01 Mar Project Starlight

PART I

The air in Nathaniel Ross’s basement carried the stale scent of things abandoned. Dust and mildew thickened in the corners, creeping over old furniture draped in sheets. The basement itself was larger than expected, the concrete walls marked with faint discolorations where shelves had once been bolted. Cardboard boxes sat undisturbed along the perimeter, their edges softened by time.

Agent Michael Graves adjusted the grip on his flashlight, its narrow beam cutting across the dimly lit room. Beside him, his partner, Agent Rebecca Thatcher, exhaled sharply. She had a hand pressed against her hip, her expression unreadable.

“Doesn’t look like much,” she muttered, kicking at the dirt-encrusted floor. “You’d think a guy storing classified intelligence would’ve invested in a better hiding place.”

Michael didn’t respond. His attention had settled on something that didn’t belong—a section of wall near the far corner, where the cinder blocks didn’t quite align. The misalignment was subtle, but once seen, it was impossible to ignore. The mortar was thinner, the seams sharper. A false wall.

He turned back toward the forensic team combing through the space. “Pry this open,” he ordered.

It took a few minutes. The first strike of the crowbar sent a dry crack echoing through the basement. Splinters of wood and plaster crumbled away, revealing the rough edges of a panel embedded into the concrete. Another pull, and the entire section groaned forward, shifting loose from whatever frame held it in place. Behind it, a recessed cavity stood revealed.

Inside, a wooden crate sat nestled against the exposed foundation. The crate was unmarked, save for a few faded scuffs on its surface. The nails securing it were rusted. Someone had meant for this to stay buried.

One of the techs, a younger man with wire-framed glasses, hesitated. “You sure about this?”

Michael met his gaze without flinching. “Open it.”

The man exhaled through his nose before crouching down, wedging a pry bar against the lid. The wood groaned, then splintered. A stale odor rose as the top was pulled away.

Inside the crate, beneath layers of aged wax paper, lay stacks of yellowed documents, fragile with time. Atop them, resting like relics unearthed from another era, sat two undeveloped film reels, their metal casings tarnished with rust. The labels were handwritten in black marker:

PROJECT STARLIGHT – SESSION 5

Rebecca leaned in, nudging the edge of a small, leather-bound journal with her gloved fingertips. The binding had cracked with age, the spine nearly disintegrating. She opened it carefully, her eyes scanning the brittle pages.

Her brow furrowed. “This isn’t just stolen intelligence,” she murmured. “This is something else.”

Michael lifted one of the reels, turning it over in his hands. It felt heavier than it should have, dense in a way that suggested its contents carried weight beyond their physical form. The handwriting on the journal’s final page caught his eye. The ink had faded, but the words were still legible:

THE CHILDREN WERE NEVER TERMINATED. ONLY CONTAINED.

A silence stretched between them. Rebecca closed the journal carefully, as if half-expecting it to crumble in her hands.

Michael exhaled slowly. “Get these reels developed,” he said, his voice quieter now. “I want to know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

* * * * * *

The motel was the kind of place designed to be forgotten.

Its sign flickered against the darkness, casting a sickly orange glow over the cracked pavement of the parking lot. Michael checked in without much thought, taking the key from the front desk without acknowledging the clerk’s tired expression.

The room smelled of stale air and old carpet. The furniture had seen better days, the walls adorned with generic paintings of places that didn’t exist. A television bolted to a chipped wooden dresser hummed with static before Michael switched it off.

His laptop sat open on the small desk, a dim glow spilling across the surface. The film reels had been processed hours earlier, their contents digitized for review. He had already watched the footage twice. A third time wouldn’t change what he had seen.

On the screen, grainy black-and-white film flickered to life. The footage was old, the edges marked with scratches and imperfections. A sterile room came into view, its walls lined with dull metal panels. The camera’s focus was unsteady, the frame adjusting before locking onto a row of children. There were seven of them, no older than twelve.

They stood in loose formation, their bodies eerily rigid. Their feet hovered inches above the ground. Their eyes were rolled back, showing only the whites. Their lips moved in unison, forming words that held no sound.

Michael watched as their mouths shaped the same phrase over and over, an incantation without a voice.

His attention caught on the girl at the center. Her head tilted back slightly, her mouth open wider than the others’. Something about her expression made his stomach tighten—a look caught between pain and revelation.

A soft knock broke the silence. Michael’s head snapped toward the door. He hadn’t heard footsteps outside.

