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CHAPTER 21 — THE TRUTH BENEATH ROOM 13

David was still holding the phone when the screen went black.

STOP LOOKING FOR PAGE 27.

YOU'RE GETTING TOO CLOSE.

The two messages sat in his notifications like burns. He looked up through the grimy window of the old archive, across the courtyard to the administration block.

Dr. Anya had been standing behind the glass on the second floor, perfectly still, watching the archive. Watching them. By the time he blinked, she was gone, as if she had never been there at all.

"We should leave," Tunde whispered. His voice was tight. He had Ada's personnel file tucked under his arm like it might be snatched.

David didn't move immediately. He opened the folder again on the dusty desk and looked at the index.

PAGE 27 - FINAL PERSONNEL ACTION - 15/09/2002

The torn edge. The fresh staple holes. The half-sentence that had survived on Page 28: See attached report regarding the whereabouts of Nurse Ada Nwosu after—

After what? After Clinical Storage? After 11:42? After she was taken?

Something bothered him. It wasn't just that someone had removed Page 27. It was when. The rust on the original staples, the shine on the new ones. Someone had come into this archive recently, not twenty years ago. Someone had opened a confidential cabinet that already had a new padlock on it, taken one exact page, and restapled the file to make it look untouched.

Why would someone go through an old archive recently just to remove one page, unless Page 27 wasn't the only thing they were afraid of? Unless Page 27 pointed to something else?

"We're looking for Page 27," David said quietly, taking quick photographs of every remaining page in the folder, "but maybe Page 27 was looking for something too."

He closed the file and put it back into the confidential cabinet. He locked it again with the small brass key and left the key hanging where he found it. Let whoever was watching think they still had control.

Outside, the sun was harsh. Students passed with buckets and textbooks. Normal life kept going, and that made what had just happened feel more obscene.

They walked back to the hostel in silence, both of them checking over their shoulders without meaning to.

The corridor of the old hostel was unusually quiet for midday. No music from other rooms, no one shouting. As David reached Room 13 and put his key in, he stopped.

The bottom of the door was damp. Not soaked. Just a faint, dark wetness around the edge, as if someone had mopped and missed a spot, or as if water had seeped out from inside.

Tunde froze behind him.

"David..."

David touched it with his fingertip. Water. Cold.

He pushed the door open.

The room looked normal at first glance. Two beds, two tables, the window, the wardrobe. His notebook open where he left it. Tunde's bag. But the air was cooler, damper, like after rain, even though it hadn't rained.

Then David saw it. A faint dark stain on the concrete floor beneath his own bed. The exact spot where, weeks ago, he had woken up at 2:13 a.m. convinced something was moving under there. He had never told anyone except Tunde.

"Remember what I told you?" Tunde said, his voice barely audible. "Never look under that bed after midnight."

David answered, "It's morning."

Tunde shook his head. "Some things no dey care about time."

David knelt down anyway. For weeks he had obeyed all the rules Tunde gave him on his first day — don't follow unexplained water, don't look beneath the bed, don't answer knocks after midnight, don't whistle after midnight, Room 13 has history. He had thought they were just hostel superstitions to scare freshers. Now he wasn't sure.

He got on his knees and looked beneath the bed.

Dust. An old slipper he thought he'd lost. A broken biro. Nothing else.

Then he saw it, scratched into the concrete itself, faint but deliberate.

Three letters: A.N.

He touched them with his finger, feeling the grooves.

"Ada," Tunde whispered instantly.

Beside the initials were three numbers, scratched in the same hand, deeper.

11 - 4 - 2

11:42. The time on Ada's watch. The time on the authorization that sent her to Clinical Storage. The time Grace heard the phone ring.

Someone had scratched this years ago, not as a joke, but as a marker.

David leaned closer. Next to the scratches was a narrow crack in the concrete, almost invisible. Something metallic glinted inside it.

He used a screwdriver from his desk to pry at it. A small rusted metal plate came loose, no bigger than a matchbox. It had a number stamped on it.

13-B

Tunde immediately recognized the format. He pulled out his phone and opened the photographs of Chinedu's notebook — his brother's notes that he had kept for seven years.

He scrolled quickly, his hands shaking.

Then he found it. A page titled in Chinedu's hurried handwriting:

ROOM 13

Underneath: The room isn't where they hide the records.

Then another sentence, underlined twice: It's where they watch the people who find them.

Tunde went pale.

"Your brother knew?" David asked.

Tunde nodded slowly. "He told me Room 13 was different. He said students who became interested in the old clinic records were repeatedly assigned to Room 13. Not randomly. The allocation officer always put them there. Not all of them disappeared. Some simply stopped investigating. Some requested transfers after one week. And a few vanished. He wrote it here - ROOM 13 - AGAIN. I thought he meant the room was haunted again. But he meant someone had returned to the room. Again."

David remembered Tunde's original warnings on his first night. They had sounded like folklore. Now they sounded like a survival guide passed down.

"Who gave Chinedu these rules?" David asked.

Tunde shook his head. "He said he learned some of them from an old nurse who used to work at the clinic. He never told me her name."

An old nurse. Ada had been a nurse. But she disappeared in 2002. Chinedu disappeared years later. Could the rules have been passed from Ada to someone else to Chinedu to Tunde?

Not folklore. Instructions. Warnings.

A drop of water fell from the ceiling onto David's desk.

Then another.

Tunde looked up. The ceiling was dry. No leak. No stain. The plaster was intact.

Another drop fell. This time it landed directly on David's open notebook, right beside where he had written PAGE 27.

David stared at it. The water wasn't dripping randomly. It formed a tiny trail across the floor, moving with impossible purpose, as if pulled.

Tunde backed away. "Guy..."

The trail moved toward the bed. Toward the exact spot where the initials were scratched.

David followed it. He remembered Ada's last written line from her diary, the one that had started everything.

If they take me, follow the water.

He had thought it was poetry. A metaphor for the river.

What if it wasn't?

He got down on his knees again. This time, instead of looking underneath the bed, he followed the direction of the water with his hand.

One floor tile didn't match the others. It was newer, the cement around it slightly lighter. The tile in the photograph.

He pressed it. It moved slightly.

Together, he and Tunde pried it open with the screwdriver. The tile came up with a soft scrape.

Beneath it was a shallow cavity, about a foot deep, cut into the concrete.

Inside was a rusted metal box, the kind used for holding cash in small shops, its lock broken long ago.

Tunde whispered, "My brother."

David pulled it out and set it on the bed. Inside were not patient records, not personnel documents.

Photographs. Dozens of them, old and curled at the edges.

Pictures of Room 13. Different years. Different students. Different beds and curtains and posters. But one thing remained identical - the room layout, the position of the beds, the window. Someone had been documenting Room 13 over many years, like a study.

David spread them across the floor.

One dated 2002. A young man standing inside Room 13, smiling awkwardly at the camera. Chinedu. Younger, thinner, wearing the same shirt Tunde still kept in his wardrobe.

Another photograph, years later. Different occupants, same room.

Another.

Then David found one photograph that made him stop breathing.

A woman standing inside Room 13.

Not in her nursing uniform. She wore a plain dress. She held a brown folder against her chest like something precious. Her hair was neatly packed. She looked tired and afraid and determined all at once.

On the back, in faded ink: 14/09/2002 - 10:58 P.M.

Ada.

Ada Nwosu had been inside Room 13 on the night she disappeared, less than an hour before 11:42.

"Ada came here?" Tunde stared. "Why would a nurse come to a student hostel room?"

David studied the image. Behind Ada was the exact bed he slept on now. The same metal frame.

He turned over another photograph from the same night. On the back, in Ada's unmistakable handwriting, the same handwriting from the diary:

If they find me, they will search this room.

Then another line, hastily added:

Don't let them open the floor.

Tunde looked at the exposed cavity in the floor. But the box was already open.

David realized something with a jolt. Ada hadn't hidden something here because she wanted someone to find it. She had hidden it because she wanted someone to keep it away from them. She knew they would search her own quarters first. So she hid it somewhere they would never look - a student room that was supposed to be haunted, that nobody wanted to stay in for long.

Then another note, on a separate piece of paper, folded tightly:

Room 13 must remain occupied.

Tunde looked confused. "Why? Why must it remain occupied?"

David didn't answer yet. He was putting everything together in his head, and the picture that formed was not what he had expected for four months.

The wet footprints that appeared after it rained even when it hadn't rained. The water under the bed. The knocks at 2:13 a.m. The sounds beneath the bed. The warnings. The strange appearances of Ada's watch in places he hadn't left it.

They weren't random haunting events. They had a pattern.

The water repeatedly appeared whenever David was close to discovering something dangerous - when he first found the diary, when he found the key to Clinical Storage, now when he was looking for Page 27.

The knocking occurred at night when someone was approaching the room from the corridor, footsteps he had heard but dismissed.

The sounds beneath the bed had led him toward the hidden evidence.

And the warnings Tunde gave him - never follow water at night, never look under the bed after midnight, never answer knocks - had all prevented him from walking directly into traps, into being seen, into being caught alone at night.

"Ada wasn't haunting this room," David said quietly.

Tunde looked at him.

David continued, his voice low, "She was warning whoever came after her. Every student who stayed here and started asking questions. She was trying to tell them to stop, to leave, to not follow the same path."

Then he remembered something terrifying. Every time David ignored the warnings, something happened. He followed the water to the river and found the path to Clinical Storage - and was followed. He answered a knock late at night in the first week and the next day his bag had been searched. He looked under the bed at midnight and the next morning the administration called him in for questioning.

Someone wasn't simply trying to frighten him.

Someone was trying to stop him. And Ada was trying to keep him alive long enough to understand.

David examined the box again. At the bottom was a folded sheet, unlike the other papers. Much newer. Not Ada's handwriting.

Chinedu's.

It read:

Ada was protecting the room. Not from the dead. From the living.

A second line, written later, darker ink:

From the people who still work here.

Tunde's face changed. He looked toward the door. Suddenly the room didn't feel haunted. It felt watched. Like the walls had ears. Like the legend of the haunting was a convenient curtain.

David found one final photograph at the very bottom. It showed Ada standing beside the floor where the box was hidden, caught mid-motion. Someone had written on the back, not Ada this time:

She found what they were looking for.

David asked, "What did Ada find?"

Tunde shook his head. They still didn't know.

But David noticed something in the photograph he had missed before. Ada wasn't looking at the camera. She was looking toward the door, her eyes wide. Someone was standing just outside the frame. Only part of a sleeve was visible.

A security uniform. The dark green sleeve with the reflective strip.

David remembered Grace's confession in the old staff quarters before the window exploded.

Two men took Ada.

One wore a clinic coat.

The other wore security clothing.

Ada had discovered something that connected the clinic and the security system. Something that required both to cover up.

Tunde finally understood why his brother had written ROOM 13 - AGAIN.

It wasn't because Room 13 was cursed.

It meant someone had returned to the room. Again and again. People who knew too much. People who found something. People who needed somewhere to hide evidence before they disappeared.

"They didn't make this room haunted," David said, looking at the floor, at the photographs, at the initials scratched into concrete. "They made it look haunted. So nobody would stay long enough to discover what was underneath. So anyone who said they saw water or heard knocking would be called a liar or a fresher who was scared."

"Why?" Tunde asked.

"So nobody would stay long enough to be assigned here twice. So the room would always be empty enough to search."

A memory returned, sharp and clear. The first night in Room 13. The knocking. Three slow knocks at 2:13 a.m. David had been terrified, had assumed something wanted him to open the door, wanted him to be taken like Ada.

But what if it wasn't asking him to open it?

What if it was telling him: Don't open the door. Because someone is outside. Right now.

"Tunde..." David whispered.

"What?"

"Ada wasn't trying to get me."

Tunde stared at him.

David looked toward the door, his pulse loud in his ears.

"She was trying to keep them away from me."

Silence fell. The hostel corridor outside was still too quiet.

Then—

KNOCK.

Three slow knocks. Exactly as before.

Both men froze.

Another knock, louder this time.

David didn't move. For the first time since he arrived in Room 13, he understood the rule. Never answer the knocks. Because the knocks were never coming from Ada. They were coming from the living, checking if the room was occupied, checking if the warning had worked, checking if the room was finally empty enough to open the floor.

The knocking stopped.

David slowly walked toward the floor cavity. Something had changed.

The metal box was still there.

But underneath it, inside the cavity, where there had been only concrete before, was another object that hadn't been there a minute ago.

A small folded piece of paper, damp at the edges.

David pulled it out with shaking fingers.

Ada's handwriting. Fresh, as if written yesterday.

Only one sentence:

If you're reading this, I've already failed to protect you.

David's face fell. His hands went cold.

Then he turned the paper over.

On the back, in the same handwriting but rushed, almost torn:

THEY KNOW ABOUT CHINEDU.

Tunde went completely still. His breath stopped.

Before either could speak, the lights in Room 13 went out.

From beneath the floor, from the empty cavity where the box had been, came a single metallic sound.

CLINK. Like a key dropping.

David raised his phone flashlight with a trembling hand.

The cavity was empty.

The box was gone.

And on the floor, where the water trail had been, written in fresh water that hadn't been there a second ago:

11:42

It glistened in the flashlight.

David looked at Tunde.

This time, neither of them thought the room was haunted.

They finally understood.

Ada was never trying to kill them.

She had been trying to protect them from the people who were still here.

And whatever she had been protecting them from was still inside Room 13, beneath their feet, and it had just taken the evidence back.

CHAPTER 20 — THE LOCKED FILE

David barely slept after the attack on Grace Okoro.

Every time he closed his eyes he saw it again - the window shattering, the stone wrapped in cloth smashing into the table, the metal box flying, and Grace on the floor with blood running from her head into the cracks of the cement. He could still feel how her hand had gripped his shirt before it went limp.

Tunde hadn't slept either. He sat on the edge of the bed in Room 13 with his head in his hands, his shirt still stained dark at the sleeve where he had pressed it against her wound.

At dawn, the phone rang. Grace had survived. She had been taken to General Hospital, unconscious, with a severe head injury. The doctors didn't know when, or if, she would wake up.

The police had come. The neighbors had called them after Tunde shouted for help. They took pictures. They took a statement. They put up tape and then took it down again.

It wasn't enough. The attacker had escaped into the bush path toward the river. The photocopy with Dr. Anya's signature - the only hard proof that someone inside the school had signed the lie about Ada - was gone. And Grace had never finished her sentence. She had been about to say where Ada was taken.

David opened his notebook and wrote three lines and circled them until the pen tore the paper.

THE PERSON WHO TOOK ADA ≠ THE PERSON WHO KILLED ADA

WHO KILLED ADA?

WHO TOOK THE FILE?

That last line was new. He stared at it. The attacker hadn't just attacked an old woman. He had known exactly what evidence she had in that metal box. He had known to take only one paper and leave the rest scattered.

By nine in the morning they were back at Grace's house. The room was exactly as they had left it, only worse in daylight. Broken glass everywhere, the torn curtain hanging, the dried blood dark on the floor, the metal box overturned with its contents spilled - old payslips, clinic memos from 2001 and 2002, ID cards.

David knelt and gathered them carefully. Most of her documents were still there. She had been a records clerk for twenty-one years. She kept everything.

But the voluntary abandonment report with the faded signature that read ANYA was missing. Tunde sifted through the pile twice to be sure. It was gone.

Tunde stood up, angry. "Why would somebody risk attacking an old woman just because of one paper?"

"Because that paper proves something a rumor can't," David said, looking at the bloodstain. "A rumor says the school lied. A signature proves someone inside the school signed the lie. A signature can be traced."

As he put the scattered papers back into the metal box, his hand stopped on a thin folder at the bottom. Its label was handwritten in Grace's neat, old-fashioned writing.

PERSONNEL - NURSING STAFF

It wasn't Ada's file. It was a log of all the nursing staff files that had passed through Grace's hands for filing, hundreds of names. He ran his finger down the list. Ada's name wasn't there. It had been skipped alphabetically. But next to where her name should have been, Grace had written in tiny pencil:

N-0471 - See Admin Archive (Confidential)

Tunde leaned over. "What is that?"

"Personnel number," David said. "Every employee had one. Students, staff, everyone. My brother's old file was N-0398, remember? This is hers."

He checked Ada's identification plate. No number. He checked the hundreds of photos of her diary on his phone. No number. But he suddenly remembered the abandonment report that had just been stolen. At the bottom, in a small box, there had been a reference.

N-0471. That was it.

He realized something then. The clinic records weren't the only files being manipulated. Ada had a personnel file separate from her medical and clinic records. And if someone wanted to erase her completely, to make it look like she had abandoned her job without permission, that file would be the place to start. They would have to falsify that file too.

He looked toward the administration block, its white paint visible in the distance over the rooftops.

"That's where we're going."

They entered the administration building during working hours on purpose. The building was busy. Students queuing for transcripts, staff carrying files, printers running, phones ringing, a cleaner mopping the corridor. Everything looked completely, boringly normal. After last night, that normality felt obscene.

David approached the front desk. A woman with glasses was stamping forms without looking up.

"Good morning. I'm looking for old personnel records. Nursing staff. Around 2002."

"Those are archived. You need authorization," she said.

"Who can authorize access?"

She finally looked up. Her eyes flicked to David, then to Tunde.

"Administration officer."

"Dr. Anya?" David asked.

Her hand stopped stamping. She paused a beat too long.

"Yes."

Before David could ask anything else, a man in a senior staff shirt who had been watching them from an office doorway called her away. She stood quickly and left, leaving her stamp on the desk.

"She knows something," Tunde whispered.

"Everybody seems to know something," David said. "That's the problem. Everybody knows and nobody says."

They didn't wait for authorization. They turned down the corridor Grace's notes had described, toward the back wing where the old archive was, behind an unmarked door that stuck in the humidity.

The room inside was dusty and cold. Old shelves from floor to ceiling. Metal cabinets with rusted handles. Cardboard boxes marked with years in marker - 2001, 2002, 2003.

David searched the nursing personnel records for 2002. He ran his finger along the tabs. Adebayo. Ajayi. Asuquo. The N-0471 file should have been between N-0469 and N-0473.

There was an empty space. A file-sized gap, exactly one folder wide. The dust around it was smeared, with fresh swipe marks and no new dust settled over them.

"Somebody removed am," Tunde said.

David crouched and looked at the shelf in the light from his phone. Someone had been accessing old files recently. In the last few days. Someone knew they were coming.

At the back of the archive was an old steel cabinet that didn't match the others. Unlike the other cabinets which hung open or had broken locks, this one had a modern, shiny padlock. Silver. New. Someone had added it recently. There were deep, fresh scratches in the paint around it, as if someone had tried to force it with a screwdriver and failed.

A small label was attached with tape: PERSONNEL - CONFIDENTIAL.

"You think Ada file dey inside?" Tunde asked.

"If it wasn't important, they wouldn't lock it," David said. "And they wouldn't try to hide it twice."

They searched the surrounding shelves. Behind the door, hanging on a nail and covered in cobwebs, was an old key ring. Most keys were labeled with faded masking tape - LAB, STORE, MORTUARY, ARCHIVE - OLD.

One key had no label. Small. Brass. Newer than the others.

David tried it. It fit. The lock clicked open.

Inside were dozens of old personnel folders, crammed tightly together.

Near the middle, a faded green folder. The tab typed, not handwritten:

NWOSU, ADA - NURSING STAFF - N-0471

For several seconds, neither man spoke. This was the first time David had held what should be the complete official record of Ada's life at this institution. Not rumors. Not diary entries. Not witness memories. The official file.

He opened it on the dusty desk.

Inside, page by page: Employment application dated 15 January 2002. Nursing qualification from School of Nursing, Abakaliki. Identification photograph - Ada, younger than David had imagined, hair neatly packed, unsmiling, serious. Appointment letter Grade Level 07. Salary records. Shift schedules. Performance reports. Medical clearance. Leave requests. Staff evaluations. Disciplinary records - none.

Everything was there.

Except - David frowned and flipped back. There were two versions of several documents. One original, stapled cleanly. One later replacement, photocopied on whiter paper, stapled slightly crooked. Her appointment letter existed twice, same date, different reference number. Her shift schedule for September 2002 existed twice - one version listed her as Ward B, the other listed her as Clinical Unit - Float.

"They edited her file," David said quietly. "They kept the original but added a second version to cover something."

Then he found the page that changed his understanding of Ada entirely.

A memo dated 28 August 2002. ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITY ASSIGNMENT. It stated that due to staff shortage, Nurse Ada Nwosu (N-0471) had been assigned additional responsibility for clinical records verification on a temporary basis.

Not officially a records clerk. But she had written permission to cross-check patient records between wards and the main register. That explained why she was able to discover U. Eke's missing record. She wasn't snooping. She was doing the job they gave her. And then she found something she wasn't supposed to find.

Tunde said, "So she had access."

"More access than we thought," David said.

Then he found a staff evaluation dated September 5, 2002 - nine days before she disappeared. Most of it was positive. Punctual. Diligent. Good with patients. But at the bottom, in different handwriting, a note:

Employee has demonstrated unusual interest in restricted patient transfers.

No signature.

He turned the page. September 10, 2002:

Advised to limit access to transfer documentation.

Then September 12, 2002:

Review pending. - A.

Just the initial. A.

David looked at Tunde. "They were already watching her. Two days before she disappeared, they were already building a case against her."

David searched through Ada's final week. September 10 - Day shift, Ward B. September 11 - Day shift, Ward B. September 12 - Off. September 13 - Night shift, Clinical Unit. Then September 14.

The final shift record was there, typed.

SHIFT: NIGHT
LOCATION: CLINICAL UNIT
DATE: 14/09/2002

Then beneath it, in bold:

SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT - AUTHORIZED - CS-1142

Tunde asked, "What special assignment?"

David searched for the attached authorization form. Every special assignment should have an attached form explaining the task, the authorizing officer, the location. There was no authorization form. Only a reference number. CS-1142.

Clinical Storage. 11:42. The same number that kept appearing around Ada's disappearance. Her watch. The file reference. The time Grace remembered the phone ringing.

"CS is Clinical Storage," David whispered. "1142 is the time. This is the order that sent her there."

At the bottom of that shift record, paper-clipped rather than stapled, was another document. A personnel movement authorization. Ada's personnel number - N-0471. Date: 14/09/2002. Time: 11:42 P.M. Nature of Movement: Special Assignment - Clinical Storage - Records Retrieval. Authorized by: Dr. Anya. Signature, clear and looping.

Tunde whispered, "So she sent Ada there? Na she be the one?"

David forced himself to read it like Grace had taught him to read records - not what you want to see, but what is actually there.

