_Jennyver_

  Background Investigation

  I settled in front of my makeshift command center—two monitors on either side of my ptop, stacked carefully on my desk. The journals y open beside me, marked with different colored tabs. My evidence board filled the wall to my right, red string connecting photos, names, and dates in a crazy-looking web that only I understood.

  Mostly.

  It still looked a little crazy, but at least it was organized.

  The blue screen light made sharp shadows in my office. My coffee was cold and bitter, but I drank it anyway. I knew I'd need to be wide awake tonight.

  "Let's see what secrets you're hiding, Witchlight Academy," I muttered, my fingers flying across the keyboard.

  I clicked on my voice recorder.

  ??? Case update: Cross and Mitchell investigations. Starting to dig into Witchlight Academy's background, how they recruit students, and if it connects to the Veritari thing Sam and Emma wrote about.

  The school's website looked professionally designed but generic. Lots of stock photos of smiling students and fancy buildings, but not many actual details. No list of teachers, no comments from past students, and no information about how well their students did—just vague stuff about "amazing results" and "special learning pns."

  "Sam," I said to the empty office, "your school's website looks like it was made by AI, perfect in a creepy way that makes my gut uneasy. It's too perfect. Too vague. What did you see when you looked at this page? Did you see what I'm seeing, or something totally different?"

  I dove deeper, checking out school records and public information, and opening DataViz Pro, my computer program for spotting patterns. What I found—or rather, what I didn't find—set off arm bells.

  Witchlight Academy had perfectly normal statistics.

  Every student who graduated had roughly the same results—not amazing, not terrible, just average. SAT scores were all in the middle. College acceptances were exactly what you'd expect. Career paths had no big successes or failures.

  ??? Voice note: Their stats are perfectly normal across the board. That's impossible without someone messing with the numbers. It looks like they're designed to avoid attention.

  I paused the recorder. "They're hiding in pin sight, Sam. Making themselves invisible by being perfectly average."

  I opened my data program and pulled up a 3D model of Witchlight's student results. The graph that popped up made me sit up straight.

  "This isn't just unlikely," I muttered, leaning closer. "It's fake. It has to be."

  The perfect bell curve glowed on my screen—too perfect. In my seven years as a detective, I'd never seen anything like it. Real schools have kids who are geniuses, kids who struggle, and kids who surprise everyone. This looked like someone had copied an example straight from a textbook.

  As I stared at the screen, something weird happened. The numbers started to wiggle like they were alive. I blinked hard, but they kept changing and rearranging themselves when I wasn't looking right at them.

  I clicked on "Student Achievement Distribution" to get a closer look. The number 87.3 changed to 23.9, then back again.

  "What the—" I pushed my chair back, the legs scraping on the floor.

  ? The screen seemed to pull me in. The neat rows of data twisted into weird shapes that reminded me of Sam's math notebooks. The blue light from my monitor got darker, almost purple, and seemed to reach out to me.

  ? Then all three of my screens changed at once. The data vanished, repced by the same triangur eye symbol from the journals. It pulsed like it was breathing, like it could see me.

  Pain exploded behind my left eye. My mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood, and I felt it dripping from my nose. I grabbed for my voice recorder, my hands shaking.

  ??? Incident report. Visual problem while looking at Witchlight data. Numbers change when I look at them. Headache and nosebleed.

  I took three deep breaths, waiting for the pain to go away. When my vision cleared, I tried a different approach: social media.

  There had to be students posting about Witchlight—teenagers post about everything.

  But there wasn't much. My search on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit found only a few verified Witchlight students, even though the school cimed to have over 300.

  Even stranger was what happened to those accounts. They all followed the same pattern: lots of personal posts preceded acceptance, then regur changes followed after school began.

  A student named Jayden Kim (@physics_jay) caught my eye. Before Witchlight, he posted every day about quantum mechanics, anime, and his dog.

  Then:

  Month 1: Still personal, but more Witchlight stuffMonth 2: Mostly photos of the school with boring captionsMonth 3: Not many posts, and they sounded like they were reading from somethingMonth 4: Nothing

  I used my special social media tracking software—an expensive tool for missing persons cases—and put in the usernames of all the Witchlight students I suspected. The program showed a pattern that made my skin crawl: every timeline showed the same drop in activity.

  "Sam," I said, turning to her picture, my voice tight, "your online activity disappeared in the exact same way. You went from posting about quantum physics and space stuff every day to just school announcements, then nothing."