The knock came again, lighter this time, almost hesitant. His hand instinctively moved toward the gun at his hip. He rose carefully, crossing the room without making a sound. The peephole offered only an empty walkway, the neon light outside painting the ground in streaks of red and orange.

He hesitated.

Another knock—this time, it came from behind him. Michael turned sharply. There was no second door.

The motel room was empty. Then, in the dark, he heard a recognizable whisper, soft and familiar.

His own.

PART II

Michael awoke with his mouth dry. The motel room was silent, yet the whisper still clung to the space, lingering like the echo of something that had never been spoken aloud. He turned his head, scanning the dark. The only illumination came from the slivers of neon light slicing through the gaps in the curtains.

He sat up slowly, his mind replaying the sound—his own voice, murmuring from somewhere deep in the shadows. The words had not been clear, but the cadence was unmistakable. He ran a hand over his face and let out a slow breath, grounding himself.

It was exhaustion. It had to be. He’d spent too many hours poring over declassified files, staring at grainy footage of children who should not have been able to do the things they had done. Sleep deprivation did strange things to the mind. But that didn’t explain the knock.

He forced himself to stand, checking the door, then the window. There were no signs of disturbance. The parking lot outside was empty except for his own car and a single truck parked beneath the flickering vacancy sign. A quiet night in a town that barely existed on a map. Yet something had been here. His gut told him so, even as his rational mind worked to deny it.

* * * * * *

The drive to New Mexico was long, the scenery shifting from flat Midwest nothingness to stretches of desert that swallowed the horizon. Rebecca sat in the passenger seat, scrolling through her phone.

“You’re quiet,” she said without looking up.

Michael kept his eyes on the road. “Long night.”

She glanced at him, her expression skeptical. “Bad dreams, or something worse?”

Michael didn’t answer right away. He had told her about the film—about the children, their floating bodies, the silent chanting—but he had not mentioned the motel, the whisper, the voice that had come from nowhere.

“I’m fine,” he said instead. “Tell me what you found on the facility.”

Rebecca let it go, though he could tell she didn’t buy it. She tapped her screen. “Starlight was never an officially recognized program. It was absorbed into a larger project called Sentinel in the early ‘80s. But get this—there are no death records for the test subjects. No obituaries, no birth certificates after they entered the system. It’s like they stopped existing.”

Michael tightened his grip on the wheel.

Rebecca continued, flipping through her notes. “The project was shut down after some kind of ‘incident’ in 1978. No details, just a vague memo about a containment breach. After that, the records stop cold.”

Michael nodded, his jaw set. He had read similar things in the journal they had found. Words that skirted around the truth but never confirmed it.

The children were never terminated.

Only contained.

* * * * * *

The facility was nestled in the middle of nowhere, its existence erased from modern maps. The road leading to it had been overtaken by dust and time, the pavement cracking beneath years of neglect. The building itself loomed in the distance, squat and industrial, its faded metal siding barely visible against the barren landscape.

They parked a mile out, approaching on foot. The closer they got, the more wrong the place felt.

Michael noticed it first—the sensation of being observed, though there were no cameras, no movement beyond the wind stirring the dust.

Rebecca slowed her steps beside him. “Tell me you feel that.”

Michael nodded. “We’re not alone.”

The entrance was unmarked, the doors rusted but intact. There were no signs of forced entry, no graffiti or vandalism—only the stillness of abandonment. Michael tested the handle. Unlocked. He exchanged a glance with Rebecca before pushing the door open.

Inside, the air was stale, thick with dust and something acrid that clung to the back of his throat. The first room was an administrative office, the furniture untouched. Papers lay scattered on desks, curling at the edges from years of exposure. A bulletin board on the far wall still held faded memos, notices stamped with outdated government insignias.

Michael’s eyes settled on a row of filing cabinets. He tried the nearest drawer. Locked.

Rebecca moved ahead, sweeping her flashlight across the space. “Doesn’t look looted. If someone shut this place down, they left in a hurry.”

Michael didn’t respond. His attention had shifted to the far end of the room, where a steel door stood slightly ajar. Beyond it, a hallway stretched into darkness.

Something about the open door unsettled him.

He stepped forward, pushing it wider. Beyond the threshold, the walls bore signs of something older than simple neglect. Faint, hand-shaped smudges trailed along the surface, as if someone—or something—had been led through the corridor. The prints were small. Child-sized.

