Chapter 106: Closing the Dorms
The morning after Selene’s name and Damien’s midnight vanishing, the dorm smelled like burnt coffee and anxiety. No one slept more than a few hours. We’d been living on that edge for months — a different city, different faces, different lies every week — and it had a way of wearing on you until the smallest things felt like avalanches.
We gathered in the common room like a jury about to give a verdict. Map spread across the coffee table. Laptops open. Mugs empty and refills waiting.
“You can’t keep sleeping on that floor,” Elena said, folding her arms and then shaking her head. “I tripped on it twice last night. We can’t afford shattered bones.”
“I sleep where the runes don’t hum,” Echo replied without looking up from her notes, which were neat and thin. “If the ground echoes, it’s safer to stand.”
“What do your notes say?” Aidan asked, rubbing his jaw. He’d been up all night too; there were hard lines along his face that hadn’t been there a week ago.
Echo set the pencil down and folded her hands. “Selene is a name. The journal’s mention matches a pattern of guardians and rogues. Nothing new there. But the way Damien said it — the timing, the lantern — that’s a call. It wasn’t random. Whoever Selene is, she wanted you, Roxanne, to hear her name. That changes things.”
I folded my arms, listening. The words landed differently when Echo said them. Less prophecy, more fact.
“Okay,” Ethan said, pushing his glasses up. “We wrap the dorms today. We finish the sweep. We catalog every student we’ve had contact with during the operation and mark any anomalies. Then we pull Damien’s data — what he gave us and what he didn’t. After that we decide if we stay, run, or bait.”
“Bait?” Elena made a face. “I thought we were done playing understudies in some Victorian horror adaptation.”
“We bait because he said the Creed was recruiting here,” Ethan said. “If they are, we need to know where their heads are. Lure one out, follow the thread. Get a name. Get a node. Get the network.”
Aidan looked at me. “We don’t want to stay in place if Selene is stirring. We need to move fast and quietly. If she knows too much, she’ll come back. We need to be the ones who step into the light on our terms.”
Rhea slid over a sheet of paper she’d been keeping folded in her sleeve. “I made a list of everyone we spoke to over the past week. Room numbers, times, anything suspicious. There were six students who hung around the Kappa Delta house more than normal. One of them handled the guest list the night we infiltrated.”
Ethan’s fingers flew across his keyboard before anyone could stop him. “Give me those names, give me the IDs, I’ll cross-check social feeds, financials, anything. These kids are heavy on family money. Places of influence show patterns.”
I nodded. The plan was getting its skeleton. We’d been undercover long enough to know that skeleton had to be wrapped and double-wrapped in caution.
\---
They call it “rounding down” — wrap up the cover, collect what you’ve learned, and vanish before the other side realizes you were investigating. It’s boring work in the moment: paperwork, deleting trails, shutting down accounts you had to fake open, returning library books you “borrowed” for a lead. But it’s work that keeps you alive.
Elena did the loud part: she gleefully antagonized the dorm RA while we canceled our fake meal plans and dropped our names from class rosters in the university system Mara had cracked earlier.
“Why do you want to quit Intro to Moral Philosophy?” the RA asked, puzzled. “You only showed up twice.”
“Because it asks the wrong questions,” Elena said, smiling too wide. “But seriously, cancel me. I have… an urgent internship in the city.” She winked at me like it was a performance. Aidan suppressed a laugh.
Ethan, bless him, buried himself in the data. He sat cross-legged on the floor with three devices and headphones, speaking at half-speed to his laptop.
“You know,” he said, “if you guys didn’t keep me hopped up on caffeine and fear, I might actually get a thesis out of this.” He meant it less as a joke and more as survival.
Rhea and I checked our pockets, removing the smallest lies we’d been living in the past week. A few staples of identity — receipts, library cards — that kept our cover. We left Mars behind: the fake Rachel Dean that had introduced me to the campus, the histories I’d memorized, the fake friends I’d laughed with. It always felt like shedding a skin.
By noon we had what we could: names, a pattern, a few photos, a list of odd family links. Damien hadn’t lied about the Creed having people here. They were scattered like seeds: one on the student council, one in a late-night research lab, one in the mythology club. All small influence but linked in a way you could see with enough data points.
