Chapter 27 The Person on Campus

Chapter 27 The Person on Campus
POV: Wren

"Show me the deposits," I said.
Dex pulled out his phone. He had screenshots, which meant he had seen this coming before he walked through my door, or at least had suspected something was coming and had prepared accordingly. Three months of screenshots from a shared building notice board where residents occasionally posted Venmo requests and payment confirmations, the specific low-privacy culture of a student building where nobody thought their financial activity was interesting enough to hide.
Aaron Briggs had been less careful than he should have been.
The deposits were irregular in amount but consistent in timing, every ten to fourteen days, always between two hundred and four hundred dollars, always from an account listed only as a series of numbers with no attached name. Not a person sending money. A buffer account, the kind you set up when you wanted transactions to look like nothing in particular.
Three months of them. Starting the week after semester began.
I photographed every screenshot.
"The maintenance logs," I said. "How did you get those."
Dex looked briefly uncomfortable, which was the most honest expression I had seen from him since the common room. "I know someone in the facilities office. We have an arrangement where she tells me things occasionally and I don't ask her to explain why she has access to things she probably shouldn't."
"I'm not going to ask more questions about that," I said.
"Appreciated."
I pulled up the university's student directory on my laptop. Public facing, basic information, searchable by name. I typed Aaron Briggs and the profile loaded in three seconds. Third year graduate student, urban planning department, student housing in Dex's building, partial scholarship, facilities management assistant listed under employment.
Profile photo. Average face, early twenties, nothing that matched any face I had filed from the past three weeks of watching people watch me.
I scrolled down to the transfer information section. Most graduate students had it, the undergraduate institution listed as part of the academic record, visible in the directory if the student hadn't opted to hide it.
Aaron Briggs had not opted to hide it.
Crestfield.
The word sat on the screen in standard directory font, small and unremarkable, listed under Prior Institution the way hundreds of transfer records were listed in hundreds of student profiles across the university.
Crestfield High School, then undergrad at a state school, then Harlow for graduate study.
My high school.
I sat very still looking at the screen.
Callum came to look over my shoulder and I heard him read it and go quiet in the particular way he went quiet when something landed that he hadn't seen coming.
Dex, from across the room, said: "What is it."
"He transferred from my high school," I said.
The room absorbed that.
Aaron Briggs had been at Crestfield. Not overlapping with me by much, the age gap and the graduate level suggested he was two or three years ahead of me, but Crestfield was not a large school. Two or three years ahead in a school that size meant shared spaces, shared staff, shared institutional memory of the same events.
He had been there the year my article was pulled.
I went back to the directory and pulled the transfer date. He had enrolled at Harlow eighteen months ago, which was six months after I arrived, which meant he had come here after I was already here, after I had already made myself invisible, after I had already built the two-year version of my life that was supposed to be impossible to find.
Someone had sent him here.
Not to Marcus's timeline. Marcus had arrived recently, his operation was reactive, responding to Callum and me going public. Aaron Briggs had been planted eighteen months ago, which was before any of this started, before Callum walked into the paper office, before the bet pool, before any of it.
Someone had known eighteen months ago that I needed watching.
"He's not Marcus's," I said, because Dex had already suggested it and now I had the date to confirm it. "Marcus didn't know I was a problem eighteen months ago. I wasn't visible eighteen months ago. Nobody was paying attention to me."
"Someone was," Callum said.
I looked at the transfer date again. Eighteen months ago. Six months after my enrollment. Long enough after my arrival for someone to have assessed that my invisibility was holding and then decided to put someone close anyway. Not reactive. Precautionary.
The kind of move you made when you were not managing a current threat but maintaining surveillance on a future one.
"Someone decided eighteen months ago that I might eventually become a problem," I said. "And put someone in my building to make sure they knew before I did."
Callum pulled a chair from the desk and sat down and looked at the screen. "Who knew you were here eighteen months ago."
"My department. The scholarship committee. Administration." I stopped. "Anyone who had access to enrollment records."
"Thrace," Callum said quietly.
Gerald Thrace. Marcus's legal team, the foundation's compliance documentation, the man whose name had been circled darkest on the article in my locker. The man who structured donations and managed paper trails and had been on this campus twice this semester for reasons Marcus had called compliance business.
Thrace had been here before this semester too. Nobody had said he hadn't.
I opened a new search and pulled up the university's public visitor log, the one the administration office maintained for external stakeholders attending formal meetings. It was incomplete and inconsistently updated but it existed.
I searched Thrace.
Four visits. The two Callum had mentioned. And two more, eighteen months ago, one week apart, both listed under foundation compliance review.
The same week Aaron Briggs enrolled.
I turned the laptop toward Callum and watched him read the dates.
He took out his own phone. Scrolled. Found something. Held it next to my screen.
His father's foundation calendar, the public-facing one posted on the foundation's website, the one that listed speaking engagements and site visits for transparency purposes.
Eighteen months ago. A site visit to Harlow University. Listed under regional education investment.
Marcus had been here too.
All three of them, Marcus, Thrace, and Aaron Briggs, on this campus in the same week, eighteen months before any of this started.
My phone buzzed on the desk. Unknown number, new one, never seen before.
One line.
Aaron knows you found his name. He's already gone.