The first reports began arriving shortly after midnight. Druve sat alone in Rana's study, the laptop throwing a pale glow across the desk while the rest of the house slept. Riya had given him very little that could be turned into something searchable—a medical smell, a room she couldn't leave, something heavy around her wrist, men nearby, fire and the desperate need to get away. He had kept everything else between them. His men knew only the parameters required for the search, nothing about the strange flashes that had led him there.
Most of the reports were eliminated quickly. One hospital had evacuated part of a floor after an electrical fault; another had dealt with a fire that never reached the patient wards. Druve followed each only far enough to confirm that everyone involved had been accounted for before moving on. He wasn't looking for a place that merely resembled pieces of what Riya had seen. He needed something that didn't fall apart the moment he questioned it.
His phone vibrated beside the laptop.
"Sir, Aarunya Psychiatric Care Centre. There was a fire in one of the older wings a month ago. The damage was contained to that section, but part of the wing was badly affected."
Druve's attention shifted from the screen. "Cause?"
"Electrical fault. The building has had wiring problems for years."
One month. The date was wrong enough to weaken the lead immediately, but Druve asked for the report anyway. Aarunya was an old yet fully operational psychiatric facility, with regular staff, registered patients and nothing particularly unusual in its daily functioning. Renovation of the older section had been postponed more than once, making an electrical fire there hardly remarkable.
Then he reached the building details.
"They have secured rooms in that wing?"
"Yes. Isolation rooms too."
Druve's gaze stopped on the screen. A medical environment, a room someone couldn't simply leave and fire. For the first time that night, several details Riya had given him existed in the same place.
"Were those rooms occupied that night?"
"According to the records, yes."
"Don't give me the records. Verify the people."
The answer took longer this time, but when it came, Aarunya still gave him nothing solid. Every registered patient from the affected section had been accounted for. The staff roster matched, there were no unexplained transfers and no visitor had disappeared during the evacuation. The fire had damaged part of the wing badly enough to force people out of it, but the rest of the centre had continued functioning.
Druve studied the map for a few seconds before speaking again. "Check emergency activity around Aarunya after the fire. Five kilometres."
His man didn't question the order. Several minutes later, the call came back.
"There was one road accident several kilometres away. Pedestrian."
"When?"
"After the fire."
Druve leaned forward. "Victim?"
"Woman. Estimated late twenties."
"Condition?"
"She died, sir."
The answer quietened whatever interest the timing had created. Druve looked at the location his man had sent, then at the brief information beside it.
"Identity?"
"Unknown."
"Still?"
"Yes. Nothing was found on her, and nobody came forward to identify her."
Druve's eyes remained on the screen.
A month was a long time for someone to remain without a name.
"No missing-person report matched her?"
"Nothing that led to an identification."
For a moment, Druve forgot about Aarunya altogether. His attention stayed on the two words written where a name should have been.
Unidentified female.
He wondered whether somewhere there were people who didn't know they were supposed to stop waiting. Parents could still be calling her phone. A brother or sister might still be asking friends if they had heard anything. Perhaps someone who loved her was furious by now, telling themselves she had chosen to disappear because anger was easier than admitting they had no idea where she was.
That thought settled somewhere uncomfortably familiar.
Not knowing gave a person too much room to destroy himself with possibilities. A final conversation could be replayed until every word sounded different. A mistake that once seemed small could grow large enough to explain an entire disappearance. Eventually, you could convince yourself that if you had said one thing differently, stopped her at one door or followed when she walked away, everything afterward might have changed.
Druve knew that kind of waiting.
His gaze dropped again to the woman who had no name.
Somewhere, someone might still be doing exactly that for her.
"Anything connecting her to Aarunya?"
"Nothing."
"Check properly."
They did. No patient was missing, no member of staff had disappeared and no visitor remained unaccounted for. There was no documented connection between the woman and the facility. The roads between the two locations proved only that she could have travelled from one to the other, not that she had.
The lead should have ended with that answer. Instead, Druve found himself looking again at the blank space where the woman's identity should have been. Whether she had anything to do with Aarunya no longer seemed particularly important. If someone was still looking for her, they deserved to know where that search had ended.
"Send me the accident file."
"The summary?"
"Everything."
The first report contained little beyond what he already knew. The woman had been struck by a vehicle, suffered catastrophic injuries and died without identification. Druve reached the end and frowned.
