Sasha was at a table near the back.

I almost turned around. She hadn't seen me, and whatever she was doing looked private. But something in the way she was sitting stopped me. The posture was wrong. Sasha sat like a person who'd learned to take up the minimum possible space and fill it with maximum efficiency. Straight back. Organized spread. Everything in its place.

This wasn't that.

Papers were scattered across the table in a way I'd never seen from her. Pages torn from notebooks, not cut. A timeline that spanned the entire surface, names and dates written in handwriting that got less steady as it went. No color-coding. No tabs. No system at all. Just chaos, spreading outward from a center point like something had detonated.

I pulled out the chair across from her. She looked up and her eyes were red.

"Don't say anything," she said.

I didn't.

She went back to staring at the mess she'd made. I could see names going back years. Students I'd never heard of. Dates from long before either of us arrived. Sources scribbled in margins.

"I went further back," she said after a while. "Past the public enrollment reports. Into the yearbooks and newsletters in the library archives. Cross-referenced what I could find with anything online." She pulled a sheet toward her. "Eighteen students in the last five years alone who left mid-semester with no forwarding address. All first-generation. All scholarship. Fourteen of them had no social media presence after they withdrew. No college applications. No jobs. Nothing."

"Sasha."

"Fourteen people who just stopped existing." Her voice was very controlled. Too controlled. "And before that, more. I found mentions going back decades if you know how to look. Yearbook photos of students who were there one semester and gone the next. Always the same profile."

She looked at me, and the analytical distance that usually separated her from the things she studied was gone. Stripped away. What was underneath was not the brilliant girl who color-coded her fear into something manageable. What was underneath was a thirteen-year-old from Silver Spring who was very scared.

"I'm the profile, Eli." Her voice didn't crack, but it came close. "First-gen. Scholarship. Nigerian parents who can't even call the school because they don't know what this place really is. If they took me tomorrow, my mom would get a phone call saying I'd had an emergency. And she'd believe it, because what else can she do? She doesn't know anyone here. She doesn't have money for lawyers or investigators. She'd just have to take their word for it and wonder for the rest of her life why her daughter never came home."

I didn't try to fix it. Didn't offer reassurance or a plan or any of the things you're supposed to say when someone tells you they're afraid. Sometimes the only honest response to someone's fear is to not pretend it isn't real.

"You're not going to disappear," I said. "I won't let that happen."

"You can't promise that."

"I know. But I'm saying it anyway."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Quick. Angry at herself for the tears. Then she started gathering the scattered pages, stacking them into something that wasn't quite order but was at least contained.

"Help me sort these," she said. "The timeline needs to be organized by semester, not by date. I need a separate column for financial aid status."

We sat there until almost three in the morning, rebuilding her system from the chaos. By the time we finished, the color-coding was back. The tabs were in place. The handwriting was steady again.

But I'd seen what was under all of it. And I think she needed someone to see it, even if she'd never say so.

We walked back to the dorms in silence. At the door to her room, she stopped.

"Thank you," she said. "For not telling me it's going to be okay."

"Is that what you want? For someone to tell you it's going to be okay?"

"No." She looked at me. "I want someone to tell me the truth. Even when the truth is that they don't know."

I nodded. She went inside.

I stood in the hallway for a moment, listening to the old building settle. The traces pressed in from every direction. Decades of students who'd walked these halls. Some of them had graduated. Some of them had left for family emergencies.

Some of them had never been heard from again.

Back in our room, Dao was asleep. His hands were still, resting open on the blanket. When Dao's hands went still, something was seriously wrong.

I reached for Dad's coin on the nightstand. Warm from the wood of the drawer. Small and ordinary and real.

Sleep came eventually. It always does, even when you don't want it to.