Rebecca stiffened. “Michael.”

Her voice had lost its usual sharpness. He followed her gaze to a rusted plaque bolted to the wall.

SUBLEVEL 1 – CONTAINMENT

Michael swallowed. The word lingered, heavy with meaning.

Rebecca exhaled, shaking her head. “I don’t like this.”

Michael stepped forward. “Let’s find out what they were containing.”

* * * * * *

The scientist’s house was deep in the desert, a squat, sun-bleached structure with bars over the windows and a door that looked as though it had been reinforced from the inside. Dr. Walter Henshaw had been declared dead in 1993, but the man who answered their knock was very much alive.

His skin was weathered, his hair white. His eyes, though, were sharp—alert in a way that spoke of long years spent expecting the worst.

Michael held up his badge. “Dr. Henshaw, we have some questions about Project Starlight.”

The man studied them for a long moment before stepping back, motioning them inside.

The interior of the house was sparse, cluttered only with stacks of books and piles of documents yellowed with age. A television played static in the corner, though there was no antenna in sight.

Henshaw sat heavily in an old armchair, rubbing a hand over his face. “I told them to let it die,” he muttered. “To bury it deeper than it already was.”

Michael took a seat opposite him. “Tell us what happened.”

Henshaw exhaled. “You think they were just children, don’t you? You think we found them, plucked them from orphanages, trained them like weapons.” He shook his head. “That’s not the truth. The truth is, they weren’t chosen.”

Rebecca frowned. “Then how were they selected?”

Henshaw’s expression darkened. “They called us. Every single one of them. We didn’t find them—they let us know where they were.”

Michael felt a chill settle along his spine. “What were they?”

Henshaw looked at him, eyes sunken and tired. “Not human. Not entirely. We thought we were studying them, but the entire time, we were the ones being observed.”

“Then why lock them away?” Rebecca asked.

Henshaw’s fingers curled against the arm of his chair. “Because they weren’t speaking to us. They were speaking to something else. And one day, we realized—”

The lights flickered.

Henshaw stopped mid-sentence. His gaze lifted past them, toward the doorway.

Michael turned, following his line of sight. The hallway beyond the room was empty.

But somewhere in the darkness, something whispered.

PART III

The road leading to the Starlight facility had been overtaken by time, swallowed by desert and dust. The remains of the pavement cracked beneath their tires, the worn edges blending seamlessly into the barren landscape. It had been decades since anyone had officially set foot here. Yet, as Michael slowed the car to a stop just outside the rusted chain-link perimeter, he could see the fresh tire tracks cutting through the sand, leading straight to the main entrance.

Rebecca was already scanning the area. “Someone else has been here recently.”

Michael nodded, gripping the wheel tighter than he needed to. The facility loomed ahead of them, a squat, industrial structure half-buried in the landscape. It had been built to last, reinforced against time and the elements, but its windows were long gone, either shattered by the desert winds or something else.

They approached on foot, weapons drawn. The front entrance was a heavy steel door, once painted white but now streaked with rust. A faded government seal remained, the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY barely legible beneath decades of wear. Michael tested the handle. It turned easily.

Rebecca tensed beside him. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

Michael pushed the door open. The hinges groaned, but there was no resistance.

Inside, the air was stale, carrying the scent of metal, dust, and something harder to define—something chemical. The lobby had once been an administrative space, but time had worn it down to ruin. Desks sat overturned, chairs missing legs, file cabinets left ajar. Papers littered the floor, curling at the edges, but none had the yellowed fragility of decades-old documents. These were newer.

Rebecca crouched beside a pile of them. “Someone was going through this stuff recently.”

Michael swept his flashlight across the room, his gaze settling on a set of double doors marked LAB ACCESS – LEVEL 1. The doors were slightly ajar. Beyond them, a hallway stretched into darkness.

“We check the offices first,” he said. “If someone’s been here, they might’ve left something behind.”

Rebecca didn’t argue. They moved carefully through the space, their footsteps muffled against the dust-caked floor. The offices had been left in disarray, but nothing about it suggested vandalism or looting. Files had been removed from their drawers with precision, not carelessness. Whoever had been here before them hadn’t come for destruction. They had come for something specific.

Michael’s attention caught on a desk near the back of the room. A yellowed folder sat open, its contents spread haphazardly. He lifted the top page. Subject 3—Speech Patterns was scrawled across the top. The report detailed an incident from 1975, in which Subject 3, a ten-year-old girl, had begun speaking in a language no one could identify.

