After lunch, he had two hours free before his next class.
He went straight to the library.
Kuoh University’s main library was exactly what he’d come for. Five floors. A central atrium with a skylight that let natural light fall onto dark wooden tables. Absolute silence—the kind that only exists in places where thousands of people have studied and some of that stillness has soaked into the walls.
And on the third floor, the archive.
The archive.
Adrián registered his name with the librarian—an older woman with a gray bun and glasses hanging from a chain—showed his student ID, signed a form stating he’d handle the documents with care, and gained access to the restricted section.
The air smelled of old paper. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves, packed with folders labeled by year, by region, by case type.
Adrián walked slowly, running his fingers along the folder spines.
Unsolved disappearances. 2020. 2021. 2022.
His fingers stopped on the thick folder labeled 2022 — North Coast.
He pulled it out.
Sat down at an empty table by the window. Opened the folder.
And there it was.
Page thirty-seven. Small photo, black and white, his sister’s face. Below it, the official report.
Elena Vega, 22 years old. Last seen: May 3, Mercier Street, approx. 9:40 PM. Sole witness: younger brother (14 years old, inconsistent statement, evaluated by psychologist). No signs of struggle. No cameras in the area. Case closed due to lack of evidence: probable voluntary disappearance.
Voluntary disappearance.
Adrián clenched his teeth.
Voluntary disappearance my ass.
He flipped through the rest of the folder. Looked for other names. Other dates. Any pattern. Any similar cases in the area. Anything the police had overlooked.
He was so focused that he didn’t notice the other person in the section until he nearly bumped into her while reaching for another folder.
"Sorry," he said automatically, stepping back. "Didn’t see you."
"No problem."
The voice was soft, with a slightly foreign accent he couldn’t place.
Adrián looked up.
And for a second, he forgot to breathe.
The girl in front of him was tall. Almost his height. Very long black hair with purplish highlights that fell to her waist. Very pale skin. Amber-yellow eyes, the color of dark honey, with an intensity that wasn’t challenging or flirtatious—just attentive, like she was evaluating every detail of his face and cataloging it.
She wore a long-sleeved black silk blouse with the top button undone. A black midi skirt. Thigh-high boots. In her right hand she carried two thick books: Criminal Profiles of the 20th Century and Psychopathy and the Boundary of Evil.
Adrián registered all of that in the time it took him to breathe twice.
Then he registered one more thing: there was a silver ring on her index finger, with a feather engraved on the surface.
"I’m in your way," she said, stepping aside. "Sorry."
"No, no, I was distracted."
"We both were, then."
She kept walking. Stopped at the next shelf. Pulled out a folder labeled 2023 — Prematurely Closed Cases.
Adrián glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
"Criminology?" he asked, nodding at the books.
She seemed surprised he’d spoken to her. Then mildly amused.
"Yeah. And you?"
"Psychology. Though I guess the two sections overlap up here."
"They overlap a lot," she confirmed, flipping through the folder. "Though we get here for different reasons. You guys come up here to read about why people do things. We come up here to read about what to do after they’ve done them."
"That’s a pretty dark way to put it."
"It’s the correct way."
Adrián smiled despite himself.
"Name?"
She hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then:
"Sariel."
"Just Sariel?"
"Corvax. Sariel Corvax. Third year. And you’re..."
"Adrián. Vega. First year."
"It shows."
"That obvious?"
"You’ve got the folder open to page thirty-seven and you’ve been on the same page for twenty minutes. A third-year already knows that if a case has you that obsessed, you photocopy it and get it out of here before the librarian sees you and gets suspicious."
Adrián felt something cold in his stomach.
"You were watching me?"
"I was studying at the table next to yours before I came for this folder. It’s hard not to notice someone breathing like the paper personally insulted him."
Ah. Great. Subtle as a metal band at a funeral.
"It’s my sister’s," he said, without planning to, without knowing why he was telling a stranger. "Page thirty-seven."
Sariel stopped flipping.
She looked at him. Really looked at him. Her amber eyes settled on him with an attention that was very different from before. She wasn’t cataloging him anymore. She was... reading him.
"I’m sorry," she said, quietly.
"It’s been three years."
"That doesn’t matter."
"...thanks."
They stood facing each other, in the narrow aisle between the shelves, saying nothing for a few seconds.
Then Sariel closed the folder she was holding with a sharp snap.
"Photocopier at the end of the aisle, second door on the left," she said, in a practical voice. "The machine’s broken but if you hit it twice on the right side, it works. The librarian pretends not to know. Copy what you need and take it with you. If you’re going to do this seriously, don’t do it reading at a table where anyone can see you."
"...why are you helping me?"
She hesitated.
For a moment—just a moment—Adrián could have sworn he saw something cross her expression. Something sad. Something guilty.
But it disappeared so fast he’d probably imagined it.
"Because no one else is going to," she said. "And because people’s sisters deserve to be looked for."
She turned around.
Started walking away.
"Sariel."
She stopped.
"Yeah?"
"Will I see you around?"
She didn’t turn around. Spoke forward, toward the empty aisle of shelves.
"I’m here every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon."
And she left.
Adrián stood there for a few seconds.
Then he walked to the photocopier. Hit it twice on the right side. The machine hummed and powered on.