"No. She authorized the assignment. That's not the same thing as taking her." The distinction mattered. It was everything. Dr. Anya may have ordered Ada to Clinical Storage. She may have helped cover up what happened afterward. But authorizing an assignment doesn't mean she was the one waiting by the river. Chapter 19 had already established that there were two different people involved. "We need to know who received her. Who signed her in at Clinical Storage?"

He flipped the page. There was no receiving signature.

David went through the remaining pages quickly now, his breath shallow. The file contained everything up to the night Ada disappeared. But every personnel file should end with a final personnel action report - the document used when an employee resigns, is dismissed, disappears, dies, or is transferred.

He checked the index at the front of the folder, typed in 2002. The index listed PAGE 26 - PERFORMANCE REVIEW - 13/09/2002, PAGE 27 - FINAL PERSONNEL ACTION - 15/09/2002, PAGE 28 - FILE CLOSURE MEMO.

He counted. Page 25. Page 26. Then the back cover. Then, tucked behind it, Page 28. No Page 27. He checked again, slower. 1 to 26. Then 28. The page numbers were handwritten in the top corner. There was no 27.

He slowly turned the last remaining page to the light. At the top, it said PAGE 28 - FILE CLOSURE MEMO - 16/09/2002. The paper edge beside it, where Page 27 should have been attached, was jagged. Torn out. Not cut cleanly with scissors, but ripped, in a hurry. David ran his finger along the torn edge. Tiny paper fibers stood up.

"What was on Page 27?" Tunde asked.

David looked at the file index again. The description was partially visible, typed but faded: FINAL PERSONNEL ACTION - 15/09/2002 - N-0471. And in smaller type, underneath: Action Taken: But the date was clear. September 15. The day after Ada disappeared. The same date U. Eke's file showed his transfer to Grave 47.[Illegible]

"That page fit tell us wetin happen to Ada. That na the last page," Tunde whispered.

"And somebody made sure we can't read it," David said.

Then David noticed something else. At the bottom of Page 28, a handwritten note remained, half-covered because the missing page had been stapled over it. Only half a sentence had survived.

He read it aloud: "See attached report regarding the whereabouts of Nurse Ada Nwosu after—"

The sentence ended exactly where the torn edge began.

Whereabouts. Not abandonment. Not resignation. Whereabouts. Someone, on September 15, knew where Ada had gone. And had written a report about it.

David examined the torn edge again, closer. The paper itself was yellowed, but the torn fibers were whiter. Fresher. He looked at the staple. The original staple marks were there - two holes, rusted. Then another set of holes, just millimeters away. Shinier. No rust.

"The page wasn't torn out twenty years ago," he said. "Somebody restapled the file. Recently. They opened Ada's personnel file, tore out exactly one page - Page 27 - and restapled it to hide that it was missing."

Meaning someone still had access. Someone still walked into this archive. Someone still protected the secret.

David closed the file. His hands were shaking now.

Then his phone vibrated in his pocket. Unknown number. No name.

One message:
STOP LOOKING FOR PAGE 27.
David stared at the screen. The blood drained from his face.

A second message arrived instantly.
YOU'RE GETTING TOO CLOSE.
Tunde looked at him. "Who send am? Who be that?"

David didn't answer immediately. He slowly raised his eyes from the phone, across the dusty archive, across the courtyard visible through the small, grimy window.

Across the courtyard, standing behind the glass window of the administration office on the second floor, was Dr. Anya.

She was not on a call. She was not working. She was standing perfectly still, watching them. Watching the archive.

Then, as David watched, she turned away from the window and disappeared into her office.

His phone vibrated again. But this time, there was no message. Just a missed call from the same unknown number.

David looked down at the locked file in his hands.

He finally had the complete personnel file he had been chasing since the beginning.

And the one page that mattered most was gone.

And someone knew he was looking for it.

Am from Bayelsa state and you

That chapter 5 doesn't it much with chapter 4

Am doing good thanks for your concern,am writing lots of books in different platforms that why I delay to pst update

Thanks I really appreciate your comments and it motivate me to write more chapters

CHAPTER 5 — THE FIRST CONTACT

The post had been up for 17 minutes before it was deleted.

Umar knew because he had a script running that scraped the confession pages every 60 seconds. It was a dumb script, something he built in his second year to catch cheating boyfriends and girls posting about lecturers who harassed them. He called it Ear. It listened.

At 2:13 AM on a Tuesday, Ear pinged him.

Anonymous post. No profile. Location tag spoofed to Lagos, but the image metadata was still intact — someone hadn't cleaned it. A single photo. A blood-stained student ID card. The name blurred, but the matric number half-visible: UNIBEN/2009/...

The caption was just seven words:
They buried him but he never died.
The comments blew up instantly. 43 in four minutes. Then the post vanished. Deleted by the poster, not by the mods. Umar had seen enough deleted posts to know the difference.

He sat up in his hostel bed at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. His roommate was snoring, mouth open. The blue light of his laptop made the room feel underwater.

He saved everything. Screenshot, source code, image EXIF.

He knew that ID. Not the name — the format. The way UNIBEN printed their IDs in 2009. The faded green border.

And he knew who would care.

He opened WhatsApp.

There were two chats pinned at the top. Always.

Zainab — last seen today at 1:47 AM. Profile photo: her in a lab coat, arms crossed, trying to look serious. She was at UNILORIN, final year Medical Lab Science. She hated that course but loved knowing things other people didn't.

Blessing — last seen today at 2:02 AM. Profile photo: her braids, bright red lipstick. She was at UNIBEN. Yes, UNIBEN. Computer Science. 400 level. The loud one. The one who always said "I go handle am."

The three of them had been friends since secondary school in Minna. Federal Government College Minna. Same class, same back bench. Umar, the quiet one who fixed everybody's phones and laptops. Zainab, the one who read ahead and told the teachers they were wrong. Blessing, the one who fought the senior girls when they tried to bully Zainab for wearing hijab.

They had done JAMB together. They had promised to go to the same university. Life scattered them instead — Zaria, Ilorin, Benin. But the group chat never died. Minna Trinity. They called themselves that as a joke in JS2. It stuck.

If anyone posted a UNIBEN ID card talking about a burial that never happened, Blessing had to know.

Umar messaged her first.
Umar: You up?
Umar: [Image - screenshot of deleted post]
Umar: This was posted with a UNIBEN ID. 2009 set. The account deleted after 17 mins. Location spoofed but the photo was taken in your campus. I checked the IP.
Three dots appeared instantly.
Blessing: NA WHO BE THIS??
Blessing: Wait. That ID. That matric number. UNIBEN/2009/ART... That is Faculty of Arts. That is not my faculty but I know that set. My elder brother was 2009 set.
Blessing: Umar where you see this?

Umar: Confession page. I traced the original upload IP. It came from Faculty of Physical Sciences Computer Lab. Block B. Your school lab. Whoever posted it used the lab computer. Lab 2, system 14. The lab has static IPs.
Blessing sent a voice note. Her voice was low, like she was in her hostel corridor.

"Umar, are you serious? Lab 2? That lab closes by 6pm. No one uses it at night unless... unless you have the key. Only the lab attendant and some final year students doing project have the key. What is happening?"
Umar: I don't know yet. But I think someone is trying to talk.
He switched to Zainab's chat.
Umar: Zainab. I need your eyes.
Umar: [Image - enhanced version of the blood-stained ID]
Zainab replied after 10 minutes. She was always slower. She thought before typing.
Zainab: Umar, this blood is not fresh. It's oxidized. Dark brown, not red. This is at least months old, maybe years. The stain pattern — see the way it pooled at the edge of the plastic? The card was lying flat when the blood dropped on it. This wasn't held by someone bleeding. This was placed.
Zainab: Where did you get this? Is this a prank?

Umar: Someone posted it anonymously. Said "They buried him but he never died." Then deleted.
Umar: I think it's connected to those missing student cases you told us about last month. The ones your cousin was researching.
Zainab sent three dots, then stopped. Then started again.
Zainab: My cousin stopped researching because someone warned her. Umar, be careful.
Umar stared at his screen. His room was hot. The fan was turning slowly, doing nothing.

The Minna Trinity had a rule since SS2. Rule No. 3: If one of us is in something, all of us are in something. They wrote it on the back of a maths textbook and signed it with biro.

He created a new group chat. Just the three of them. He named it EAR - URGENT.

He added Zainab and Blessing.
Umar: I think we should meet. Physically. Not on call.
Umar: I traced the post to UNIBEN computer lab. Someone inside UNIBEN wants to be heard but is scared. Blessing can check that lab physically.
Umar: Zainab, you can tell if the ID and blood are real. You know forensics more than us.
Umar: I can trace the digital footprints. But we need to share everything we have.

Blessing: I agree. But not in Benin. If someone is watching the lab, they will watch me too. My department is too close.

Zainab: Not Ilorin. My parents will ask questions. And Zaria is too far for me.

Umar: Kaduna. Neutral ground. Our old place. Arewa Guest House, the one near Command Secondary School where we used to go for inter-school debate. Nobody knows us there.

Blessing: I can come Saturday. I will tell my roommate I'm going for a cousin's wedding.

Zainab: I can come Saturday too. Morning. I will take 7am bus from Ilorin.

Umar: Saturday 2pm. Room 12 if we can get it. That was our room during debate competition in SS3.
Blessing sent a laughing emoji, then a love emoji.
Blessing: Trinity still dey.

Zainab: Trinity always.
Umar smiled for the first time that night. That was the thing about them. Even when they were talking about blood and missing people, they had a language that was only theirs. Blessing would always be the one who made a joke when she was scared. Zainab would always be the one who double-checked everything. Umar would always be the one who traced things back to their source.

He told them goodnight and closed his laptop. It was 3:40 AM. He had a test by 9 AM. He tried to sleep.

He woke up at 8:15 AM to his alarm. He rushed to class, wrote his test with half his brain, and spent the rest of the day in the library pretending to read while actually running deeper traces on the IP. The lab system 14 at UNIBEN had been used by a user ID: STAFF_GUEST. That account was only supposed to be used by lecturers who forgot their password. Someone knew the generic password. UNIBEN2020! — the default they never changed.

Whoever posted it didn't want to be traced, but they weren't a professional. They were scared and in a hurry.

At 6 PM, he was back in his hostel. He was boiling water to make noodles when his phone buzzed.

Blessing.
Blessing: Umar, I went to Lab 2 today. I told the attendant I left my flash drive. System 14 was clean. No history. Someone wiped it. But I saw something under the keyboard. A paper. Small. Folded. It had numbers: 47 and a name: EKE. Does that mean anything to you?
Umar's hand froze holding the kettle.

Grave 47. That was from the David story Blessing had been obsessed with on Twitter. She kept sending them threads about a guy named David investigating a missing nurse named Ada. Umar thought it was just another Twitter story.
Umar: Keep that paper. Don't show anyone. Bring it on Saturday.

Blessing: Okay. But Umar...

Blessing: I felt someone watching me today in the lab.
Umar typed quickly.
Umar: Go back to your hostel now. Lock your door.
He didn't hear from her again that night.

Friday night, he packed a small bag. Laptop, power bank, the notebook where he wrote IP addresses by hand because he didn't trust cloud storage. He told his roommate he was going to Kaduna to see his aunt.

Saturday morning. 10:30 AM. ABU campus was quiet. Most students were still sleeping.

Umar stepped out of his hostel gate at Shika. He was waiting for a Keke to take him to the main road where the Kaduna buses loaded.

That was when it happened.

A black Toyota Hilux — not a Prado, not a fancy SUV, a workhorse Hilux with tinted windows — slowed down. It wasn't supposed to slow down there. That road was always fast. Bikes and cars speeding to avoid potholes.

It slowed right in front of his hostel gate. The passenger window came down, just halfway. Not fully.

Inside, a man. He wasn't looking at the road. He was looking directly at Umar. He wore dark glasses even though the morning was cloudy. He had a phone in his hand. Not making a call. Camera open.

He took Umar's photo.

Click.

The shutter sound was loud in the quiet morning.

Umar froze. Noodles half-digested in his stomach. His bag suddenly heavy.

The man didn't smile. Didn't say anything. He just rolled the window back up, and the Hilux accelerated away, kicking up dust.

Umar stood there for maybe 30 seconds. His heart was beating so loud he could hear it in his ears.

He looked around. A few students walked past, none of them noticed.

He pulled out his phone with sweaty hands.

Group chat EAR - URGENT.
Umar: Something just happened.
Umar: A black SUV just took my photo outside my hostel. They slowed down on purpose.
Umar: I think they know I'm looking.
Blessing replied instantly, as if she had been holding her phone.
Blessing: WHAT? Umar, where are you now? Go back inside!

Zainab: Umar, don't go to Kaduna alone. Wait. I'm almost in Zaria now. My bus is at Jaji. I can join you. We go together.

Blessing: I'm already on the road. Kaduna. My bus left Benin 5am. I will be there by 1pm. Don't be scared. Trinity dey.
Umar read their messages. His hands were still shaking, but his chest felt less tight.

That was the thing. They were not just three friends from secondary school who gisted sometimes. They were connected. When Umar was scared, Zainab's logical voice calmed him. When Zainab was overwhelmed, Blessing's loud laugh brought her back. When Blessing was in trouble in Benin and felt watched, she knew she had two people who would take a bus across three states just because she saw a paper under a keyboard.

They were not investigators. They were not detectives. They were 21, 22 year olds who were supposed to be worried about final year projects and NYSC posting.

But Rule No. 3 still stood.

If one of them was in something, all of them were in something.

And now, someone in a black Hilux knew Umar's face.

He zipped up his bag, walked back into the hostel, and waited for Zainab's bus to arrive. He would not go to Kaduna alone.

The first contact had been made. Not between them — between them and whoever was watching.

And whoever it was, they had made their first mistake.

They had shown themselves.

CHAPTER 19 — THE CONFESSION

The house at the edge of the old staff quarters looked like it had been forgotten on purpose.

The paint had peeled down to the cement, the roof was rusted at the edges, and a single mango tree leaned over it like a guard. But the small yard was swept clean. A bucket of water sat by the door. Clothes hung neatly on a line. Someone lived here carefully, deliberately.

David knocked.

For a long time, nothing. Then slow footsteps inside. The curtain moved.

An elderly woman opened the door a crack. Her wrapper was tied neatly, her headtie white and clean. Her eyes were not cloudy with age. They were sharp. Alert. The eyes of someone who had spent years watching records move.

"Good evening, ma," David said. "Are you Mrs. Grace Okoro?"

She studied him, then Tunde behind him.

"Who is asking?"

"My name is David. This is my friend Tunde. We used to be students here. We are looking for information about someone who worked here in 2002."

"Many people worked here in 2002," she said.

David reached into his bag and brought out his phone. He showed her the photograph he had taken of Ada's diary. The faded ink in the margin.

Her eyes went to the screen.

And her entire body changed.

She didn't ask who Ada was. She didn't ask why they were asking. She went completely silent, her hand tightening on the doorframe.

"Where did you hear that name?" she whispered.

David felt his chest tighten. It was the exact same reaction the cemetery caretaker had given them at Grave 47. The same fear. The same recognition.

"You know her," David said.

Grace Okoro didn't answer. She looked past them, toward the road, as if checking who else might be listening.

"She kept writing," she said finally, her voice barely audible. Tears were already gathering in her eyes. "She kept writing even after I told her to stop."

David glanced at Tunde.

"She?" Tunde asked.

Grace looked directly at David.

"Ada."

She opened the door.

Inside, the house was small and immaculate. A table with two chairs. A shelf with old files tied with twine. A small television covered with lace. On the wall, a framed photograph of a younger Grace in a nurse's uniform.

She didn't offer them seats immediately. She locked the door. Not a simple turn of the lock. She bolted it top and bottom, then pulled the curtain completely shut. Not because of ghosts. Because she was afraid of being overheard, even now.

"What do you know about Ada Nwosu?" David asked.

Grace sat down slowly. Her hands were shaking.

"I told her to stop checking," she said.

"Checking what?"

"The registers." She looked up. "I was the clinical records clerk for twenty-one years. I kept everything. Admission, treatment, discharge, transfer. If a patient entered the clinic, their name passed through my hands."

David took out Ada's identification plate and placed it on the table between them. The small rectangle of metal caught the light.

Grace stared at it. Her breathing became shallow.

"The school lied," she whispered.

David didn't move.

Tunde leaned forward. "What do you mean they lied, ma?"

Grace's voice hardened, as if the words had been sitting in her throat for two decades.

"Ada did not run away. She did not abandon her post. That girl loved that work. She loved her patients. The day she disappeared, she had already arranged to cover a night shift for another nurse. Does a person who plans to run away arrange to cover a night shift?"

It was the confirmation David had been searching for since Chapter 9. Since the first time he saw the official report that said VOLUNTARY ABANDONMENT. Since the first time something in his gut told him it was too clean, too convenient.

The official story was false.

"She was not a runaway," Grace said, tears now falling freely. "She was taken."

"What was she doing before she disappeared?" David asked.

Grace wiped her face with the edge of her wrapper.

"In September 2002, Ada started noticing discrepancies. Patients would appear in the treatment rooms, but their names would disappear from the main register. Some files were marked as transferred, but there was no signature. Some patients were recorded as having left, but nobody had signed them out. No relatives. No discharge form. Just... gone."

David felt a chill go down his spine. The same pattern he had found with U. Eke.

"I told her to stop," Grace repeated. "I told her, Ada, leave these files alone. Some questions are dangerous."

"Why did you tell her that?" David asked.

"Because I had already seen what happened to people who checked too much."

She stood up and went to her shelf. She pulled down one of the bundles tied with twine, but didn't open it. She just held it.

"U. Eke was one of those cases," she said. "He arrived at the clinic. Young man. Fever. He was treated in Ward C. I recorded his admission myself. Then, three days later, I was instructed to mark his file as transferred to a larger facility in the city. No transfer order. No receiving signature. I never saw him leave. Later, when I checked the cemetery register for something else... I saw his name. Grave 47."

Tunde's jaw tightened.

"Who instructed you to mark it as transferred?" David asked.

Grace shook her head. "The instruction came from administration. The signature was not clear. But the system was always the same."

She sat back down.

David asked the question he had been holding since they found the watch.

"What happened on September 14?"

Grace's hands began to shake violently.

She closed her eyes.

"She came into the records room late that evening," she said. "Around eleven. She was frightened. She was holding her watch in her hand. She said, 'Aunty Grace, they're moving the files again.' I asked her where. She said, 'Clinical Storage.'"

The name hung in the air.

The building beside the river. The building the old key opened.

"That building was not just for documents," Grace continued. "Sometimes sealed boxes went there. Sometimes medical equipment. Sometimes patient files. And sometimes things nobody was supposed to ask about. That night, Ada said she had seen something in the original records. Something that proved the transfers were not transfers at all."

"11:42," David said quietly. "Do you remember that time?"

Grace's eyes snapped open.

"11:42," she whispered. "That was when the phone rang. Someone from the clinic called my office and told me to bring the file of U. Eke to Clinical Storage immediately. I refused. I told them I was closing. A few minutes later, I heard movement outside. Ada came running into my office. She was holding her nursing watch. She was breathing hard. She looked at me and said, 'If anything happens to me, don't let them say I ran away.'"

The exact fear Chinedu had expressed years later in his own notes. The same sentence, passed down like a curse.

"I never saw her again after that night," Grace said.

Tunde had been silent for a long time. Now he finally spoke, his voice rough.

"What about my brother? Chinedu Okoro?"

Grace looked at him, really looked at him for the first time.

"You're his brother," she said. It wasn't a question.

Tunde nodded once, his eyes red.

"He came to me years later," Grace said. "Maybe 2015? He was asking the same questions. He showed me notes. He knew about U. Eke. He knew about Ada. He knew about Clinical Storage. And he asked me one question I could not answer. He asked, 'Who authorized the transfers?'"

She paused.

"I refused to answer. Not because I didn't know. Because I was afraid. He looked at me and said, 'Aunty, if they made Ada disappear, they can make me disappear too.'"

Tunde covered his face with his hands.

"He was right," Grace whispered.

David swallowed. "How did the school cover it? How did they explain Ada?"

Grace stood again and went to an old metal box under her table. She opened it with a small key she wore around her neck. Inside were old papers, yellowed photocopies.

"There was never a death certificate," she said. "Never a burial record. Never a proper termination letter. Instead, someone prepared a voluntary abandonment report. It said she left the institution without permission, without notice, and forfeited her position."

"A lie," David said.

"A lie," Grace agreed. She pulled out a photocopied sheet and placed it on the table. "Ada never signed it. Someone signed on her behalf."

David leaned in.

The ink was faded. The paper was stained. At the bottom, under AUTHORIZING OFFICER, was a signature, half gone from bad photocopying. But the surname was still clear enough to read.

ANYA.

Tunde reacted instantly. "Dr. Anya."

Grace nodded slowly, but she raised a hand.

"Don't assume that means she killed Ada," she said quickly. "Dr. Anya was on the administrative side. She had authority over records. She signed documents. She authorized transfers. She had the keys to Clinical Storage. But I do not know if she ordered Ada to be taken. I only know she was involved in covering it afterward. That is a different thing."

David stared at the name. For months, Dr. Anya had been a shadow in the corner of the investigation. Too helpful. Too informed. Too close.

"Who took Ada?" David asked, putting everything on the table — the watch, the ID plate, the photocopy, the key. "Mrs. Okoro, who took her?"

Grace began to cry openly now.

"I saw her," she said. "Not inside the clinic. Outside. Near the rear route, the path that leads to the river road. It was dark. I had followed her because I was worried. I saw two men with her. One wore a clinic coat. The other wore security clothing, like the men who worked the rear gate. She was not unconscious. She was walking. But she was terrified. I heard her say, 'I didn't steal anything.' And one of the men said, 'You weren't supposed to find it.'"

"What did she find?" David whispered.

"The original patient records," Grace said. "Not the edited ones. The real ones. The ones that showed what was really happening."

"What was in them?"

Grace looked at him, her face filled with horror.

"It wasn't just names. It was a pattern. Patients came in. Their names disappeared from the live register. Their bodies were transferred. Their files were moved to Clinical Storage. And certain people inside the institution were signing off on everything. Ada discovered it. U. Eke was one. But she had found more than one name."

David felt his mouth go dry.

"How many?"

Grace whispered, "Twenty-three."

The number fell like a stone in the small room.

Twenty-three missing patient records. The conspiracy wasn't about Ada. Ada had stumbled into something much larger, and it had swallowed her.

Tunde stood up, his chair scraping the floor. "Twenty-three? Twenty-three people?"

Grace nodded.

David forced himself to focus. "Why did they kill her?"

Grace suddenly went very still. She looked toward the window, then back at David, her eyes wide with a different kind of fear.

"I never said they killed her," she said.

David froze. "You just said—"

"I said they took her," she interrupted, her voice sharp.

