Chapter 16 – The Vanishing
1601 Words
It started as a flutter on the Vault's main corridor screens—a subtle reordering of the day's roster that, to anybody else, would have gone unnoticed. But Faris had been observing Layla for the better part of an hour, hunched over the holographic water-flow records as she ran her routine diagnostics. She paused when the engineer's rotation list appeared.
Mariam Dahran's name was not on it.
That in itself wasn't unusual—engineers switched shifts all the time. But Layla's eyes stayed fixed to the place where her mentor's name should have been, her mouth slightly ajar, as though she was staring not at emptiness, but a piece torn from herself.
"She's off-duty?" Faris tried to sound casual.
"No," Layla breathed. "She wouldn't take leave. Not during the heatwave cycle."
Her tone carried an edge he recognized—an edge sharpened by alarm. Faris leaned in closer, his voice low. “You’re sure?”
Layla’s hand hovered over the console, then began to fly across the surface, drawing up archived schedules, shift logs, and emergency call lists. Mariam’s records ended abruptly two days ago. The files before that looked normal—system check-ins, inspection notes, repair authorizations.
And then nothing.
No record of resignation. No leave request. Not even an automatic transfer notice.
"Comm logs?" Faris asked.
Layla was already there, calling them up. Mariam's ID tag log was empty. Not blank, but purged.
Faris's scowl intensified. "That's a full wipe. Who can do that but—"
"The League registry desk," Layla filled in.
Her hand hovered over the panel. Her eyes were hard as she gazed at him in a manner he had never seen.
"They're erasing her," she said.
---
The Vanishing Trace
They moved quickly to the Archive Annex, a dim, climate-controlled space behind the filtration hall where years' worth of hardcopy rosters and schematics were stored physically. Faris hated it—the electric, dusty smell in the air always made him sneeze—but Layla moved like she owned it, opening shelves, pulling binders down.
Mariam's name would have been in the engineer's list, her face on the ID board in case of emergencies, her signature on hundreds of repair reports. Nothing.
Wherever they looked, her presence had been methodically removed, like rot cut from fruit.
Faris closed one binder harder than he intended. "This is not dismissal. This is. erasure."
Layla didn't answer. She was kneeling alongside the bottom shelf, digging through inspection records from three cycles ago.
"She taught me everything," she breathed. "Not just pressure valve calibration—everything. How to read ancient schematics. How to tell when the League's math didn't add up. How to listen to the pipes like they were speaking."
She stopped flipping pages. The binder trembled in her hands. "She wouldn't just disappear.".
The Moment Layla Fell
They took an elevator to the upper concourse, headed for Mariam's assigned living quarters.
The corridor was too quiet. Doors along the line were shut, biometric pads glowing red. When they reached Mariam's door, Layla put her hand on the sensor. Denied.
Faris stepped forward, trying his own—denied.
He was about to suggest another approach when Layla's knees buckled. She braced herself against the wall, but her breath came in fast, shallow gasps.
"Layla—"
"I can't—" She wobbled.
Her face was pale beneath the smudges of dirt, her pupils huge. It was more than a shock. She was collapsing inward, as if the oxygen in the Vault had reduced to zero.
Faris reached for her, but her weight rested against him before he could balance. She dropped to the deck.
The scrape of her head against the bulkhead made him flinch. He knelt, grasping her shoulder.
"Stay with me. Breathe."
Her eyes shut, lashes trembling.
Faris laid his thumb across the pulse in her throat. Too quick. Too faint.
He was called a med-assist, voice tense.
---
Watching the Burn
The med-unit came and took her vitals. They said she'd dropped from stress shock—nothing uncommon in Vault dwellers during periods of excessive heat. But Faris was aware it was different.
He sat with her in the med-bay afterward, elbows on his knees, and watched the slow rise and fall of her chest. Her hair was damp from the cooling mist system, curls clinging to her temples.
He'd seen her angry, seen her upset, seen her stubborn—but not like this. Not drained.
It wasn't just the death of a mentor. It was the quiet devastation of realizing the League could reach into your life and erase someone you cared about as if they'd never existed—and no one would ever dare to question why.
