Knight Syndrome

Ameena

"Did you see the top post on our college board? It's viral."

Ameena shook her head, indulging Rida in a gossip conversation.

"The celebrity blogger EmpressNotes has made a post. Some top shot named Thyme is in town and he was spotted on campus."

Sara made a face, "You said that about some heiress last time who turned out to be a scammer. What was her name? Habriel? You should stop following gossip pages."

"Didn't you wait two hours in a queue to see her through a glass window?" Ameena recalled.

Rida looked disgruntled but she nodded anyway.

"Be careful, this time it might be more than just your time" Sara warned her.

"This time I'm going to be right and y'all are going to regret teasing me" She picked up her backpack and walked out scrolling through the posts.

Thanks to Rida's obsession with the message board, Ameena knew where she had to be — away from the center of attention.

Why on earth is a library built like a labyrinth?

She spent a whole ten minutes studying the floor plan of the library. It always made her feel dazed and confused.

Catalogue landing, take the stone staircase, first floor, and walk to the south gallery.

Ameena repeated it three times to make sure the information didn't evaporate midway.

Starstruck by the rows upon rows of wooden shelves matching the color of the books in them, Ameena climbed a tall ladder checking her balance every few steps.

Slowly caressing her fingers across a series of titles beginning with "AY" she pulled out a thick book with one hand and blew the dust off. The ladder shook.

She stifled a scream. Taking a deep breath, she tried not to look at the scary journey down.

She settled into a desk bordering a cozy corner right under a huge CCTV eye.

Ayuthya and Chola Empire, she clicked a picture of the official seal of the last king inscribed on the cover. The pages were thick and woven from natural fibers.

I should have become a librarian she would tell herself often.

While the event management degree worked as her cover for the job, she really was interested in archives. Old books, rare texts, something that scholars would drool over.

Her phone storage was full of photographs she clicked whenever she chanced upon scripts in a museum tour or special auctions that she had a chance to observe while waiting for guests outside the door.

Registering the book against her name she stood by the large doors. She could hear some people shouting in front of the building, but she could not see them through the thick wall of raindrops that had been dancing across for hours now. She wanted to dance too. Ameena was feeling a little silly.

She felt the cold drops of water on her skin and breathed in the scent of fresh rain.

A world full of adventure.

It reminded her of the night she held a torch under her blanket trying to figure out what the code message meant.

She had thought it was some kind of joke. She had been so wrong.

In the second stage of the assignment, one is assigned a contact person, someone who is not fully associated with Mirage, a ghost that appears and disappears on his own. The contact person will relay information between the assignee and the company.

If Ameena succeeds in contacting Thyme, the message has to be relayed.