Chapter 198: The Popular Girl Who Remembered the Room
The architecture studio smelled of pine balsa wood, fresh-cut chipboard, and the dry, mineral scent of 3D printing resin. Tall north-facing windows flooded the space with a clear, even light that caught the dust motes swirling above drafting tables littered with precision knives, metal rulers, and cups of cold coffee. It was a temple to visible creation, every surface dedicated to turning thought into tangible, reviewable form.
Anbara el-Mady stood at a central table, tweaking the roof angle on a delicate model of a modern museum. She wore a simple linen smock over her clothes, her focus absolute, her movements economical. When Xia and Antoinette entered, she looked up, and her welcoming smile was instant, warm, and perfectly calibrated. It faltered by a single watt when she registered their expressions.
“Miss Lin, Miss Ngoya,” she said, setting down her tweezers. “Haala mentioned you might stop by. She said you were asking about… older parts of the campus.” She kept her tone light, inquisitive, but her eyes were already assessing, measuring the distance between a casual visit and whatever this was.
“We are,” Xia said, returning a smaller, quieter smile. “We found an image. We were hoping you could help us understand its context.” She didn’t wait for permission. She produced a slim tablet and called up the screenshot Haala had provided—the stark corridor, the two figures, the blindfolded man.
Anbara’s polished composure was a remarkable thing. It didn’t shatter. It merely cooled, solidified, like liquid glass hitting a cold surface. Her smile remained, but it became stationary, a held expression. Her eyes, however, dropped to the image, and her pupils dilated slightly. She leaned in, not taking the tablet, just studying it.
“This is from Haala’s collection,” she stated, not asking. Her voice had lost its welcoming lilt.
“It is,” Antoinette confirmed, watching her like a hawk. “Do you recognize the location?”
Anbara was silent for a long moment. Her finger, clean and neatly filed, hovered over the screen, not touching it, tracing a line in the air just above the blurry wall behind the figures. “The concrete finish… the pattern of the pouring seams. It’s not a main service corridor.” She looked up, first at Antoinette, then at Xia. The warmth was gone, replaced by a focused, analytical clarity. “This is the ancillary passage that leads from the old freight elevator to the project storage rooms. The ones behind this studio.”
The confirmation hung in the dusty light. The studio, so full of deliberate creation, felt suddenly adjacent to something much darker.
“Who uses it?” Antoinette pressed.
“Maintenance. And us,” Anbara said, her words precise. “For moving large models, presentation boards, bulky supplies. It’s supposed to be locked, but the lock has been broken for a year. We all know the code to the keypad on the studio side.” She hugged her arms around herself, a subtle, self-protective gesture. “There was… an issue last week. A notice went around the senior project group. It said there was a potential moisture problem in the storage rooms. That all valuable models and finished work needed to be relocated to the temporary lockers in the new wing. It was very sudden.”
“Who issued the notice?” Xia asked, her voice still soft.
“It was an email from the facility management office,” Anbara said. But her gaze flickered away, toward a pile of rolled schematics in the corner. “The header looked correct. The language was formal.”
“But?” Antoinette prompted, hearing the unsaid word.
“But no one had mentioned any inspections. No work order was posted on the main board. And when I went to move my team’s model, the rooms didn’t smell damp. They smelled… clean. Sterile. Like strong antiseptic.” She looked back at the image on the tablet, at the blindfolded man. Her throat moved as she swallowed. “I thought it was odd. But I didn’t question it publicly.”
“Why not?” Antoinette’s question wasn’t an accusation, but it carried the full weight of her own relentless nature.
Anbara met her gaze, and for the first time, a crack appeared in her graceful armor—not of guilt, but of a deeply ingrained philosophy. “Rajab once told me,” she said, her voice lower, “that at a certain level, some problems aren’t solved by dragging them into the light. Sometimes, an unseen hand is cleaning up a mess, and asking too many questions just turns a contained issue into a public scandal. It can make things worse for everyone.” She shrugged, a graceful, helpless gesture. “I assumed it was something bureaucratic. A budget line, a liability waiver. Not… this.”
