The sun had long since surrendered to the night, leaving the office stifled by the heavy scent of stale, brewed coffee and the lingering heat of overworked bodies. Drenched in sweat, the officers began the slow, agonizing ritual of packing up, their backs aching under the weight of a relentless workload.
One officer groaned as he straightened his spine, the joints popping like dry twigs. He bent over to gather a scattered mess of documents.
"Where on earth are the interns?" he grumbled, gesturing to the chaos. "The files are practically wallpapering the room."
His colleague cracked his knuckles, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion. "How should I know? Unlike you, I haven't had a second to breathe. I'm buried under a mountain of work, and now I have to deal with these quirky—" He cut himself off, pausing mid-sentence.
The first officer had frozen, his fingers tightening on a manila folder. "Hey, listen to this."
"What? What's the drama now?"
"Isn't this the case Chief Aric took on? The old one?"
The other officer bolted upright. "What? No way. Wasn't that shifted over to that new group—Lisprey 109?"
"Then why are these files scattered all over our floor?" the first replied, bewildered. "Did both groups just... abandon it?"
The colleague shrugged, the haze of sleep returning. "Who knows? Just shove them on the incomplete rack. We're going home."
The Next Day
"Chief, we hit a dead end," Lucien reported, his voice tight with frustration. "We canvassed the entire area, but no one saw a thing. It's like the suspect never existed."
Chief Aric didn't look up. He sat submerged in a sea of paperwork, his mind a tangled web of unanswered questions. He turned slightly toward the window, watching the city below. Would it be so hard, he wondered silently, if people weren't so consumed by greed?
The door creaked open as Darian entered, his face barely visible behind a fresh tower of files.
"Did you find something?" Lucien asked, his eyes gleaming with a desperate sort of hunger for a lead.
Darian heaved the files onto the table with a heavy thud. He locked eyes with Aric. "Yes."
For a fleeting second, the tension broke. The three men shared a brief, triumphant laugh—a rare moment of shared hope in a dark room.
Aric adjusted his chair, leaning forward. "Don't keep us waiting, Darian. What do you have?"
Darian took a deep breath, his expression flattening. "I checked every outgoing transit log—buses, trains, private charters. There was no record of the kid, and no one suspicious matching the description."
The silence that followed was suffocating. The flicker of happiness died instantly, replaced by a cold, heavy disappointment.
Lucien began flipping through the new reports, his eyes scanning the pages at high speed. Suddenly, his thumb snagged on a specific line. He stared at it, then tapped the paper urgently.
"Chief?"
Aric turned, his brow furrowing. "What is it, Lucien?"
"Why are there no details under this entry? It's just... blank."
Aric and Darian leaned in. Aric straightened his glasses and read the name aloud: "Obsidian Cross Hospital."
"Oh, that," Darian said, waving a hand dismissively. "When I asked around, they said it's been abandoned for over ten years. All facilities and services were cut long ago. I didn't think it was worth pursuing."
Aric went still. His mind began to race, pulling at the threads of the past. He closed his eyes, attempting to trigger his unique ability to reconstruct a crime scene.
Wiss... Wiss... Wiss...
The mental static hissed in his ears. He strained, reaching for a vision of the hospital, but the air remained cold and empty. For the first time, his power failed him. There simply wasn't enough evidence left in the world to feed his gift.
After a long, tense silence, Lucien reached for his phone. He didn't need orders. He dialed the number of the one person Aric had mentioned in emergencies: the underground hacker.