Wraithlight

Watched

I don't sleep.

I lie in bed with the flash drive under my pillow like it's something that needs guarding, my laptop shut on the desk across the room, and every time I close my eyes I hear her voice cut off mid-word.

Something happened to me before I could—

By six, I give up pretending. I get dressed, grab my bag, and head out before my aunt's even awake to ask why I'm leaving early on a day I don't have a shift.

I need to go back to the library.

Not for the drive that's staying with me, zipped into the inside pocket where I keep the little cash I have. I need to check the bin again. If Odalys hid one thing there, she could've hidden more. A second drive. A note. Anything.

Mrs. Alvarez isn't in yet. The library doesn't open for another hour, but the side door by the returns slot sticks half the time, and I know exactly how hard to pull it.

The overflow bin is empty.

Not reshelved-empty. Empty like somebody already went through it and took everything out.

"You're early."

I spin around so fast my bag swings off my shoulder. Caspian's standing by the returns slot, hands in his jacket pockets, like he's been waiting for me instead of just showing up.

"What are you doing here?"

"Following a hunch." He nods at the empty bin. "Looks like somebody had the same idea I did. Except they got here first."

"You think someone took the rest of what she hid?"

"I think somebody's been one step ahead of both of us since Tuesday." He says it flat, no drama in it, which somehow makes it worse. "You listened to it. The drive."

It's not a question. I don't bother lying.

"Yeah."

"All of it?"

"All nine."

Something shifts in his face not surprise. Relief, maybe, though he covers it fast. "Then you know it's not finished."

"There's a tenth file. She said she hadn't recorded it yet."

"She recorded it." He says it with a certainty that makes my skin go cold. "She just never got the chance to hide it."

"How do you know that?"

He doesn't answer right away. He looks past me, out toward the empty parking lot, like he's checking something before he decides how much to say.

"Because I know Odalys better than people think I do," he says finally. "And because whoever's been cleaning up after her wouldn't be this careful if there wasn't still something left to find."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting right now."

I want to push. I want to grab him by the jacket and make him explain how a guy nobody trusts ends up knowing more about a missing girl than the police do. But something in the way he's standing shoulders tight, eyes moving to the parking lot every few seconds tells me this isn't the place for that conversation.

"I have to get home before my aunt notices I'm gone," I say instead.

"Good idea." He's already walking away from me, toward the street, not toward the school. "Go home. Don't stop anywhere on the way."

"Why would I stop anywhere?"

He doesn't answer that either. He just disappears around the corner of the building, same as prom night, gone before I can get another word out of him.

The walk home takes twenty minutes if I go the long way past the gas station, twelve if I cut through the lot behind the church. I go the long way. I don't know why. Maybe because Caspian told me not to stop, and something in me wants to prove I make my own choices, even small ones.

I'm two blocks from my street when I notice the car.

Black, parked half on the curb outside a house that's had a for-sale sign in the yard since spring. Windows tinted dark enough that I can't see who's inside, engine running low enough I almost miss it under the sound of my own footsteps.

I don't stop walking. I don't look at it directly. But I clock it the way you clock things when your body decides something's wrong before your brain catches up — the angle of it, facing my street instead of the empty house. The exhaust curling up into the cold morning air, meaning it's been running a while.

Meaning somebody's waiting.

I keep my pace even. Don't run. Don't speed up. My aunt used to say that's the first thing that gives you away, moving different than you normally would, and some part of that lesson stuck even though she never explained why she needed me to know it.

I pass the car. Don't look at it.

Nothing happens. No door opens, no window rolls down. Just the low hum of an engine at six-forty in the morning outside a house nobody lives in.

I make it to the end of the block. I let myself glance back, once, quick, telling myself I'm imagining the whole thing, that it's somebody's dad leaving early for work, that Ashcombe isn't the kind of place things like this actually happen.

The car is still there.

Still running. Still facing my street.

I take one more step toward home.

And behind me, low and smooth, I hear the engine shift into gear.