  What was especially weird was that, unlike most schools where tons of students stop using social media each year, Witchlight only had a few cases, and not even every year. I found only seven students like this in the st three years, and some years had none at all. But when it did happen, it followed the pattern perfectly.

  ??? Voice note: Social media analysis shows this only happens to certain students. Unlike normal schools, where many students quit social media, Witchlight only has a few cases, and not every year. But these rare cases all disappear in the same way, which means it's on purpose, not random.

  I switched gears and searched for news articles about Witchlight. Again, there wasn't much—a couple of boring articles about the school helping out in the community and a mention in a history thing about old buildings in the city. Nothing important, nothing controversial.

  Then I found something strange—a weird number thing that was easy to miss.

  Witchlight didn't have kids transfer out every year. But when it did happen—about every 2 or 3 years—2 or 3 students would leave in the middle of the year, all at once. The school called it "family relocations" and "special learning needs." The number itself wasn't that weird if you looked at it over a long time, but the pattern was strange. The transfers happened in groups, then nothing for years.

  I checked the transfer dates against my astronomical calendar notes. My breath hitched. Each cluster of transfers happened within days of an equinox or solstice. Sam vanished three days after the winter solstice. Emma Mitchell, right after the spring equinox. It clicked into pce with sickening crity. Sam's unusual case was due to her timing retive to Witchlight's cycle—they took her outside their established pattern.

  "This isn't a coincidence," I muttered, a thrill of discovery warring with dread. I rolled my chair to the evidence board, marking the dates on my timeline with a thick red marker. The pattern went beyond Witchlight. My fingers flew across the keyboard, cross-referencing other elite schools. The same "transfer" phenomenon emerged—2 or 3 students per school, every few years, always aligned with the equinoxes or solstices. I leaned back, staring at the screen, the pieces rearranging themselves in my head. It looked like whatever was happening moved methodically between schools, a slow, patient rotation. Viewed individually, each school's numbers seemed innocuous. Viewed together? It screamed coordination. Organized. Deliberate. And terrifyingly vast.

  A sharp memory popped into my head as I typed "private school transfers equinox" into a search engine.

  I was seven or eight, sitting at our kitchen table while Mom spoke quietly on the phone.

  "You have to warn her," Mom whispered urgently. "Those special schools aren't what they seem. They're looking for kids with the gift. They'll take her daughter if they find out."

  She went silent, listening to the person on the other end.

  "No, I can't expin how I know. Please keep her away from their testing. Once they identify a child with Veritari potential—" Dad walked in then, and Mom immediately changed the subject, hanging up a few seconds ter. When I asked who she was talking to, she smiled too brightly and offered me cookies.

  The memory felt important, connecting to the Veritari symbol from the journals. Why had my mom warned someone about "special schools" and kids with "the gift"? And why did Dad seem so freaked out by the conversation?

  "Sam," I said aloud, turning back to my computer, "Mom knew something about this. She tried to warn someone. Did she ever say anything to you about the Veritari? About searching for truth?"

  The silence was heavy.

  I changed my approach, searching for parents talking about simir stuff. After hours of scrolling through forums, I found what I needed—a hidden message board called "Where Are Our Children?" It looked like a support group for parents whose kids changed after going to fancy private schools. I signed up and introduced myself as a private investigator working on a missing person case.

  A moderator messaged me right away: "We use code words here. Our posts keep getting deleted otherwise. Call them 'special schools' and the kids 'gifted.'"

  I posted about Witchlight, and even though I only got a few replies, they sent chills down my spine:

  WorriedDad78 wrote:My son went to the "special school" st year. His letters got super weird. He wrote about "seeing beyond the veil" and "awakening his potential." When we tried to visit, they always had excuses. Then they told us he'd "transferred" somewhere else. No address. No phone number. Nothing.

  Finding Hope wrote:Same thing happened to my daughter! Got accepted out of nowhere, started acting different, then suddenly "transferred." The police didn't help because all the paperwork looked perfect. But I KNOW she didn't write that transfer request. It wasn't even her handwriting.

  The posts were from parents of students at different schools, but the stories were eerily simir. Then I found a post that made my heart stop:

  VeritasSeeker wrote:They're hunting truth-seekers. My grandmother warned me about these schools. They can spot kids with the Veritari bloodline. They take them when their abilities start to show. I've found 17 cases at 12 different schools in just 10 years. They're careful—never more than 2-3 kids from one school before moving on. Watch for the triangur eye symbol. If your child draws it or talks about it, they could be targeted.

