The frat house had gone too still.
Not silent. This was a curated hush. Choreographed casualness. Someone had passed the word to act normal, and now every Delta in sight was overperforming the role of Not Nervous Guy #3.
Bob clocked it first. He’d been in too many rooms like this to not to — too many people offering coffee with one hand and hiding the blood trail with the other. The cigarette stayed behind his ear, unlit. He was sharper when he needed it more than he wanted it.
He was watching the frat boys like they were on trial and already lying. Some were too helpful. A few too absent. One tried to explain the fog machine setup like he was proud of it — which earned a look that could’ve peeled paint.
The attic stunt hadn’t landed the way they thought it would. Not with Bob, and definitely not with Aiden. That punch had been instinct, not temper — and afterward, Aiden had gone quiet. Too quiet. That meant he was sorting data and cataloging threats and maybe, just maybe, biting back something that needed saying.
Stephen was still talking. About residual fields and layered anomalies, voice pitched halfway between a sermon and a science lecture. He could’ve had a brilliant career in either — probably still could, if he ever picked a side.
Bob turned toward Aiden.
“What if Leo didn’t vanish?” he asked. Flat, yet not casual.
Aiden’s answer was a nod. One, but weighted.
What came next wasn’t said out loud, but it was there — a held breath in the shape of a theory no one wanted to confirm: What if they didn’t just lose him? What if he run from something or someone?
Behind them, movement.
Colby.
Half-shadowed, spine against the wall by the laundry room. He looked as if a scare had set up permanent residence behind his ribs. Clutching a vape like it might save him. Eyes too wide, as if he’d already seen the thing he was afraid they’d find.
He hadn’t meant to be seen. But Bob saw him anyway.
The hallway light flickered. The kind of thing that only meant something if you were already primed to be scared.
Stephen adjusted his goggles, muttering something about flow lines. Aiden didn’t move, watched the corners, reading them.
And Bob…
Bob lit the cigarette after all.
Which meant he was done asking politely.
He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t even change direction. Just pivoted — slow and deliberate — and walked toward Colby.
The kid froze. Not from fear, not exactly. More like resignation. As if he already knew the interrogation was inbound and just hoped to survive it with his bones intact. His grip on the vape tightened.
Bob didn’t smile. Didn’t threaten. He stopped two steps short and looked at him.
Colby cracked like old veneer.
“I have something,” he said, before anyone even asked. “Proof.”
Bob waited.
Colby fumbled in his backpack — because of course he had a backpack, and of course it was covered in patches for bands that hadn’t put out a new album in a decade — and pulled out a plastic sleeve stuffed with unlabeled DVDs. Burned, hand-written timestamps. Things that usually meant embarrassing prank footage or deeply inadvisable confessions.
“These are from the hallway cams,” Colby said. “All of ‘em. Past three weeks. Nothing deleted, I swear.”
Bob took the discs.
Stephen looked over with polite interest. Aiden didn’t. He was still tracking the room.
“It skips sometimes,” Colby added. “Like… the feed goes weird. Static, glitchy. But not just camera-glitch. Like the air goes wrong. Like something’s messing with it.”
“And you think this proves what?” Bob asked, not hostile.
Colby licked his lips. Lowered his voice.
“That it’s real.”
The words landed uneven — half panic, half defiance. The thing you say when you’ve already tried not believing, and it didn’t help.
“Cameron’s scared too,” he went on. “Not that he’ll admit it. But he knows. Something’s off. TJ’s been a wreck since midterms. And Dylan — okay, yeah, he’s a jackass, but even he looked… I dunno. Fuzzy. Like he wasn’t all in there.”
He meant drugged. Or haunted. Maybe both.
Stephen, ever curious, tilted his head. “And you’re all self-medicating out of recreational optimism, I presume?”
Colby actually snorted.
“There’s weed. Sure. Some guys do Adderall. One dude microdoses. But not like… this.” He tapped the stack of DVDs, eyes wide. “You don’t hallucinate the same shadow three nights in a row unless it’s actually there.”
Bob said nothing.
“Look, I get it,” Colby continued, more desperate now. “It sounds insane. But it’s not just stories. Ralph jumped out the damn window. He wasn’t high. He wasn’t joking. He saw something, and he ran.”
“And you?” Bob asked.
Colby’s jaw worked before he said, almost shy: “My room’s safe. Salted it.”
Even Stephen paused.
“Salted it,” Bob repeated.
Colby nodded fast. “Doorframe. Window sill. Even the radiator. Nothing’s gotten in since.”
No one laughed. That was the worst part. Stephen looked intrigued. Bob looked tired. Aiden finally looked at Colby — just once — and whatever he saw made him scan the ceiling next.
The lights flickered again.
“If this is staged,” Bob said quietly, “I’ll know.”
Colby opened his mouth, but Bob kept going.
“And if it’s not — run. Before it finds you again.”
For one brief second, Colby looked like he might ask what it was.
But he didn’t.
He just nodded. Tight. Then turned and disappeared down the hallway, vape clutched like a rosary. The scent he left behind was something synthetic and fruit-flavored.
Bob watched him go. Didn’t say a word.
But he didn’t put the cigarette out and back behind his ear, either.
He smoked it all the way to the car.
***
Stephen’s office wasn’t much of an office.
Not technically. Not in the sanctioned, university-blessed, OSHA-compliant sense. It was more of a reclamation project — part storage closet, part science fair apocalypse, part forbidden temple to the gods unsupervised research.
