Night had cimed the city by the time I had my research materials spread across every surface, transforming my office into the den of a conspiracy theorist. The blue glow from three computer monitors cast my shadow in triplicate against the wall. One screen dispyed Witchlight's polished website with its gothic letterhead; another showed property records with numbers that refused to add up; the third ran a search algorithm through news archives that kept returning "No Results Found."

  I paced the worn path in my office carpet, the floorboards beneath groaning in familiar pces. Seven steps to the window, pivot, seven steps back to the desk. A habit from my early days as a detective when I'd learned that movement sometimes shook loose ideas that sitting still couldn't access.

  My eyes burned as I forced them to focus on the school's official history. For an institution with such a supposedly stelr reputation, Witchlight Academy’s backstory was suspiciously unremarkable. Founded in 1867 by three families: Valmere, Ashwood, and Gss, it was initially a ?progressive educational experiment“ and is now a "premier preparatory academy for exceptional students." Their faculty photos showed an ethnically diverse group of educators with identical closed-mouth smiles and vacant eyes.

  I clicked through to the alumni testimonials, where successful graduates praised their alma mater in nguage so identical that the same program might have generated it. The distribution was perfect: doctors, wyers, civil servants, academics. No one is famous enough to draw media attention, but everyone is prosperous enough to suggest quality education.

  "Statistically impossible," I muttered, reaching for my coffee only to find it had already cooled. No school produces such a consistent success rate without a single dropout or failure to offset the curve. It was like looking at a perfectly normal bell curve with all the outliers surgically removed.

  It's too perfect, I thought, frowning at the screen. Like someone airbrushed out all the wrinkles and scars. Real schools have failures. Real schools have scandals. Real schools leave tracks.

  The property records made even less sense. According to city pns, Witchlight Academy occupied a modest lot between two modern office buildings downtown. The dimensions listed would make it smaller than my apartment building's lobby. Yet the brochure photos showed extensive grounds with manicured gardens and at least five towering spires.

  Either the city pns are wrong, or the brochure is lying.

  I pulled up Google Maps and switched to street view, finding only a blur where the school should be. The camera malfunctioned at that spot, creating a smear of pixels between two clearly defined office buildings. Three separate mapping services showed the same digital glitch. The building appeared to be a nondescript brick structure on Apple Maps that changed slightly with each refresh. On Bing Maps, the satellite view showed a roofline that cast a shadow impossibly longer than the building itself.

  "Architectural impossibility," I said to the empty room, my voice sounding strange in the stillness. "My favorite kind."

  This is crazy, I thought, rubbing my tired eyes. Buildings don't hide from satellite imagery. Buildings don't exist in spaces too small to contain them.

  The news archives yielded nothing but digitized tedium—bnd announcements of academic achievements and community events dating back decades, each article constructed with the same tempte: "Witchlight Academy proudly announces..." followed by an achievement so generic it could apply to any school in the country.

  - No scandals.

  - No tragedies.

  - No investigative reports.

  It's like someone's sanitizing their history in real time. Or maybe creating it from scratch.

  My printer groaned as it spat out student transfer records I'd "borrowed" from the Department of Education database. The paper was still warm as I spread the sheets across my evidence board, connecting data points with red string until patterns emerged.

  The numbers told a story nobody was reading: Witchlight had a 22% mid-year transfer rate—four times the national average. Students disappeared from enrollment records, categorized as "transferred to alternative education" with no specified destination. The pattern repeated every semester, with a slight spike during months containing equinoxes.

  Like Sam. Like Emma Mitchell would soon be if the pattern were held.

  They're not just disappearing, I realized, my stomach tightening. They're being disappeared. Systematically. With paperwork and cover stories ready to go.

  Most damning was what I couldn't find: no social media presence from current students. In an age where teenagers documented everything from breakfast choices to bathroom visits, Witchlight's students were digital ghosts. No Instagram posts tagging the school. No TikTok videos in school uniforms. No Twitter compints about homework.

  I pinned the transfer records beside a printout of the school's impossibly perfect graduation rates, stepping back to absorb the contradiction. Normal schools don't make students vanish, appear on Google Street View, or trigger unexpinable new abilities in their students.

  Either the most exclusive school in America has students who unanimously agree to an online media bckout, or something is actively preventing their digital footprint. Do their phones even work inside?

  My coffee machine sputtered its death rattle. The carafe contained a liquid that more closely resembled crude oil than coffee, but I poured the st cup anyway, needing the chemical motivation.

  The persistent ticking of the wall clock seemed to grow louder in the silence, each second a reminder of time slipping away. The sound triggered an old memory - my first stakeout as a rookie investigator, waiting in a car until 3 AM to catch a cheating spouse. I'd counted ticks to stay awake then, just as I did now, though the stakes were immeasurably higher.

  My eyes felt like they'd been rolled in broken gss, but sleep remained a luxury I couldn't afford. Just one more search.

  I typed "truth-seekers historical persecution" into the database and hit enter. The results were sparse but chilling: scattered references in medieval witch trial transcripts where witnesses described the accused as having "eyes that pierce false faces." An 18th-century pamphlet warning against those with "the sight to pierce illusions" described execution methods in graphic detail.

  I realized people have been killing truth-seekers for centuries, a chill running down my spine. Anyone who could see through deception was a threat to power. Still is. But now, instead of burning them, someone's collecting them. Why?

  I clicked through to a digitized manuscript from 1692, the Salem witch trials. The spidery handwriting described a young woman who could "discern truth from falsehood by the color of words as they left the speaker's mouth." She was among the first executed. Simir accounts appeared throughout history—a man in 17th century France who could "see the shadows behind masks" was burned at the stake. A woman in Renaissance Venice who could "perceive lies as red mist" was drowned as a demon.

  A single academic paper titled "Veracity Detection as Historical Threat to Established Power Structures" had been cited exactly once before disappearing from schorly journals. The author, Dr. Eleanor Valmere—whose name matched one of Witchlight's founding families—had apparently left her university position abruptly after publication. No further academic work appeared under her name.

  The common thread was unmistakable: those who could detect lies had historically ended up dead.

  Sam isn't just some runaway, I thought, my heart pounding faster. She's a truth-seeker in a world that's always killed people who see too much. And she saw something at Witchlight she wasn't supposed to see.

  I closed the ptop, and the final piece clicked into pce. Sam hadn't run away. She'd found something at Witchlight about "truth-seekers" being collected. And now Emma Mitchell had stumbled onto the same secret.

  Tomorrow, I'd find out what happened behind those impossibly gothic gates, even if I had to break every w and professional standard I cimed to uphold.

  For Sam, I'd cross any threshold.

  Even if it kills me, I thought, determination hardening inside me. Finding her is the only thing that matters now.

  The empty cup stared back at me from my desk, dark residue clinging to the sides like the questions that refused to let me rest.