"Then where is she? Where did they take her?"

Grace leaned forward, her voice dropping to a whisper so low David had to lean in to hear her.

"That's what I was going to tell you. Ada was not taken to Clinical Storage."

David's expression changed. "Then where?"

Grace looked toward the locked door, then toward the covered window.

"She was taken somewhere else. Somewhere only—"

CRASH.

The window behind her exploded inward.

Glass shattered across the floor. The curtain tore.

Everyone ducked. Tunde fell against the wall, shielding his head. David threw himself over Grace, pulling her down to the floor. Something heavy struck the table — a stone, wrapped in cloth — and sent the metal box flying across the room. Papers scattered everywhere.

Grace screamed.

A shadow moved outside the broken window, fast.

David scrambled up and rushed toward the window.

Outside, in the dark between the houses, he saw a figure running — black clothes, hood — sprinting toward the old staff quarters, toward the bush path that led to the river.

David started after them, vaulting over the windowsill, glass crunching under his shoes.

"David! Leave am! Leave am!" Tunde shouted, grabbing his arm from behind.

David pulled free.

Then he heard it.

A choking sound behind him.

He turned.

Grace was on the floor. Blood was running from her head, dark and fast. The stone hadn't been the only thing. During the confusion, someone had come through the door, or reached through the broken window. A second attacker, or the same one doubling back.

"Madam! Madam!" Tunde knelt beside her, pressing his wrapper against her head.

David dropped to his knees beside her.

"Mrs. Okoro! Mrs. Okoro!"

Her eyes were open but unfocused. Her breathing was shallow, rattling. Her hand reached up weakly and gripped David's shirt.

"What were you going to tell me?" David said, his voice breaking. "What were you going to say? Where did they take her?"

Her lips moved. No sound came out at first. Then a whisper, soaked in blood and terror.

"The person who killed Ada..."

David bent so close he could feel her breath.

"...wasn't the person who took her."

The room went silent except for Tunde shouting for help outside, his voice echoing between the quarters.

Two separate people.

The person who took Ada.

And the person who killed her.

Grace's eyes began to close. She forced them open with everything she had left.

Her hand went limp.

"Madam! No, no, no!" Tunde shouted, shaking her gently. "Somebody help!"

David looked toward the broken window. Toward the empty space on the floor where the metal box had been. The document with the signature — ANYA — was gone. Whoever had thrown the stone hadn't wanted to kill Grace at first.

They had wanted to silence her before she could name someone.

He looked down at Grace, bleeding on her own floor because she had finally decided to tell the truth after twenty-three years.

He looked toward the river.

Then toward the clinic, its lights faint in the distance.

Then at Ada's watch inside his bag.

11:42. Frozen forever.

And somewhere in the darkness outside, beyond the mango tree, a vehicle engine started and drove away fast, without lights.

David stood.

His hands were covered in blood that wasn't his.

Someone was still protecting the secret.

And now they knew David was coming.

Am doing alright thanks for your concern ☺️

Ch. 6 — The Protest
POV: Zainab

I did not plan to protest.

Baba warned me. My mother begged me. Umar told me to stay low until we meet on Saturday. But when you are in KASU and you hear that your SUG has called for a peaceful walk to the Government House because they killed your faculty mate like a fowl, you cannot sit in your room and be reading Locus Standi.

The flyer was everywhere on WhatsApp since Thursday night.

JUSTICE FOR IBRAHIM MUSA. Peaceful Protest. Faculty of Law, KASU. 9am. Dress Black. No Violence.

It was supposed to be peaceful. That is what they always say.

I wore black. Black abaya, black veil. I tied my sneakers tight. I put my power bank, my ID card, and my phone in my small bag. I put a small bottle of water and handkerchief soaked in vinegar — someone on Twitter said it helps for tear gas. I did not believe it, but I carried it.

My father called me at 7:30am.

"Zainab, where are you?"

"I dey hostel, Baba," I lied. I was already at the faculty gate.

"Good. Don't go anywhere today. There is intel that today's protest will be hijacked. Stay in your hostel. You hear me?"

"Yes, Baba."

He cut the call. He knew I was lying. I knew he knew.

At the faculty gate, about 200 students were gathered. Some wore black, some wore white. Some carried placards: END POLICE BRUTALITY, WE ARE LAWYERS NOT CULTISTS, IBRAHIM DID NOT DESERVE TO DIE. The Law Clinic guys were trying to organize us into lines. The SUG President, a tall guy in his final year, was shouting with a megaphone that was not working.

"Comrades! Today we walk peacefully! No stone! No insult to police! We are law students! We know our rights!"

We started walking from KASU main gate towards Independence Way, to go to Sir Kashim Ibrahim House. The road is long. The sun was already hot, even though it was 9am. Kaduna sun does not respect peaceful protest.

People were joining us on the way. Bike men stopped and watched. Market women shouted, "Na true o, dem kill person for Barnawa!" Some boys from other faculties joined. Some were not even students — just area boys who like protest because they can shout.

I was in the middle, filming with my phone. I was doing Instagram Live. My voice was shaking.

"Good morning, we are here at KASU, we are protesting the extrajudicial killing of Ibrahim Musa, a 400 Level law student who was executed yesterday by police at Barnawa..."

At first, police were just following us. Two Hilux vans, with officers in black, holding rifles but not pointing. They were calm. One even waved at us to keep to one side of the road.

Everything was fine until we reached near Command Secondary School junction.

A police van blocked the road ahead.

An officer came down with a loudspeaker. "You people should stop there! You have no permit to protest! Disperse now! This is an unlawful gathering!"

The SUG President tried to talk. "Oga, we have written to the Commissioner! We have right under Section 40—"

"Section 40 my foot! Disperse now or we will use force!"

That was the moment everything changed.

One student shouted, "We no go gree o!" Another shouted, "You kill Ibrahim, you wan kill us too?"

Someone threw a pure water sachet. It did not even reach the police. But it was enough.

The officer shouted, "Fire!"

Not bullets. Thank God, not bullets. Tear gas.

The first canister landed right in front of us. Pssshh! White smoke burst out. People started coughing, running.

"Everybody down! Everybody down!" someone shouted.

I tried to run but my veil tangled. My eyes started burning. That smoke is not ordinary smoke. It enters your eye, your nose, your throat at the same time. You cannot breathe. You cannot see. I was coughing, my chest tight.

I fell. My phone fell. People were running over me. I thought I would die there, trampled.

Second canister. Third. They were firing into the crowd, not up. That is against the rules. Even in police manual, you fire tear gas up, not directly at people.

A canister rolled and stopped two inches from my head. It was hot, hissing.

I could not move. My legs were gone.

Then a hand grabbed my arm. Strong hand. Pulled me up.

"Stand up! Run this way!" A male voice. Not familiar.

He dragged me into a small street by the side. Away from the smoke. He pulled me behind a shop where a woman was selling akara.

I was coughing, tears everywhere, snot everywhere. Very embarrassing.

He gave me water. "Wash your face! Quick!"

I washed. My eyes were red. I looked up to thank him.

He was wearing black too, but not student black. He wore a face cap low, and a nose mask. Tall. Light skin. I could not see his face well.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yes," I croaked. "Thank you."

"Don't go back there. They are beating people now. They brought batons."

I could hear shouting from the main road. Screams. The sound of baton hitting.

"Who are you?" I asked. "Are you from Law?"

He did not answer. He looked towards the main road, then looked at me again. He said, "Tell your father DSP Suleiman that Cell 3 is full."

My blood froze.

Cell 3. The same Cell 3 that BabanLauje_00 mentioned. The place where they mark people.

"What? How—" I started.

But he was already gone. He walked fast into the crowd of people running and disappeared. I tried to follow but my eyes were still blurry and my legs were shaking.

I found my phone on the ground, screen cracked. But still working. My Live had ended. 34 people watched.

I ran back to school through back streets, with other students. Some were bleeding from baton hits. One girl's wrapper was torn. The SUG President was shouting, "They attacked us! Peaceful protest!"

By 11am, we were back in school. School management announced immediate closure. "All students should vacate campus till further notice."

I went straight to my father's house. I was still in black, smelling of tear gas and sweat.

My father was in uniform, about to go out. When he saw me, his face changed.

"Zainab! I told you not to go! Look at you! Look at what you did!" He was angry but also relieved.

"Baba, they fired tear gas at us. Directly. They beat us. We were peaceful."

"I know," he said quietly. "I told them not to. The order came from above. Not from me."

"Baba, who is Adeyemi Ogunlade?" I asked suddenly.

He stopped buttoning his uniform. He stared at me.

"Where did you hear that name?" His voice was very low.

I swallowed. "I heard people mention him. That he is involved in this cult thing."

My father walked to the door and locked it. He pulled me to his study. He closed the door.

"Zainab, I will tell you once. Stop mentioning that name. In this house, in school, anywhere. That man is not a lecturer alone. He is a dangerous man. He has boys everywhere. In police, in school, in government. If you put your mouth, they will make you disappear and I cannot save you. Do you understand me?"

"But Baba, they killed Ibrahim—"

"I know who killed Ibrahim! I know! But you cannot fight them with placard and Instagram Live! You will only die!"

He was shaking. My father, DSP with 23 years, was shaking.

I started crying. Not because of protest. Because of fear.

"Baba, today someone saved me at the protest. He told me to tell you that Cell 3 is full."

My father's face turned white. Like paper.

He sat down slowly on his chair.

"Where is that boy? Where is he now?"

"He disappeared, Baba. I don't know him."

My father put his head in his hands. For a long time, he said nothing. Then he said in Hausa, "Sun fara. They have started."

I wanted to ask what he meant, but he stood up.

"Go to your mother's room. Stay there. Don't go out. Don't use your phone to post anything today. Please, Zainab. For once, listen to your father."

I went out.

In the evening, around 7pm, I was in my mother's room, watching TV with her. NTA was showing a press briefing.

And there he was.

Dr. Adeyemi Ogunlade. In agbada, clean shave, smiling, sitting beside the Commissioner of Police and the SSG. He was not looking like a cultist. He was looking like a statesman.

The caption: Security Stakeholder Meeting on Campus Cultism.

He was speaking.

"My heart goes out to the family of the young man who lost his life in Barnawa. But we must be clear. Preliminary investigations show that the deceased was involved in cult-related activities and a land grabbing syndicate in Television area. His death, though unfortunate, happened during a gun duel. We must not allow students to be used by opposition to cause chaos. What we saw today in the protest was cultists hijacking a peaceful gathering to attack our gallant police officers..."

I sat up.

Land grabbing syndicate in Television area. Gun duel. Cultists hijacking protest.

Those were details that were not in public. Police had not released any official statement with that much detail. The only people who knew about the land issue were people close to the station. People like BabanLauje_00.

How did Dr. Adeyemi know all that? How did he know that protest would be hijacked, when even we did not know police would attack us?

He was not condemning the killing. He was writing the script. The same script they used for Lukman in Sokoto. Suspected cultist. Armed robber. Land matter.

He was on TV, using his position to label Ibrahim a cultist after killing him.

My phone buzzed. Session messenger. Message from Umar.

We saw news. Are you okay? Did you go for protest?

I replied: I went. They attacked us. And I just saw Adeyemi Ogunlade on TV. He knows everything. He is the one.

Blessing replied immediately: Omo, that man na devil. Tunde just told me today that he is travelling to Kaduna tomorrow for "clearance".

Clearance for what?

Tomorrow was Saturday. Our meeting day. 10am. Barnawa Lodge.

Umar: Then we meet tomorrow as planned. No fear. We have to.

I looked at the TV again. Adeyemi was still smiling. Calling for calm. Calling for students to respect the rule of law.

And I realized the most dangerous cultists are not the ones with tattoos in the bush.

They are the ones wearing agbada on NTA, calling for calm after they ordered a killing.
***
ABEG NAIRALANDERS, THIS PROTEST DON CAST!

Zainab go protest peacefully, police fire tear gas for her face, almost kill her with canister.

One stranger wey she no know pull her comot for death, whisper "Tell your father DSP Suleiman that Cell 3 is full" - then disappear like ghost!

Who be that stranger? Police? Cult? Or inside person wey don tire?

And now Dr. Adeyemi Ogunlade don show face for NTA, dey call Ibrahim "cultist" and "land grabber" - SAME script wey dem use for Lukman for Sokoto!

Na him dey write the story even before police release statement. How e take know?

Question for una:

If Adeyemi get power to order killing for Kaduna, order marking for Benin, and still sit down for TV beside Commissioner dey call for "calm" - who go stop am?

And that black SUV wey snap Umar for Sokoto - na Adeyemi boys?

Oya drop your theory. Who be the stranger wey save Zainab? Make I know who sharp for here.

Chapter 7 go drop tomorrow 9pm if we reach 100 comments. I no dey joke this time. No comment, no chapter.

If you never read from Chapter 1, link dey first page.

Ch. 5 — The First Contact
POV: Umar

The video did not delete itself properly.

BabanLauje_00 thought he deleted everything when he deleted his account on Gaskiya. But people who use Tor and think they are smart always forget one thing — the metadata.

I had been running Gaskiya for nine months. I built it myself after watching YouTube tutorials for three weeks. I am not a hacker. I am just a Biochemistry graduate with too much time and a missing brother. But I knew how to log IP addresses. Even if the user is on Tor, sometimes the browser leaks. Especially if they post from a public computer that has not been configured well.

When BabanLauje_00 posted that second-angle video, my small log script captured something. It was not his real IP. It was an internal IP from a university proxy. And the file name of the video was not renamed.

UNIBEN_ICT_Lab3_PC14_BARN_02_08_26.mp4

UNIBEN. University of Benin. ICT Lab 3.

The cleaner who said he worked in Barnawa, Kaduna, posted from a computer lab in Benin. Why?

Either he lied about being a cleaner in Kaduna, or he travelled to Benin, or — and this is what my mind told me — the video was moved. Someone recorded it in Kaduna, sent it to someone in Benin, and that person in Benin posted it on my forum.

Three states. One oath. The message was already telling me it is a network.

I did not sleep after that night. I took the names from my whiteboard and started searching. I needed to find other people who saw the symbol.

I searched Twitter, Nairaland, Facebook, for "wrist symbol Kaduna boy", "circle three lines mark police", "Ibrahim Musa wrist."

Most results were noise. People arguing about EndSARS, people posting fake news.

But two results stood out.

One: On Nairaland, a story titled The Campus Oath by Frankcallys. Chapter 3. A girl named Blessing in Benin. Her boyfriend Tunde. A photo with a police officer who had the same wrist mark. The comments were full of people arguing. The writer was describing my exact symbol. I knew it was not fiction. Or if it was fiction, the writer knew something.

Two: On Twitter, a thread by a girl. @Zee_Law_ Kaduna. She had posted: "I knew him. He was in my faculty. I saw something on his wrist but I did not tell anyone." Then she deleted it. But someone had quoted it before she deleted. I found the quote.

Zee_Law. Zainab. Law. Kaduna.

I have a way of finding people. Not hacking. Just OSINT. Open Source Intelligence. You leave traces everywhere. Matric number in bio, faculty WhatsApp group link in your tweet, your Facebook that you forgot to lock.

Within three hours, I found Zainab. Zainab Suleiman, 300L Law, Kaduna State University. Daughter of a policeman. That explains how she got close to the case.

And I found Blessing. Blessing Osagie, 300L Accounting, UNIBEN. Her boyfriend is Tunde Okonkwo. The same name I saw on DSP's list? No, I had not seen the list yet. At that time, I only knew Tunde as boyfriend.

I did not know if they were real or if they would answer. But I had to try.

I created two new accounts. ProtonMail. No phone number.

First email to Zainab, through her faculty email I found on a moot court flyer:

Subject: Ibrahim Musa - You saw his wrist

Zainab, my name is Umar. My younger brother Lukman disappeared in Sokoto last November. He had the same mark as Ibrahim on his wrist. I run an anonymous forum that documents these disappearances. I have a second-angle video of Ibrahim's killing that was posted from UNIBEN. I think you know more. I think you are in danger if you keep it to yourself. Can we talk? Securely? - U

Second email to Blessing, through her business Instagram where she sells hair:

Subject: Your story - Tunde and the wrist mark

Blessing, I read your thread/story about Tunde and the photo with police and lecturer. That mark you described is real. My brother had it. The boy killed in Kaduna had it. I think Tunde is involved in something big. Three states. I have evidence linking UNIBEN to Kaduna. Are you safe? Can we talk? Please don't tell Tunde you got this message. - U

I sent them at 11:34pm.

I did not expect reply that night. Sokoto was dark. Light was off. My mother was praying Tahajjud in the next room.

At 12:07am, Zainab replied.

Who are you? How did you get my school email? Are you police?

I replied: I am not police. I am a brother to a missing boy. Check your hidden folder. Does the mark look like a circle with three bent lines?

At 12:19am, she replied: Yes.

At 12:22am, Blessing replied on Instagram: Omo, who you be? How you take know about Tunde? You dey stalk me? Delete this message abeg. I no wan put for trouble.

I replied to Blessing: I am not stalking you. I saw your post on Nairaland. Your boyfriend is on a list I am investigating. There is a man called Adeyemi Ogunlade. Is Tunde close to him?

She read it and did not reply for 30 minutes. Then: How you know that name?

That was all I needed. She knew Adeyemi Ogunlade.

By 2am, I had both of them in a single encrypted group on Session messenger. No phone numbers. Just IDs.

Zainab: I found a list in my father's study. He is police. He has names. Ibrahim is on it. Marked DECEASED - REFUSED. There is a name circled in red: Adeyemi Ogunlade.

Blessing: Jesus. That's the lecturer in Tunde's photo. The one in agbada.

Umar: My brother Lukman is on that list too. MISSING - REFUSED.

That night, we put it together.

Zainab had the police side. Blessing had the campus enforcer side. I had the missing students and the network map.

It was the same thing. They call it marking. If you refuse to swear their oath, they waste you. If you agree, you become enforcer. Like Tunde.

Zainab typed: My father said it is linked to Govt House. That means politics. Election is near. They need boys to do their dirty work.

Blessing: Na why Tunde dey always get money. He no dey work but he get new iPhone. He say na from him uncle.

I said: We need to meet. Not online. Physically. Kaduna is neutral ground. Not Sokoto, not Benin. Zainab is in Kaduna already. Blessing, can you travel?

Blessing: Travel go Kaduna? My mama go kill me. And Tunde dey monitor me. Since I see that photo, he dey call me every hour.

Zainab: I can arrange a place. My aunt has a small lodge in Barnawa. No one knows. We can meet there Saturday.

Saturday. Four days from now.

We agreed. Saturday, 10am. Barnawa Lodge. Room 5. Zainab would book it.

After we agreed, Blessing left the group. She said she would delete Session from her phone and reinstall only on Saturday morning so Tunde would not see it.

Zainab stayed small.

Zainab: Umar, are you sure we should do this? My father warned me. He said this is bigger than us.

Me: My brother has been missing for 9 months. If we don't do it, who will?

She did not reply. She left.

I shut my laptop. My power bank was dead. The room was completely dark and hot. I lay on my mat and tried to sleep. For the first time since Lukman disappeared, I felt like I was not alone in this madness.

Morning came. Friday. A day before the meeting.

I needed to buy data and print some of the evidence to take to Kaduna. I left my hostel in Arkilla around 8am, wearing my faded blue shirt and slippers. I had my backpack with my laptop and the printed pictures of Lukman and Ibrahim's wrist.

I was about to cross the road to the business center when I heard a car slow down behind me.

Not normal slow. That kind of slow that makes you feel someone is watching you.

A black SUV. Toyota Land Cruiser. No plate number in front. Tinted glass.

It crawled beside me.

My heart stopped.

I tried to act normal. I kept walking, looking straight.

The passenger window came down small. Just small. Enough for a phone camera.

A man inside, wearing dark glasses, face cap, pointed his phone at me. Click. He took my photo. No hiding. Openly.

Then he said in Hausa, but loud enough for me to hear, "An gane ka." We have identified you.

And the SUV sped off. Fast. It splashed gutter water on my slippers.

I stood there on that Sokoto road, my backpack heavy, my slippers wet, and my whole body shaking.

They knew me. They knew where I lived. They knew my face.

I ran back to my hostel. I locked my door. I checked my windows.

I opened Session. I wanted to tell Zainab and Blessing that we have been compromised. That we should cancel.

But then I thought: if they already took my photo today, cancelling the meeting will not save me. It will only mean Lukman and Ibrahim died for nothing.

I typed instead:

See you tomorrow. 10am. Don't be late. And don't tell anyone you are coming.

I turned off my phone. I put my laptop under my bed. I sat on the floor with my back against the door, like they do in movies, and waited for Saturday morning.

The SUV did not come back that day.

But I knew it would.

Ch. 4 — Father's Warning
POV: Zainab

I did not plan to go home.

After the video, after seeing that symbol on Ibrahim's wrist, I could not stay in the hostel. Aisha and Ese were arguing about Indomie and police brutality like it was a debate topic. I needed somewhere quiet. So I entered a Keke from Unguwar Dosa to Malali, to my father's house.

My father is not just my father. He is DSP Ibrahim Suleiman. Kaduna State Police Command. He has been in the police for 23 years. At home, we don't call him DSP. We call him Baba. But in town, everybody knows him as Sule. He is the kind of policeman people still respect because he does not take bribe openly.

I grew up in the barracks before we moved to Malali. I know how police talk. I know when they are hiding something.

I met him in the living room. He was watching NTA News. The same video was playing, but blurred. NTA was calling it "the unfortunate Barnawa incident."

"Baba, good evening sir," I said. I removed my shoes at the door.

He looked at me. He did not smile. "Zainab. You came. Your mother said you did not come last weekend."

"I was reading for test, Baba."

He muted the TV. "You have seen it?"

He did not need to say what "it" was. Everybody had seen it.

"Yes, Baba. Na my faculty mate. Ibrahim Musa. 400 Level."

My father kept his face straight. That is his police face. No emotion. He nodded slowly. "I know. I have seen the file. It is a very sad case."

"File?" I sat down opposite him. "Baba, that video, is it true? Did your people kill him just like that? For land matter?"

He looked at me sharply. "Zainab! What kind of question is that? Your people? I am not 'your people.' I am a police officer. And you don't ask me about an ongoing investigation like you are on Twitter."

His voice was low but hard. My mother, who was coming from the kitchen with tea, stopped at the doorway.

"Baba, I'm sorry, but—" I tried to be calm. "Everybody is saying different things. Some say he is a cultist, some say armed robber. But I know him, Baba. He is not cultist. He is in Law. He is always in mosque."

My father sighed. He rubbed his face. He suddenly looked very tired. Very old.