One of the windows was blacked out with mylar. The other held an old antenna he insisted was “calibrated to pull ambient frequency warps.” It had once picked up a police scanner, a dying baby monitor, and, once, a single Morse code blip that still made him nervous when he thought about it too long.
Bob called it “the chaos cupboard.” Aiden just looked like he was trying not to breathe near anything flammable.
Stephen was in his element.
He moved fast. Not frantic, not chaotic even. For the first time Aiden saw him, Stephen was actually focused and effective.
He had the DVDs laid out on a foam-core tray, each labeled now with meticulous Sharpie. Three laptops running. A slide mount for chemical testing. A digital spectrometer duct-taped to a thermos. And something that looked suspiciously like a centrifuge built from a salad spinner and the back half of a microwave.
Bob watched it all from a stool in the corner, cigarette extinct but still clutched in his fingers. Aiden stood with his arms crossed, assessing the threat.
The scent compound came first.
Stephen ran it through the GC-MS module twice — old tech, finicky, but he swore by it. The machine hummed, beeped, spat out something that wasn’t a clean read. Too much overlap. The base was synthetic — isobutyl quinoline, something sweet and aggressive — but layered under it, trace alkaloids. Bitter. Organic. Nearly psychoactive.
“Fear response,” Stephen said. “Engineered. Cleverly.”
Bob raised an eyebrow. “Drug?”
“Trigger.” He spun one of the chemical maps toward them. “Not enough on its own to cause hallucination. But paired with suggestion, environmental cues, and hormonal spikes —”
“It pushes people over,” Aiden said. Not a question.
Stephen nodded. “Over, through, and somewhere else.”
Next was the blood sample.
He held it with tongs. Dried. Flaked. Pulled from a wax seal on the boiler room floor. Stephen hadn’t wanted to contaminate the results, so he’d run a partial protein strand against the blood from Leo’s hoodie — and a second control from the material salvaged out of Leo’s hidden lab.
It not matched — the degradation was high. But enough to rule out coincidence.
Aiden leaned over, squinting at the readout. “How precise is your scope?”
Stephen didn’t look up. “It’s quartz-stabilized.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I account for harmonics.”
Bob groaned, rubbing his eyes. “We’re trusting crystal math now.”
“Everything is frequency,” Stephen said, slightly wounded.
They turned to the DVDs.
Standard feed at first. Hallway. Motion-activated cams from a couple years back, nothing impressive. Just jittery grain and bored frat guys in various stages of undress.
Then TJ walked by.
Then… again. Same hoodie. Same slouch. Same path, exact.
Only this time he stopped.
Paused mid-step, turned and looked directly into the camera. Not at it. Into it. His face a little too close, like he’d leaned in past the physical lens. The light flickered. The screen stuttered.
His mouth moved.
No sound. Just shape. A slow articulation of something that wasn’t English. Or maybe was, but underwater. Pixel crawl bled up the screen edges — digital distortion that looked almost organic. Like mold on tape.
A whisper scratched through the speakers — not synced. Distorted. Mechanical. Almost… wet?
“He’s coming back.”
Stephen didn’t breathe for three full seconds. His hand twitched over the trackpad like it could electrocute him.
Aiden said, very quietly, “That’s Leo?”
Bob shook his head. “No.”
He didn’t sound certain.
“That’s the guy who came to us with this case.”
Silence followed.
Stephen finally exhaled and reached for another DVD.
They kept watching.
Stephen cycled through the footage like he was dissecting a new language. Most of it was normal — or frat-house normal. Slurred conversations. Midnight fridge raids. Someone trying to play acoustic guitar at two a.m. wearing nothing but boxers and misplaced confidence.
But then it happened again.
The hallway froze.
Not visually — not like a paused video. More like a loop that didn’t know it was looping. Three cameras, different angles, same frame — repeated. A blur at the edge. Another frat boy, they didn’t meet him in DOT house yet. Mid-turn, half-step, never quite finishing either.
Stephen tapped a key. Then another. The glitch held.
Aiden leaned forward. “System crash?”
Stephen shook his head. “No error log. Cameras kept running. Timecode advanced.”
Bob didn’t move for a full beat. Then he set the remote down a little too hard. It didn’t clatter. Just landed like a conclusion.
“This isn’t bad wiring,” he said. “It’s intentional.”
Stephen frowned. “You mean tampering?”
“I mean, someone built it to skip. Like they wanted something edited… but not gone. Just misaligned.”
The room held still. Even the computers seemed to hum quieter.
Aiden crossed his arms. “Then we need someone who can break it open.”
Bob’s eyes narrowed. He reached for a cigarette. Got it halfway to his mouth — then paused.
He sighed and tucked it behind his ear instead.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Unfortunately.”
Stephen looked up from the screen. “Unfortunately?”
“Because she’s smarter than all of us and knows it.”
Aiden raised an eyebrow. “That a problem?”
“No.” Bob’s voice stayed dry. “It’s a personality trait.”
Stephen perked up, already reaching for a spare notebook. “A peer, then. Wonderful. I’ve been meaning to collaborate with someone in code theory —”
Bob cut him off. “She’s not theory. She’s chaos with a keyboard and a grudge.”
Aiden tilted his head, slightly. “Will she help?”
Bob didn’t answer right away. He looked at the frozen footage one last time — three frames stuck on something that shouldn’t exist, like the building itself had flinched.
“She’ll get us in,” he said. “Then she’ll make us regret it.”
No one argued.
Stephen finally clicked to the next file.
And somewhere across the city, a girl with sharp fingers and worse intentions probably felt her ears burn.
Or maybe just scowled.