Classes were cancelled that afternoon.
The announcement came during third period—a campus-wide alert delivered by runners who moved through hallways with the urgent efficiency of people trying to contain panic through the appearance of control.
All students report to dormitories. Faculty meeting in the Grand Hall. Further instructions to follow.
Elarion watched students file out of Quantum Resonance Studies with varying degrees of concern. Some looked frightened. Others excited—drama was entertainment when you didn't understand the stakes. A few, like him, looked carefully neutral, revealing nothing.
Doctor Vael stood at the front of the classroom, chalk still in hand, equations half-finished on the board. Her expression was complicated—frustration, worry, and something else. Something that looked uncomfortably like recognition.
"Mr. Voss." Her voice cut through the shuffling exodus. "A moment."
Elarion stopped at the door. Waited for the last student to leave before turning back.
Vael set down her chalk with deliberate care. "You were in Professor Thorne's class yesterday. The same class as the missing students."
"Yes."
"Did you notice anything unusual? Anyone acting strangely?"
"Everyone acts strangely on the first day. New environment, new expectations, social anxiety."
"Don't be clever. You know what I mean." She moved closer, and Elarion noted the tension in her shoulders, the way her hands stayed visible—not threatening, but alert. "Three students vanish overnight from the same class. That's not coincidence. That's a pattern."
"I agree."
Vael blinked, as if she'd expected denial. "You do?"
"Pattern recognition is a survival skill. I learned it early." Elarion kept his voice even. "But I don't know what the pattern means. I'm as confused as everyone else."
"Are you?" She studied him with uncomfortable intensity. "Because from where I'm standing, Mr. Voss, you look like someone who's been expecting something bad to happen and is now calculating responses rather than reacting with appropriate shock."
Perceptive. That was dangerous.
"I've seen bad things happen before," Elarion said carefully. "It affects how you process new bad things."
"The war."
"Yes."
"Which branch did you serve in?"
"That's—"
"Classified, I know." Vael's expression hardened. "Everything about you is classified. Your enrollment, your records, even your presence here seems designed to avoid scrutiny. Which makes me wonder, Mr. Voss, what you're really doing at this College."
This was spiraling into territory Elarion needed to avoid. Time to redirect.
"What do you think is happening to the students?" he asked.
Vael hesitated, caught off guard by the reversal. Then, quietly: "I don't know. But the way they vanished—no signs of struggle, rooms locked from inside—that suggests either voluntary departure or..." She trailed off.
"Or manipulation sophisticated enough to bypass physical barriers." Elarion finished the thought. "Consciousness-level interference. Making them want to leave, or making them forget they had a choice."
Vael's eyes narrowed. "That's very specific speculation."
"You're the quantum resonance specialist. Consciousness-linked entanglement, neural pattern manipulation—that's your field, isn't it? I read your published work."
A lie. He'd barely skimmed the publicly available papers. But people loved being acknowledged as experts—it made them more talkative.
"My work is theoretical," Vael said, but her tone had shifted slightly. "The practical applications would require technology we don't have. Equipment that could entangle multiple consciousnesses simultaneously, maintain coherence across distances, suppress individual will without triggering alarm responses—that's decades away from feasibility."
"Unless someone's been working on it in secret," Elarion suggested. "Military applications, perhaps. Classified research that doesn't appear in academic journals."
Vael was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped to barely above a whisper.
"Three years ago, my thesis was classified. I thought it was because the implications were too dangerous—the ability to link minds could be weaponized in ways that made physical warfare look humane. But when they sealed it, they also offered me a position here. Full funding, state-of-the-art laboratory, complete research autonomy."
"That's generous."
"Too generous. I've been wondering ever since why they wanted me here specifically, at this College, with access to thousands of young minds at precisely the developmental stage where neural plasticity is highest." She looked at him directly. "And now students are vanishing with symptoms consistent with consciousness manipulation, and you—someone with no academic history but enough theoretical knowledge to discuss entanglement mechanics—appear out of nowhere."
She wasn't accusing. Not quite. But she was circling something true, and that made her either an asset or a liability.
"What are you suggesting?" Elarion asked.
"I'm suggesting that maybe we're both pawns in something larger. You brought here for reasons you don't understand, me positioned here years ago for reasons I'm only now beginning to question." Vael walked to the window, looked out at the campus. "I'm suggesting that if someone is experimenting with consciousness manipulation, the Arcane College would be the perfect laboratory."