"Zainab, listen to me because I am your father. Not because I am police," he said. "Some boys, they get involved in dangerous things. Things bigger than law. Things you in university will not understand. This Ibrahim... he was involved in dangerous things."

That word again. Dangerous things.

"What dangerous things, Baba? Tell me. If he did something wrong, why not take him to court? Why shoot him on the road like a dog?"

"ZAINAB!" He shouted. My mother flinched.

"I said don't ask me about this case! You want to put my job in trouble? You want them to query me because my daughter is doing activist on social media? I am warning you. Stay away from this matter. Don't post anything. Don't go for any protest. You hear me? Just face your book and graduate. Let me handle it."

He never shouts at me. Never. Even when I failed JAMB first time, he did not shout. So when he shouted now, I knew it was not anger. It was fear.

I kept quiet.

My mother dropped the tea and said in Hausa, "Sule, easy, she is your daughter. She knows the boy."

My father stood up and went to his study. He slammed the door. Not too hard, but enough to say the conversation was over.

I sat in the living room with my mother. She whispered, "Your father has not slept since yesterday. They called him from headquarters. This case is big, Zainab. Bigger than that one boy. Please, do as he says."

But I could not. Because when my father said "dangerous things," his eyes shifted. Like he was not talking about Ibrahim. Like he was talking about something he had seen.

I waited until 9pm. My father came out of his study to pray Isha. He went to the bathroom for ablution. His study door was open small.

I know I should not have entered. I know it is wrong to enter your father's study without permission. In our house, his study is like a police station. No one enters except my mother when she is cleaning.

But my legs carried me.

His study is small. One table, two chairs, shelves full of law books and police manuals. On his table, there were files. Many files. I saw one with red writing: CONFIDENTIAL - OPERATION CLEAN CAMPUS - NORTH WEST COMMAND.

My heart beat fast.

I opened it.

Inside, there were printed sheets. List of names. With matric numbers, schools, states, phone numbers. And photos stapled. Small passport photos.

I saw Ibrahim Musa. LAW/2019/078. UDUS? No, Kaduna State University. Photo attached. Status written with biro: DECEASED - 25/08/26 - REFUSED.

Refused what?

Next to him: Lukman Umar. BIO/2022/011. Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. Status: MISSING - 15/11/25 - REFUSED.

Next: Tunde Okonkwo. ENG/2020/094. University of Benin. Status: ACTIVE - ENFORCER - MARKED.

Enforcer.

I flipped more. There were about 30 names. From Sokoto, Zamfara, Kaduna, Kano, Benin. All students. Some marked ACTIVE, some MISSING, some DECEASED, some INITIATED.

And on the first page, there was a name circled in red, with three underlines. Like my father was focusing on him.

Adeyemi Ogunlade.

No matric number. No school. Occupation: Lecturer / Political Mobilizer / Coordinator.

Under it, my father had written in his own handwriting: Sponsor? Link to Govt House? Protected.

I heard the toilet flush. My father was finishing wudu.

I quickly brought out my phone. I snapped the list. Snap, snap, snap. Three pictures. Flash off.

I arranged the file exactly as I saw it. Exactly.

I ran out of the study and sat back on the sofa, my chest doing gbim gbim gbim.

My father came out, wearing his jalabia for prayer. He looked at me.

"You still here?" he asked.

"Baba, I want to sleep here today. Hostel no get light," I said. My voice was shaking small.

He looked at my eyes, then at his study door. I thought he knew. For a second I thought he would slap me.

He just said, "Okay. Tell your mother to make room for you."

He went to pray.

I went to the guest room and locked the door. I opened my phone. I zoomed the pictures.

Adeyemi Ogunlade. That name sounded familiar. Not from Kaduna. From somewhere else.

I searched on Google. Network was slow.

First result: Dr. Adeyemi Ogunlade, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, University of Benin. Former Special Adviser on Youth Matters.

University of Benin.

Same school as Tunde Okonkwo, the Enforcer.

And suddenly, all the states were connecting. Sokoto boy - Lukman Umar - missing. Kaduna boy - Ibrahim Musa - dead. Benin boy - Tunde Okonkwo - active enforcer.

Three states. One list. One coordinator.

I remembered the second video I saw on a blog today — the one from a cleaner who claimed he saw the killing from behind. He said something before his account disappeared. Someone posted his last message on Twitter: "This is only the first. Three states. One oath."

Three states. One oath. One coordinator.

My father knows. My father knows who Adeyemi Ogunlade is. He wrote "Protected" and "Link to Govt House." That means he knows they cannot touch him easily because government is protecting him.

And he told me to stay away. Not because he wants to protect the police. But because he wants to protect me from these people.

I sat on the bed in my father's house, in the same house where I grew up hearing "police is your friend," and I realized my father is afraid of the same people who killed my faculty mate.

He is a DSP. With 23 years in service. And he is afraid.

What does that mean for me, a 300 Level law student with no power?

I looked at the picture of the list again. Ibrahim's face stapled there. Smiling passport photo. He was alive when that photo was taken.

And beside his name: REFUSED.

He refused to swear. Like Lukman.

What oath did they want him to swear that made them kill him in broad daylight?

I sent a message to Fatima: "Fatima, if anything happen to me, check my hidden folder. Password na my matric number."

Then I deleted the chat.

I did not sleep. I could hear my father walking in his room. Up and down. He was not sleeping either.

For the first time in my life, I felt that my father, the policeman, could not protect me.

@Frankcallys you get mind o! Na that option B be the most dangerous but na e go give her power.

If Blessing pretend like she see nothing, she fit follow Tunde go inside the inner circle and see who be the real "Oga Sule" and wetin that marking really mean.

But question be say - if she stay too long, she fit become marked herself?

I like your way. You be like person wey go survive for this kind story. 👀

Chapter 4 go show if Blessing get that kind mind.

Chapter 19: The Weight of a Promise

I did not sleep.

The night passed in fragments—Veras's deadline ticking in my skull, Ivy's portrait still burning behind my eyes, the promise I had made pressing against my ribs. When the first grey light seeped through the curtains, I gave up on rest and dressed in the dark.

The campus was empty at dawn. Frost crusted the grass. My boots left dark prints on the cobblestones as I walked without direction, past the music hall and the overgrown garden, past the chapel where the stone pulsed its endless, patient rhythm. I had not eaten. I had not fed. The hunger was a dull ache at the base of my throat, familiar and ignorable.

I stopped at the edge of the eastern quad and pressed my palm against the cold stone of the colonnade. The world tilted, just slightly. I closed my eyes and forced my breathing to slow.

"You look terrible."

I opened my eyes. Kael Mercer stood at the corner of the colonnade, a book tucked under his arm, his coat collar turned up against the cold. His grey eyes moved over my face with that quiet, assessing directness I had come to recognise.

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome." He stepped closer. "You look like you've been awake for days."

"Perhaps I have."

"Have you eaten?"

"I am not hungry."

"That's not what I asked."

I said nothing. He studied me for a moment longer, then shifted the book under his arm. "There's a cart near the east gate. The coffee is terrible, but it's hot. You look like you could use terrible coffee."

"I do not drink coffee."

"Then you can hold the cup. It'll keep your hands warm." He turned and began walking toward the east gate. He did not look back to see if I was following. "Terrible coffee builds character."

"I have enough character."

"Then I'll drink yours too."

The corner of my mouth moved before I realised it. I followed.

---

The coffee cart was a battered wooden stall run by a woman who had been serving students for thirty years and had long since stopped making conversation. Kael ordered two cups. He handed one to me and kept the other for himself. The steam curled between us.

We walked. No destination. Just movement. The campus was stirring now—early risers, groundskeepers, the distant clang of the morning bell. Kael drank his coffee. I held mine. The warmth seeped through the paper cup into my palms.

"You always walk this early?" he asked.

"Only when I cannot think."

"What are you trying not to think about?"

I glanced at him. "You ask very direct questions."

"I'm a history student. Direct questions are the only kind worth asking." He took another sip. "You don't have to answer."

We passed the library, its windows still dark. A grounds-keeper was salting the steps against the frost. Kael nodded to him, and the man nodded back.

"Why do you watch everyone?" I asked.

"Why do you avoid everyone?"

"I asked first."

He considered this. "My father taught me. When I was young, he said the world was divided into hunters and prey. He wanted me to be a hunter. I didn't want that. But I kept the watching. It's useful."

"And what do you see when you watch me?"

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Someone who's always waiting for something bad to happen."

I did not answer. The coffee was growing cold in my hands. A bird launched itself from the chapel roof and wheeled into the grey sky.

"What about you?" he asked. "Why do you avoid people?"

"Because people ask questions."

"Like me."

"Like you."

He almost smiled. "Do you want me to stop?"

I looked at him—at the steady grey eyes, the ink stains on his fingers, the way he walked beside me without demanding anything. "No," I said. "I do not think I do."

---

We stopped at the low stone wall that bordered the old cemetery. The graves here were ancient, their inscriptions worn smooth by centuries of rain. Kael set his empty cup on the wall and turned to face me.

"You're carrying something," he said. "I don't know what it is. I'm not asking you to tell me. But whatever it is—you don't have to carry it alone."

I stared at the graves. The names were illegible. The dead had no more secrets to keep.

"I made a promise," I said. "To someone. That I would come back. And I am not certain I can keep it."

"Why not?"

"Because there are forces moving that I cannot control. People who want things from me that I am not willing to give. And if I make the wrong choice—" I stopped. The words would not come.

Kael waited.

"I have never had someone waiting for me before," I said. "I do not know how to carry that."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he reached up and unclasped something from around his neck. It was a thin silver chain with a small pendant—a simple circle, unadorned, worn smooth by years of wear.

"My grandmother gave me this," he said. "She told me it was for protection. I don't know if it works. But I've carried it for fifteen years, and I'm still here." He held it out. "Keep it if you need it."

I looked at the pendant. At his outstretched hand. The silver glinted in the pale morning light.

Then I reached out and gently closed his fingers around it.

"It has protected you for fifteen years," I said. "It should remain with you."

He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded and clasped the chain back around his neck. The pendant settled against his chest, and he tucked it beneath his shirt without a word.

"I do not understand you," I said.

"You don't have to."

He turned and began walking back toward the campus. I followed.

---

He walked me to my door. The morning had fully broken now, pale sunlight spilling across the quad. Students were beginning to fill the paths, their voices bright with the ordinary concerns of ordinary lives.

"You didn't have to stay," I said.

"I know."

He didn't say anything else. He simply nodded once and walked away, his hands in his pockets, his coat collar still turned up against the cold. I watched him until he disappeared around the corner of the music hall.

I stood there longer than I should have.

"No one had ever stayed simply because they wanted to. I stood at the door for a long moment, trying to understand why that mattered."
---

CHAPTER 18 — THE RIVER

David barely slept.

The previous night's discoveries were spread across his notebook in his own handwriting, messy from writing them at 2 a.m. after Tunde had fallen asleep on the other bed.

ADA NWOSU — ID PLATE FOUND
U. EKE — MALE PATIENT — BURIED IN GRAVE 47
CHINEDU OKORO — ROOM 13 BEFORE ME — DISAPPEARED
11:42 P.M. — SAME TIME ON EVERYTHING
DR. ANYA — CLINIC / ADMINISTRATION — KNEW BOTH?
ROOM 13 — AVAILABLE

Tunde was snoring lightly. The fan turned.

David went through the photographs of Chinedu's notebook again on Tunde's phone. He had asked Tunde to send all of them to him.

One phrase kept bothering him more than the grave.

THE RECORDS AREN'T BEING DESTROYED. THEY'RE BEING MOVED.

That was what Chinedu had written after crossing out three other theories.

If they were being moved, where? Not within the clinic. He had searched the archive. The registers had pages cut out, not moved.

Then he remembered something from Ada's diary that he had previously treated as insignificant because it sounded like a random observation.

A repeated reference to water.

Not the supernatural water from the hostel stories, the drip under the bed, the footprints. Actual water. Mud. Vehicles.

Ada had written: Heard vehicles near old clinic again, near back side, tyres muddy. Footprints leading toward rear side of campus, not toward gate.

David searched his own photographs of her diary pages, zooming in.

He found another line he had skipped, on September 9: If they move anything from clinic after midnight, they don't use front road. The river road is easier. Water side.

He sat up.

"Tunde. Tunde."

Tunde sat up, half asleep. "Wetin?"

"We no go clinic first."

Tunde rubbed his eyes. "Then where?"

David turned the phone toward him, showing Ada's line about river road.

"The river."

---

Tunde was skeptical. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the photo.

"Why Ada go get anything to do with river? Na nurse, no be fisherwoman."

David explained that he had been reading her notes differently since Grave 47. Ada wasn't just documenting missing patients. She was documenting movement. How things were moved around campus without being seen.

Vehicles that came after midnight. Times. Footprints. Locations where staff could move without passing the main gate where security asked for a pass.

The river road was one of them. It was behind the clinic, behind the mortuary, leading away from the main road.

Tunde frowned, then remembered something. He scrolled his own phone to Chinedu's notebook.

He showed David a page.

His brother had written in small letters at the bottom: Rear route — water side — no checkpoint.

David immediately connected it.

Ada and Chinedu had both identified the same part of campus, years apart, without knowing each other. Different lives. Different investigations. Same route.

Tunde asked, quieter now:

"You think that's where they took people? Like... bodies?"

David didn't answer directly.

Instead: "I think Ada wanted somebody to look there. She didn't write river road because she liked the view. She wrote it because she saw something using that road."

---

They needed to be sure the road still existed.

Behind the abandoned administration corridor, near the old notice-board cabinet where exam results were once pinned, they found what they were looking for.

An old campus map, laminated but damaged by humidity, from the early 2000s. Several buildings on it had since been demolished or renamed. The new lecture theater wasn't there.

David traced with his finger: Old Clinic. Old Mortuary. Behind them, a narrow dotted road, almost faded, leading toward a body of water marked simply: RIVER CHANNEL.

Tunde looked at it.

"That place still dey? That river no dry?"

David nodded. "The river is still there. Behind botanical garden. But nobody dey go there again because dem close the back gate."

Then David noticed something else on the map, not part of the printed map.

Written faintly in pencil, small, beside the river mark, two letters:

A.N.

David's expression changed. The pencil mark was old, the lead smudged. Someone had marked the river after the map was printed, by hand.

A.N. — Ada Nwosu.

Someone — maybe Ada herself — had marked it.

---

They left campus through the rear route, the one the old cleaners used.

The atmosphere changed quickly. The main campus was noisy with students shouting, generators, music from kiosks.

But the farther they walked along the old tarred road that led behind the clinic, the quieter it became.

Old classrooms with broken windows. Abandoned staff quarters with clotheslines but no clothes. Broken drainage channels full of leaves. Overgrown elephant grass that scratched their legs.

Tunde kept looking behind them.

David noticed.

"You think somebody's following us?"

Tunde shook his head, but not convincingly.

"I don't know. This road... my brother once told me never to use river road after dark. He said if you must pass, pass quick."

At the time, Tunde thought it was another warning to scare him.

Now he wondered whether Chinedu had seen something there and didn't want his younger brother to see it too.

---

They finally reached the river.

It was wider than David expected, maybe fifteen meters across, water slow and brown beneath trees that leaned over it. The bank was muddy, with concrete in places, old.

On the opposite bank were remnants of an old concrete structure, almost collapsed, like a jetty or a small landing.

Tunde pointed.

"That one used to be part of old campus. When I small, I hear say old college use am for practical. Before dem move main campus."

David studied it. A collapsed pathway led from the old clinic direction, through the bush, straight toward the river. Not a proper road anymore, but the shape was there — tyres would have passed there once.

This confirmed Ada's notes. There had been a route connecting the clinic area to the river, avoiding the front gate.

David searched the riverbank, walking slowly.

At first, nothing. Plastic bottles. Old slippers.

Then he noticed something strange.

There were old metal rings embedded in the concrete near the bank, thick iron loops, rusted but solid. Like something had once been tied there. A boat, maybe. Or something heavy that needed to be anchored.

No one would need boat rings for a campus river unless they were moving things across.

---

David took out the diary photographs and compared descriptions.

One sentence caught his attention, from September 10:

If they move anything from the clinic after midnight, they don't use the front road. The water side is easier. No light.

Another line, from September 11:

Saw muddy footprints again, leading from clinic side toward river. Same as before.

David's stomach tightened. Ada wasn't guessing. She had discovered the route and she was documenting its use.

Tunde asked:

"So they used this place to carry things?"

David looked at the river.

"Maybe. Or someone."

Then he noticed footprints.

Fresh ones. Not old. Not his. Not Tunde's. Someone wearing boots, maybe security boots, had recently walked down toward the water, then back up. The mud was still soft.

David crouched.

The footprints stopped near an old concrete drainage opening, a square culvert that drained campus water into the river.

Tunde immediately said, low:

"David..."

David looked up.

Something was tucked inside the opening, pushed back where rain wouldn't wash it away. Wrapped in black nylon.

---

David reached inside. The nylon was wet on the outside but dry inside.

He pulled out a small piece of waterproof plastic, the kind used to protect documents in labs.

Inside was a folded piece of paper, old but protected from water.

David opened it carefully. Tunde leaned over his shoulder.

There were only a few words, written in handwriting he recognized instantly from the diary — neat but hurried, blue biro.
If they take me, follow the water.
David went completely still.

Tunde read it again over his shoulder.

Neither spoke for several seconds.

This changed everything.

Ada knew she was in danger before September 14. She left a deliberate instruction. Not for the school. Not for the police. For whoever eventually found her notes.

David looked across the river, toward the opposite bank.

"She knew," he said quietly. "She knew they would come for her."

---

David searched the area around the drainage opening again, more carefully.

He noticed something metallic caught between rocks near the edge of the river, where water lapped.

At first he thought it was rubbish — a bottle top.

He stepped into the shallow water. Mud sucked at his shoes.

Tunde warned him.

"Guy, leave am. That water no clean."

David reached down. His fingers closed around metal attached to something soft.

He pulled. It was attached to a broken leather strap, rotted and black.

He wiped away mud with his thumb.

Nothing immediately recognizable. Then he turned it over and saw the face.

A small round watch. Old-fashioned nurses' watch that pins to the uniform, not a wristwatch with a big strap. The glass was cracked, spiderwebbed. The metal casing heavily stained green.

David turned it over.

There were initials engraved on the back, small, hand-engraved:

A.N.

His breathing stopped.

Tunde looked at him.

"Ada?"

David didn't answer. He knew. He had seen that style of watch in Ada's staff photo, pinned to her uniform pocket.

---

David cleaned more mud away with his thumb, careful.

The watch face was frozen. The hands stopped. Not moving.

The time:

11:42

David's expression changed completely.

The same time. Again.

11:42.

Ada's disappearance around 11:42.
U. Eke's transfer at 11:42 p.m.
The altered duty register cut at 11:42.
Chinedu's notebook circled 11:42.
And now Ada's own nursing wristwatch, stopped at 11:42.

Tunde whispered:

"No..."

David looked at the cracked glass. The watch wasn't simply evidence that Ada was at the river.

It suggested she was wearing it during whatever happened to her. It stopped when it was damaged, or when water got inside. And someone removed it afterward, or she lost it while trying to escape, and it was washed here.

Or someone kept it and later threw it here.

---

David turned the watch over again. There was something else beneath the dirt on the back.

A tiny inscription, stamped, not engraved.

The nursing school emblem — a small lamp. And beneath it:

A.N. — 2001

David remembered something from Ada's diary. September 5: Lost my watch again near clinic. Matron will shout. Found it later behind store.

She had mentioned losing her watch once before. But she said she had found it.

Which means this watch had disappeared after the final entry in her diary on September 14. Which means someone had possession of it after Ada disappeared.

He asked Tunde:

"You think somebody planted this here for us to find?"

Tunde looked at the river, at the fresh boot prints.

"I think somebody wanted us to find it. Or somebody threw it away and river bring am come."

David looked toward the opposite bank. For the first time, he noticed something beyond the trees on the other side, almost completely hidden by vegetation and vines.

An old structure. Small. Concrete. Flat roof. Windows blocked with wood.

A small building.

---

David zoomed in with his phone camera.

The building had a faded sign above the door. Most letters were gone, paint peeled.

But one word remained visible, in black stencil:

STORAGE

Tunde remembered Chinedu's notebook instantly.

"The records aren't being destroyed. They're being moved."

David's eyes widened.

"Clinical Storage."

The phrase from U. Eke's transfer document: Transferred from Clinical Storage — 11:42 p.m.

Maybe Clinical Storage wasn't inside the clinic at all. Maybe it was never a room in the main building.

Maybe it was this old building beside the river. The place where records — or something else — could be moved without being seen from the main campus, using the river road Ada documented.

David gripped Ada's watch, now wrapped in his handkerchief. They have found a new location. Not just a river. A building.

---

They prepared to leave the riverbank. David wrapped Ada's watch carefully and put it into his bag, inside the nylon with the note If they take me, follow the water.

Then he heard something.

A metallic sound. Clink. Soft, from water.

He turned.

The river had pushed something against the bank, rolling it in mud.

A small metal object, glinting.

David walked toward it, crouching.

He picked it up.

It was a key. Old, big, iron, with a rusted loop. Attached to the key with thin wire was a faded plastic tag, the kind used for store keys.

Three words were written on it in faded marker, but still readable:

CLINICAL STORAGE

David stared at it.

Tunde stepped beside him.

Neither spoke for several seconds.

Then David looked across the river toward the abandoned storage building. The building had one visible door. And the door had a heavy padlock.

He slowly closed his fist around the key. It was cold.

Behind them, somewhere along the riverbank, up toward the clinic path, a branch snapped. Loud.

Both men turned sharply.

Nothing. Just grass moving.

David looked back at the building across the river.

Then at Ada's wristwatch in his bag.

11:42.

The same time. The same mystery.

But now they had a location.

David had spent days searching for the place where Ada disappeared.

Now he was standing beside the river holding the key to the place she had warned them about.

Clinical Storage.

And for the first time, David wondered whether Ada had left the watch behind deliberately.

Not as proof that she died.

But as proof that she had been there.

And someone had wanted her to be found.

Ch. 3 — Blessing's Boyfriend
POV: Blessing

I did not want to watch the video.

Everybody in my hostel in Benin was watching it. At Ekosodin, if one person shouts "blood of Jesus," you know something has happened. That afternoon, it was the Kaduna video.

My roommate, Ese, was already holding her phone with her mouth open. "Blessing, come see o. Police don kill person again o. For broad daylight."

I was folding my clothes. I just came back from the market at Uselu. I said, "Abeg, I no wan see. My BP dey high already because of this Cost Accounting test."

But Ese brought the phone to my face anyway. "You go see am. Na law student o. Just like us."

