Chapter 371: The Records
Evaline:
When my friends arrived for the weekend, I took the first chance I got to pull Rowan aside.
We moved like conspirators. I checked the hallway outside twiceto make sure no one had followed us. My chest felt tight as a fist as I locked the door. The soft thunk of the latch sounded enormous.
For a moment, when I faced Rowan, the quiet was almost comical- the chatter and laughter muffled outside, while the two of us stood inthe privacy of my bedroom where truth felt dangerously close.
Rowan didn’t wait for me to speak. His eyes, searching and honest, already carried the question I had been circularly rehearsing for days. "Is this about Elder Nicholas?" he asked.
His question answered one of mine - Kieran had told him about Elder Nicholas’ case.
I nodded my head before I asked, "How much do you know so far?"
Rowan was quick to reveal how Kieran had called him the morning after the day of the incident to inform him about Elder Nicholas being the newest target of Soul Death. "However, that’s the only thing I know. He didn’t contact me after that."
I nodded in understanding. "There’s not much to say. Nothing has been found suspicious even though days have passed. It’s just like the previous cases. No evidence. No leads."
The two of us were silent before Rowan told me how he had been keeping an ear out around campus, but he hadn’t found anything unusual. He also admitted there had been no odd behavior among the senior students I had mentioned to him, the ones related to the secret group.
That should have comforted me. But it didn’t.
I told him what had been circling inside my head, the plan I had been refining like a wound. "We need the full records. Not just the new cases, but the old ones as well if we need to understand this matter more clearly. We can’t stay dependent on the secret group of students any more."
"The old ones? Where can we find them?" Rowan asked.
"Those cases happened centuries ago. And from what I learned during my internship, such old records have been recorded only in brittle ledgers, written by hands long gone. Those early accounts haven’t been digitized."
Rowan arched his eyebrows. "So... are those records in the Council headquarters?"
A soft smile bloomed on my lips as I corrected him. "That’s right. Such old and important records can only be found in council headquarter’s archives, but... not at the new one."
"The old council headquarters?" Rowan asked, catching up to what I was implying.
I nodded.
"As for the recent cases, they are recorded as the confidential files in the system at the new headquarters. But only a handful of people had access to them."
Rowan listened as I talked, his brow furrowed. "So we need records of both old anc new cases."
"Yes," I said. "Both. If there’s a pattern - dates, rituals, locations, words used, anything at all - it could mean the difference between waiting for the next victim and stopping whoever is doing this."
He nodded slowly, more thoughtful than I had ever seen him. "The old headquarters... you know the layout?"
I did. From months of being an intern at the Council. During my time as an intern, I had done quite some detective work, and I knew more than tnough about the old headquarter building.
"But knowing the layout isn’t enough. Not until we have a way to make our way inside the building through the securits check at the entrance." I informed him about the biggest problem in our way when it came to get old files.
"And the modern files?" Rowan asked.
That was where we needed help. "We need someone who can breach system security," I told him. "Someone who can get past the surveillance logs, the firewalls, the two-factor authentications to open and copy those records. But the Council’s digital safes are layered. It’s not something you just pick at."
His jaw tightened. "The Rogue Alphas won’t hand these files to us. They’ll lock it up. And even if they didn’t, the Council keeps things-" He waved his hand in the air as though cutting the problem into pieces.
He was right. My mates would never allow us to get further involved in these cases.
"We would need the right person. Someone we can trust. Maybe Noah could-" Rowan looked at me, his eyes hopeful.
Noah was capable. He was clever, quick with gadgets, and he had shown an aptitude for the kind of tinkering that turned into hacking. But these weren’t small security locks on dorm doors, these were behind-the-scenes, defense-grade systems bound by Council oversight. Bribing a maintenance worker was one thing, sliding past the Council’s inner digital sanctum was another. We couldn’t risk a careless hand, or worse... someone who would report us.
"Noah isn’t a bad option... but how are we going to explain everything to him? It would be wrong to pull him blindly into this plan only for him to realize how high are the stakes of this breach attempt latter. But at the same time, we can’t just carelessly tell him everything about the soul death cases."
I could imagine the look on Kieran’s face once he would learn we had involved another innocent student in this deadly matter.
Rowan let out a sigh and dropped on the edge of my bed. He ran his hands down his face, the helplessness quite visible in his eyes.
"So... even though we now have an idea about what we need to do in order to find some answers, we can’t do anything." He put out our exact situation.
"We know where the old records are, but we don’t have a way to get inside the old headquarter building. We also know where the new records are, but we don’t have a way to get to those either... at least not a safe one."
The silence stretched between us for a moment, before I finally spoke. "I might have a way to get these records. Though I’m not confident, it’s worth a try."