CORRUPTED FILE [Lumina Chronicles Past Drafts]

Level Five

[ELLE'S PoV]

"Okay so what the ever loving heck is going on, Elle? I go abroad for three months and come back to find out Maggie's been missing for a whole week now? Talk!" Tara glared at me over Skype with her arms crossed. She had been friends with Mags and I in high school. I had always been closer to Maggie, but right now Tara was all I had.

"I don't know, okay?" I answered. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and sighed. "Like I'm freaking out, and no one's found anything!"

"There wasn't even a ransom call? Her mom's a Senator and her Dad does... what does he do again? Anyway, the point is her family's rich. I could totally see this being that kind of kidnapping."

I shook my head. "No calls, no notes, no clues. Nothing to even indicate that it was a kidnapping. She just vanished. Her bag was in the art building basement, she even left her phone."

Tara perked up slightly. "Did you check her phone? Maybe—"

"I went through all her messages, all her contacts. I even called this 'Adrien heart-emoji' guy she never bothered to tell me about," I muttered. "Her parents plastered every news source within a fifty mile radius. It'll probably end up on the national news too, because of the whole Senator thing."

There was a shuffle on the other end of the video call as Tara's younger brother ran into the room, while she was busy arguing with him, I picked up Maggie's sketchbook and flicked through it.

It was all stuff I'd seen before for the most part: SoL fan art, dumb drawings of me, tons and tons of landscapes... but then I got to the last page and froze.

"Hey Tara, I'll call you back later, okay?" I didn't give her a chance to reply before I clicked end-call.

I sat up straighter and adjusted my desk lamp so I could get a better look at the sketch. It was a roughly drawn door frame standing in the art basement, with measurements and project ideas scrawled to the side.

Then I remembered what that weird guy had said. "I came here through a door, but the door is gone now..."

I didn't like the theory that was quickly lodging itself into my brain. I didn't like dealing with things I couldn't think about logically. And if, for example, logic was Earth, a disappearing door to another world was Neptune.

The police scanner I'd had running on my computer non-stop for the past week crackled with sudden voices and I jumped, accidentally dropping the sketchbook. I bent to pick it up, but stopped when I realized what the officers on the scanner were saying.

"—black hair, roughly six feet tall. No shoes. Says he's twenty years old, and also— get this, a prince," a male officer scoffed. "Kid, where did you say your kingdom was?"

"In the river valley between Lumina and Nox, in the Western Territory!" A muffled but slightly familiar voice called out. Speak of the freaking Devil.

"Found him shouting at one of the vending machines on North Campus. Should I bring him in?" The male officer asked.

"Might as well," a voice I recognized as the red haired officer I'd spoken to sighed from the other end of the call. "At the very least we can find out what he's smoking. I might be interested," she added with a laugh.

I stood, pulled on my jacket, and hurried out of my dorm building. I formulated a plan in my head as I ran, and reached the Campus Security building just as a police officer helped the dude I'd kicked in the gut yesterday out of his car. Marcella-whatever.

"Oh my god, Marc, where have you been!" I shouted once I was close enough to be heard.

Marc's eyebrows furrowed. "Demon woman?"