Chapter 2 - What Happened?

Adrian spent the next three minutes doing absolutely nothing.

He sat on the edge of the cot with the auto-injector resting on his knee and stared at the name on the phone.

'Vincent Vane.'

It was still there. Unfortunately.

He looked around the room again, in case it had changed its mind. It hadn't. The coins were still scattered across the floor, the uniform still hung from the chair, the books were still stacked on the desk, and the Halcyon Gate notice was still on the screen like a bill waiting for him to wake up.

— Okay,— he said, rubbing his face with both hands. — Panicking isn't going to help.—

It wasn't that he wasn't panicking. He just had more useful things to do.

If this really was Vincent's room, then Vincent had left something behind. People always did: receipts, messages, assignments, passwords, half-finished arguments, some stupid thing forgotten at the back of a drawer. A life was hard to erase. A person, not so much.

In a novel, that was doubly true. After all the ones he'd read, Adrian knew the clues were always there. You just had to be patient enough to find them.

He got up and went to the desk.

The first sheet he picked up was a class timetable. Names, dates, course codes, deadlines. He read it once, then again, and his eyes narrowed.

'First Year.'

He checked another sheet. Same. Another. Same.

Vincent Vane was a first-year student. That wasn't surprising. The date was. The academic year was well underway, and the notice on the phone said "Term 2."

Adrian kept digging, and near the bottom of the pile he found two timetables stapled together, the way you staple something you don't want to lose sight of again. The same course codes. The same rooms. The same teachers' initials. Different years.

He slowly lowered the phone.

— You're repeating the year, — he said to the empty room.

No answer came.

The rest of the pile filled out the picture, and it was ugly in an ordinary way. Unsubmitted assignments. Failed assessments. Warnings. Practical credits at zero. One disciplinary notice, then another, then a third with a heavier stamp. And finally, the suspension notices: the first, in effect since the week of last year's Term 3 final exams; the second, extending it straight through Term 1 of this year. Both barred any assessed activity.

Adrian read that part twice. A suspended student couldn't sit a practical exam. Vincent had missed every one.

He leaned back against the desk. Vincent wasn't a hidden genius. He wasn't a fallen heir, or someone secretly important. He was a student who had been bad at university and, apparently, even worse at staying out of trouble.

What he couldn't find was the trouble itself. Every report that should have pointed to a cause said only "conduct incompatible with the Student Code", and the lines where a witness or a second name should have been were blacked out, or written in that careful language people use when they're protecting someone.

— What the hell were you doing, Vincent?

The room didn't answer. It had the look of a room that had stopped answering questions a long time ago.

But Adrian thought he knew at least part of the story.

'The extension of the suspension in Term 1 must have been because of that.'

He vaguely remembered the book. Vincent liked one of the protagonist's friends and, unable to stand seeing the guy near her, started causing trouble. He gathered a group of thugs, got beaten, and, still not satisfied, tried to poison the protagonist.

Adrian sighed.

— This guy is the embodiment of a third-rate villain. Worse: an extra. Of course he was going to be forgotten. But...

Except the math didn't add up. That explained the second suspension, at most. It didn't explain the first, the one in Term 3 of last year, which had started long before the protagonist ever set foot on campus. And it didn't explain how someone who had tried to poison another person had gotten off with only a suspension. Halcyon Gate was an extremely strict university.

— Something doesn't smell right...

Sniff, sniff.

Literally. Something didn't smell right, and that something was Adrian. Or rather, Vincent: dried cold sweat on the shirt, floor dust stuck to the skin, and the source of all of it was a subject Adrian firmly decided not to examine just now.

— Fuck. Doesn't this guy shower before bed?—

✦ ✦ ✦

Since none of it added up, Adrian did what he always did when a problem had too many unknowns. He found a clean sheet of paper and a pen that still worked, and started a list.

"THEORIES"

He stared at the word for a while. It looked ridiculous. It was also, he noted with some irritation, the most organized thing he'd done since waking up.

— Never thought I'd end up inside a novel,— he sighed. — And in the extra's subgenre, no less.

If he was going to be thrown into a book, they could at least have had the decency to make him the hero. Or the villain. Or the best friend who dies in chapter forty with a tragic flashback. But an extra? Someone had filed his paperwork under "background."

He wrote "1. Ritual and underlined it twice."

— Did he do some kind of ritual?

It was the obvious answer. It was also the dumbest, which in Adrian's experience made it the most likely.

He knelt and looked under the cot. Dust. A sock. No chalk circle, no candles, no suspicious stains. He tapped the floorboards one by one, listening for a hollow sound, feeling like the lead in a cheap detective show. Nothing. He examined the walls for symbols and found only a damp stain shaped like a very disappointed face.