So I saw it. The kneeling boy. The police officer. The shot.

I felt my stomach turn. Not because I have not seen such videos before. In UNIBEN, you see things. But because of the way the boy knelt. Like he knew he was going to die and had already accepted it.

"God abeg," I whispered.

Ese said, "Na why I dey tell you make we no waka for night again. This country no safe."

I called Tunde immediately.

Tunde is my boyfriend. Final year, Engineering. Three years together. In UNIBEN, if you see a relationship last more than one semester, you know it is serious. Tunde was serious. Or so I thought.

He picked on the second ring.

"Tunde, you don see the video wey dey circulate? The Kaduna own?"

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, calm, too calm, "Which video?"

"The one where police kill that law student. Ibrahim."

"Oh, that one," he said. He yawned. "I don see am since morning. Na old news na."

Old news? The video just went viral two hours ago. How is it old news?

I ignored it. "E pain me. The boy just kneel like that. Them just waste am."

Tunde said, "Na so e dey happen. If you no get person wey sabi person, police fit kill you for nothing. You know how Naija be."

There was something in his voice. Detached. Like he was reading from a script. Tunde is usually very passionate. If a lecturer fails him, he will talk for one hour about wicked lecturers. But today, about a boy killed like a chicken, he sounded like he was bored.

"Tunde, you sure say you okay? You sound somehow."

"I dey fine. I dey for workshop. We get practical later. I go call you later, okay baby?"

He cut the call before I could say anything.

That was strange.

Later that evening, he came to my hostel. He does that sometimes, buys gala and La Casera and comes to gist. He was wearing his usual black polo and jeans. He smiled, kissed my forehead.

"My babe," he said.

We sat on my bed. Ese gave us space and went to the balcony to press her phone.

I brought up the video again. I don't know why. I wanted to see if he would react normally this time.

"Tunde, I still dey think about that boy. I hear say na because of him papa land. Na true?"

He was scrolling through his own phone. He did not look up. "Land matter fit kill person for North. You know Northerners and land. E dey always bloody."

"But police no suppose kill am na. Na court suppose—"

"Blessing, abeg leave this matter," he cut me off, suddenly sharp. "Why you dey always carry bad news for head? No be you be police PRO. Make we talk better thing."

I was taken aback. Tunde has never spoken to me like that.

"You dey vex?" I asked softly.

He sighed and changed his face immediately. Softened. "No, baby. Sorry. I just tire. Workshop stress me today. Oga for workshop shout for my head. Make we no talk about death abeg. You cook?"

He changed the subject. Just like that.

My friends have always said things about Tunde. "Blessing, you too love that boy. All these UNIBEN boys na cultist." "Blessing, open eye. Engineering boys for UNIBEN get as e be."

I always defended him. Tunde is not like that. Tunde does not keep late nights. Tunde goes to church. Tunde even led prayer in our fellowship once. He is not a cultist.

But that night, when he went to the bathroom to flush, his phone lit up on my bed.

He usually puts password, but that day it was open. Maybe he forgot. The screen showed a WhatsApp message preview.

Oga Sule: The Kaduna boy don cause wahala. Tell our boys to stay low for Benin for now. No marking this week.

Marking.

That word again. I had seen people in the comment section of the viral video using that word. "Check his wrist, they marked him." I did not understand it then.

Marking this week.

My heart started beating fast. I should not have looked. I know it is wrong to check your boyfriend's phone. My mother taught me that. But my hand moved on its own.

I swiped.

The chat was from a contact saved as Oga Sule. No profile picture. The last messages were:

Oga Sule: The Kaduna boy don cause wahala. Tell our boys to stay low for Benin for now. No marking this week.
Tunde: Yes sir. But the Benin chapter don already arrange for 2 for Ekosodin. We go hold am?
Oga Sule: Hold am. After election na. No need to attract eye now.

I scrolled up.

There were more messages. Voice notes. Pictures of boys. List of names. My hand was shaking.

I quickly tapped on his gallery. The most recent photo was taken two days ago. It was Tunde, smiling, his arm around two police officers in black uniform. And a man in the middle wearing senator cap and agbada. I recognized that man immediately. Dr. Akindele. He is a senior lecturer in Political Science. He contested for House of Reps last year. Very popular in UNIBEN. He always comes to talk during SUG week about youth in politics.

All four of them were smiling like they just closed a big deal.

And then I saw it.

On the wrist of one of the police officers — the one on the right — the sleeve of his uniform shifted up a little. And there was a mark. A circle with three bent lines inside it. Dark, like a fresh tattoo but rougher. Like a scar.

The same symbol people were saying they saw on Ibrahim's wrist.

I felt cold water pour on my head.

"Baby, you don see my charger?" Tunde's voice came from the bathroom door.

I dropped the phone like it was fire. It fell on the bed, screen still on.

He walked out, towel in hand, smiling.

He saw my face. Then he saw his phone on the bed, screen on.

His smile vanished. Just like that. Wiped off.

In one fast move, he picked the phone and locked it.

"Wetin you dey do with my phone?" His voice was low now. Not shouting. Low and controlled. That was scarier.

I tried to act normal. My mouth was dry. "Your... your phone light up. I wan check time. Your charger—"

"You dey check my phone?" He stepped closer.

"No," I said, too quickly. "Tunde, no."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he smiled again. But this smile did not reach his eyes.

"Blessing, you know say I love you, abi?"

I nodded.

"You know say I no dey like when you dey listen to all those your hostel girls wey dey talk say every UNIBEN boy na cultist. You know say I no be cultist, abi?"

His hand was on my shoulder now. Squeezing.

"Yes," I whispered. "I know."

"Good," he said. "Because if you start to believe those stupid gist for Twitter about marking and symbol, you go just dey give yourself headache. That Kaduna boy na armed robber. Police do their work. Simple. No put your mouth."

He kissed my forehead again. His lips were cold.

"And Blessing," he said near my ear, "no ever touch my phone again. If you get question, ask me directly. You hear me?"

I nodded. Tears were forming but I held them.

He stayed for ten more minutes, talking about his final year project, acting like nothing happened. He even laughed. He ate the gala he brought. Then he left, saying, "Make you lock door. Benin no safe for night."

After he left, Ese came inside.

"Babe, wetin happen? You and Tunde quarrel?"

I did not answer. I went to my corner and opened my own phone. I went to Twitter. I searched for the cropped picture of Ibrahim's wrist that someone had posted.

Circle. Three bent lines.

Same as the officer in Tunde's photo.

My boyfriend, who I have defended for three years. Who prayed in fellowship. Who told me he wants to marry me after NYSC.

He was in a picture with a police officer who had the same mark as a murdered boy. And his chat said "No marking this week."

What does marking mean? Are they marking people to kill? Or marking people to initiate?

And who is Oga Sule? And what does Dr. Akindele, a respected lecturer and politician, have to do with police officers and my boyfriend?

I sat on my bed and pulled my wrapper tight around me.

For the first time since I started dating Tunde, I was afraid of him.

And I was afraid that if I told anyone — if I told Ese — the next viral video might be from Benin, and the person kneeling might be me.

I did not sleep. I just kept looking at the door, wondering if Tunde would come back because he knew I saw something.

At 2:13 am, my phone buzzed.

It was Tunde.

Tunde: Baby, you sleep? Abeg no vex for how I talk earlier. I love you. Delete that video from your phone. Make you no put yourself for wahala.

How did he know I saved the video? I never told him.

My blood ran cold.

***
NAIRALANDERS, MAKE UNA HELP BLESSING JUDGE THIS MATTER ABEG!

3 years she don dey defend Tunde say "my boyfriend no be cultist, na church boy". Now for him phone she see:
1. Chat - "Oga Sule: No marking this week" 2. Photo with police + big lecturer Dr. Akindele, and one of the officers get the SAME wrist mark wey dem carve for Ibrahim before dem kill am.
And by 2:13am, Tunde text am: "Delete that video from your phone."

HOW HIM TAKE KNOW SAY SHE SAVE AM?

If na you be Blessing, wetin you go do?

A - Japa comot for that relationship that night, go report.
B - Act like say you no see anything, dey gather evidence.
C - Confront am face-to-face.

Drop your answer for comment. No dey ghost this thread.

If this thread enter 50 comments, I go drop Chapter 4 tomorrow by 8pm.

Who else notice say "marking" no be random cult thing, e be like say police dey inside am?

Ch. 2 — The Forum
POV: Umar

My laptop is my office.

I live in a single room in Arkilla, Sokoto. The kind of room where the heat stays even at 9pm. My rechargeable fan has been blowing hot air since morning because NEPA took light. My power bank is at 32%, and I am managing it like it is pure gold.

Outside, you can hear the distant sound of generators and okadas. Inside, it is just me, my whiteboard on the wall, and my laptop.

The whiteboard is where I keep my madness organized. It has a hand-drawn map of North West Nigeria. Sokoto, Zamfara, Kaduna, Kano. Fourteen red pins stuck on it. Each pin is a boy who disappeared.

I started this after my brother vanished.

Lukman. 19. 200 Level Biochemistry, UDUS. He went out to buy suya at Mabera last November and never came back. We went to the police. They told us to wait 48 hours. We waited. We went back.

The DPO did not even look at my mother. He just said, "Your son is a suspected cultist. We have intel that he and his gang were involved in a robbery at Runjin Sambo. He has probably run away."

My mother fainted right there in the station.

Lukman, a cultist? Lukman who was afraid of lizards? Lukman who reminded me to pray? That was the day I knew something was wrong with how they were labeling these boys.

So I created Gaskiya Forum. Gaskiya means truth in Hausa.

It started as a Telegram channel, but I moved it to a private board on Tor. Invite only. Anonymous posting. No real names, no profile pictures. Just people who have lost someone and the police told them the same story: suspected cultist, suspected armed robber, died during a gun duel.

For nine months I have been collecting these cases. All boys. 18 to 24. All students.

Tonight, the whole country is shouting about one case. Kaduna. A video went viral this afternoon — a police officer executing a kneeling student in broad daylight. They said his name is Ibrahim Musa, a law student.

I watched that video five times. Not because I wanted to. Because it looked familiar. The way it was done. The kneeling. The calmness of the officer. It was not rage. It was procedure.

I was trying to archive the video when a notification entered on my forum.

New post in /kaduna/ thread.

Username: BabanLauje_00. Account created 11 minutes ago.

Title: You only saw the front angle. I saw the back.

My chest tightened. I clicked.

There was a video attached. 14MB. The description was short: "Barnawa, Kaduna. Yesterday night. You think it's just one police officer?"

I downloaded it immediately. Data or no data.

I played it.

It was the same killing. The same boy in the white kaftan, kneeling. But this was a different angle. This one was shot from behind the police officer. Closer. You could hear everything clearly.

In the viral video, you could not hear what they were saying. In this one, you could.

The officer said, "You think you know book more than us? You think law will save you?"

The boy on his knees, Ibrahim, his voice was shaking but he was still trying to be a lawyer. "I have the right to call my lawyer. You cannot —"

The officer laughed. "Lawyer? Here? Oga lawyer, let me teach you law today. Section 33... I am the law here."

Then a second voice came from off-camera. Plain clothes. Not police uniform. He said, "Do it quick. Oga is waiting. Mark him first."

Mark him first.

In the video, the officer bent down. He grabbed Ibrahim's right hand. Ibrahim struggled. The officer brought out something sharp, like a small blade, and cut his wrist quickly. Ibrahim screamed.

Then the officer stood up and shot him.

It was not an accidental shooting by a trigger-happy policeman. It was ordered. And there was a step before the killing. The marking.

I paused the video at that moment. I zoomed in. The quality was poor, but I could see blood on his wrist and a pattern — a circle with three bent lines inside it, like claws.

I have seen that symbol before.

My hands started shaking.

I opened my private folder on my laptop. LUQMAN_EVIDENCE. It has about two hundred pictures. The last photos we got from Lukman's phone before he disappeared.

Picture 67. Lukman is holding a bottle of Coke at a suya spot. His wrist is exposed. There is a faint scar there. At the time, I thought it was a burn from the suya fire. My mother said the same.

But now, looking at it again, it is not a burn. It is a circle. With three bent lines.

The same symbol.

I went back to the forum. BabanLauje_00 had dropped another comment under his own post.

"Check his right wrist. It's an oath. They are not killing cultists. They are recruiting. If you refuse, they sacrifice you."

I stared at that line for a long time.

I typed fast.

Me (Admin_Umar): @BabanLauje_00 where did you get this video? Were you there? Are you police? How did you get this close angle?

The typing indicator showed. He was typing, then stopped, then started again.

He did not reply on the thread. He replied in my DM. Direct message to Admin.

I opened it.

BabanLauje_00: I am not police. I am a cleaner at that station in Barnawa. I clean the cells at night. They brought him in at 2am. They said he is cult. But he is not cult. He was shouting that it is because of his father's land at Television. They beat him. Then oga called them on phone. Said they should mark him. If he refuses to swear, they should waste him.

I was sweating despite the fan.

I typed: What is mark? What is swear? Which oath?

BabanLauje_00: I don't know. I just hear them talk. They have something they do inside. Inside Cell 3. That's where they mark people. They have done it for many boys. Some agree, they release them but they have changed. Some refuse. Like this one.

My throat was dry. I typed the question that has been sitting in my chest for nine months.

Me: Why are you telling me? Why post it on my forum?

He typed for a long time.

BabanLauje_00: Because I saw your post about Lukman. The boy from UDUS. I cleaned that cell too last year November when they brought boys from Sokoto side. Your brother refused to swear. I was there when they carried him out. I could not talk since. But today when I saw them kill this law boy in broad daylight, I knew they are not hiding again.

The room spun.

My brother refused to swear.

I typed with blurry eyes: Where is my brother? Where is his body?

Two minutes. No reply.

Then a new message came.

BabanLauje_00: This is only the first. Three states. One oath. They will start to show power now. Election is near.

Three states. One oath.

I wrote it in my jotter in capital letters. THREE STATES. ONE OATH.

Before I could reply, a system notification popped up.

User BabanLauje_00 has deleted his account.

I refreshed the page. The thread was gone. The account was gone. Like he never existed.

Only the downloaded video remained in my folder because I was smart enough to save it immediately.

I played it again. I watched the marking again.

I looked at my whiteboard. Fourteen red pins. Now fifteen, with Ibrahim in Kaduna. I took a black marker and connected Sokoto, Zamfara, and Kaduna. It formed a triangle.

I picked up my phone. I have one contact that still picks my calls. DSP Musa Bello (Rtd). He was a friend to my late father. He was the only policeman who believed me when I said Lukman was not a cultist.

I sent him a message: "Sir, good evening sir. Please sir, I have new evidence about Lukman's case and about this Kaduna boy they killed today. Please sir I need to show you something. Very urgent."

He read it immediately. He started typing.

"Bring it to the station tomorrow morning. 9am. Don't post it online yet."

I looked at my laptop again. The video was paused on Ibrahim's wrist.

If they are marking boys who refuse to swear, and they are now killing them in daylight, it means they are no longer afraid.

And if I post this video on Twitter, I might be next.

But if I don't post it, who will speak for Lukman? Who will speak for Ibrahim?

I did not sleep that night. I sat on the floor of my hot room, listening to my mother snore in the next room, listening to my fan make that krr krr sound, and watching that symbol on repeat.

Circle. Three bent lines.

Ch. 1 — The Execution

My phone was already hot before I even unlocked it.

That kind of heat that comes when your data is finishing, your battery is at 14%, and your group chats have gone mad at the same time. I was sitting at the back of Law Library, Second Floor, the one with the faulty AC that only blows hot air and dust. My wig and gown was folded beside me because Moot Court practice had just ended and my feet were killing me inside those small court shoes.

I only wanted to check if Aunty had sent the money for my handout.

Then I saw 147 unread messages on Faculty of Law, 300L WhatsApp group.

"Na true be this?"
"Jesus."
"They have killed him na."
"Kaduna Police again"

I frowned. I clicked the first video. It was 23 seconds. Shaky.

At first I thought it was one of those skits. The ones these yahoo boys do with fake police uniform. Because Kaduna sun was too bright in that video, the kind of bright that makes everything look white. There was a man kneeling on tarred road. His white Kaftan already dirty. Hands behind his back. And standing behind him, a police officer in black. Not even trying to hide his face.

Someone off-camera was shouting, "Oga please! Oga please!" in Hausa mixed with pidgin. "He said he no do am! He no do am!"

The kneeling man looked up once. Just once.

And my stomach dropped.

I knew that face.

I knew that jaw. That small tribal mark by his left eye that looks like a tear. That was Ibrahim.

Ibrahim Musa. 400L. Law. The guy that always sits in front during Jurisprudence and asks Prof questions that make the rest of us look like we didn't read. The guy that was supposed to be called to the Bar next year. The guy that borrowed my Constitutional Law textbook last semester and returned it with notes in the margins finer than the textbook itself.

The video was still playing.

The police officer said something I couldn't hear clearly. Then he lifted his rifle. No warning. No struggle.

He shot him.

Not from far. Close. The back of his head.

I felt the sound even though the video had no clear audio. My earphone fell from my ear.

In the library, someone gasped too. A girl two tables away. So she was watching it at the same time. Everybody was watching it at the same time.

"Zainab? Zainab, you dey okay?" That was Fatima, tapping my shoulder. Fatima was my reading partner since 100L.

I couldn't answer. My mouth was open but nothing was coming out.

On the video, after the shot, the kneeling body fell forward. Just fell. Like bag of rice. The person recording shouted "Walahi! Walahi! You don kill am!" And started running. The video scattered, sky, ground, people shouting, then black.

Then it started auto-playing again. WhatsApp does that wicked thing.

I locked my phone.

Fatima was staring at me. "You know am?"

I nodded. My throat was dry. "Na Ibrahim. For our faculty. Ibrahim Musa."

Fatima covered her mouth. "No. No no no. Not Ibrahim wey dey lead Chambers? No na lie."

I stood up. My legs were shaking. I needed air. Outside the library, the faculty was already scattered. People were standing in small small groups, phones in their hands, faces tight. Nobody was even pretending to read again.

"Na extra-judicial killing na," someone was saying. He was from Law Clinic, one of those too-woke boys. "This one is clear case of Section 33. Right to life. We must protest. SUG must do something."

Another person, "Protest wetin? For Kaduna? You wan make dem kill you join?"

I walked past them. I went to the front of the faculty building where network is better. I opened Twitter. X. Whatever.

It had already blown.

#KadunaExecution was trending number one in Nigeria. The video was everywhere. Some pages had blurred it, some didn't. 200k views in one hour. Quote tweets: "Nigeria police is not reformed." "This country is finished." "Say his name: Ibrahim Musa."

Under one tweet, someone had posted his school ID. Matric No: LAW/2019/078. It was really him.

My hand started sweating.

I called his number. I don't know why. I had his number because we were in same editorial board for The Gavel, our faculty press. The number rang. Once. Twice. Then a strange woman picked.

"Hello? Who is this?" Her voice was crying.

"Ah... ah... is this Ibrahim's number?" I asked, my voice small.

"Who are you? Why are you calling? My son is... my son..." She broke down. She was wailing now. Someone collected the phone from her. A man's voice, heavy Hausa accent. "Please don't call this number again. Please."

He cut the call.

I stood there with my phone in my hand. The sun was hitting my hijab. I felt like vomiting.

"You don confirm am?" Fatima had followed me outside.

I nodded. "Na his mama pick."

Fatima started crying immediately. That loud, open-mouthed cry that Nigerian girls do when grief catches them outside. "Chineke! They killed him like chicken! Like chicken! Ibrahim no dey even fight for class. Him sef dey always talk say police need reform. Now dem don kill am!"

I didn't cry. I don't know why. I just felt cold. Like my blood had left my body.

The faculty officer, Mr. Garba, came out. "All students, please, go back inside. No gathering outside. Management is aware. Please, no protest yet. Let us be calm."

Nobody moved.

Someone shouted from the back, "Calm for what? Dem kill our student like dog and you dey talk calm? Oga you dey mad?"

Mr. Garba looked tired. He just went back inside.

By 3pm, school authority sent a circular. "The University is aware of a disturbing video circulating... The university is in touch with police command... Students should remain calm and not take laws into their own hands..."

Useless.

I went back to my hostel. Off-campus. At Unguwar Dosa. I shared a room with two other girls. They were already inside, watching the video on repeat on someone's small Techno phone.

As soon as I entered, Aisha, my roommate, said, "Zainab, true true na your department?"

I threw my bag on the bed. "Yes."

"Wallahi, Kaduna police don craze finish," she said. "Dem no dey fear God again. See as dem kill am like say na fowl."

I sat on my bed. My laptop was open. My Jurisprudence assignment was still there. Discuss the doctrine of natural justice. I closed it.

I couldn't get the way he fell out of my head. The way his kaftan lifted a little at the back when he dropped.

And then I remembered something. In the video, when he fell, his hand... his hand came out from behind his back for one second. When people tie your hands behind you, and you fall, your hands will shift.

I unlocked my phone again. My battery was now 7%. I needed to see it again. I hated myself for needing to see it again.

I opened the video. I reduced the brightness. I put it on mute this time. I watched.

0:01 - kneeling.
0:07 - looks up.
0:11 - officer lifts rifle.
0:13 - shot.
0:14 - he falls.

I paused at 0:14. Dragged the slider back small small. Frame by frame with my thumb.

There. At 0:14. When he fell forward, his right wrist turned outward.

Something was on his wrist.

At first I thought it was blood. Or injury. But it was too straight. Too deliberate.

I pinched to zoom. The video quality was rubbish, 240p at best. But I could see it. A mark. Not a tattoo. Like a cut. Like someone used razor.

It was carved into his skin. Fresh, because the edges were still dark red. Not healed.

It was a circle with three lines inside it. Like a sun but the lines were not straight. They were bent at the end. Like claws? Or like... I didn't know. I had never seen it before.

I zoomed more. The pixels broke.

Circle. Three bent lines.

My heart started beating fast again. Not like fear. Like something else. Like when you know something you are not supposed to know.

I checked the comments under the Twitter post. Nobody was talking about any symbol. Everybody was talking about police. Police brutality. EndSARS. Government. Nobody mentioned wrist.

Maybe they didn't see it. Or maybe they saw but thought it was wound.

Ibrahim was not a cult boy. That I knew. Ibrahim was the kind of guy that carries Quran in his bag alongside his law books. He was always doing wudu before Zuhr at the faculty mosque. He didn't even argue with girls. He would just say "Ameen, you have a point, Barrister Zainab."

So who carved symbol for him?

And why?

I saved the video to my phone. I did screen record of the paused frame. I cropped it. I put it in my Hidden Photos.

Then I deleted it from my recent. I don't know why I did that. My instinct just said, hide am.