The assessment aligned too closely with Elarion's own suspicions. Which meant either Vael was genuine, or she was very good at seeming genuine.
"If that's true," Elarion said, "then talking openly about it is dangerous. For both of us."
"Yes." Vael turned back. "Which is why I'm going to pretend this conversation didn't happen, and you're going to pretend you don't know more than you should about classified research." She paused. "But if you learn something—anything—about what's happening to those students, I want to know. Not through official channels. Quietly."
"Why trust me?"
"Because you're the only other person in this building who looks at these vanishings and sees a pattern instead of an anomaly." She moved back to her desk, began gathering papers. "And because trust is a calculated risk, and right now the risk of staying silent seems higher than the risk of speaking to the wrong person."
Elarion understood that calculation intimately.
"If I learn something, how do I contact you?"
"Library. Third floor, acoustics section. No one goes there—too specialized, too boring. Leave a note in the book titled Harmonic Resonance in Confined Spaces. I check it every evening."
Dead drop protocol. She'd done this before.
"Understood."
"Good." Vael looked at him one more time, and something in her expression softened slightly. "Be careful, Mr. Voss. Whatever game is being played here, people who know too much have a tendency to vanish."
She didn't need to specify whether she meant the students or people like them.
Elarion left the building and crossed the courtyard with measured steps, aware of eyes watching from windows, guards standing at new positions near the gates, the subtle tightening of security that suggested administration panic poorly disguised as precaution.
The dormitory was unusually crowded—students clustered in common areas, speculating wildly about the disappearances. Kidnapping. Political conspiracy. Dark magic. The theories grew more elaborate with each retelling.
Elarion bypassed them all and climbed to the fourth floor.
Lira was waiting in the hallway, leaning against the wall between their doors with studied casualness. When she saw him, she straightened.
"Your room or mine?" Her voice was light, but her eyes were serious.
"Neither. Roof in ten minutes."
She nodded and disappeared into her room.
Elarion used the ten minutes to gather materials: the vial he'd taken from the intruder, a notebook, a pencil. Simple items, nothing that would raise suspicion if someone searched his room.
The roof was becoming their operations center. Not ideal—too exposed to weather, too dependent on no one else discovering their meetings—but better than anywhere indoors where sound could travel.
Lira was already there when he arrived, sitting in the same spot as last night. She'd brought her own notebook.
"Doctor Vael cornered me after class," Elarion said without preamble as he sat down. "She suspects consciousness manipulation. Thinks someone's been positioning pieces for years—her research, my arrival, the College as testing ground."
"She told you this directly?"
"Yes. Either she's genuine or she's very good at seeming genuine."
"Or she's testing your response." Lira frowned. "Did you tell her anything?"
"Nothing she couldn't have figured out herself. But she's smart, observant, and now actively looking for patterns. That makes her either an ally or a threat."
"What's your instinct?"
Elarion considered. Instinct had kept him alive for sixteen years, but instinct could be manipulated by people who understood psychology.
"Sixty percent genuine, forty percent potential trap. We treat her as provisional ally with extreme caution."
"Fair." Lira opened her notebook. "I talked to my friend in the registrar's office. Got the names of the missing students: Marcus Tellwin, Sera Brighthollow, and Jace Mordent. All first-years. All high marks in theoretical applications. All—" She paused. "All orphaned during the war."
That stopped Elarion cold. "All three?"
"All three. Different battles, different circumstances, but all lost family to the conflict." She looked up. "That can't be coincidence."
"No. It can't." Elarion's mind raced. "War orphans with strong theoretical aptitude, enrolled in a class focused on wave mechanics and consciousness manipulation, sitting in the front row taking detailed notes—"
"They were targets from the beginning," Lira finished. "Someone selected them specifically."
"But for what? What makes war orphans particularly vulnerable to consciousness manipulation?"
"Trauma," Lira said softly. "Psychological vulnerabilities, attachment disorders, hypervigilance, the desperate need to belong to something larger than themselves." She'd gone pale. "We're taught this in medical training—trauma survivors are more susceptible to manipulation because their threat assessment is already compromised. They're looking for safety in all the wrong places."
And Elarion was a war orphan too. So was Lira.
The implications settled like ice water in his stomach.
"We fit the profile," he said.
"Yes."
"Which means we might be targets too."
"Or you already were, and the letter was how they brought you in." Lira's hands tightened on her notebook. "Elarion, what if the whole point of getting you here was to add you to their collection?"