He realized, with a slow, sinking weight, that her fire wasn't all science or justice now. It was sorrowful now.
And sorrow burned differently—it burned low, ate deep, and lasted far longer than any spark of anger.
---
The Closed Doors
Layla didn't ask where she was when she woke. She didn't look around. She only whispered, "We have to find her."
Faris nodded. "We will. But they've closed every record, every—"
"Then we look outside the records," she cut in. "If the League is going to pretend she never existed, fine. But pipes in the Vault still remember her hands. Work she's done—someone will have seen it. Someone in maintenance, or the reclamation pits."
Faris did not ask how she was planning to track a deleted woman through steel and water pipes. He simply said, "Then I'm with you."
The thrum of the filtration corridor hung between them, a low mechanical moan that should have been comforting, but tonight it pressed upon Faris's chest like an accusation. He stood over the med cot where Layla lay, her breathing shallow and regular, the thin blanket barely stirring with each breath.
Her fainting was abrupt, terrifying in its suddenness. One moment, she was reading aloud the final snippets of archived data she'd been able to salvage from the League's secure servers; the next, her voice cracked, her eyes blurred, and she fell into him like a puppet whose strings had been severed.
Now the doctor—a thin, gray-haired man whose loyalty belonged to machines instead of patients—had left after a quick examination, muttering something about "exhaustion." Yet Faris knew it was more than tiredness. This was grief. This was betrayal seeping in like a slow poison.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, trying not to notice the flicker of the status light above the cot—amber, not green. “You’re still in there,” he murmured, though he wasn’t sure if he was speaking to her or himself.
Her mentor's disappearance—the reticent, whip-genius woman who'd taught Layla not just to read aquifer schematics but to listen to the voice of water—was more than a disappearance. It was a cutting out from the world. All records in the League's database, deleted. Her apartment, cleared out. Even the engraved wrench Layla used to keep in her toolkit—gone.
Faris thought of the warning whispered to him a few nights ago in the conduit junction: Keep digging, and you’ll end up like your father. At the time, he’d dismissed it as an intimidation tactic. But seeing Layla collapse under the weight of erasure… he wasn’t so sure anymore.
He grasped her hand. Warm but lifeless. "You told me once," he whispered, "that every drop in the Vault has a tale. You can't allow them to silence hers. Or yours."
A faint stir in her fingers. His heart spasmed—then settled when her eyelids flickered, sluggish, as if fighting the heaviness of the world.
Her voice was a whisper, rough and sand-dry. "They didn't simply take her, Faris. They… rewrote her out of the stream."
He scowled. "Stream?"
Layla's eyes opened wide now, glassy but intense. "The League's central records aren't merely files. They run them through the Memory Stream—cross-linked in every department. If a person's erased from that… it's as if they never lived."
A shiver clenched his spine. "That's not merely deletion. That's annihilation."
She nodded, a tear rolling from the corner of her eye. "And if they can do that to her…" She didn't finish the sentence, but Faris knew what she meant. If the League could erase someone so completely, then no one—no truth—was safe.
The lights in the hallway dimmed for ration hour, the hum of the filtration slowed to a lazy cadence. Somewhere deep in the infrastructure, water flow was being rerouted. Faris listened, having learned from his father many years ago to sense pressure changes by sound alone.
But this change wasn't normal. The sound had a hollow echo, as if fluid was gushing through a bypass.
Layla noticed it too. "That isn't going through primary filtration," she whispered, sitting up on one elbow in spite of her muscle's protest.
He leaned in closer, his voice developing a keen edge of urgency. "Then where is it going?"
Her gaze darted upwards, upwards towards the dark traceries of pipework that twisted away from them like living tendrils. "Somewhere the League doesn't want anyone to see."
And with it, the gravity in the room shifted from grief to a new, dangerous clarity. They weren't only dealing with the loss of a mentor. They were looking at the brink of the very same abyss that had taken her.
The only difference was—they were going to look it dead in the eye.
—
- Writer