  My eyes scanned the post again, trying to absorb it all, when the text flickered and vanished. Repced by: [This user account has been deleted]. Gone. Just like that. I hit refresh, smmed the back button – nothing. Wiped clean, faster than any forum admin could move. A cold certainty settled in my gut. Someone was watching this forum. Or something. But not before someone had replied with three words: "Equinox. Solstice. Threshold."

  As I reread the post, my breath caught in my throat. This was a direct link to the triangle eye symbol Sam and Emma had drawn in their journals. Their exact words, "the waiting vessel approaches the threshold," echoed this user's mention of "crossing the threshold of awakening." The connections were too exact to be a coincidence.

  I smmed my fist on the desk, sending pens flying. "Sam!" I shouted to the empty room. "You were trying to tell me all along! The symbol, the threshold, the Veritari—it's all connected!"

  I grabbed a string from my evidence kit, moving with a sudden burst of energy. I made a new connection on my evidence board—linking the forum post to the journal entries about truth-seeking and the threshold. Then, using a green marker, I circled the word "Veritari" everywhere it showed up in my notes, creating a web of connected clues.

  I leaned back, trying to take in everything I'd just read. A cold knot tightened in my stomach as the truth became clear. This wasn't just about Sam or Emma Mitchell. This was a system—a careful, unhurried pn to target kids with a special ability or genetic trait.

  The Veritari bloodline. Truth-seekers. The triangur eye symbol.

  It all fit with what I'd found in the journals, but the pattern was bigger than I'd first thought. This wasn't something recent—the forum had posts going back almost ten years, and some mentioned even older cases. But the small numbers were important—only 2 or 3 students per school, and the schools were only revisited every few years. This wasn't a mass kidnapping. This was careful, selective picking.

  I reached for my voice recorder, shaking with a mix of fear and a sense of being right.

  ??? Major breakthrough: The evidence strongly points to a network of schools, including Witchlight Academy, that deliberately target individuals with 'Veritari' abilities—the same 'truth-seeking' skills Sam and Emma were developing. The pattern shows a pnned rotation between schools, taking only 2 or 3 students from each before moving on. This is why it's been so hard to spot—if you look at each school alone, their 'transfer' rate seems normal. The pattern only appears when you see it as a rger system.

  My screen flickered as I dug deeper, and the images twisted for a moment when I looked at certain pages. This time, the distortions were stronger—text scrambling into nonsense before fixing itself, pictures flipping their colors, or quickly showing something completely different. At first, I bmed my old computer. But the pattern was too specific—the weirdness only happened when I looked at certain information about Witchlight or searched for words like "Veritari" and "truth-seeker." It was almost like something was interfering with my research.

  ? The light from my monitor changed from electric blue to a sickly, ultraviolet color. It stained my hands the color of fresh bruises as I typed, growing so bright I had to squint. The air between me and the screen thickened, becoming almost visible. Digital information seemed to leak out of the monitors, with symbols and bits of code hanging in the air.

  ? All three screens suddenly synced up, showing not words or pictures but a living symbol—the triangur eye, its pupil growing and shrinking as if it was alive, giving off a strange light that seemed to suck up the light around it.

  Pain exploded behind my eyes like a fshbang, throwing me backward. It wasn't just a strong pain—it felt like an attack, aimed right at my mind. The electricity in my office went wild—lights fshing in patterns that looked like a weird alphabet, along with a sound that hit the pain centers of my brain. Warm fluid filled my nose before running over my lip. I watched, like I was outside my body, as blood spttered on my keyboard in random shapes that briefly turned into symbols before soaking into the keys.

  "Sam," I choked out, holding a tissue to my nose. "They don't want me to see this. Something's actively blocking me—the same thing that took you."

  The pain and the weirdness stopped as fast as they started, leaving me shaking and confused. This wasn't a computer glitch or a hallucination. This was... protection. Something was guarding information about Witchlight and the Veritari.

  I switched to old-school methods, pulling out newspaper clippings I'd found early in my investigation. An article from 1937 mentioned Witchlight Academy's founding in 1867 as "a safe pce for gifted young people with unusual perceptive abilities." Another article from 1952 talked about the school being rebuilt after a fire, noting that even with all the damage, "Verita Hall remained untouched."