It was a horrifying thought. And entirely plausible.
"Then they miscalculated," Elarion said. "Because I don't manipulate easily, and neither do you."
"How do you know I don't?"
"Because you're still asking questions instead of accepting explanations. Because you noticed patterns no one else saw. Because when someone broke into your room, you protected information instead of giving it up." He met her eyes. "People who manipulate easily don't do those things."
Lira looked away, but not before he saw something complicated cross her face—gratitude, maybe, or relief at being understood.
"So what do we do?" she asked.
"We find the missing students. Or at least find where they went and why."
"How?"
Elarion pulled out the vial he'd taken from the intruder. "This was in his pocket. I haven't tested it yet, but I'm guessing it's not water."
Lira took it carefully, held it up to the light. Her medical training kicked in immediately—she examined color, viscosity, clarity with professional precision.
"Could be a sedative. Could be something more exotic." She looked at him. "I can test it in the medical lab. I still have access from my field medic certification. But I'll need a reason to be there after hours."
"What kind of reason?"
"Insomnia, anxiety, stress from the disappearances—pick one. Medical students self-medicate all the time, and the lab has diagnostic equipment." She pocketed the vial. "Give me until midnight. Meet me at the medical building, west entrance. I'll prop the door."
"That's risky."
"Everything about this is risky." She stood, brushed off her clothes. "But sitting around waiting for the next student to vanish seems riskier."
She was right. Action beat paralysis, even when action was dangerous.
"Midnight, then. Be careful."
"You too." She moved toward the access door, paused. "Elarion?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For not lying to me. For treating me like someone capable of handling the truth." Her voice was quiet. "A lot of people saw the trauma and decided I needed to be protected from reality. You see it and trust me to handle reality anyway."
"You're not fragile," Elarion said. "You're a survivor. There's a difference."
She smiled—brief, genuine, transformative. Then she was gone, leaving him alone on the roof with the wind and his thoughts and the growing certainty that they were running out of time.
That night, Elarion didn't sleep.
Instead, he sat at his desk and drew patterns. Names, connections, timelines. The letter that brought him here. Professor Thorne's admission. Doctor Vael's suspicions. The intruder's questions. The missing students' profiles.
Every piece pointed to something coordinated, long-planned, and sophisticated beyond anything he'd encountered before.
Someone was collecting war orphans with magical aptitude.
Someone had positioned researchers years in advance.
Someone had brought him here specifically, knowing his abilities, his history, his vulnerabilities.
And somewhere in the College—in locked rooms or underground chambers or spaces he hadn't discovered yet—three students were missing, and no one seemed to know how or why.
Except Elarion suspected the truth was worse than kidnapping.
The truth, he suspected, was that the students had been taken apart at the consciousness level and rebuilt into something else.
Something connected.
Something that thought with multiple minds.
At 11:45 PM, he left his room and made his way through silent corridors toward the medical building. The campus at night felt different—shadows deeper, sounds sharper, every footstep potentially hostile.
He moved like smoke, friction-dampened steps making no sound, confusion effect encouraging eyes to look elsewhere. Old skills, muscle memory, the art of being a ghost.
The medical building's west entrance was propped open with a folded piece of cardboard—subtle, easily missed unless you were looking for it.
Elarion slipped inside.
The hallway smelled like antiseptic and something faintly sweet—healing salves, probably, or whatever passed for magical medicine in academic settings. Emergency lights cast everything in dim red.
A sound echoed from deeper in the building. Not footsteps—something else. Something that made the hair on his neck stand up because it was rhythmic, mechanical, and shouldn't exist in an empty building at midnight.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Like fingers drumming on a surface. But perfectly regular. Unnaturally precise.
Elarion moved toward the sound, every sense alert.
The laboratory was at the end of the corridor, door half-open, light spilling out.
Inside, Lira stood at a workbench, surrounded by equipment and making notes. Safe. Normal.
Except she wasn't alone.
Three figures stood in the corners of the room—perfectly still, perfectly silent, perfectly synchronized. Their eyes were open but empty. Their breathing matched exactly. And their fingers were tapping against their legs in identical rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The missing students.
Lira hadn't noticed them. She was too focused on the vial, on her analysis, on her notes.
Elarion opened his mouth to shout a warning.
And then the three figures spoke in perfect unison, their voices overlapping into a single sound:
"Hello, Echo. We've been waiting for you to notice us."