Further notes indicated that the language had been analyzed by experts, cross-referenced against every known dialect, ancient and modern. No matches.

He flipped to the last page, where a handwritten note had been scrawled in hurried script: They’re not learning it. They’re remembering it.

A sound echoed from deeper within the facility.

Michael’s head snapped up. The noise had been distant, a metallic scrape against concrete, like something shifting in the dark.

Rebecca had heard it, too. She reached for her sidearm, her expression tight. “We’re not alone.”

Michael placed the folder back on the desk and motioned toward the hallway. “Let’s move.”

* * * * * *

The deeper they went, the worse it became.

The first sign was the electricity. Despite being abandoned for decades, the facility still had power. Some of the overhead lights flickered weakly, buzzing with the hum of old wiring. Others remained entirely dark, leaving long stretches of the corridor swallowed in shadow.

Then there were the footprints. The dust on the floor was thick, undisturbed in most places. But here and there, footprints broke the pattern. Some were fresh—heavy boot treads leading toward the lower levels. Others were smaller, fainter, as though they had been left long ago but never fully faded. Child-sized.

Rebecca knelt beside one, brushing a gloved hand over it. “These shouldn’t still be here. If these were made in the ‘70s, they would’ve been covered up by now.”

The facility had been sealed for decades. The only people who should have been here recently were adults. But these prints were different.

Rebecca stood, dusting off her hands. “The lower levels are where they kept the test subjects.”

Michael nodded. “Let’s find a way down.”

* * * * * *

The elevator was long dead, but the stairwell was still intact. The concrete steps spiraled downward, the air growing colder with each level they descended. Faint warning signs remained bolted to the walls.

LEVEL B1 – CONTAINMENT ACCESS

LEVEL B2 – RESEARCH & MONITORING

LEVEL B3 – TERMINATION FACILITY

The last sign had been scratched through, deep gouges carved into the metal.

At the bottom of the stairwell, a steel door waited. A government-issued warning was painted across its surface in bold white letters:

LEVEL B3—NEVER OPEN

The words were underlined twice, the paint chipped but still stark against the corroded metal.

Rebecca ran a hand over the lettering. “Never open.”

Michael reached for the welding seams. The door had been sealed shut long ago, multiple layers of steel melted over the edges to prevent it from ever moving again. Someone had cut through them. The welding had been sliced open, the seams broken. The door stood slightly ajar.

Michael exhaled. “They already opened it.”

Rebecca hesitated. “We don’t have to go in.”

Michael met her gaze. “You really believe that?”

She didn’t answer.

With a deep breath, they stepped inside.

* * * * * *

The chamber was massive, far larger than the facility’s exterior had suggested. Thick observation glass lined one side of the room, its surface clouded with age and dust. Monitoring stations sat along the perimeter, their screens dark but intact.

And at the center of the room, suspended in midair, were the children. Seven of them, their bodies unchanged from the film reels. They hovered inches above the ground, their eyes open but unseeing. Their lips moved in unison, forming silent words.

They should have been dead, Michael thought. The film reels had been recorded in the 1970s. Decades had passed. Yet here they were, exactly as they had been.

Rebecca stepped forward. “It’s like they never left.”

The overhead lights flickered, and the whispering grew louder. Michael’s gut twisted. It wasn’t coming from the children. The sound was everywhere—the walls, the ceiling, the air itself.

A voice—no, voices—whispered in unison, their words threading through the silence like a current. Michael turned toward the glass, and his reflection was not his own. It was a child—a girl with dark, hollow eyes and a mouth that moved without sound.

Behind him, Rebecca inhaled sharply. Then the lights died, and the facility shook. A low siren wailed from deep within the complex, its tone mechanical yet almost human. The speakers overhead crackled, and a robotic voice broke through the static:

“Protocol Omega initiated. Release imminent.” 

From the shadows beyond the containment chamber, a man in a suit stepped forward, a government-issue sidearm raised in one steady hand.

Director Charles Harlow.

“Step away from the chamber,” he ordered. “Now.”

Before Michael could respond, the children turned toward Harlow as one. Their heads moved, but their bodies remained still.

Harlow hesitated. His gun trembled. Then, blood trickled from his nose. From his ears. From his eyes. He let out a strangled sound, choking on something unseen. His body twisted unnaturally, the snap of bone sharp against the silence.