  Verita. Truth. The connection was obvious.

  A photo of the rebuilt school was with the 1952 article—a bck and white image. As I studied it under my desk mp, I noticed something strange. The way the school looked in the photo didn't match how it looked now, even though they said the rebuild kept the original design. Windows that should have lined up were crooked. A tower that should have been on the east side was on the west side instead. It was like the building itself was changing, depending on who was looking at it.

  I grabbed a Witchlight brochure I'd gotten months ago and compared it to the old photo. Something was definitely wrong.

  ? As I stared at the glossy pamphlet, the paper seemed to ripple under my fingers. The stone gargoyle on the school's roof—just a carved detail I'd barely noticed—its carved head ground sideways with a faint scraping sound only I seemed to hear. It looked right at me, chipped granite eyes suddenly possessing an unnerving awareness. Then, impossibly, it slid across the printed roofline before stopping in a new position. The entire building in the photograph warped and shifted, architectural lines bending like rubber, settling into a subtly different configuration.

  "Holy—" I dropped the brochure as if it were burning, knocking over my cold coffee. The dark liquid pooled across my desk, ignored. My heart hammered against my ribs. My brain scrambled, grasping for expnations—a projection, an optical illusion built into the printing, stress finally snapping my sanity. But the expnations felt flimsy, pathetic, against the cold certainty that solid ink and paper had just rearranged itself. That stone had just turned its head and looked at me.

  "Jesus Christ," I whispered, the words choked, hands shaking uncontrolbly. "What the hell?"

  I forced myself to pick up the brochure again. The gargoyle wasn't moving now, but it wasn't in the same pce as before. And now it was facing forward with detailed eyes that were definitely not in the original image. I grabbed my voice recorder, words rushing out.

  ??? I just saw something impossible. The Witchlight brochure changed while I was looking at it. The gargoyle moved—actually moved—and seemed to look right at me. The entire building rearranged itself.

  I looked at my evidence board—all the red strings connecting missing kids, journal entries, and weird patterns. For months, I'd been piecing together clues without seeing the entire picture. Now the image was forming. And it broke every rule I knew about how the world worked.

  "Sam," I said to the empty room, "I get it now. Why couldn't you just tell me what was happening? This isn't about kidnapping or some weird cult." I took a deep breath. "This is about something... not normal. Something I don't even have a word for yet."

  I went back to my computer, searching for anything I might have missed. A database of private school accreditations showed another weird thing: Witchlight's paperwork was renewed every five years, but no one ever came to inspect the school.

  Every other school had detailed reports, but Witchlight's file was just the certificate, with no proof to back it up.

  Going back to Emma's journal, I found an entry from May 14th:

  ?? During our tour today, we found the most amazing book in the school library: "Veritari Histories: The Lineage of Truth." I've never heard of the Veritari before, but reading it felt like coming home. The book describes what I'm going through—the colors, the knowing, the feeling that reality isn't quite what it seems. It talked about something called "the Threshold" that truth-seekers have to cross.

  I compared this with Sam's entry from November 20th:

  ?? Professor G. gave me a book today—" The Veritari Lineage: A History of Truth-Seekers." It expins everything I've been experiencing. The colors I see when people talk, the way reality seems to shift. I come from a long line of Veritari—people who can see and understand truth on many levels. He says my abilities are incredibly strong, stronger than most students he's met. I don't know if I should be proud or terrified. P.S. The Information Containment Protocol is much stricter after reading this book. Professor G. says I can't write down anything from it outside this journal, and this journal is seriously protected. People who aren't "awakened" can't know anything about Veritari's history.

  Two girls, months apart, got the same book, the same ideas, and the same words. That wasn't a coincidence. It was recruitment, brainwashing, and preparation.

  I started putting all my notes into a proper case file, and then I had a hunch. What if the disappearances weren't random? I matched a calendar of space events—like the start of spring and winter—with my timeline of who vanished. And bam! They lined up perfectly. Every "transfer" happened within days of an equinox or solstice, not just at Witchlight, but at several schools in a repeating pattern.

  The next one was coming up in three weeks—the summer solstice.

  My blood ran cold as I remembered Sam's st journal entry:

  ?? Something happens during the Equinox Alignment. I need more proof before I confront Headmistress V. The Circle must be stopped before they find another vessel.