Antoinette’s jaw tightened. The answer, so reasoned, so pragmatic, irritated her deeply. It was the logic of closed doors and silent agreements, the very atmosphere in which a man could vanish.
Xia, however, simply nodded, as if she’d heard this song before. “Will you show us the rooms? Now?”
Anbara hesitated. The conflict was plain on her face. This was crossing a line from observing oddities to actively investigating them. It was the opposite of containment. She looked at the model of her beautiful, fictional museum, then back at the ugly, pixelated truth on the tablet. She took a slow breath. “Yes.”
She led them through a rear door hidden behind a large pin-up board of architectural sketches, into a short, dim hall that ended at a industrial keypad. She input the code—a soft beep, a clunk—and pushed the heavy metal door inward.
The storage rooms were a labyrinth of steel shelving units crammed with the ghosts of past projects: foam-core landscapes yellowing at the edges, meticulously painted clay buildings wrapped in plastic, skeletal wooden structures gathering dust. The air was cool, still, and yes—carried a faint, chemical tang beneath the smell of glue and paper. It was the smell of a space that had been scrubbed.
Xia stepped inside, her presence suddenly alien in the clutter. She moved slowly, her head tilted, not looking at the projects but at the spaces between them, at the floors, at the shadows under shelves. Her Elarion lens cycled through spectra, looking for traces human eyes would never catch—heat ghosts, mineral disruptions, molecular shed.
Antoinette watched her, the hope a hard, painful knot in her chest. Anbara lingered near the doorway, her arms still wrapped around herself, observing.
Xia moved toward a corner where several large model bases sat stacked. One, a heavy square of MDF representing a city plaza, was slightly askew. She knelt, her movements silent. Her fingers brushed the concrete floor beside it. Then she stopped. Pinched between her thumb and forefinger, she lifted a single, tiny thread.
It was perhaps two centimeters long, impossibly fine. To Antoinette and Anbara, it looked pale gray, almost silver. It was too smooth, too perfectly cylindrical to be cotton or polyester. It looked like a filament of captured moonlight.
Xia held it up, and her ocular implant flooded her vision with data. The atomic structure was not terrestrial. The polymer chains were woven with infinitesimal strands of phased crystalline lattice, a material designed for durability, thermal regulation, and low sensory signature. Elarion civilian-grade tunic weave. Common. Utterly mundane there. Here, it was a screaming beacon.
It was not a clue to where he was. It was a footprint. A proof of passage. He had been here, in this room of student dreams, and something—a struggle, a rough adjustment of bindings, the simple attrition of captivity against fabric—had left this minuscule part of him behind.
Xia did not speak. She carefully placed the thread into a sterile sampling vial from her pocket. The click of the cap sealing was deafening in the silent room.
Anbara had seen the moment of discovery. She had seen the absolute, focused stillness that came over Xia, the way Antoinette’s entire body leaned forward as if pulled by a wire. She understood, without technical details, that the thread was everything.
“The hidden man,” Anbara whispered, the words seeming to fall from her lips and break on the hard floor. “He’s not a story. Not campus gossip.”
“No,” Antoinette said, her voice rough. “He’s a prisoner. And someone used your maintenance notice, your broken lock, your habit of not making a fuss, to keep him here. Maybe just for a night. Maybe as a transfer point. But he was here.”
Anbara’s hand came up to cover her mouth. The polished kindness, the strategic silence, the entire elegant architecture of her social survival crumbled into something far simpler and uglier: complicity. She had seen an anomaly and chosen to believe it was a bureaucrat’s error, because that was cleaner, safer, quieter. She had accepted the logic of containment.
And in doing so, she had helped keep a ghost in a room full of mock cities and cardboard towers.
She looked from Antoinette’s fierce, anguished face to Xia’s serene, sorrowful one, and then down at her own clean, capable hands. The tremor that started in her fingers was barely visible, but it was there. The studio, with its beautiful, deliberate light, felt like a lie she had been telling herself. The real building was here, in the dark, behind a broken lock, and she had walked past its door every day.
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King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — student lounge and media hallway near the marketing classrooms on the main campus.