He made eighteen copies of Elena’s file and three similar cases he’d marked in the folder.
Stuffed them in his backpack.
And walked out of the library feeling, for the first time in three years, that maybe he wasn’t alone in this search.
He was wrong. But not in the way he thought.
---
The afternoon dissolved into two more classes—a mandatory statistics course and a research methodology class—which Adrián spent taking notes mechanically while thinking about the file in his backpack and Sariel Corvax’s amber eyes.
When he walked out of the last building, the sky was already turning orange.
Yuki intercepted him at the main exit—how she’d found him exactly, Adrián had no idea, but he’d already learned not to question Yuki’s methods.
"Adri!"
"Yuki, do you have a GPS installed in my backpack or something?"
"One day you’re going to be grateful I’m like this. Come on, I’ll walk you home."
"You live next door to me."
"Exactly. It’s literally the same route. I’m not following you. You’re being dramatic."
They walked the first ten minutes in comfortable silence, Yuki nibbling on a roll she’d pulled from somewhere in her backpack and offering pieces to Adrián without asking.
At a corner, near the intersection with Mercier Street—Adrián felt the name like a sting—Yuki stopped.
"Adri."
"What?"
"I know you’re thinking about Elena."
Adrián said nothing.
"That’s not a reproach," she continued. "I’m just saying I know. You’re in the city now. And I know why. And I want you to know that if you need to talk, or if you need... not to talk and just have someone keep you company... I’m here."
Adrián looked at her.
Yuki had her eyes very wide, very honest, and her cheeks were red again, and her whole being had the energy of someone who’d rehearsed that little speech for hours and still wasn’t sure if she’d delivered it right.
"Thanks, Yuki."
"You’re welcome."
"Seriously."
"Seriously you’re welcome."
They stood there for a moment. Then she gave him a little nudge with her shoulder—her shoulder came up to his elbow—and they kept walking.
They reached Adrián’s building first.
"Dinner tomorrow," Yuki said, not as a question.
"Dinner tomorrow."
"Good."
And she walked the half-block to her house without turning around, though Adrián suspected she was dying to.
Adrián went up to his apartment. Dropped his backpack on the desk. Pulled out the photocopies from the file. One by one, he pinned them to the corkboard, around Elena’s photo.
When he finished, he took a step back.
Three new cases. Three disappearances in areas near Mercier Street, between 2020 and 2023. All young women. All closed as "voluntary disappearance" with no real evidence. All with sole witnesses the police had dismissed.
Pattern. It’s a pattern. Elena wasn’t the only one.
Adrián sat on the edge of his still-sheetless bed and ran his hands through his hair.
Three years. Three years thinking Elena’s disappearance was unique, isolated, something that had happened only to her. And all this time there were more. In the same neighborhood. With the same profile. With the same vague, lazy police dismissal.
He pulled out his phone to add a note to the document where he kept a record of everything.
And there, on the notification screen, was a message.
Unknown number. Sent ten minutes ago.
I don’t know if you saved my contact. This is Sariel, from the library. I asked admissions for your number. Yes, I know that’s completely inappropriate. I was going to wait until Thursday but I thought of something about one of the cases you copied. See you tomorrow at the convenience store on the corner of your building? At seven. Coffee’s on me.
—S.
Adrián read the message twice.
Then a third time.
She asked for my number. From admissions. On the first day. After talking to me for twenty minutes.
His brain processed the information with its usual methodological order:
One: that’s weird.
Two: that’s very weird.
Three: ...but also useful. If she really saw something in the cases, I want to know.
Four: shut up, I know what you’re thinking and it’s not that.
Five: ...it’s a little bit that.
He lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling. Laughed quietly, once, almost soundlessly.
Typed a response. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted it.
Finally wrote:
Okay. Seven. Moonlight Convenience Store. How do you know where I live?
He sent the message.
The reply came within thirty seconds.
It’s the only 24-hour store in your area and you said you were a first-year, so I assumed university student housing. Small area. It’s not magic, Vega. Just logic.
Adrián smiled at his phone.
Criminology is brainwashing you.
It was already brainwashed. That’s why I chose the major.
See you tomorrow.
He put the phone down on the nightstand.
Stared at the ceiling for a long time.
Three new people in a single day. Three people who, each in their own way, had inserted themselves into his life without being invited. Ishtar with her lollipop and her too-sharp sarcasm. Yuki with her containers and her poorly disguised jealousy. And now Sariel Corvax, with her amber eyes and her way of finding patterns in things he’d been staring at for three years without seeing.
I came here to be alone, he thought. To investigate without distractions. To not have to explain myself to anyone.
This plan isn’t going the way I expected.
He closed his eyes.
Somewhere in the city, in a very tall building, a woman with wine-red hair looked at an incomplete deck of cards and wondered, without yet knowing why, if the name of a first-year psychology student she’d overheard casually that afternoon in a report would mean something.
In another building, lower but older, a girl with red pigtails and fangs slightly too long wrote in a black velvet-covered journal:
Met someone interesting today. Tall. Lies well but not well enough. I’m going to play with him.
And in a third place—a rooftop with a view of Adrián’s building—a figure with black wings folded against her back watched the fourth-floor window where the light had just gone out.
And for the first time in many years, she doubted her orders.
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