  "Sam," I whispered, "you figured it out. You found the pattern. That's why they took you when they did—you were getting too close to the truth."

  I checked the time—3:17 AM. Orientation weekend started in less than five hours. My evidence board was a mess of connections, my monitor showed graphs and timelines mapping out a pattern that had been going on for decades, and my desk was covered in journals, photos, and news clippings.

  It all pointed to one unavoidable conclusion: Witchlight Academy wasn't what it cimed to be. It found and recruited kids with the ability to see truth, moved between schools to stay hidden, developed those abilities, and then took the kids during important astronomical times. What made Sam's case strange was that she disappeared outside the normal schedule—there hadn't been transfers from Witchlight in almost two years. She must have discovered something that forced them to act sooner.

  I stared at the triangur eye symbol I'd drawn on my evidence board. It seemed to stare back, with a cold, smart look. The air in my office felt charged with energy. Every hair on my body stood up, and that familiar metallic taste filled my mouth.

  "Whatever this is," I said, my voice quiet in the buzzing silence, "whatever they're doing to these kids—to Sam-it 's beyond anything I've ever dealt with." I swallowed hard, the metallic taste still coating my tongue. "It's not just crime. It's..."

  The word felt alien on my tongue, an admission that shattered my entire worldview: "...supernatural." Six months ago, I'd have scoffed, offered rationalizations—stress, grief, delusion. But the detective who trusted only verifiable facts was gone, repced by the man who'd seen data twist into symbols, screens bleed energy, and stone gargoyles turn their heads. The journals weren't teenage fantasy; they were field notes from a reality I hadn't known existed. The world wasn't broken; my understanding of it was. And Sam—my brilliant, observant sister—had stepped into this world long before me.

  I looked at Sam's photo one st time, her serious eyes meeting mine. My determination solidified, burning away the lingering fear. "I know you told me to stay away," I said, my voice low but steady. "You were trying to protect me. But I'm coming for you tomorrow, Sam." The words felt like jumping off a cliff into darkness, terrifying but absolute. "Whatever this threshold is, whatever waits on the other side—I'm crossing it to find you."

  The research had left me drained. My eyes burned from staring at the computer screen, and my back ached from hours hunched over my desk. Exhaustion pressed down on me like physical weight, making even the simple act of pushing back from my desk require effort. I needed to rest if I had any hope of successfully infiltrating Witchlight tomorrow, but my mind refused to slow down, racing with connections, theories, and half-formed pns.

  I rubbed my face with both hands, the stubble rough against my palms. The digital clock on my computer showed 3:42 AM—less than five hours until Witchlight's orientation activities began.

  "I need to sleep," I muttered to the empty office, "but I need answers more."

  My gaze drifted to my evidence board, settling on a triangur symbol I'd found in Sam's room after she disappeared - identical to one in Emma Mitchell's journal. The forum post I'd just discovered echoed in my mind: "The symbol to watch for is the triangur eye—if your child draws this or mentions it, they've been targeted."

  I reached out to touch the symbol on my evidence board, my fingertips brushing against the cool surface. When I touched it, a jolt ran up my arm like static electricity, but stronger—a current that raced from my fingers to my skull instantly.

  "What the—" I gasped, but couldn't finish the thought.

  Memory Fshback? The world around me blurred, my office dissolving like watercolors in rain. The harsh fluorescent lighting softened into warm morning sunshine. The scent of stale coffee and old paperwork transformed into the aroma of butter and eggs. The silence of night was shattered by the cheerful ctter of breakfast preparations.

  I wasn't in my office anymore. I was in my memory—vivid, immersive, and impossibly detailed.

  Six months and one week ago. The day Sam received her Witchlight acceptance letter.

  My small apartment kitchen was bathed in golden morning light, dust motes dancing in the sunbeams that streamed through half-closed blinds. The yellow walls (which I'd never gotten around to repainting from the previous tenant's choice) were chipped in pces but gave the space a cheerful feel that contradicted my usual mood. Unwashed dishes from the previous night's dinner were stacked precariously in the sink—evidence of my perpetual bachelorhood.

  I was making breakfast—scrambled eggs and toast—the spatu scraping rhythmically against the non-stick pan as I hummed some half-forgotten tune. My hair was shorter then, my face less lined, my movements more rexed.

  The door burst open with a bang that made me jump, nearly sending eggs flying across the stove.

  "Derek! It came! It actually came!"