"Zainab, you go eat?" Aisha asked. "I wan cook Indomie."

"I no dey hungry," I said.

My phone buzzed. Faculty group again. Someone posted: "Please any last info about Ibrahim Musa, what happened? People say police catch am for Barnawa last night for cult matter. Na true?"

Another person replied immediately: "No be cult o. My cousin wey dey for police station say dem carry am for midnight because of some land matter for his papa house. Na because he challenge dem na im dem kill am."

Another: "Abeg make una no dey spread fake news. Police say na armed robber."

I read those messages and felt my body become even colder. Armed robber. Cult. Land matter. They were already writing his story for him. Giving reasons why he deserved to die.

I looked at the cropped picture again. The symbol.

I knew if I posted it in the group, they would say I am doing too much. Or they would say it's tattoo. Or they would start another fake gist. Or worse, police would see it and clean it up.

So I said nothing. I locked my phone.

Outside, Kaduna was starting to shout. Far from our hostel, I could hear bike horns, and a siren. The city that was always on edge was about to burst again. And I knew by tomorrow, students would wear black. Would carry placard. Would shout "Justice for Ibrahim." VC would promise investigation. Police PRO would promise "We have arrested the officer, orderly room trial."

And then everyone would forget. Like they always do.

But that symbol on his wrist would not let me forget.

I closed my eyes. I could still see him kneeling. I could still see that last look up. He was not looking at the police officer. He was looking at the person recording. Like he was trying to say something with his eyes.

Like, help me. Or remember me.

I finally cried. Small tears first, then my shoulders started shaking. I pulled my hijab forward to cover my face so my roommates would not see.

Aisha came and sat beside me. She didn't ask anything. She just rubbed my back and said in soft pidgin, "E don do, Zainab. E don do. Na God go judge dem. E don do."

But inside my head, I wasn't thinking about God judging them.

I was thinking: who carved that thing on Ibrahim's wrist before they killed him? And why was I the only one wey see am?

Genre
Nigerian Crime Thriller • University Drama • Mystery • Supernatural Thriller • Romance

THE CAMPUS OATH
They said Ibrahim was a cultist.
Then a video of his execution went viral.
He was on his knees.
A police officer stood over him.
And just before the gun was fired, Ibrahim looked directly into the camera.
Zainab knew him.
He was her coursemate, her friend—and only days earlier, he had warned her that something dangerous was happening on campus.
In Sokoto, Umar Farouk has spent months investigating students who disappeared without a trace. His own younger brother is one of them.
Then an anonymous account sends him another video of Ibrahim's death.
The message attached to it contains only seven words:
“This is only the first. Three states. One oath.”
In Benin, Blessing Ekhator discovers that her boyfriend, Tunde, has been hiding something from her. A photograph on his phone connects him to police officers, a respected university lecturer, and a strange symbol appearing on the wrists of dead students.
Soon, the three strangers are following the same trail.
Kaduna.
Sokoto.
Benin.
Students are disappearing.
Police records are being altered.
Cult groups are being protected by people who are supposed to stop them.
And behind everything stands a respected man named Dr. Adeyemi Ogunlade.
But the deeper Zainab, Umar and Blessing dig, the more they realize they are not investigating a normal criminal organization.
There is an oath.
There is a history.
And something buried beneath Nigeria's university campuses may have been waiting for them long before they were born.
Because some secrets don't die when the people who know them are killed.
They wait for someone else to discover them.

CHAPTER 17 — TUNDE'S SECRET

David came back to the hostel muddy, exhausted, carrying more than just the weight of his bag.

His trousers were stained with grass and damp soil from Grave 47. His shirt clung to his back. In his palm, wrapped in a small piece of nylon so it wouldn't get lost, was Ada's identification plate. ADA NWOSU.

He kept replaying everything as he walked through campus, past students who stared at him.

U. Eke. A man, not Ada, in Ada's supposed grave.
11:42 p.m. — the time cut from the register, written in Ada's diary, printed on a transfer document.
Ada's uniform cloth that wasn't there when the coffin was first buried.
Dr. Anya.

He didn't tell anyone on the way. He pushed open the door to Room 13.

Tunde was already there, sitting on David's bed, scrolling his phone.

He looked up.

"Guy, where you go? You look like person wey fall inside gutter. You miss test?"

David didn't answer immediately. He dropped his bag, brought out the nylon, and placed the identification plate on the reading table.

The metal clinked softly.

Tunde leaned forward to see it. He read the name.

ADA NWOSU.

His expression changed.

Not fear. Not confusion.

Recognition. Quick, like a name he had heard in a house where it wasn't supposed to be spoken again.

David caught it.

"You know this name?"

Tunde looked away fast.

"No. No, I no know."

David studied him. He remembered Chapter 4. All those strange warnings Tunde had given him on his first night in Room 13, the ones he had laughed off as hostel superstition.

"If you see water for corridor for midnight, no follow am."
"After twelve, if you hear something under your bed, no look."
"That room, e get history."

The things that sounded like jokes suddenly didn't sound stupid anymore. They sounded specific.

David asked quietly, "Tunde... how much do you actually know about this room?"

Tunde didn't answer. He picked at his fingernail.

---

David told him what happened at the cemetery. Not everything at first. He started with what was easier to say.

He told him about Grave 47. About the burial register with pages re-stitched. About the empty marker with A.N. carved under it. About the coffin.

Tunde listened silently, elbows on his knees.

When David said, "I opened it," Tunde looked up.

"Inside was not Ada. It was a man. U. Eke. The missing patient from the clinic register. The name Ada wrote in her diary that his card was gone."

He showed him the photo of the transfer document: TRANSFER OF REMAINS — September 15, 2002 — U. EKE — 11:42 p.m.

When David said the time, Tunde's expression changed again. A small flinch around his mouth.

David noticed immediately.

"Why did you react?"

Tunde said, "I didn't."

"You did. When I said 11:42."

Silence in Room 13. The fan turned slowly.

David pushed harder.

"You knew about that time."

Tunde finally admitted, looking at the floor.

"I've heard that time before."

David asked where.

Tunde didn't answer. Instead he asked, with genuine disturbance:

"You opened the grave?"

David nodded.

Tunde looked genuinely disturbed. Not because of a dead body. Because of what David might discover next.

---

David remembered all the things Tunde had told him earlier. The jokes, the stories, the warnings he gave in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

He said, "All those stories you told me. Water in corridor. Noise under bed. Room 13 get history. Where did you learn them?"

Tunde tried to laugh it off. It didn't work.

"Everybody knows them. Hostel gist."

David shook his head.

"No. They don't. Other people for hostel no sabi that kind detail. You knew about the water. You knew about the corridor. You knew this room specifically."

He stepped closer.

"Who told you?"

Tunde finally sat down properly on the chair, not on the bed. His joking personality disappeared completely. He rubbed his face with both hands.

"My brother."

---

This was the emotional center David hadn't expected.

Tunde had an older brother. Chinedu. Older by about seven years.

Chinedu was a student at the same institution years earlier, in the early 2000s. Nursing.

Tunde explained that Chinedu was one of the students who stayed in Room 13. Long before David. Long before the school repainted it.

David was stunned.

"Room 13? Same room?"

Tunde nodded.

"Same room. Same bed position sef."

David looked around. Suddenly the room felt different. Not because it was haunted, but because someone had lived here before him, slept on this same floor, looked out of this same window, and had been connected to the same mystery.

Tunde said his brother used to tell him strange stories whenever he was small. He said the room had a history. He told Tunde never to sleep there if he could avoid it.

"I thought he was just trying to scare me because I was small. Until he stopped joking."

---

Tunde explained that his brother was studying at the college around early 2000s, around the same period Ada was working at the clinic.

He became interested in old clinic records after noticing inconsistencies involving patients. Not because he wanted to be a journalist. Because he noticed that a patient he had escorted to the clinic as part of his practical was never recorded as having arrived.

He wasn't investigating Ada initially. He was looking into missing names.

This connects Chinedu naturally to the conspiracy David is uncovering, not as a rival investigator, but as a predecessor.

Chinedu started visiting the clinic archives after lectures. He asked questions. He spoke to old workers. He became convinced that certain patients were being deliberately removed from records.

Tunde remembered one particular conversation. His brother came home one evening, quiet. He said:

"Something is wrong with that clinic."

Tunde didn't understand, he was in secondary school then.

Chinedu told him:

"People enter that place, but sometimes there is no record that they ever came."

That sentence hit David hard. Because that was exactly what he had discovered — names cut out, burial registers re-sewn, U. Eke vanishing from duty books.

---

Tunde revealed that Chinedu kept notes in Room 13. He wrote at night.

David asked, "What kind of notes?"

Tunde said his brother had a notebook, small, blue cover. He wrote down names. Dates. Times. People he spoke to. And one location appeared repeatedly in his notes:

The old mortuary.

David's mind immediately returned to Ada's diary. Same location. Same pattern. Different investigator, same place.

David asked, "Did he know Ada?"

Tunde hesitated.

"I don't know. He never said he knew her personally. But he knew the name."

David froze.

Tunde explained that Chinedu once mentioned a nurse named Ada while they were eating. He never explained who she was. He only said:

"If something happens to me, don't let them say I ran away."

That line was delivered quietly. Just the realization that someone else, years before David, had been afraid of the exact same lie.

---

David became angry, not because Tunde was lying, but because he had waited.

"You knew all this and you never told me?"

Tunde didn't immediately defend himself. He looked at the identification plate on the table.

He admitted he was scared.

His family had been told that Chinedu abandoned school. One evening he left Room 13 to return a file to the clinic. He was supposed to return the next morning for a test. He never did.

The school said he left without telling anyone. That he probably travelled to Lagos to look for work.

But Tunde never believed it. Because Chinedu had left his things behind. His clothes folded. His books on the table. His documents in his bag. And most importantly — his notebook.

Tunde says he kept the notebook hidden for years at home in a box with his mother's wrapper.

David asked, "Where is it?"

Tunde looked at him.

"At home. In Port Harcourt."

David immediately said, "Why didn't you show me?"

Tunde answered, voice low:

"Because the last person who asked too many questions about my brother disappeared too."

David asked who.

Tunde said it was an old family friend, a senior student who had tried to help the family find out what happened to Chinedu. He went to the admin to ask for Chinedu's file. After that, he stopped coming to their house.

---

Tunde finally pulled out his phone. He had photographs of several pages from Chinedu's old notebook. He had taken them years ago because he was afraid the physical notebook might be lost.

He opened his gallery. He handed the phone to David.

David looked at the screen.

Names. Dates. Locations. Handwriting similar to Ada's — hurried, tired.

Then one page caught his attention. At the top, written in capital letters:

ROOM 13

Underneath, two names, one under the other:

ADA NWOSU
U. EKE

David's breathing slowed.

He looked at Tunde.

"Your brother knew both of them."

Tunde shook his head.

"I don't know if he knew them personally. I think he found their names like you did."

David scrolled further.

There was another line, circled twice:

11:42 P.M.

Now the connection was undeniable. Ada. U. Eke. Chinedu. Room 13. 11:42.

---

One photograph showed a page with several entries crossed out with angry lines. One sentence remained uncrossed at the bottom:

"The records aren't being destroyed. They're being moved."

David understood immediately. The people behind this weren't simply burning files. They were transferring them.

That's why the clinic records have gaps but no ash. That's why the burial register was re-sewn instead of replaced. That's why U. Eke's transfer document said:

CLINICAL STORAGE — 11:42 P.M.

David realized the phrase "Clinical Storage" may not mean a normal storage room. It may have been a coded destination. Or a temporary holding location. Possibly the same underground area behind the mortuary freezer where he found Ada's name badge.

---

David asked quietly, "What happened to your brother? Officially and... what you believe?"

Tunde didn't answer immediately. He told David the official story again — left one evening to return a file, never returned, school said he abandoned studies.

No body. No burial. No official explanation. Just gone, like Ada.

David looked at Tunde.

"And you believe he was killed?"

Tunde shook his head.

"I don't know if he was killed. I know he didn't run away."

Then he said something more important:

"But before he disappeared, he left one message for me."

David asked, "What message?"

Tunde opened an old photograph on his phone. It was a picture of a handwritten note on a torn piece of paper.

Three words were visible:

ROOM 13 — AGAIN.

David stared.

Tunde explained that Chinedu had written it shortly before disappearing and left it inside his textbook. He never explained what "again" meant.

---

David sat silently for a long time.

He looked around Room 13. For the first time, he didn't see a haunted hostel room with wet footprints and knocks.

He saw a place that had repeatedly housed people who started asking questions.

Different people. Different stories. Same clinic. Same records. Same time. Same room.

David realized something even more disturbing: Maybe it was important because someone had deliberately placed certain people there — people who asked too many questions.

He asked Tunde:

"Who assigned your brother to this room?"

Tunde didn't know.

But he remembers something his mother kept — the allocation slip. The room assignments weren't handled by students. They were handled through the administration office. And his brother had specifically requested another room, Room 8, because his friend was there.

His request was rejected. The reason written on the form by the admin officer:

"ROOM 13 AVAILABLE."

That small detail is enough to suggest the room may have been deliberately used as a place to keep an eye on curious students.

---

David opened his own notebook. He wrote slowly:

ADA NWOSU — 2002 — CLINIC — DISAPPEARED AROUND 11:42 P.M.
U. EKE — 11:42 P.M. — RECORD REMOVED — BURIED IN 47
CHINEDU OKORO — ROOM 13 — INVESTIGATED MISSING RECORDS — DISAPPEARED
DAVID — ROOM 13 — 11:42

Then he added, and circled it:

DR. ANYA — CLINIC / ADMINISTRATION

Tunde watched him.

David said:

"Your brother wasn't investigating Room 13."

Tunde looked confused.

David continued:

"He was investigating the people connected to it. The clinic. The records. The administration."

Then David realized something else. Ada's diary had been hidden in the clinic cabinet, Chinedu's notebook was hidden at home, the burial register was altered, the grave was falsified. Someone had spent years making sure every person who got close to the truth became disconnected from the evidence.

But there is one thing they hadn't managed to erase.

People remembered.

Ada remembered and wrote.

Chinedu remembered and wrote.

The caretaker remembered and spoke.

Tunde remembered and hid.

And now David knows.

---

Tunde finally said, after a long silence:

"If you're really going to find out what happened to my brother..."

David looked at him. He closed his notebook.

"I'm not just finding your brother."

He placed Ada's identification plate beside his notebook, next to Tunde's phone showing ROOM 13 — AGAIN.

"I'm finding Ada. And U. Eke. And Chinedu."

Tunde nodded, eyes red.

David looked toward the clinic buildings visible through the hostel window, where a light was still on in the admin block.

Then he said, calmly:

"Tomorrow, we go into the clinic archives again."

Tunde asked, "For what?"

David answered:

"To find out what happened at 11:42. And who authorized Room 13."

Tunde nodded.

For the first time since Chapter 12, David wasn't investigating Ada's disappearance alone.

He looked around Room 13.

For the first time, it didn't look haunted.

It looked deliberate.

A room where the school had placed people who asked too many questions.

CHAPTER 16 — THE FALSE GRAVE

David remained beside the zinc shelter, Ada's identification plate clenched in his hand.

The radio continued playing softly. A low static hymn.

He called out:

"Sir?"

Nothing.

He checked behind the shelter. The space where the cutlass had been was empty. The ground was scuffed.

He looked toward the road leading out of the cemetery, toward the chapel. No caretaker. No figure walking away.

The cutlass was gone too.

David's first thought was that the old man had simply walked away because he had become frightened, because the name Ada Nwosu made him want to disappear.

But something bothered him.

The radio was still on.

The caretaker wouldn't have left it playing. He had turned it down carefully when David approached. He wouldn't leave it in the open where rain could take it.

David looked toward Grave 47.

The overgrown section suddenly felt different. Not quiet in the way a cemetery is quiet. Quiet like someone was listening.

He looked at the number again.

Then at Ada's identification plate in his palm.

ADA NWOSU.

He realized something:

If someone deliberately erased Ada from the burial records, they may have left another record somewhere beneath the grave itself. Not on paper. In the ground.


---

David returned to Grave 47.

He examined the concrete marker more carefully this time. In Chapter 15 he had thought it looked new. Now, kneeling, he was sure.

The cement around it was newer than the surrounding graves. The others were grey and pitted, full of small stones showing. This one was smoother, the sand around its base not yet packed by years of rain.

He pressed his fingers into the loose soil beside it.

The top layer was dry and crusted.

But underneath, the soil was softer. Not naturally soft from roots. Recently disturbed. It gave under his thumb.

He noticed a faint rectangular depression beneath the grass, about six feet long, two feet wide. Not enough to be obvious from a distance. From standing height you would think it was just uneven ground.

But from kneeling, it was clear.

Something large once occupied the space. Something the size of a person.

A coffin.

David's stomach tightened.

He looked around. The cemetery was empty. The caretaker was gone. The radio still played faintly behind him.

He knew he should leave. Take the plate and go back to campus and think.

Instead, he started clearing the grass with his hands.


---

He expected to find a coffin immediately, wood showing through soil.

Instead, he found concrete.

A thin slab had been poured over part of the ground, just under the grass layer. It wasn't thick, maybe two inches, but it was deliberate. It covered the rectangular depression.

It isn't old enough to match the surrounding cemetery. The edges were sharp, not eroded.

He ran his fingers over it. Near one corner was a small metal ring, rusted, set flat into the concrete.

A burial access point. Like the ones used for family vaults.

He hesitated.

Then he pulled.

The slab didn't move.

He tried again, both hands on the ring. Nothing. It was sealed.

He searched around the edge and found a narrow gap where someone had poured cement to deliberately seal it shut. The same pattern again.

He remembered the mortuary basement. The hidden passage behind the freezer. The blood. Ada's name badge. The words on the wall:

DON'T OPEN.

The same pattern again. Someone had spent years closing things. Cabinets. Registers. Passages. Graves.


---

Just as David was about to leave, to go and find something to lever it with, he heard footsteps behind him.

He turned sharply.

The caretaker was standing several metres away, cutlass back in his hand, face pale.

"I told you not to come here."

David stood, dust on his knees.

"You disappeared."

The old man didn't answer. His eyes went to the slab.

David held up Ada's identification plate.

"You know who this belongs to."

The caretaker looked at it.

His expression changed.

Not surprise.

Recognition.

David noticed. The man's lips tightened.

"You knew Ada."

The caretaker looked away, toward the road.

"I knew what they told me."

David stepped closer.

"What did they tell you?"

The old man said nothing.

Then finally, quietly:

"They told me this place was for somebody else."

David froze. He looked at Grave 47, at the fresh cement, at the ring.

"Who?"

The caretaker refused to answer.

Instead, he said, "You need to go before somebody sees you here."

David asked, "Was there a coffin?"

Silence.

That silence was the answer. The caretaker's eyes dropped to the ground.


---

The caretaker finally admitted it, voice low, as if the grass itself might hear.

Years ago, shortly after Ada disappeared, a coffin was brought to the cemetery.

Late at night. He remembered because the radio had been off and the dogs were barking.

No family. No funeral. No priest. No wailing. Just the same white hospital van he described in Chapter 15, reversing without lights to the edge of this overgrown section.

The people who brought it told him the burial was confidential. Institutional matter.

They gave him one instruction:

Do not open the coffin.

David asked, "Was the coffin marked Ada Nwosu?"

The caretaker shook his head.

"No name. No name at all."

David's heart sank.

"Then why Grave 47?"

The caretaker looked toward the marker, the fresh cement.

"Because later, they told me to put the number there. Months later. They said if anybody ask, I should say 47 is old grave. No name."

That meant Grave 47 wasn't originally Ada's grave. It had been an unmarked, confidential burial.

Someone made it look like it was hers later.


---

David looked at the sealed slab.

The caretaker tried to stop him.

"Young man, leave it."

David didn't.

He said, "If there's nothing inside, I'll leave. But if there is..."

He didn't finish.

Together, reluctantly, the caretaker helping only because David would have done it alone, they exposed the sealed section. The caretaker used his cutlass to chip away the thin cement that sealed the ring.

Beneath the concrete was a wooden coffin.

Old. Darkened by moisture and soil. The metal fittings were heavily rusted. The wood swollen.

There was no nameplate. Only a number scratched into one side with a nail, deep and hurried:

47

David's breathing became shallow.

This is it. The grave that was never supposed to exist. The coffin that was never supposed to be opened. The record that was never supposed to be checked.


---

The caretaker backed away a step.

"Young man, leave it."

David didn't. He knelt and removed the rusted fastening. It broke in his hand.

The lid resisted, stuck by mud.

Then slowly, with a soft sucking sound, it opened.

A smell of damp earth and old cloth escaped. Not rot. Just damp.

David raised his torch.

Inside was a body wrapped in an old hospital sheet, yellowed. The face was barely recognizable, skin darkened and tight. The clothing had deteriorated — a faded hospital gown.

David stared, torch shaking.

Then he noticed something on the wrist, just above the sheet edge.

A male hospital identification bracelet, plastic, the kind that never rots.

Not Ada. A man.

He leaned closer and wiped dirt away.

The name was still partially visible, printed in faded ink:

U. EKE

David's blood ran cold.

The same name Ada had written in her diary in Chapter 14:

U. Eke — his card is gone. I know I entered him on Sept 4.

The missing patient from the clinic register. The name cut out at 11:42 p.m.


---

David stepped backward away from the coffin.

Everything connected at once, not as supernatural, but as procedure.

The erased clinic record. The missing patient. Ada's diary saying she started copying records because cards were disappearing. The mortuary basement with blood. The false burial. The white van.

Grave 47 wasn't created to hide Ada.

It was created to hide someone else. Someone whose existence had already been erased from the clinic records before Ada started asking questions.

David whispered, voice barely audible:

"They buried the missing patient."

The caretaker said nothing. He stared at the bracelet.

David turned toward him.

"Why?"

The caretaker's eyes filled with fear, not of ghosts, but of people.

"Because they needed somebody inside that grave."

David looked back at the coffin.

The body wasn't Ada.

But someone wanted people to believe that whoever was inside Grave 47 had been the person who disappeared. So that if anyone ever asked about the girl, there would be a number to point to, a grave to avoid, a file that said nothing.


---

David examined the coffin more carefully. He lifted the edge of the hospital sheet slightly.

Underneath the body, pressed flat, was a folded piece of plastic, like a document sleeve used to protect papers in storage.

He pulled it out.

Inside was an old institutional document. Most of the ink had faded from damp.

But one section remained readable, stamped:

TRANSFER OF REMAINS

David read the date underneath, typed:

September 15, 2002.

The day after Ada disappeared.

His hands began shaking.

The document doesn't list Ada.