“Good,” Aidan said. He’d been quiet, closing his fists in that slow, steady way he does when he is planning action. “We leave this city tonight. We follow the strongest lead. We don’t play the long game here.”
I held his gaze. “What’s the strongest lead?”
Ethan pulled his headphones off and pushed the laptop toward us. On the screen glowed a payment ledger — small transactions, transfers that on paper meant nothing. But pattern emerged: payments from an account tied to a private trust that financed “scholarship programs” for highly promising students. A handful of those scholarships were routed through a consulting firm linked to the parents of one of the Kappa Delta leaders — a student who’d shown up in the guest list the night of the infiltration.
“And the firm?” Aidan asked.
“It’s a front,” Ethan said. “But it’s real enough to touch bank accounts. It handles events, logistics. And look.” He zoomed in. “There’s a routing number tied to an old shipping yard outside city limits and to a storage company downriver. The shipping yard is old, but active. Contracts in the last three months. The storage shows lease agreements, but everything’s in cash.”
Echo was already standing. “The Creed hides in places that don't leave digital prints,” she said. “Places where people come and go, unload crates, walk at night. Shipping yards are classic. Old warehouses, new owners. They recruit the right kind of worker: young, hard up, easily told a story about fighting for a cause greater than rent.”
Rhea’s hands trembled slightly. “Selene as recruiter,” she said. “She could be running something like that. Or watching over it.”
“Then we go,” I said.
Aidan reached for his jacket. “We go now,” he added. “We can’t wait for them to realize they were under surveillance.”
\---
The sky turned.
We drove without fanfare — old cars, routes that took us away from GPS-routed streets and into the kind of roads that shut off cell service for long stretches. Ethan rode with me in the back so he could keep his laptop open if needed. Mara took point, her old callused hands on the wheel like she’d been born to dead-night runs. Aidan rode shotgun, his skull held forward, every muscle tuned like a coiled string.
The shipping yard looked like what it was: half alive, half dead. Cranes slouched like sleeping giants. Containers stacked in uneven rows. One lone watchtower with its light sweeping the lot once every few minutes. Men moved between containers, hauling, checking manifests, smoking. The air smelled of salt and oil and old metal. Some of the workers glanced up, but nobody screamed. Nobody pulled a gun. The yard was a place where things came and went at night, and people learned not to ask too many questions.
We parked in the shadow of a warehouse a few blocks away, took our kit, and walked, moving as close to the fence as we could. Elena had pried a small set of bolt cutters from the car and worked on the padlock, her hands steady.
“You do this a lot?” I asked.
“More than I'd like,” she muttered. “But fewer broken padlocks than broken hearts. That’s a win.”
Cutting the chain made a sound that felt huge in the dark. We slipped through like ghosts and hugged the shadows of shipping containers. Ethan’s phone pinged twice, but no one answered. Radio silence. Good.
“Cameras?” I whispered.
“Low-grade DVRs on old poles,” Ethan said, voice soft. “One blind spot covering the loading docks. That’s where the storage units link up. That’s your node.”
“We split?” Aidan asked.
“Two teams. Elena, you and me take the west dock. Rhea and Echo take the east. Ethan stays on comms and watches the system. Mara and Callum —” (Callum had arrived to meet us at the lot; he kept to the edges of the world and liked it that way) “—will block exits.”
Everything felt like a chessboard. Move a rook, test if the other side moves a pawn.
We moved. The dock was quieter than I expected. In the shadow of the loading bay door, three men in work jackets loaded a crate. They looked like any blue-collar night crew. But we listen not for proof of sin but for lessons in comfort. The Creed uses normal men for abnormal tasks.
Elena signaled, and we dropped on the men like the trap we were. Quick, sure, controlled. Hands behind backs. Aidan’s voice was low and steady. “Where’s the office for Site 22?”
They stared at us like we were lunatics. But the second one’s jaw tightened and he muttered, “No names. Just deliveries.”
“Who takes the deliveries?” Elena asked.
“Two men. Nights. Kid with a scar. Blonde. Calls himself ‘Thom’.” The words came out like a confession.
We took that. Names were always the currency of movement. A kid named Thom with a scar — the sort of detail that people who aren’t part of this business miss.