  Sam tumbled into my apartment without knocking, a whirlwind of teenage energy and excitement. She never knocked, ciming that siblings had "perpetual entry privileges" regardless of age or living situation. Her backpack hung off one shoulder, unzipped and threatening to spill its contents—textbooks on advanced calculus, dog-eared science fiction novels, and a tangle of charging cables for her various devices.

  She waved an envelope in the air, her face flushed with excitement. Her blonde hair had escaped its usual ponytail, framing her face in disarray. Her gray eyes, like mine, sparkled with an intensity I rarely saw. She wore her favorite NASA t-shirt, faded from too many washes, paired with jeans with equations scribbled in pen along the cuffs—her unique self-expression that baffled her more fashion-conscious peers.

  "What came?" I asked, sliding the eggs onto two ptes. "And good morning to you, too, by the way. Since you timed this intrusion perfectly, I assume you're staying for breakfast."

  "The acceptance letter from Witchlight Academy!" She spped the envelope on my kitchen counter, nearly knocking over my coffee. "I didn't even apply! They found me, Derek. They actually found me!"

  I squinted at the envelope. Heavy cream paper, embossed with a seal I didn't recognize—a triangur shape with what might have been an eye in the center, surrounded by rays or fmes. My spatu paused midair.

  ? The memory paused abruptly, like a video on hold. I found myself back in my darkened office for a moment, my heart racing.

  "That symbol," I whispered, reaching for my voice recorder. "It was there from the beginning—the triangur eye from the journals was on the Witchlight acceptance letter. How did I miss that?"

  I made a quick note, connecting this detail to what I'd discovered in Scene 4 about the forum warnings. "The marking was literal—the symbol on their correspondence identified potential Veritari."

  ? Before I could process further, the memory pulled me back in, as powerful as an undertow.

  "What do you mean, you didn't apply? That's not how schools work, Sam."

  She was already pulling out the letter, her hands trembling slightly. I noticed her chipped nail polish—gaxy-themed with tiny silver stars she'd painstakingly added herself—catching the light as her fingers moved.

  "It's a special program. For students with 'exceptional perceptive abilities.' That's what they called it."

  ? As she spoke, the kitchen around us seemed to shift slightly. The colors intensified—the yellow of the eggs becoming almost luminous, the red of Sam's sweater vibrating with unnatural brightness. For a moment, everything looked hyper-real, as if I were seeing it through some kind of filter that heightened every detail.

  ? The edges of objects appeared to blur and sharpen simultaneously, creating an impossible visual effect. Sounds became muffled and then too clear, like someone adjusting an audio dial back and forth. The smell of breakfast intensified until I could distinguish every component—butter browning, coffee oils, the faint citrus of Sam's shampoo.

  "Listen to this," Sam continued, oblivious to the strange sensory distortion I was experiencing. "'Dear Miss Cross, We are pleased to inform you that you have been identified as possessing exceptional perceptive abilities that align with Witchlight Academy's specialized educational focus. Our talent identification program has recognized your tent potential, particurly in areas of intuitive pattern recognition and truth discernment.'"

  Truth discernment. The phrase triggered something—a memory within a memory—of my mother's reaction when Sam was very young.

  "She has the eyes, Derek," Mom had whispered, looking at four-year-old Sam who had just correctly identified which of my friends had broken her toy despite all of them denying it. "The Veritari eyes, just like you used to have before..."

  Before what? The memory fragmented there, refusing to complete itself.

  ? "Wait," I said aloud, finding myself back in my office chair, disoriented by the rapid shift. "Mom knew. She knew about the Veritari eyes, about truth discernment."

  I grabbed a notepad, scribbling frantically: "Family connection to Veritari confirmed. Mom recognized the signs in both Sam and me. Dad seems to have suppressed it somehow—'before' what?"

  Sam's final journal entry floated before my mind:

  ?? Derek, if you find this, don't trust the IDs and DON'T CROSS THE THRESHOLD.

  The warning took on new meaning now—if I had Veritari potential too, even dormant, I might be at risk at Witchlight.

  "I need to know what happened to me," I told Sam's photograph. "What did Dad do to suppress my abilities? And why didn't it work on you?"

  ? The memory recimed me before I could pursue that thought further.

  Back in the kitchen, Sam was still reading, her voice growing more excited. "'We offer a unique curriculum designed to nurture and develop these rare abilities in a supportive environment. Witchlight Academy has a long tradition of educating those with special perceptive gifts dating back to our founding in 1867.'"