It lists:

PATIENT: U. Eke
TRANSFERRED FROM: Clinical Storage — 11:42 p.m.
DESTINATION: Long-term Holding

David stared at the time.

11:42 p.m.

The exact time Ada disappeared. The same time that had been cut from the old duty register in Chapter 10. The same time written in his own notebook and circled in Room 13. The same time on the transfer.

Someone had used Ada's disappearance to conceal the death — or the moving — of another person at the exact same minute.


---

David turned on the caretaker.

"You knew."

The old man's eyes filled with tears.

"I knew something was wrong. That burial was not normal."

"You helped bury him."

The caretaker lowered his head.

"I helped them cover the grave. I did not carry the coffin. I covered it. That is different."

That distinction mattered to him.

He insists he never saw who brought the body. Two men in clinic coats. No faces he remembers. He never saw what happened to Ada. He never saw Ada that night.

But he remembers one thing, one sentence spoken when the coffin was being lowered, when one of the men thought he was too far to hear.

When the coffin was being lowered, one of the men said:

"Nobody will look for her now."

David's blood ran cold.

Her.

Not him.

Her.

The people responsible weren't merely hiding a dead patient.

They were using the dead patient to make Ada disappear. They needed a body in the ground so that the absence of another body would never be questioned.


---

David looked inside the coffin again.

Something caught the light beneath the body, near the shoulder.

A small piece of white fabric, folded, not part of the hospital sheet.

He pulled it free. It was stiff with dried mud.

It had a faint embroidered symbol on the edge:

Rivers State College of Health — School of Nursing

David recognized it. The same emblem from Ada's name badge found in the mortuary.

A piece of a nurse's uniform. But it isn't Ada's name badge.

There is something written on the inside seam, in small blue biro, faded.

Two initials:

A.N.

David stared at them.

The caretaker whispered, stepping closer despite himself:

"That wasn't there when we buried him. I swear. I arranged the sheet myself. There was no cloth."

David looked at him.

"What?"

The caretaker stepped backward, hands up.

"I swear on my life. That cloth was not there that night."

Now the question changes again.

If the fabric was placed inside later, someone has returned to Grave 47 after the original burial. Someone has opened the coffin again, after the slab was poured, and placed a piece of Ada's uniform inside.

Someone wanted Ada's identity connected to the coffin long after U. Eke was buried.


---

David doesn't take the fabric immediately. He looks at the caretaker.

"Who had access to this place after 2002? Who comes here?"

The old man hesitated, eyes darting to the road.

Then he gave him one answer, quiet:

"The clinic. Sometimes they bring papers to burn."

David asked, "Who? Who from the clinic?"

The caretaker looked toward him, afraid to say it, then said it anyway:

"Dr. Anya."

David's stomach dropped.

But this time, there is no ghost. No knocking. No wet footprints. No mysterious figure in a blue uniform.

Just a name.

A real person.

Someone who is still on campus. Someone who warned him in Chapter 11. Someone Tunde said was asking about him in Chapter 12. Someone whose name was written inside Ada's diary cover in Chapter 14.

Someone who has been watching David.


---

David looked down into Grave 47 one last time.

The body inside isn't Ada. The grave wasn't hers. The records were altered. Her name was erased. Someone planted evidence connecting her to the grave after. And U. Eke — the patient Ada had secretly documented — had been buried in her place.

He finally understood the purpose of the lie.

They didn't need to prove Ada was dead. They only needed to make sure nobody ever searched for her. An empty grave with a number, a missing file, and a story that she ran away was enough.

He slowly closed the coffin. The lid thudded softly.

Then he looked at the identification plate in his hand.

ADA NWOSU.

For the first time, he said her name aloud without fear, not as a mystery, but as a person who had been erased.

"You weren't buried here."

He looked toward the abandoned clinic buildings in the distance, past the chapel, past the water works.

"So where did they take you?"

And now David had his first real direction:

The clinic.

Not the cemetery. Not Room 13. Not the mortuary.

The people who were still there.

CHAPTER 15 — THE BURIAL RECORD
David sat frozen on the floor of the archive, diary pages spread around him, the metal box open beside his knee.

The three knocks from the other side of the door had stopped.

He waited.

Nothing. No footsteps. No voice. No handle moving again.

But he didn't feel relieved.

Someone had followed him into the archive. Or someone had been waiting for him to finish reading.

After several seconds, he stood up slowly and walked to the door. He opened it in one quick pull.

The corridor was empty. The fluorescent light buzzed. A mop leaned against the wall.

On the floor, exactly where a person would have stood to knock, was a small piece of paper, folded once.

David picked it up. The front was blank. He turned it over.

On the back, handwritten in blue biro, was a number:

47

He looked down the empty corridor toward the clinic entrance where students were passing.

He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He photographed it with his phone — the photograph from the night before, with its message written across the back, had taught him to keep a copy of everything now.

He didn't understand what 47 meant yet.

---

He locked the archive from inside and spread Ada's diary pages across the table again.

The more he read, the more one question kept pushing forward.

If Ada disappeared... what did the school officially say happened to her?

The watchman in Chapter 9 said the story they told students was that she ran away, abandoned duty. That was gossip.

But there had to be something official. A query letter. A termination. A death certificate. Something to close a staff file.

He searched the cabinet again, not for Ada's handwriting this time, but for the school's.

He found resignation forms for 2002. Transfer requests. Two disciplinary panels. No death certificates. No police reports.

He searched alphabetically. Eke, Musa, Nwosu...

No Ada Nwosu.

No termination. No resignation. No transfer.

It was as if she had never been employed at all.

Unless she was never declared alive to be declared gone.

He thought about procedure. If someone died while working for the institution, the bursary had to sign. The cemetery behind the chapel had to have an entry. Family had to be called.

Unless there was never a burial.

---

He had only seen the old cemetery once, during his first year orientation. The chaplain had pointed from a distance.

"Old staff cemetery. Before they built the new fence. We no longer use it."

It was behind the abandoned chapel at the edge of campus, past the water works where the road turned to sand.

By late afternoon, David reached it.

It was quieter than he expected. Old concrete graves with small headstones, many tilted. Grass knee-high. Some names erased completely by rain.

An elderly man sat under a small zinc shelter, listening to a small radio. A cutlass rested against his leg.

David approached.

"Sir, good afternoon. Please, I'm looking for an old burial record."

The man looked up and turned the radio down.

"What year?"

"2002."

The caretaker's face tightened slightly around the eyes.

David noticed.

"What?"

"Which name?"

David hesitated. Wind moved the grass.

"Ada Nwosu."

The man's hand stopped on the radio dial.

For several seconds he said nothing. Then he asked, "Who told you that name?"

---

The caretaker didn't wait for an answer. He stood up, took his cutlass, and walked toward a small block office. Inside was a wooden desk, a chair, and several thick registers stacked on a shelf, all dusty.

He pulled down the largest one and dropped it on the desk.

BURIAL REGISTER — 1998–2005

The cover was stained with water.

David's pulse rose. This was what he needed — an official record, something that couldn't be folded or hidden in a bag.

He opened it.

Names. Dates. Grave numbers. Cause of death. Family representatives.

He started searching.

2000. Names of retired matrons. One lecturer.

2001. Two drivers.

2002. January, February, March... His finger moved down pages dusty with age.

June. July. August.

He reached September. He checked every line for September 2002. Malaria. Road accident. One old security man.

Nothing for Ada.

He checked again, slower. Checked October, November, December. Checked the whole year again, including the appendix for unclaimed bodies.

No Ada Nwosu.

---

David remembered the paper in his pocket.

"Sir, what about grave number 47?"

The caretaker frowned.

"Why you dey ask of 47?"

"I saw the number."

The man looked uncomfortable. He took another register from the shelf, older, spine held with black tape.

He opened it to the back where a list of graves was numbered and mapped.

47 was there, drawn on a rough sketch of the cemetery.

But the name beside it had been scratched away. Not crossed out. Scraped off with a blade until the paper thinned and tore. The area around it was darker, as if someone tried to erase ink with correction fluid and then scraped again.

David leaned closer. The paper fibers were rough.

"Who was buried there?" he whispered.

The caretaker closed the book quickly.

"I don't know."

"You don't know your own grave?"

"I was doing casual work then. Cutting grass. I wasn't keeping the records. I became caretaker in 2004."

That removed the contradiction. He had been there, but not in charge.

David didn't believe the rest.

---

"Is there another register? For temporary?"

The man hesitated, then brought out a smaller book, thin, with a red cover.

Temporary burial entries — bodies kept while families were contacted.

David searched it. Checked every variation — Ada Nwosu, A. Nwosu, Adanna Nwosu, even just Ada.

Nothing.

His stomach tightened. He closed the small book.

The school said she ran away. The diary suggested she was afraid she would disappear. The basement contained her name badge and the words DON'T OPEN. But the cemetery had no record that she ever died.

He finally understood something that chilled him more than the wet footprints in Room 13.

Nobody buried Ada. At least, not officially.

---

David closed the register. "Sir, you said you came 2004 but you did casual in 2002. Do you remember anything about September that year?"

The old man looked toward the far end where grass was highest. His voice dropped.

"There was one night."

David waited.

"A vehicle came after midnight. No light."

"What vehicle?"

"White hospital van. No number."

David's heartbeat quickened.

"Who was inside?"

"I no see face."

"Did they bring a body?"

Silence. The radio crackled.

Finally: "They told me not to open the back."

"Why?"

"Because they said there was nothing there for me to see."

---

David asked where the van went.

The caretaker pointed with his cutlass toward the far end.

"There. Old storage section. Before dem build new fence. That side no be burial side. Na store."

David looked. The area was overgrown, with small concrete blocks that didn't look like graves.

He remembered the phrase from the photograph.

Find where they buried the lie.

Maybe it wasn't telling him to find a grave. Maybe it meant a place where the truth had been hidden.

He started walking toward the overgrown section.

The caretaker grabbed his arm.

"Don't go there."

David turned. "Why?"

"Because that place was never supposed to be opened again."

---

David pulled his arm free and pushed through grass that cut at his ankles. The air was hotter here, still.

The old section had several abandoned markers, some without names, just numbers.

Then he saw it.

A concrete marker, low, half sunk, with a number painted in black that had faded but was still visible:

47

No name. Just the number.

He crouched. The cement around the marker looked newer than the others. The others were cracked, covered in moss. This one had fresh sand around its base. Someone had replaced it. Recently.

He brushed dirt at the bottom. Underneath the marker, carved into concrete with a nail or key, faint but there, were two letters:

A.N.

Ada Nwosu.

His breathing stopped.

Then he noticed something else. The grave had never been opened. No mound. No depression. No disturbed soil. Grass growing directly over where a body should have been.

Whatever Grave 47 was meant to contain, nothing had ever been buried there.

---

David rushed back to the shelter.

He opened the burial register again to number 47, pointed at the scratched-out name.

"Look."

The caretaker stared.

"You said you didn't know who was there."

"I don't know," he repeated, but lower.

"But the grave exists. I saw it."

The old man said nothing.

David flipped through pages again, this time looking at spine, not names.

The pages around September 2002 were newer. Not paper color — the stitching. The thread holding them was white and clean, while thread on rest of book was yellowed.

Someone had removed several pages and re-sewn the register.

He ran his finger along inside spine. Tiny cuts where pages had been cut out.

Just like the clinic register. Just like Ada's staff file. Just like old duty register where male patient's name had been cut out at 11:42 p.m.

Someone had physically altered burial records.

---

David searched one final time. Every page. Every section.

Nothing. Not one entry. Not one burial. Not one death. Not even a temporary record.

He closed register slowly. Dust puffed.

The conclusion was unavoidable.

Ada Nwosu was never officially buried.

But then he remembered the message on the photograph from Chapter 9:

She never died.

For first time, those words no longer felt like a threat from whoever wrote YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED.

They felt like evidence.

If Ada wasn't buried, where did she go? And why did someone create a grave number for a person who was never recorded?

As he turned to leave, something caught corner of his eye, half-buried beneath grass near office step.

A small metal plate, rusty, kind riveted to hospital stretchers or mortuary trolleys.

He knelt and pulled it free. Wiped dirt away with thumb.

It was a hospital identification plate. Letters faded, but stamped deep.

And beneath them, a name:

ADA NWOSU

He stared at it. Then looked back toward Grave 47, empty marker with A.N.

The grave was empty. The burial register had no Ada Nwosu. But someone had prepared a grave for her, erased her name, and left her ID plate in grass.

Someone had deliberately erased her death.

David slowly turned back toward the caretaker.

"Sir?"

No answer.

The chair beneath the zinc shelter was empty.

The radio was still playing.

The cutlass was gone.

David looked toward the cemetery.

Nothing moved between graves.

He tightened his grip around Ada's identification plate.

For first time, he understood what missing burial record really meant.

Someone hadn't forgotten Ada's death.

Someone had deliberately erased it.

# Chapter 14 – Ada's Diary

David stayed frozen beside the bed, eyes fixed on the three words scratched into the dust.

*I KNOW TOO.*

He didn't dare touch them. The message felt too deliberate, too precise — whoever had written it understood exactly what he was chasing, and had slipped into Room 13 without leaving a trace of how they'd entered.

He searched the room a second time. Nothing revealed itself.

Then the memory surfaced: the photograph from the night before, the note tucked beneath it. *Find where they buried the lie.* A realization settled over him, cold and sudden — this wasn't only about frightening him. Someone was steering him, shaping what he was allowed to uncover. Which meant there was something they desperately needed hidden.

By morning, he skipped his first lecture and headed straight for the clinic archives instead, craving the kind of silence that let him think clearly. While combing through the old records, his attention snagged on a wooden cabinet shoved against the far wall — one he'd noticed before, always locked. Today, though, a door hung slightly ajar.

He hesitated, glanced around to confirm he was alone, then eased it open.

Inside sat a clutter of forgotten things: expired forms, ruined textbooks, folders thick with dust. Most of it was worthless. But the bottom shelf caught his eye — nearly bare except for a single metal box, tucked into the corner like an afterthought.

He lifted it out. Heavier than expected. No lock. Beneath the lid, papers wrapped in cloth gone pale with age. He unwound the fabric, and his pulse stuttered.

A name, handwritten across the first sheet: **Ada Nwosu.**

His instinct screamed to put it all back exactly as he'd found it. Instead, his fingers kept moving. The script was neat but rushed, some pages blotched, others torn at the corners. A date sat at the top — September 3, 2002.

"Ada," he murmured, as though saying it might summon an answer.

What followed wasn't ghostly or strange — it was simply a life. Ada wrote about her shifts, her patients, the exhaustion of long nights, the students who wandered in at odd hours seeking treatment. Ordinary complaints, ordinary worries.

Then something shifted.

One entry described being summoned to the old mortuary after midnight to see a patient there. David reread the line twice, a chill crawling up his spine. The mortuary — the exact place where he'd stumbled onto the passage beneath the building.

Further in, the tone darkened further. Ada described records vanishing from the clinic — not through carelessness but through deliberate removal. Distrustful of whoever was handling the originals, she'd begun keeping her own copies. David understood immediately what that meant: the gaps in the old register weren't sloppy filing. Someone had erased names on purpose.

A line jumped out at him: *"They told me not to ask why certain patients were never entered into the register."*

His stomach clenched. The missing male patient. The section sliced from the ledger. Pieces were locking together in his mind, forming a shape he didn't want to see.

A noise broke through his concentration — footsteps, drawing close outside the archive door. He went rigid, snapping the diary shut and darkening his phone screen in the same motion. The handle turned once, then again, testing. He held his breath until, after a long stretch of silence, the footsteps retreated.

Only then did he open the diary again, and this time he noticed what he'd overlooked before: a cluster of pages torn free, not at random, but from the very week leading up to Ada's disappearance.

He turned back to the cabinet, running his hands along the inside behind where the box had sat. A wooden panel gave slightly under pressure. Behind it, a narrow gap concealed several folded sheets, older and more worn than the rest, one stained brown along the bottom edge, another so faded the ink had nearly vanished.

He laid them out by date. The last one read September 14, 2002 — the day Ada vanished.

Her words there carried a different weight, fear bleeding through every sentence. She wrote of being followed, of warnings to keep away from the mortuary, of glimpsing someone carrying files into the building long after dark. Then came the line that stole the breath from his lungs: she'd discovered someone using the underground passage — the very one he had found himself, with its dried bloodstains, the abandoned name badge, the warning scrawled across the wall: *DON'T OPEN.*

Ada had known about the basement. She'd been circling the same danger, investigating it long before it swallowed her.

The handwriting grew rougher toward the end, some words nearly illegible beneath dark stains soaked into the paper. *"If they discover that I copied the records, they will come for me,"* she'd written. His hands trembled as he kept reading. *"I don't know who I can trust anymore."*

Water damage had eaten away at several more lines. He tilted the page toward the light, straining to piece together what remained. One final paragraph waited at the bottom, the letters suddenly large and jagged, as if she'd written in a rush, terror outpacing her hand. He made out only the beginning before the paper gave way to a tear.

A single sentence survived intact: *"If I disappear, don't trust—"*

Nothing else followed. The remainder of the page was simply gone, ripped away by someone determined that the rest never be read. He flipped it over, hoping for continuation. Blank. He scanned the floor for a missing fragment. Nothing there either.

Then his gaze dropped to the inside cover of the diary, where faint ink revealed a name he hadn't expected.

**Dr. Anya.**

Ice spread through his chest. The same woman who'd warned him to abandon his questions. The same one Tunde claimed had been asking about his search.

He closed the diary slowly, the weight of it suddenly enormous in his hands.

Outside, footsteps halted directly beside the archive door.

Then came a knock.

One.

Two.

Three.

The Comeback 😭🔥

Guys, I know… I disappeared for almost 2 weeks. 😭😂 Life happened, but I’m finally back!

Thank you to everyone who stayed, followed, and waited for the next chapter. ❤️

Now we’re back on the journey — and trust me, the story is about to get even crazier. 👀🔥

If you’re still here, comment “WELCOME BACK” so I know my people are still alive 😂❤️

And if you haven’t followed yet, follow me and let’s continue this journey together! 🚀





CHAPTER 13 — THE NIGHT VISIT

David didn't go back inside.

He stared at the wet footprints. They led away from his door, down the dark corridor toward the staircase. Bare. The water around them caught his phone light.

His first instinct was to follow. See who it was. Catch them.

He took a step forward.

Then he remembered what Tunde had told him in Chapter 4, laughing at the time, telling those stupid hostel stories to scare freshers.

"If you see water for corridor for midnight and you no see rain, no follow am. You go follow am tire."

The footprints were already drying at the edges.

David followed them anyway.

He walked slowly, phone torch low, following the trail. Past Room 14. Past Room 15. The corridor turned. The footprints turned with it.

Past the general bathroom. The smell of disinfectant.

Then, in the middle of the corridor, three steps before the staircase — they stopped.

Just stopped.

No footprints going back. No turn. No fade. One moment there, next moment gone, as if the person had lifted straight up into the ceiling.

David stood over the last print and shone his light around. Dry floor. No water on the walls. No window open.

Whoever left them wanted him to see them.

---

He went back to Room 13 and locked the door. Double-locked it.

"Na prank," he said out loud. "Somebody wan scare me."

His voice sounded too loud.

He laughed, short, and started to breathe again.

Then he looked down.

The floor inside his room was completely dry.

He froze.

He crouched slowly and ran his hand over the tiles where the footprints had started. Dust. Dry dust.

If someone had come from outside, the floor inside would be wet first. The first footprint would be inside.

It wasn't.

The first footprint had started in the middle of his room.

---

He tried to sleep. He left the small reading bulb on and lay on his bed facing the door, notebook under his pillow, mortuary key pressed tight in his pocket so it wouldn't fall out.

The hostel became silent gradually. First the shouting stopped. Then the generators. Then the music from someone's Bluetooth speaker.

Then —

Drip.

David's eyes opened.

Silence.

Drip.

He sat up.

Drip. Drip.

Slow, from somewhere in the room. Like a tap not closed properly.

He checked the bathroom. Dry. He had not fetched water today. The bucket was empty.

He checked the window. Locked. No rain outside.

Drip.

It was coming from under his bed.

A slow scrape followed it. Wood on tile. Like something shifting its weight beneath the frame.

He remembered Chapter 4 again. Tunde: "After twelve, if you hear something under your bed, no look. No look at all. You go see wetin you no suppose see."

David stared at the edge of the bed. He did not look under.

The scraping stopped.

---

He sat up fully, back against the wall.

A shadow moved across the opposite wall.

David went cold.

Someone was standing near the window. Tall, still.

He didn't move. He could see the outline of the person's head against the curtain.

He reached slowly, slowly for his phone on the bed, not taking his eyes off the window.

He switched the torch on and pointed it.

Nothing.

The window was empty. Curtain still. Locked.

But on the floor, directly beside his bed, where there had been nothing seconds before, was a single muddy footprint.

Fresh. Water still beading on the edges.

Someone had been standing beside him while he lay there.

---

David's eyes went to his bag.

It was on the bed. He always left it beside the table, zipped. Now it was on the bed, zip half open.

He moved to it and checked.

Notebook — there. Charger — there. Wallet — there, money still inside.

Nothing stolen.

But his documents were not how he left them. His admission letter was underneath his clinic form. His ID card was turned over. Someone had gone through them quickly, not looking for money.

Searching for something specific.

He checked his notebook. The pages about Ada were still there.

His hand went to his pocket. The mortuary key was still there.

Then he remembered.

The photograph. The one the watchman had left behind in Chapter 9. The enlarged staff photograph with Ada's face standing out from the others, and the red writing on the back.

He dug into the front pocket of the bag where he kept it.

Empty.

He checked again, shaking the bag. Nothing. He checked around the bed, on the table.

Gone.

His stomach dropped.

That was the only hard evidence he had that Ada existed outside the register. The only thing linking the watchman's story to the file.

Someone had come for the evidence.

---

He turned toward his desk to get his phone.

The photograph was lying there.

Face down.

He knew it had not been there before. He had looked at the desk twice.

He walked to it slowly. His legs felt weak.

He turned it over with one finger.

The front was the same — the old staff photograph, faded with age, Ada's face standing out among the others.

But the back had changed.

Before, it said:

*She never died.
We only told the world she did.
Find where they buried the lie.*

Now, under it, in the same red marker but fresher, wetter, was a new line:

YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED.

David's blood went cold. The ink was still wet enough to smear.

Someone had written it inside this room. Minutes ago.

---

Knock. Knock. Knock.

David didn't move. He stared at the door.

Three more knocks.

But not from the main door this time.

From inside the room.

He turned slowly.

The bathroom door was open by an inch. He knew he had closed it. He always closed it because the toilet flushed by itself.

A thin line of water began creeping from under it. Dark. Smelling of mud.