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King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — student lounge and media hallway near the marketing classrooms on the main campus.
The student lounge was a study in manufactured comfort. Low, modular sofas in institutional blues and grays formed islands around scarred coffee tables fossilized with cup rings and forgotten flyers for crypto seminars. The lighting was soft, the air conditioning a constant hum, the whole space designed to absorb sound and anxiety. It felt like the waiting room for a future that had already been decided.
Saleel el-Pasha was slouched in a corner, one ankle propped on the opposite knee, scrolling through his phone with a thumb that moved too fast for actual reading. He was performing relaxation, but the set of his shoulders was rigid. When he saw them enter, his face automatically arranged itself into a smile that didn’t disturb the watchfulness in his eyes. “Hey,” he called out, his voice deliberately casual. “The investigators. Haala texted me. Said you were making the rounds.”
He didn’t get up. Xia and Antoinette crossed the synthetic carpet and stood before his sofa, breaking the invisible bubble of his performance.
“We’d like to talk about the anonymous account,” Antoinette said, dispensing with preamble. “The one you help manage with Haala.”
“Manage?” Saleel let out a short, polished laugh. He spread his hands, the picture of harmless amusement. “I just repost things. Funny screenshots. Dumb memes. Stuff everyone’s already saying anyway.” His eyes flicked between them, seeking the path of least resistance. “It’s just social stuff. Campus vibes.”
“We’re not here about vibes,” Antoinette said, her voice flat. She didn’t blink. “We’re here about a specific image that passed through that channel. One that deleted itself.”
The practiced smile on Saleel’s face froze at the edges. His thumb stopped scrolling. He shifted his weight, the leather of the sofa creaking underneath him. “Lots of stuff gets deleted. People send junk.”
Xia moved then. She sat on the low table opposite him, putting them at eye level. The move was quiet, non-threatening, but it collapsed the distance he’d been trying to keep. She placed her tablet on the table between them but didn’t activate it yet. “You have a good eye for what gets attention, Saleel. What resonates. This would have resonated. It was unusual.”
“I see a lot of unusual stuff.” He shrugged, trying to recapture the shrug’s lazy charm and missing by a mile. “It’s a weird campus.”
Antoinette leaned in, bracing her hands on the table. “Was it a blurry shot of a corridor? Two guys in utilities? A third man with a blindfold?”
The color drained from Saleel’s face. It wasn’t a slow fade; it was a sudden retreat, leaving his skin pale and waxy under the forgiving lights. All performative ease vanished. He looked, for the first time, genuinely caught. His tongue darted out to wet his lips. “That… thing. Yeah. That popped up. For like, a second.”
“You reposted it,” Xia stated, her tone leaving no room for it to be a question.
He nodded, a short, jerky motion. His gaze was locked on the blank tablet now, as if the image might manifest on its own. “It came into the dump account. I thought it was some ARG, you know? An alternate reality game. Creepy pasta. I hit share to the secondary channel as a ‘what is this?’ thing.” He swallowed. “Thirty seconds later, the original post was gone. Not deleted. Gone. Like the code for it never existed. Then my share… it just evaporated. The notification history, everything. I couldn’t even find it in my cache.”
His voice had dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, the fear he’d buried under jokes now raw in the open.
“The file had audio,” Xia said softly, prompting.
Saleel’s eyes widened. He’d hoped they didn’t know that. “How did you…?” He ran a hand through his hair, messing its careful disorder. “Yeah. It was weird. Really short. Maybe two seconds.” He closed his eyes, trying to recall. “First, there was the end of the adhan. The call to prayer. Faint, like from a distant speaker on campus. Then a click. A heavy, metallic sound. Like a door with a strong bolt being shut.”
Xia’s fingers moved over her tablet. She pulled up a spectral analysis program, feeding in the audio description. She cross-referenced it with the distortion pattern she’d catalogued from the skybridge and from Haala’s corrupted file. Lines of complex code scrolled, pulsed, and resolved. A familiar, elegant distortion signature emerged, woven into the very fabric of the described soundwave like a watermark.
“It’s him,” she murmured, more to herself than anyone. “The same signal architecture. He tagged the file. It’s a live marker.”