  I set down my spatu, a vague uneasiness settling in my stomach. "How did they identify you if you didn't apply? That sounds a little invasive, doesn't it?"

  Sam rolled her eyes, that quintessential teenage expression of exasperation that she'd perfected around age twelve. "Always the suspicious detective. They have scouts who visit schools looking for students with potential. Remember that woman who came to my science fair st month? The one with the mismatched eyes?"

  I did remember—a tall woman with one blue eye and one amber eye who had spent an unusual amount of time at Sam's exhibit on pattern recognition in seemingly random data sets. She'd spoken with Sam for nearly twenty minutes, asking increasingly specific questions about how Sam had identified the hidden patterns.

  "She gave me this acceptance packet," Sam said, pulling out a folder with the triangur eye symbol embossed on it. "Said my unique perspective made me a perfect candidate. I've been carrying it everywhere."

  ? As she held up the folder, a shiver ran down my spine. The triangur symbol seemed to glow slightly, catching the light in a way that seemed almost watchful. As I stared at it, the design appeared to shift momentarily before resolidifying, the pattern rearranging itself in an eye-blink.

  ? The triangur symbol brightened, shining with a light that couldn't be attributed to the kitchen's illumination—a deep amber glow that pulsed once, twice, like a heartbeat. The air around the folder seemed to distort, rippling outward in concentric circles as if the object were generating its own gravitational field.

  ? I felt a pressure in my ears, like the sensation of altitude change, and tasted something metallic on my tongue. The hair on my arms stood straight up, and the kitchen lights flickered briefly.

  "I don't know, Sam," I said, my protective instincts fring. My hand reached out involuntarily toward her, wanting to take the folder away. "A school that recruits without applications? This whole situation sounds sketchy."

  "You're just being paranoid." She pocketed the pin, took a bite of toast, and then pointed the half-eaten slice at me accusingly. "Besides, it's a prestigious academy. Full schorship, accelerated program, specialized instruction. Do you know how rare this opportunity is?"

  I did know. Sam had been dreaming of academic recognition for years, constantly pushing herself, always seeking challenges beyond what her public school could provide. She felt isoted by her intelligence, lonely among peers who couldn't keep up with how her mind worked.

  "I need this, Derek," she said more softly, her excitement fading into something more vulnerable. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, a nervous habit from childhood. "I need to be somewhere people understand how I think. I'm not the weird girl who sees patterns no one notices."

  Her expression momentarily transformed into the one I'd seen countless times—Sam coming home from school, trying to hide that she'd been crying. Sam showed me a perfect test score that had earned her more isotion than praise. Sam was sitting alone at lunch, surrounded by books because they were more reliable companions than her cssmates.

  "Alexa Davis called me a freak again today," she'd told me once, when she was fourteen. "Because I knew she was lying about where she got her new phone. I could just... see it, Derek. The lie was this gross reddish color around her words. I can't expin it, but I knew."

  Her words struck a chord. I'd been that kid too—the one who noticed too much, who couldn't turn off the constant analysis of everything and everyone around me. I'd learned to channel it into detective work, but it had been isoting before that.

  I remembered my own experiences—how sometimes I'd see strange colors around people when they were speaking, especially when they were being dishonest. How my mother would look at me with a mixture of pride and worry when I'd blurt out observations I shouldn't have been able to make.

  "Your eyes are changing color again, Derek," she'd say quietly, pulling me aside at a family gathering when I was eight. "Remember what we talked about? Some things we notice, we keep to ourselves." Her expression had been tense, her gnce darting toward my father who was watching us with a frown.

  I'd learned to keep quiet about what I saw. By the time I was ten, my father had insisted I see Dr. Matheson for what he called my "overactive imagination." After those weekly sessions began, the colors I once saw gradually faded until they disappeared entirely. But Sam had never been sent to therapy, had never had her abilities diminished.

  "Just promise me you'll be careful," I said, relenting. "And I want to visit this pce before you decide anything."

  Sam's face lit up again. "There's an orientation next week! You can come with me. It's going to be amazing, Derek. I can feel it." She clutched the letter to her chest, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "Finally, I'll understand why I'm different."

