At the end of a hall of dorm rooms, Joe Solomon stood in the middle of the last room on the right, a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He'd been in this room once or twice before, to bring a birthday gift when no one realized the girl who resided here had managed to stay alive for another whole year, or to offer advice during a particularly difficult assignment.
He'd sat in that chair next to the desk, facing Esmeralda who'd sat, always, just across from him on the bed, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her eyes always, always locked on his. But she wasn't sitting now, and neither was he. In fact, she wasn't here at all. And that was what worried him.
She had been instructed to meet him two hours ago, and had never shown up. If there was one thing constant about Esmeralda, it was her habit of arriving exactly when she was told to, almost to the second. So when the minutes had ticked by, a slow rotation of the big hand on the clock, he'd felt something settle uncomfortably in his stomach. The walk down to her dorm room had been a long one, and he'd deliberately kept a slow pace. She'd been working hard, he told himself, and she was, despite everything, still a teenage girl. Perhaps she'd fallen asleep, or lost track of the time.
But even as the possibilities ran through his head, he rejected them. So he'd reached her door, the initials E.M. carved clearly into a small metal plaque the only thing that let anyone know someone even resided in this particular dorm room. And then he'd stopped, bent down and picked up the clear piece of fishing line, less than two inches long, a bit of two sided tape attached to either end. That was the first time he'd felt his heart skip a beat, and he'd cursed under his breath, holding the bit of string in the palm of his hand.
She taped this across the door, he knew, every time she left the room. Some might call it paranoid, but in the Academy it was simply known as cautious. If the string was on the floor, that meant someone had opened the door-the locked door-without realizing it was there. With a quiet oath, he twisted the knob, found the door unlocked, and stepped inside the room.
Nothing was disturbed in here, not a sheet of paper out of place. But the window was closed, and for as long as he'd known her, she always left it open throughout the day. A quick check showed that none of her clothes or luggage was missing, her bed was neatly made and everything exactly as it always was. She didn't have much, and never had. He'd never known her to keep a single memento or pointless knickknack. It was, in a way, lonely. But that wasn't his concern. He could find no trace of anything else out of the ordinary, nothing out of place.
But as he walked over to the window, he spotted, though it was a faint thing, a smudged fingerprint on the glass of the window pane. When he realized it was on the outside of the glass, he blew out a breath, took a step back as he glance once more around the room. Without a word, he turned on his heel, walking out of the room again and shutting the door with a quiet click.
His footsteps echoed in the halls as he made his way to the Headmistress' office, and his eyes were dark as he slipped inside and locked his gaze with Cameron's mother.
"Rachel, we have a problem."