"There has to be more."
"There is a detailed case file. Scene documentation, emergency records, personal effects and photographs."
"Send it."
The notification appeared a minute later. Druve opened the file and found the attachments arranged beneath the report. He passed over the incident notes and emergency records until his eyes reached the final folder.
Victim Photographs.
His hand settled on the mouse.
The phone rang before he clicked.
Druve glanced at the caller and answered, irritation already in his voice. "What?"
"Sir, St. Gabriel's. We found an ambulance leaving through the rear entrance during the fire, but according to the hospital records, nobody was transferred that night."
Druve's hand remained on the mouse.
"Registration?"
"Only partial. Rear cameras were offline. We checked the number against traffic footage nearby and found the same vehicle around St. Gabriel's on four other dates."
"Patient movements?"
"Three visits have nothing corresponding to them. On the fourth, St. Gabriel's says a sixteen-year-old boy was transferred to another hospital."
"Says?"
"The receiving hospital never admitted him."
Druve's hand left the mouse.
The boy had entered St. Gabriel's through a charitable treatment programme and lived in a children's shelter. When Druve ordered his men to contact the shelter directly, the answer made the missing hospital record considerably harder to dismiss. The shelter had been told that the boy required specialist treatment elsewhere. They had been discouraged from visiting while arrangements were being made, and nobody there had seen him in seven weeks.
"Check every child who entered through that programme," Druve said. "Every transfer. Every discharge. Verify where they actually went. Don't use St. Gabriel's records to confirm St. Gabriel's records."
The first discrepancies appeared quickly. A thirteen-year-old girl had supposedly been discharged to a guardian whose number didn't exist and whose address belonged to an empty building. Another child had supposedly reached a hospital that had never received him. Most of the programme's cases were legitimate, but four children could not be located.
The ambulance deepened the problem. It belonged to a private medical transport company and had officially been decommissioned eight months earlier, yet it had continued moving. Financial links led from people connected to St. Gabriel's toward the transport company and then toward accounts associated with a transplant coordinator who had lost his licence years ago.
"Sir, this may be organ trafficking."
"May be," Druve corrected. "Don't build the conclusion before you have the evidence."
A message reached his man while Druve was speaking. The silence that followed was enough to make Druve look up.
"What?"
"One of the four missing children. The fourteen-year-old girl. St. Gabriel's records say she was transferred two weeks ago, but medication was issued under her patient ID yesterday."
Druve stood. "Where was it issued?"
"At St. Gabriel's."
"Who authorized it?"
"We're checking."
"Don't contact the hospital."
"We haven't."
"Get the authorities involved and secure the place before anyone there knows why. If they're using the identity of a child they claim isn't there, I want to know what they're using it for."
Druve reached for his jacket and left the study. The call continued as he walked, already shifting his attention toward St. Gabriel's and the children whose whereabouts existed only on paperwork that had begun to collapse under scrutiny.
Behind him, the detailed accident file remained open on the laptop.
The photograph remained one click away.
St. Gabriel's looked exactly like the kind of place people trusted with someone they loved. Families waited beneath bright lights, nurses moved between wards carrying files and medication, and a tired father paced near reception with a sleeping child against his shoulder. Nothing in those ordinary scenes suggested that somewhere behind them, children could disappear while paperwork quietly insisted they had gone somewhere else.
His men met him near the entrance. The fourteen-year-old girl wasn't registered in any current ward, but the medication issued under her patient identification had definitely come from the hospital. By then, the authorities had begun securing the entrances and electronic systems, preventing anyone from quietly leaving or erasing records before they understood what was being investigated.
The search of the registered wards gave them nothing. Then one of Druve's men found an older building plan showing a basement treatment section that no longer appeared on the current patient map. A nurse standing nearby glanced toward them when the basement was mentioned. It was barely a reaction, but Druve saw it.
"What's downstairs?"
"Storage."
"Only storage?"
She hesitated. "Not everyone is allowed there."
Druve watched her for a moment. "Who is?"
Her eyes moved toward the administrative corridor. "The administrator."
They found him with his phone in his hand, deleting messages. By the time the basement was opened, his insistence that the lower level contained nothing important had already become difficult to believe. The corridor below was clean and maintained, medical supplies filled one room and equipment in another had clearly been used recently. At the far end stood two doors, both locked from the outside.
Druve stopped in front of them. "Open them."