“Who?” Saleel asked, his voice thin.
“The man who took the blindfolded man,” Antoinette said, her stare unyielding. She turned back to Xia. “Does the audio help?”
Xia was already mapping it. “The prayer call places it within range of the northern campus speakers. The metallic resonance suggests a reinforced door, possibly a climate-controlled archive or a secure electrical room.” She looked up, her luminous eyes holding a frustration that was profoundly human. “It narrows the field to about fourteen possible buildings. It does not give us the room.”
Saleel watched this exchange, the technological certainty of it, the way they spoke of signals and architecture like he spoke of hashtags and algorithms. His world of social manipulation felt absurdly small. “I thought it was a prank,” he repeated, the words hollow now. “After it vanished, I just… I told Haala I must have imagined it. I played dumb. It was easier.”
“Cowardice is a choice,” Antoinette said, not with malice, but with a crushing, factual clarity. She finally straightened up, looking down at him where he sat, shrunk into the sofa. “But what you saw, what you heard? That’s evidence. You can keep hiding behind jokes, Saleel. Or that cowardice can actually mean something. You can stop performing and start remembering. Every detail.”
Saleel opened his mouth, an automatic, defensive laugh already forming in his throat. It died before it left him. He looked at Antoinette’s unwavering face, at Xia’s silent, analytical focus, and then down at his own hands, which had begun to tremble slightly. The lounge’s muted sounds—the hum of the fridge, the distant chatter from the hallway—seemed to amplify, pressing in on him.
For the first time in his carefully curated life, Saleel el-Pasha had no punchline ready. The silence he sat in was complete, and it was entirely his own.
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King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — faculty office corridor and archive room near the university library on the main campus.
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King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — faculty office corridor and archive room near the university library on the main campus.
Midnight had turned the university into a vault of shadows and isolated light. The manicured pathways lay empty under the orange glow of sodium lamps, and the sandstone buildings looked like ancient tombs sleeping under the stars. The only sounds were the sigh of automated sprinklers and the distant, lonely hum of a ventilation unit on a rooftop. The day’s human heat had dissipated, leaving behind the cool, mineral breath of the desert night.
In a third-floor corridor of the library annex, a single fluorescent tube flickered weakly above a door marked ‘Faculty Archives – Access B’. The air here was still and carried the faint, sweet smell of aging paper and the ozone of old electronics. Professor Naaifa al-Farag stood waiting, her posture straight but not rigid, a worn leather satchel slung over one shoulder of her simple blazer. She watched two figures emerge from the stairwell shadows.
Xia’s steps were silent. Antoinette’s boots tapped a subdued, urgent rhythm on the terrazzo floor. They stopped before her, and Naaifa saw it all immediately—the strained focus in Antoinette’s eyes, the preternatural calm in Xia’s, the gravity that clung to them like fine dust.
“Professor,” Xia said, her voice a soft counterpoint to the buzzing light.
“You said it was about the hidden man,” Naaifa replied. No greeting, no small talk. Her voice was low, practiced, the voice she used when a student finally confessed something terrible. “The one from the whispers.”
Antoinette nodded, pulling out her phone. “We have pieces. We need someone who knows this place not as a student, but as someone who listens.” She played the reconstructed audio Saleel had described: the truncated, distant call to prayer, then that distinct, echoing metallic clunk-thud.
Naaifa’s eyes closed in concentration. When they opened, they were sharp. “It’s not the prayer that matters. Every recording from this quadrant picks that up.” She pointed a finger at the air as the clunk-thud played again. “That’s the east service door to the restricted manuscript annex. Its frame was welded improperly after a leak in 2018. It closes with that specific sequential sound. Metal on metal, then a drag.”
Xia’s mercury eyes fixed on her. “You are certain.”
“I’ve complained about that noise for five years,” Naaifa said, a flicker of dry weariness in her tone. “It’s three corridors over. A place for storing things the university has forgotten.” She turned, her sensible shoes squeaking faintly on the floor. “Come.”