Then, with a final, impossible lurch, he vanished.

The sirens screamed louder, the whispering rose—

And the children opened their eyes.

PART IV

The moment Harlow vanished, the entire chamber shifted, its walls stretching and warping at the edges of Michael’s vision.

The children hovered in place, their eyes wide and blank, their heads cocked at angles too precise to be natural.

Michael took a step back. Rebecca had already drawn her weapon, though they both knew it wouldn’t make a difference.

A sound—low and deep, not a siren but something beneath it—rumbled through the room. The walls, once solid, had lost their certainty. They were shifting, doors disappearing and reforming, hallways twisting into unfamiliar angles. The structure itself was changing, warping around them.

Michael turned toward the exit, but the door they had entered through was gone. In its place, a corridor stretched into darkness, lined with doors that had not been there moments before.

Rebecca exhaled through her nose. “Tell me you’re seeing this.”

Michael nodded, his jaw tight. “Stay close.”

They moved quickly, skirting the perimeter of the chamber. The whispers had not stopped, but now they came from everywhere, filling the space with voices layered atop one another, speaking words too low to understand.

A sharp burst of sound crackled from the intercom above. A recording.

A man’s voice, shaking and distorted, came through: “Final transmission… experiment failure… they were never children. They were never ours.”

Rebecca’s grip on her weapon tightened. “Henshaw.”

Michael recognized the voice, too. It was older, weathered, but unmistakable. The last scientist left alive from Project Starlight.

The recording continued, a frantic edge creeping into the words: “We thought we were teaching them. We thought we were guiding them. But all we ever did was give them a way in.”

The whispering stopped—and silence flooded the space.

Rebecca went rigid, her head snapping to the side as if she had heard something—something that wasn’t there. Michael saw it, too. A door at the far end of the room had cracked open, light spilling from the gap. Not the sterile glow of fluorescents, but something else—warmer and golden. It flickered like candlelight. Michael’s gut twisted.

Rebecca’s expression darkened. “I don’t want to go in there.”

Michael swallowed. “Neither do I.”

The whispering returned. But this time, it wasn’t incomprehensible. It was his own voice.

Michael Graves. Michael Graves. Michael Graves.

The words curled around him, pressing into his skull from all sides.

Rebecca stared at the door, unmoving. Then, somewhere inside, she heard a scream—hers.

Not the Rebecca standing next to him, but another. A version of her that was already in the room.

Michael grabbed her wrist. “We keep moving.”

Rebecca hesitated, her face pale, but nodded.

They turned away from the door and ran.

* * * * * *

The facility had changed.

The layout no longer followed the map they had studied. Corridors stretched where there had been none, staircases ending in blank walls. The place was folding in on itself.

They moved quickly, taking turns at random, following instinct rather than reason. The whispers tracked their movements, filling the air with half-heard words, pulling them toward places they did not want to go.

Then, without warning, the walls opened into another chamber. It was smaller than the first, lined with consoles and inactive monitors. At its center, a single desk sat before a projector screen, a reel already loaded. The label on the film was handwritten.

FINAL TRANSMISSION.

Michael and Rebecca exchanged a look. Without speaking, Michael stepped forward and pressed play.

The machine whirred, the reel spun, and the screen flickered to life.

The footage was old, its quality grainy, and its edges frayed with time. A man sat at the desk, his face drawn, his eyes hollow.

Dr. Walter Henshaw.

His hands trembled as he lit a cigarette, taking a slow drag before speaking.

“This will be my last recording,” he said. His voice was steady, but beneath it, something cracked—something raw and exhausted. “We never should have tried. That’s the only thing that matters now. We should have let them stay forgotten.”

A shudder ran through him. He wiped a shaking hand down his face.

“The children—they weren’t enhanced,” he continued. “They weren’t trained. They weren’t even human.” He exhaled, smoke curling in the dim light. “We thought we were studying them, but all we ever did was make it easier. We built the door. We gave them the signal.”

Michael’s stomach turned. On camera, Henshaw swallowed hard, his eyes flicking toward something just outside the frame. “I can hear them now. They’re not speaking to me anymore. They’re speaking to it.” Henshaw shuddered and went on. “I don’t know what’s coming. But I know one thing. They didn’t create the signal.”

Henshaw paused a moment and looked straight at the camera. Then, with finality, he said, “They were answering it.”

