A Second Chance

Part 73 - Return 1

I came up with a plan that I brought up over breakfast.

Dylan was at the counter with coffee reading a document, so was Libber. 

"I want to go back to the school," I said. "The basement specifically. Whatever those markings are connected to, that's the closest physical point we have to whatever's being built at the decommissioned site."

"Dylan, get him with the principal," Libber said without looking up.

"Can I come?" Charlotte asked.

"No can do, Charlotte,"

"Dylan, seriously?" Libber looked up, annoyed. "Think about it practically. She literally knows the building, she has context about what happened that Jay doesn't have, and she's been sitting in this house since it started."

"Which is a good place to stay giving the context of the things?"

"She's seventeen and she has lightning and she'll be with Jay." Libber replied. "And honestly, that girl needs to get out of the house for something other than taking a bus to Ninjago City to watch concert films."

Charlotte pointed at her mother. "There's nothing wrong with that!"

"Way more than one."

"Then she stays with you the entire time," he said to me. "She is not going to fight, act like whatever these "ninja" or whatever do, she isn't your backup, she's not going in first, she's not doing anything that puts her in front of whatever is down there."

"Don't worry, her safety will be my top priority," I promised. "I'm the escort master!"

...

The school was quieter than I expected for a weekday morning, something between a temporary closure and a situation that hadn't been officially explained to anyone yet. A few staff members were around but most of the building felt emptied out, which made the walk to the basement easier and also made the whole place feel slightly wrong in the way buildings do when they're supposed to be full and aren't.

Charlotte led the way down the stairwell without hesitation.

"Walk me through it," I said as we went down. "When did people first notice the markings?"

"Like two weeks ago," she said. "One of the janitors found them first but didn't say anything for a couple days because he wasn't sure what they were. Then one of the teachers went down for some storage thing and came back saying the basement looked different, like something was rearranged. Not drastically, just enough to notice if you knew what it looked like before."

"What about those four students who disappeared?"

"Oliver heard about it through someone who heard about it through the janitor," she said. "You know how schools are. He came to me first actually because he knew I'd want to see it, but I had a study session I couldn't miss so he went with three others instead. They went down at lunch and nobody saw them after that."

"And from that I guess, police searched and found nothing?"

"Nope, no signs of anything, no evidence anyone had been down there, just the markings on the wall and four missing students." She pushed the door at the bottom open and looked back at me. "Which is the part that doesn't make any sense physically."

"Unless there's something in the basement that the police didn't know to look for," I said.

She held the door and I went through first.

The basement was long and low-ceilinged with storage units lining both walls and a concrete floor that was slightly uneven toward the far end. The lights worked but barely, casting everything in the specific flat yellow that made distances hard to judge.