  ? As she spoke those words, another wave of disorientation washed over me. The kitchen seemed to waver, colors bleeding at the edges of my vision. Sam's gray eyes appeared to shift briefly to a bright emerald green before returning to normal. Not just a subtle change—her irises actually glowed from within, like the pin's gemstones, illuminating her face from above with an eerie green light.

  ? My breath caught, and my heart rate spiked. The room's temperature plummeted, and my exhation was visible as a cloud of vapor despite it being summer. I stumbled back against the counter, knocking over a dish that didn't break when it hit the floor but instead bounced as if made of rubber.

  "Your eyes," I said without thinking, my voice strange to my own ears. "They changed color."

  Sam tilted her head curiously, her typical analytical expression taking over. "What are you talking about?"

  "Just for a second, they looked green. They... glowed." I shook my head, bming a ck of sleep or too much coffee. "Never mind."

  She gave me an odd look. "Mom used to say the same thing. That my eyes would change color when I was 'seeing the truth.' She'd always get this worried look afterward, especially if Dad was around."

  I remembered those moments—how Mom would sometimes touch Sam's cheek when her eyes changed color, whispering something about being careful. Once I'd asked Mom what was happening, and she'd tensed, gncing at Dad before responding.

  "It's nothing to worry about, Derek," she'd said carefully. "Just a little family trait. Nothing important."

  But I'd seen the fear in her eyes, heard the tension in her voice, noticed how Dad would abruptly change the subject whenever Sam mentioned seeing colors around people's words or knowing things she shouldn't have known.

  One night, I'd overheard them arguing after I was supposedly asleep.

  "Stop encouraging them, Eleanor," Dad had snapped. "You know what happens to people who draw attention to those abilities."

  Mom had gone pale. "I'm not encouraging anything, Richard. I can't help what they inherited."

  "It means everything if the wrong people notice," he'd replied in a harsh whisper. "Do you want them taken like your sister was?"

  They noticed me listening then and immediately stopped talking. I'd never heard them mention it again. Shortly after, Dad had insisted I start seeing Dr. Matheson for what he called my "overactive imagination"—weekly sessions that had continued for nearly three years.

  Sam had never been sent to therapy, though. I realized now that by the time her abilities became noticeable, Mom was already gone—died of cancer when Sam was eleven and I was in college. Dad had managed to suppress my abilities through those therapy sessions, but he'd never had the chance to do the same with Sam.

  ? I jerked back to the present with a gasp, my office materializing around me. The implications hit me like a physical blow.

  "The therapy sessions," I said hoarsely, fumbling for my voice recorder. "Dad sent me to that doctor to suppress my abilities. That's why Sam's developed and mine didn't—she never got the treatments."

  ??? Connection discovered: Father deliberately suppressed my Veritari abilities through what appeared to be routine therapy sessions with Dr. Matheson. Cross-reference with forum post from Scene 4 about 'dampening procedures' used to hide truth-seeker children from institutional detection.

  My mind raced. If Dad had actively worked to suppress my abilities, he must have known about Witchlight or pces like it. He must have been protecting us from being "taken"—like Mom's sister apparently had been.

  "Sam," I said to her photograph, "our family history with this goes deeper than I realized. Dad was hiding us from them... until he couldn't hide you anymore."

  I took a deep breath, feeling the weight of these revetions. The clock read 4:15 AM. Just hours remained before I would enter Witchlight Academy. The infiltration now carried additional weight—I wasn't just searching for Sam and Emma Mitchell; I was confronting whatever had taken my mother's sister years ago, whatever my father had tried to protect us from, whatever had been hunting people with our abilities for generations.

  "They won't see me coming," I told Sam's photograph, a grim smile forming. "Dad made sure of that when he hid what I am. And that might be our only advantage."

  I spent the next few hours finalizing my infiltration pn. Sleep was impossible now—too much adrenaline, too many questions, too much at stake. Instead, I focused on preparation, on control, on the practical steps needed to enter Witchlight Academy undetected.

  By the time dawn broke, I was ready. I'd changed into nondescript clothes that wouldn't attract attention, packed a small bag with essentials, and checked my equipment three times. I left my apartment as the first rays of sunlight painted the city in gold, the weight of my mission settling into my bones.

  Time for surveilnce.

  I needed to observe the target location before attempting infiltration—basic procedure for any operation. But this was different. I wasn't just gathering intelligence about security systems or guard rotations. I was trying to understand a pce that seemed to exist outside the normal rules of reality. A pce that had swallowed my sister whole.