The reel ended. The machine clicked off. The silence that followed was suffocating.

Rebecca turned to Michael. “This wasn’t about a psychic program.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Michael said with a nod, his throat dry. “It was about preparation.”

The facility hadn’t been an experiment. It had been a waiting room.

And whatever they had been waiting for was finally arriving.

* * * * * *

The building trembled. The walls groaned as something shifted deep beneath the floors, something vast and unseen. Michael and Rebecca turned just as the door they had avoided before—the one with the light—opened fully.

A girl stood in the doorway. She was small, no older than ten, dressed in the same gray uniform as the children in the footage. Her hair was dark, her skin pale. Around her neck, a thin silver chain glinted in the dim light. A wedding ring dangled from it.

The girl smiled. “We are here.”

The facility shook, and the air trembled. Rebecca screamed as something in the shadows moved, stretching toward her with fingers made of darkness. Michael lunged, but the room folded—not physically, but in the way dreams change shape, reality shifting like liquid.

Rebecca vanished.

Michael stumbled backward, reaching for her, but his hands grasped nothing. The girl was still watching him, smiling. Behind her, the walls peeled away, revealing something vast and endless. Above them, the ceiling split open, and the stars—stars Michael had never seen before, constellations that did not belong—began to realign.

The whispering was no longer coming from the children, but from above.

Michael turned, running toward the only exit left.

He didn’t stop until the sky outside swallowed him whole.

PART V

Michael ran.

The facility groaned behind him, the sound like steel bending under some immense, unseen force. The desert stretched ahead, its vast emptiness offering no promise of safety. The sky had changed. The stars no longer followed constellations he recognized. They pulsed and swayed, shifting with an unnatural rhythm, as though something immense stirred just beyond them.

The whispering had not stopped.

It grew louder, layered upon itself. The words were foreign, unknowable—yet he understood them. They were not words at all. They were instructions.

Michael staggered. The motel. The basement. The film reels. It had all been leading here. It had never been about the children. Not just the children. The experiment had never ended. It had only waited.

The wind shifted. The ground beneath him trembled, as though something vast had turned its attention toward him. He could feel it now, pressing into him like hands reaching through the fabric of reality.

Overheard, a light flared.

Something was descending.

Michael’s knees buckled. His mind rebelled against the sight, his vision splitting between what he saw and what he was meant to see.

He saw the desert, the sky, the impossible realignment of the stars. And he saw something else—a shape, vast beyond comprehension—coiling through the spaces between what should be. The children had not called it. They had guided it, prepared the way. The experiment had not created them. It had only nurtured them, taught them how to listen. Taught them how to answer back.

The air split apart with a soundless scream. Michael saw figures moving in the distance, stumbling from the facility, their faces upturned in horror. Scientists. Soldiers. People who had remained hidden, waiting for a moment that was never meant to come.

It had come anyway.

Rebecca was gone. Harlow was gone. Michael did not know if he was still here.

A voice—small and childlike—whispered behind him. “You were always meant to be here.”

Michael turned. The girl from the footage stood before him. The same girl from the motel, the same one he had seen reflected in the glass. The wedding ring around her neck glinted softly in the unnatural light.

She reached for him. Michael tried to move, to step back, but his body no longer belonged to him. His vision blurred at the edges, the desert dissolving into static. The world shifted, cracking apart at the seams.

The whispering stopped.

The stars realigned one final time.

And then—

Nothing.

* * * * * *

Months later, the file appeared on a conspiracy forum.

It was buried deep, hidden among threads filled with half-truths and speculation. A single attachment, a scanned document stripped of its official classification. The header read:

PROJECT STARLIGHT—FINAL REPORT

The contents were brief:

Agent Michael Graves: Status Unknown. Presumed Deceased.
Official Records: Sealed.

The thread gained traction. Users dissected every word, every redacted line. But it was the final attachment that drew the most attention.

A photograph. Blurry and washed out, as though it had been taken through old film or a corrupted digital file.

In it, a girl stood in the center of the frame. Her face was indistinct, her features obscured by motion blur, but something about her eyes—wide, unblinking—made those who saw the image uneasy.

Around her neck, a chain hung loosely, holding a small, tarnished object. A ring.

A man in the thread claimed to have enhanced the image, sharpening the details. But when he posted the results, the photo was gone.

The entire thread was gone.

As though it had never existed at all.