The administrator stepped forward. "Those rooms are restricted. There are treatment protocols—"
"Open them."
The first room was empty.
The second held a girl.
She sat on a narrow bed with her knees drawn close to her chest, an IV line taped to one arm. The moment the door opened, she pushed herself backward until her shoulders met the wall, her eyes moving rapidly between every person outside the room. According to the records she was fourteen, but fear had folded her into herself until she looked much younger.
Druve remained outside the doorway. A female officer approached slowly, stopping well before the bed and lowering herself slightly so she wasn't towering over the child.
"We're not going to hurt you," she said. "You don't have to come near us until you're ready."
The girl didn't answer. An independent doctor waited beside the doorway rather than entering, but even the white coat made her tense. Her gaze kept slipping past them toward the corridor, as though she was less afraid of the strangers who had opened the door than of whoever might appear behind them.
"Can you tell me your name?" the officer asked.
The girl swallowed. Her fingers tightened around the edge of the sheet before she finally whispered, "Are they coming back?"
Druve went still.
For several seconds he said nothing. His eyes remained on the child, on the IV fixed to her arm and the locked door behind which she had apparently learned to listen for footsteps. When he finally turned toward the administrator, there was no visible rage in his face. His voice had simply lost whatever warmth it possessed.
"How many?"
The administrator blinked. "I don't know what you mean."
"How many children have been kept down here?"
"I handle administration. I don't know what individual doctors—"
"Your records say she left this hospital two weeks ago."
"I didn't authorize her treatment."
Druve held his gaze. "I didn't ask who authorized it."
The man fell silent.
"How many?"
"I don't know."
Druve looked at him for another second before turning toward the officers. "Take him."
He didn't follow when they removed the administrator. His attention returned to the girl instead, though he still kept his distance. She had enough strangers around her already. The independent doctor explained each movement before touching her, and the female officer stayed close while the IV was removed and a blanket was wrapped around her shoulders.
Druve followed only as far as the hospital entrance. The girl was being wheeled toward the ambulance when she suddenly looked back at St. Gabriel's. Her fingers tightened around the blanket immediately, and the fear that crossed her face was sharper than anything she had shown while being taken from the basement.
A hospital was supposed to be somewhere frightened people were brought to become safe. Someone inside St. Gabriel's had taught this child to fear the place itself.
"Sir."
Druve turned as one of his men approached. Records recovered from the basement computers showed blood typing, tissue-compatibility testing and other investigations performed on children whose documented conditions gave no reason for them. Coded schedules and financial transactions were already being connected to outside medical brokers. It still required a full investigation, but there was now more than enough for the authorities to take control of everything inside the building.
"Two possible locations for the other missing children have come up," his man continued.
"Teams are already moving."
"And the last one?"
"Still tracing."
"Find them. Then verify every child who passed through that programme, not only the four who disappeared. Anyone connected to the ambulance, those accounts or the medical brokers gets identified before they realize how much we've found."
"We'll handle it."
Druve looked toward the ambulance. The fourteen-year-old girl sat inside with the female officer beside her, the blanket still clutched around her shoulders. He waited until the doors closed before turning back.
"Preserve everything. Nobody connected to this gets enough warning to disappear. Call me the moment the other children are found."
His man nodded. "We've got it from here."
That was all Druve needed to hear. The building was secured, the girl was safe and people he trusted were already following the remaining children. Staying to watch arrests, interviews and evidence being carried out of St. Gabriel's would accomplish nothing that his presence could improve.
He left.
By the time the hospital disappeared behind his car, Druve's thoughts had already begun moving back toward the questions that had started the night. Riya had given him fragments with no explanation and, so far, every road he followed either ended in coincidence or opened into something entirely different. St. Gabriel's had demanded his attention because there had been children who might still be saved. Now that responsibility belonged to people capable of finishing what he had started.
The unknown woman from the road did not return to his thoughts.
Back in Rana's study, the laptop remained beneath the desk lamp, its screen crowded with reports that had arrived after Druve left. Somewhere beneath them sat the detailed accident file he had requested for a woman whose family, he imagined, might still be waiting for her to come home.
For a few minutes, Druve had felt sorry for whoever had been left behind. He knew what it was to live without an answer, to carry anger beside hope and to wonder whether someone had simply chosen a life without you.
The photograph that could have answered seven years of his own questions remained unopened.