The bookshelf wasn't helping either. Secondhand textbooks, cracked spines, other people's notes in the margins:

"Wear and Recovery, First Year."
"Rift Law for Beginners."
"Basic Contracts."

Not a single book of forbidden arts. Whatever Vincent had read in this room, it was to pass exams, and he had clearly needed more than one attempt.

He crossed out Ritual. Then, after a moment, wrote it again in pencil. Just in case.

— Or some entity?— he murmured, squinting at the ceiling as if something might squint back. — Maybe he was part of a cult?

"He wrote 2. Entity / cult."

If there was a cult, there was a group chat. There was always a group chat. He picked up the phone and went through everything with the thoroughness of someone auditing a warehouse.

There were eleven contacts. Two were from the university. One was saved as "Landlord (DON'T be late)."

The delivery app showed the same order of cheap noodles, over and over, like a prayer said too many times.

The only group was the First Year class chat, muted, and when Adrian opened it he saw that Vincent hadn't been removed.

He had left.

Adrian looked at that for a second longer than he meant to. Then he turned the phone face down on the desk and went back to work.

"3. Random cosmic clerical error."

That one seemed the most honest.

By the time the list reached three items, the clock read 02:26. He sat on the edge of the cot, closed his eyes, and waited. A flash. A childhood. A face. A password. Anything.

What came was the taste of dust and a dull pressure behind his eyes.

— Arghh,— he groaned. — Why does this have to be one of those where I don't get the body's memories?—

The body knew how to use an auto-injector. It remembered the exact angle and the exact click. It didn't remember a single name. Adrian had read enough stories to know the rules: the lucky ones got a flood of memories, a ready-made cheat sheet, a helpful voice in their head. He'd gotten a headache and a floor full of coins.

Out of spite, he raised a finger.

Something pale and thin trickled from the tip, a thread of light no thicker than fishing line. It wavered in front of him, brave and ridiculous. He pointed it at the light switch on the wall, and it made it halfway before shaking so badly he had to let it go. The headache came back, sharper.

— Magic exists,— he told the ceiling, — and mine is fishing line.

Nobody commented.

— System.

Nothing happened.

— Abracadabra!

Nothing.

— FUCK!

Nothing. Just the echo, and a dull thud from below, someone banging on their ceiling with a broom handle, which happened to be Vincent's floor.

— Shut fuck up!— a voice yelled from the downstairs apartment.

— Go screw yourself!— Adrian replied, out of pure reflex. Then, remorseful: — Ah, sorry!

He stamped twice on the floor, the universal code for a neighbor asking forgiveness. From below came a grumble that sounded like reluctant acceptance.

He turned back to the desk, and this time he looked at the desk itself, not at what was on top of it.

Under the tabletop, by the gap for the legs, was a narrow drawer with a small, scratched keyhole. He'd noticed it before and ignored it, because a broke student's drawer was the last place anyone would hide something worth finding. But the papers only showed consequences, never motives, and every blacked-out line pointed to someone who didn't want to be named.

— So now I have to play Sherlock Holmes,— Adrian said slowly, — and uncover the identity of a Moriarty who is Vincent?

He thought of the boy from the book, leaning against a corridor wall with a crooked smile and a few strands of light hanging from his fingers.

— Dude. The guy lasted a few lines across four chapters. What kind of Moriarty is that?

Still, there was the drawer.

People who hid keys were predictable. Adrian knew, because he was one of them. He ran his fingers along the underside of the desk and found it almost immediately: a small, flat key, taped to the wood with a piece of old cloth tape.

— Amateur,— he murmured.

The lock turned with a soft click.

Inside was a bundle of faded cloth, tied twice, the way you tie something you've handled many times. Adrian undid the knots and opened the fabric.

A notebook.

No label. The cover was soft and worn, the corners rounded by years of fingers. The pages were thicker than they should have been, swollen, patched, glued together in places, as if the notebook had been repaired more often than it had been opened.

He turned to the first page, expecting a diary. Names. Complaints. A secret or two.

There were no words.

There were circles. Rings within rings. Lines connecting clusters of tiny, cramped marks, none like any alphabet he had ever seen. Columns of symbols ran down the margins. Small glyphs repeated, again and again, in handwriting so clean and patient that the whole page looked deliberate.

He turned the page. Then another. Then ten more.

More circles. More lines. More of that careful, illegible language, filling page after page of a book that Vincent had clearly never wanted anyone to see.

Adrian went very still.

He looked at the page. He looked at the locked drawer, the faded cloth, the double knot, the key hidden where only a careful person would hide it.

— I knew it,— he whispered.

Then, louder, to the empty room and to the judgmental damp stain on the wall:

— I knew it was some kind of ritual. Look at this shit! —