Then a footprint appeared on the bathroom tiles.

One.

Then another, closer.

Moving toward him, across the dry floor of his room.

No one making them.

---

David backed until his back hit the wall.

The footprints stopped directly in front of him.

There was nothing there.

Then the mattress behind him sank.

Just slightly, by his bedside. As if someone had sat down on the edge.

David spun.

The bed was empty. But the indentation was there, clear in the torch light. A weight on the mattress.

Then the smell came.

The same smell that had filled the clinic store. The same stagnant river smell he'd noticed when he first found Ada's name in the old register.

The visitor had been in the room with him the whole time.

David squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his back harder against the wall.

He didn't open them for a long time.

---

Morning came eventually.

He didn't sleep. He sat against the wall until the corridor started getting noisy, until students started shouting and fetching water and playing music. Until generators started and normal life returned and the smell of river water faded.

He told himself it was exhaustion. Stress. Tunde was right. He was thinking too much.

Then he looked at the floor.

The muddy footprints were gone. The water line from the bathroom was gone. Everything looked normal. His chair in place. His bag on the bed.

For a few seconds, he felt relieved.

Then he noticed the bag.

The zip was open again.

He picked it up. Checked inside.

Wallet. Phone. Clothes. Keys. All there.

But searched through. Someone had clearly gone through it again while he sat awake.

He pulled out his notebook. It was open.

Not to a random page.

To the exact page where he had written in capital letters:

ADA NWOSU — SEPTEMBER 14, 2002

Underneath, someone had drawn a small circle around one line with a biro:

11:42 P.M.

The exact time Ada disappeared.

David closed the notebook slowly.

He looked around Room 13.

Whoever entered hadn't come to steal.

They came to check what he knew.

And whoever did it knew exactly which page mattered.

Then, as he shifted his foot, he saw something faint in the dust beneath his bed.

Three words, written with a fingertip:

I KNOW TOO.

Chapter 18: The Portrait

I walked back from the rail yard with Veras's deadline pressed against my ribs like a second heartbeat.

The campus was quiet, the last light of dusk bleeding into the horizon. Students had retreated to their dormitories. The hunters' patrol had changed shifts, fresh guards circling the chapel with silver at their hips. I passed through the quad without seeing any of them. My mind was still in the rail yard, still staring at the space where Veras had stood, still hearing the echo of her ultimatum. Three weeks. If you have not abandoned the mission, we will act.

I stopped outside the art building. The third-floor studio window glowed with warm light. Ivy was still there. She was always there, painting through the hours when the rest of the world slept.

I had not planned to stop. I had planned to return to my room, to sit in the dark and stare at the ceiling and count the hours ticking down toward the new moon. But my feet had carried me here, to her door, and I did not have the strength to turn away.

I climbed the stairs. The studio door was ajar. Ivy stood at her easel with her back to me, her brush moving in slow, deliberate strokes. The air smelled of turpentine and the faint sweetness of the tea she always let go cold beside her palette.

"You came back," she said without turning.

"I told you I would."

"I know. But you've been..." She set the brush down and turned. Her eyes found mine, and whatever she saw made her pause. "You look like you haven't slept."

"I do not sleep."

"Ever?"

"Not in the way you mean."

She absorbed this without flinching. Then she wiped her hands on a rag and crossed the room. "I'm glad you're here. The portrait's finished. I was going to wait—make a whole production of it—but you're here now. And I think you need to see it."

She led me to the easel by the window. A cloth covered the canvas. She gripped the edge of it and hesitated, her fingers curling into the fabric. "I wasn't sure about some of it. The gold, especially. I almost painted over it."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I thought—no. That's the part that matters most. The part that's still fighting." She pulled the cloth away.

The face that looked back at me was mine, and not mine. The coldness was there, the predator's stillness, the eyes that had seen too much for too long. But she had painted the shadows with blue and violet, deep and layered, and over them she had laid gold—threads of light catching the edges of my jaw, my brow, the hollow of my throat. She had painted the sadness, yes. But she had also painted something else. Something that looked like a door left slightly open.

My hand lifted before I could stop it. I touched the edge of the canvas, my fingers hovering just above the paint. My hand was trembling. I pressed it flat against my thigh to stop it, but Ivy had already seen.

"It's accurate," I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended.

"Accurate." She laughed, soft and bright. "That's the most Sera compliment I've ever received."

"I do not know how to do this."

"Do what?"

I turned to face her. The words felt like stones in my throat. "Accept this. Accept kindness. I have been a weapon for two centuries. Weapons do not have people who paint their portraits and bring them stale pastries and refuse to leave even when they are warned."

Ivy stepped closer. She did not reach for me. She simply stood there, her paint-stained hands loose at her sides, her hazel eyes steady. "Then learn," she said. "You're not a weapon, Sera. You never were. You're just someone who was told she was one for so long that she started to believe it."

She lifted her hand and, very gently, brushed a stray thread from my shoulder. Her fingers lingered for half a heartbeat before she let them fall.

"You're allowed to want things," she said. "You're allowed to care about people. Even if it's messy. Even if it's complicated. Even if you don't know what you're doing."

"I care about you."

The words came out before I could stop them. Raw. Unpolished. True.

Ivy smiled—not the tentative, crinkling smile I had seen before, but something fuller. Something that lit her whole face. "I know," she said. "I care about you too."

She did not push for more. She did not demand confessions or explanations. She simply returned to the easel and began telling me about her next project, a series on light through stained glass. I stood beside her and listened. The portrait watched us from the canvas, its gold edges catching the lamplight.

When I finally turned to leave, Ivy caught my wrist.

"Promise me something," she said.

"What?"

"Whatever you're doing. Wherever you're going. Promise me you'll come back."

I looked at her hand on my wrist. So small. So fragile. So impossibly brave.

"I promise," I said.

She released me. I walked back to my room with the weight of the promise pressing against my chest. I would come back. I had to. Because for the first time in two centuries, I had someone waiting for me.

---

End of Chapter 18

Chapter 17: The Rail Yard

The rail yard stretched along the eastern edge of the city like a scar that had never healed.

I arrived as the sun was bleeding its last light across the horizon. The tracks were rusted, the boxcars hollowed out by decades of weather. Gravel crunched under my boots. The air smelled of iron and old oil and something sharper underneath—the faint, familiar scent of Underworld blood. She was already here.

I stopped in the centre of the yard and waited.

Veras emerged from behind a gutted freight car with the slow, deliberate grace of someone who had nothing to prove. She was alone. Her dark hair was pulled back from a face that was all sharp angles and unreadable calm, and her hands hung loose at her sides. No visible weapons. No guards. Just a lieutenant of the Severed, meeting a princess on neutral ground.

"You came," she said.

"I came."

"The girl is unharmed. For now." Veras stopped ten paces from me, her boots grinding into the gravel. "You want to know why we threatened her instead of coming to you directly."

"I know why. You wanted leverage."

"Yes." No apology. No hesitation. "Threats are the only language your kind understands. You are Dorian's betrothed. You are the heir to the throne that exiled us. Why would we trust you to listen without something to lose?"

"My kind." I let the words hang between us. "You speak as if you are not also a vampire."

"I am. But I am not royalty. I am not a warlord. I am one of the ones who refused to participate in the blood wars, and I was cast out for it." Her voice did not rise. It was steady, measured, the voice of someone who had made peace with her choices long ago. "Do you know what exile feels like, Princess? To be stripped of your title, your lands, your family, because you refused to kill for a throne?"

I said nothing. The wind stirred the gravel at my feet.

"The Severed want the stone destroyed," Veras continued. "We have wanted it destroyed for centuries. We believe whatever it contains should never be released. We have killed to keep it buried. We will kill again."

"And Dorian's family?"

"They want it retrieved. They have been searching for it for generations. They believe it will give them power beyond anything the Underworld has ever known." She paused. "They are wrong. Whatever the stone is, it will not be controlled. But they do not know that. Or they do not care."

I held her gaze. "You said the wards are keyed to a bloodline."

"Yes."

"Whose bloodline?"

Veras was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was quieter, as if she was admitting something she did not want to admit. "I do not know. The records are incomplete. The names have been deliberately obscured. But I know this much—Dorian's family believes someone of Vane blood can bypass the wards. They believe it enough to send you here. Whether that belief is true is the question they are willing to kill to answer."

The words settled into my chest like stones. My bloodline. My family. The Vane name, woven through the oldest records, guardians or seekers or something in between. Dorian's family had not chosen me for my strength or my throne. They had chosen me for my blood.

"The stone is not the key, Princess," Veras said. "Whoever sent you here is the key. The question is—why you? What do you have that they need?"

I did not answer. I could not answer. The implications were still shifting, forming shapes I did not want to see.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

"Walk away. Abandon the mission. Return to the Underworld empty-handed, or stay here on Earth and disappear. Either way, the stone remains buried. Either way, the danger passes."

"And if I refuse?"

Veras's expression did not change, but something behind her eyes hardened. "Then the attacks continue. Not just on you. On everyone you care about. We do not wish to harm the humans. They are innocent. But if their safety is the only leverage we have, we will use it. The Mercer boy. The painter girl. The vampire who was sent to kill them. If you continue the mission, they become targets. That is not a threat, Princess. It is a fact."

The wind picked up, sending a shower of rust flakes skittering across the tracks. I did not move. I did not let my face change. But my jaw tightened at the mention of their names, and Veras saw it.

"You have three weeks," she said. "Until the new moon. If you have not abandoned the mission by then, we will act. And the blood that is spilled will be on your hands, not ours."

"Three weeks."

"Yes."

I stared at her. "And if I have not decided by then?"

"Then the decision will be made for you." She stepped back, her form beginning to blend with the shadows of the freight car. "Three weeks, Princess. Use them wisely."

She was gone before I could respond. The rail yard was empty again—just the wind, and the gravel, and the distant rumble of a train that was not coming.

---

I walked back to Ashthorne as the moon climbed toward its zenith.

The streets were quiet. The shops were dark. The city had tucked itself in for the night, unaware that a deadline had just been set, that a clock had begun ticking, that the fate of two humans and one exiled vampire rested on a choice I was not ready to make.

I did not hurry. I did not let myself think about Ivy's paint-stained fingers or Kael's grey eyes or Elizabeth's quiet vigil in the bell tower. I could not afford to think about them. Not yet. Not while the weight of the choice was still settling into my bones.

Three weeks. Twenty-one days to decide whether to betray my mission or betray my heart. Twenty-one days to uncover the truth about the stone, about my bloodline, about the people who had sent me here with lies dressed as duty. Twenty-one days before the Severed made the choice for me and the people I cared about paid the price.

I reached the campus gates as the moon crested the chapel spire. The stone pulsed beneath the earth—a constant, patient rhythm that I had felt since the day I arrived. But it was not the stone that pressed against my chest as I walked through the empty quad.

It was the clock. The deadline. The choice that was no longer theoretical.

Three weeks.

It would have to be enough.

---

End of Chapter 17

Chapter 16: Ashthorne Never Sleeps

The campus had become a stranger to me.

I walked the same paths I had walked for weeks — the eastern quad, the colonnade behind the music hall, the gravel track that wound past the chapel's north face — and saw nothing I recognised. The students still laughed. The bells still tolled the hour. The grounds-keepers still raked leaves into neat, decaying piles. But the world beneath the world had shifted, and I could not unsee the cracks.

The stone pulsed beneath the chapel. I felt it now without trying — a second heartbeat in the bones of the earth. It had been there since the day I arrived, constant and patient, but I had learned to ignore it. Now it was all I could hear.

I stopped at the edge of the chapel grounds. The hunters were changing shifts — two men in groundskeeper uniforms, their silver blades hidden beneath ordinary coats, their eyes scanning the paths with the practiced vigilance of soldiers. They did not see me. I had learned to move in their blind spots weeks ago.

The chapel itself was a monument to deliberate ignorance. Its foundations were older than the university, older than the city, older than the records that Voss had spent twenty years compiling. The original builders had not been monks. They had been guardians. Protectors. And somewhere in the archives beneath the pawnshop, their bones still clutched the secrets they had died to protect.

I did not linger. I had stood in this spot too many times already, staring at the stone walls as if they might speak. They would not. The answers I needed were not in the chapel. They were in the fragments I had gathered — Voss's journal, Elizabeth's note, my mother's orders with the second seal bleeding through. And they were in the patterns I had not yet learned to read.

I turned away from the chapel and walked toward the library.

---

Kael watched her from the colonnade.

She moved differently now. He had noticed it the moment she crossed the quad — a deliberate, economical stride, no wasted motion. She was not wandering. She was not lost in thought. She was working.

He had followed her from the eastern dormitory to the chapel and back, keeping his distance, tracking her the way his father had taught him to track prey. But she was not prey. She was something else. Something that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise even as he refused to look away.

At the chapel, she had stopped and stared at the north face for a long time. Not praying. Not admiring the architecture. Studying. As if she was reading something in the stone that he could not see.

Then she had turned and walked toward the library, and he had followed.

He was closer now than he had been before. Close enough to see the tension in her shoulders. Close enough to notice that she had not eaten, had not slept, had not spoken to anyone since she returned. Whatever she had found in the watchtower, it was consuming her.

He should have approached her. He should have asked what she knew. But something held him back — not fear, but instinct. The same instinct that told him to wait in the shadows while his father's hunters swept through the eastern rail yard. The same instinct that had kept him alive through three hunts and a dozen close calls.

She was not ready to be approached. Not yet.

But he would be there when she was.

---

Ivy found her outside the library, standing motionless at the foot of the steps.

"Sera."

I turned. Ivy was bundled in a coat two sizes too large, her sketchbook under her arm, her cheeks flushed from the cold. She looked at me with those hazel eyes — gold-flecked, warm, searching — and I felt the distance between us like a physical thing.

"I didn't see you yesterday," she said.

"I was occupied."

"You're always occupied lately." She shifted her weight. "I was going to get tea. The terrible kind from the café. Do you want to come?"

"No."

The word came out flatter than I intended. Ivy's expression flickered — not hurt, exactly, but something close. She covered it quickly.

"Okay," she said. "Maybe tomorrow."

"Perhaps."

She hesitated. I could see her weighing whether to push, whether to ask the questions she had been holding since the day I warned her to stay indoors. But she did not push. She simply nodded, pulled her coat tighter, and walked toward the café alone.

I watched her go. The guilt was still there, sharp and unwelcome, but I did not call her back. I could not give her the answers she wanted. I could not even give her the warmth she deserved. All I could give her was distance, and hope that distance would keep her safe.

---

The library was quiet at this hour. I took my usual table in the restricted section and spread the fragments before me. Voss's journal. The map of the old district. Elizabeth's note. My mother's orders. The second seal.

I had been looking at these pieces separately — each one a clue, each one a thread. But the threads were beginning to braid. The Vane name in the oldest guardian records. Dorian's family searching for the stone for centuries. The Severed willing to kill to keep it buried. And my mother, stamping her seal over Dorian's, sending me to retrieve something she had to have known was not a cure.

I traced the faint outline of the second seal with my fingertip. The Ashen Court. Dorian's house. The family that had bound itself to mine through a betrothal that was beginning to look less like an alliance and more like a leash.

If Dorian's family had drafted the orders first, then the mission had originated with them. My mother had simply approved it. Claimed it. Sent me to carry it out. But why? What did she stand to gain?

I turned to Voss's section on the original guardians. He had written: Vane name appears in earliest covenant records. Role unclear. Possible guardians. Possible something older. Records deliberately destroyed. By whom?

The same question circled back every time. Who had erased my family's history? And why?

I closed the journal and stared at the scattered papers. The answers were not here. They were buried deeper — in the covenant chamber, in the fragments Mareth had been unable to access, in the records my own ancestors had tried to destroy.

I needed to go back to the pawnshop. But not yet. First, I needed to be certain I was not being herded toward a conclusion someone else had already prepared.

---

It was past midnight when I returned to my room.

The door was locked. I had locked it myself before leaving. But when I pushed it open, something was different. The air was still — no open window, no draft — but the papers on my desk had been moved. Not scattered. Not stolen. Rearranged.

Voss's journal was open to a page I had not left it on. The map of the old district was folded differently. And on top of my mother's orders, someone had placed a small object that had not been there before.

A single pressed flower. Dead and dried, its petals the colour of old blood.

I stood in the doorway, every sense flaring. No scent. No sound. No sign of forced entry. The window was still locked from the inside. The door had not been tampered with. Whoever had been here had come and gone like smoke.

I crossed to the desk and picked up the flower. It crumbled slightly at my touch, brittle with age. Beneath it, my mother's orders had been marked — a faint circle drawn in ash around the second seal, the ghost of Dorian's house.

The message was clear, even without words. Someone wanted me to see what I had already seen. Someone wanted me to keep looking.

I set the flower down and stared at the marked page.

I was not alone in this search. I had never been alone. And the path I thought I was discovering had already been written by hands I could not see.

---

End of chapter 16

So sorry for the long wait ,I was writing my exams ,that why I couldn't keep up with the story but am actually free now ,I will be posting everyday thanks for been patient ♥️

Am interested but your number isn't going

Chapter 15: The First Lie

The campus had not changed.

Students crossed the quad in chattering clusters, their breath misting in the cold morning air. A grounds-keeper raked leaves into a pile near the chapel steps. Someone had hung a banner across the humanities building — Autumn Exhibition, November 14th — and the letters fluttered in the wind like trapped birds. Everything was ordinary. Everything was exactly as it had been when I left.

I walked through it like a ghost.

The watchtower's revelations coiled in my chest. Mareth's words. Voss's fragments. Elizabeth's warning. All of them pointing in the same direction, toward a truth I had been too obedient to see. The stone was not a cure. The mission was not a rescue. And the people who had sent me here — my mother, Dorian's family, the court that had shaped me into a blade — had known. They had known, and they had sent me anyway.

I passed the library without stopping. Kael's window was dark. I did not look for Ivy. I needed silence. I needed to think.

---

Kael watched her cross the quad from the shadow of the bell tower.

She looked different than she had three days ago. Not wounded — there was no blood on her coat, no limp in her stride. But something had shifted in the way she moved. Slower. Heavier. As if she was carrying a weight she had not carried before.

He had followed her from the old district, keeping his distance, staying low on the rooftops until the streets widened into the familiar geometry of the campus. She had not seen him. She had been too lost in her own thoughts.

Now she was heading toward the eastern dormitory. Safe. For the moment.

Kael did not approach her. He did not call out. He simply watched until her door closed behind her. Then he turned and walked back toward the library, his hands in his pockets, his jaw tight.

Three days until his father arrived. Three days to figure out what she was walking into. Three days to decide how far he was willing to go.

The answer, he realised, was already settled. He had followed her across half the city before dawn. He would follow her further if he had to.

---

Ivy caught her on the steps.

"Sera!"

I turned. Ivy was jogging toward me across the quad, her scarf trailing, her sketchbook clutched against her chest. Her cheeks were pink from the cold. She reached me slightly out of breath, and for a moment she simply stood there, her hazel eyes searching my face.

"You came back," she said.

"I told you I would."

"I know. But people say that all the time. It doesn't always mean — " She stopped. Swallowed. "I was starting to worry."

I did not know how to respond to that. The warmth in her voice, the relief in her eyes — it was directed at me, and I did not deserve it. I had done nothing to earn her worry. Nothing except exist in her orbit, cold and strange, accepting her pastries and her patience and her impossible, stubborn faith.

"I am unharmed," I said.

"You look different." She tilted her head. "Not hurt. Just... different. Like something happened."

I said nothing. Ivy waited. Around us, students pushed past on the steps, laughing, complaining about deadlines, utterly oblivious to the weight pressing down on my shoulders. The world was still moving. It had not stopped to acknowledge that everything I believed had been a lie.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" Ivy asked.

"I found pieces. Not the whole truth."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I do not know yet."

She nodded slowly. Then she reached out and squeezed my hand — a brief, warm pressure, there and gone. "Well, you're back. That's what matters. When you're ready to talk — or not talk — I'll be in the studio. I'm working on something new."

She turned and walked away before I could respond. Her scarf trailed behind her, bright against the grey stone. I watched her go and felt something twist in my chest. Guilt. Sharp and unexpected.

She had been worried. She had been waiting. And I had given her nothing.

I pushed the feeling down and climbed the stairs to my room.

---

The desk was exactly as I had left it. Books stacked in precarious towers. Voss's journal open to a page on faction histories. The map of the old district, still marked with the watchtower's location. Elizabeth's note, crumpled at the corner, the ink smudged from the rain.

I spread everything out and began to work.

If the stone was not a cure, then the mission had been a lie from the beginning. But who had told the lie? My mother? Dorian's family? The court physicians who had diagnosed his wasting curse? I pulled out the mission orders — the formal documents I had received before leaving the Underworld, stamped with the seal of the Crimson Seat. The wording was precise. Legal. Retrieve the Somnium Stone. Deliver it to the court of Dorian Vane. Secure the alliance.

Secure the alliance. Not save Dorian. Secure the alliance.

I had read those words a dozen times before my departure. I had never questioned them. Now I stared at them until the ink blurred.

Voss's journal had mentioned that Dorian's family had been searching for the stone for centuries. Mareth had confirmed they believed it would give them power. Elizabeth had been sent to kill Kael to keep him from interfering with the retrieval. Everyone — everyone — had been moving pieces around me, and I had been too focused on my duty to see the board.

I turned to Voss's section on the factions. His handwriting was cramped and difficult to read, but one passage stood out. He had circled a name — Vane — with a question mark beside it, and written in the margin: Connected to the original guardians? Lineage obscured. Records destroyed. Why?

Why indeed.

I set the journal down and picked up my mother's orders. The seal at the bottom was the same seal I had seen on every official document since childhood. The crossed swords of the Crimson Seat. The crown of the Vane dynasty. But beneath it, almost invisible, was a second impression — a faint outline, as if another seal had been pressed first and then deliberately covered.

I held the paper up to the light. The outline was barely visible, just a ghost of wax. But I could make out the shape.

It was not the seal of the Crimson Seat.

It was the seal of Dorian's house. The Ashen Court.

My hands went cold. The orders had been issued by my mother. The mission had been framed as a duty to the Crown. But the seal beneath the seal told a different story. Dorian's family had drafted the orders first. My mother had stamped over them, claiming the mission as her own.

Every clue pointed in one direction. Not toward a curse. Not toward a rescue. Toward a retrieval. Someone had wanted me to find the stone. Not to save Dorian. To use me.

The door of my room felt very far away. The walls felt closer than they had been a moment ago. I set the paper down with careful, deliberate precision, and stared at the ghost of the second seal.

My own family had sent me here to be used.

And I had walked into it willingly.

---

Hope you enjoy this chapter like and comment let me hear your thoughts and sorry for the late updates was busy with school stuff