She led them away from the main library artery, into a throat of administrative hallways most students never saw. Doors with frosted glass windows revealed dark offices, names etched in Arabic and English. They passed locked steel shelves holding bound theses from decades past, the titles fading into gloom. The air grew cooler, drier.
A heavy, repaired metal door stood at the corridor’s end. Naaifa produced a key from a large ring, the tumblers turning with a gritty, protesting sound. The door opened with the exact clunk-thud from the recording.
The room beyond was small, perhaps twelve feet square. Shelves of archival boxes lined two walls. A single, battered wooden desk and a wheeled office chair occupied the center. A suspended lamp hung dark above it. The smell was complex: paper dust, stale air, the ghost of chemical cleaning agents, and underneath it all, a faint, coppery tang of recent adrenaline.
Xia stepped in and went utterly still. Her Elarion lens activated, painting the world in layers of energy decay. She saw the fading thermal imprint on the floor—two booted feet, the shape of a chair’s legs, the residual body heat of a person sitting for a long, tense period. It was weak, barely a shimmer, but it was there. Hours old, not days.
“Here,” she whispered.
Antoinette was already moving, her hands hovering over the chair. It was turned slightly away from the desk, facing the blank wall. On the armrests, faint, polished streaks marred the old paint. Something metal had been fastened there, repeatedly. She knelt, her fingers tracing the floor near the chair legs. Flecks of something pale, like shredded plastic, were caught in a crack in the tile. Cable tie shavings.
Varek had been here. Trussed to this chair, staring at this wall, while the campus slept above him.
Naaifa remained in the doorway, one hand pressed flat against the frame. Her other hand rose slowly to cover her mouth. She saw Antoinette’s fierce, desperate search, saw Xia’s otherworldly focus fixed on empty air. She understood the evidence of the turned chair, the scuffs, the oppressive quiet of the room. This wasn’t a scandal. It was an incision.
“They used our silence,” she said, her voice hollow against her palm. “Our… tidy corridors. Our broken doors no one budgets to fix.” Her gaze swept the shelves of forgotten academic work. “He was a secret in a room full of secrets.”
Antoinette stood up, her fists clenched at her sides. The room was empty. The trail, so vivid, so visceral, ended at this stupid chair. “He’s gone. Again.”
Xia finally moved. She crouched by the thermal trace, her hand extended palm-down over the fading warmth. Her expression was unreadable, a mask of pure absorption. She was not just seeing the heat. She was tasting the quantum resonance of the space, the faint shudder in the local field left by phased technology. It was the same elegant signature, already cooling, already receding.
“Rhanian,” she said, the name flat and final in the dusty quiet. She stood, turning to look at the two women. Her face was a moon in the dark room. “The trace is fresh. The signature is his. He is not hiding his path. He is drawing it for us.”
Antoinette’s breath caught. “He’s baiting you. Us.”
“He is demonstrating,” Xia corrected, her eyes like chips of flint. “He shows us he was here, hours ago. He shows us he knows we are close. The audio, the image, the thread, this chair. Each is a gift. Each says, ‘You are clever. But I am already there.’” She looked at the empty chair once more. “We are closer than Sofia. We are within hours.”
Antoinette’s hope was a wild, scrabbling thing now. “Then we can catch him. Before he moves again.”
Naaifa’s hand fell from her mouth. The initial shock had metabolized into something harder, a grim academic resolve. “This door,” she said, tapping the repaired frame. “It’s on no standard floorplan. The camera at the corridor’s head has been ‘under maintenance’ for a month.” She met Xia’s gaze. “If he used this, he has access to our internal systems. He knows our blindnesses.”
Xia gave a single, slow nod. She walked to the doorway, pausing beside Naaifa. The professor flinched, not from fear, but from the sheer intensity of focus radiating from the younger woman. “You have given us the room,” Xia said. “Now we must find the rhythm. He moves him in intervals. He leaves presents. There is a pattern in his pride.”
She stepped back into the corridor, Antoinette following. The archive room, with its cruel, empty chair, seemed to exhale behind them. The hunt was no longer a search. It was a chase.
And the rabbit was leaving a trail of glittering, arrogant breadcrumbs.