Erka lit a small lamp.
The flame flickered low.
Mia stood beside the door.
Her ears were turned toward the corridor.
I stood by the window.
Erka took out a glass plate.
A red thread lay on top of it.
“I’m going to apply just a little heat.”
“I know.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“I know.”
“And don’t breathe too close to it.”
“I know.”
Erka looked at me.
“I’m saying it because you act like someone who doesn’t know.”
“Fair.”
Erka gripped the end of the thread with tweezers.
She brought it close to the lamp flame.
Right before it touched the fire.
The thread shriveled very slightly.
And then there was a smell.
Dried herbs.
Wet cloth.
Oil.
Beneath that, a slightly sweet scent was mixed in.
Mia immediately grimaced.
“I hate it.”
Erka’s hand stopped.
“Why?”
Mia looked toward the door.
“This smell.”
“From the stairs earlier?”
“Yeah.”
Mia took one step back.
“But it’s stronger.”
Erka pulled the thread away from the flame.
She hadn’t burned it completely.
But the end of the thread was scorched black.
From that charred end, a very small amount of red powder fell.
Erka held her breath.
“Wait.”
“Why?”
“This.”
She pressed the red powder with the tip of the tweezers.
The powder did not crumble like ash.
It clung to the glass plate like greasy dust.
Erka’s face hardened.
“It doesn’t disappear when it burns.”
“Then?”
“It remains.”
Erka held the glass plate up to the light.
The red powder had spread very thinly.
“When the thread burns, it leaves a smell and a mark.”
I looked at the red trace on the glass plate.
The medicinal smell I had noticed in front of the stairs.
The black powder under the storehouse.
Burned paper.
Red symbols.
The things that had been separate one by one now came together in one place.
Erka said quietly,
“This isn’t something they burn to erase.”
From the corridor outside the washing room came the sound of dripping water.
Drip.
Drip.
Mia’s ears pricked up again.
Erka continued.
“They burn it to leave a mark.”
I did not answer.
The red powder on the glass plate gleamed very faintly beneath the lamplight.
Nice.
The red dots stamped on paper, and the red threads tied around people’s wrists.
Were both things that left something behind?
I stared at the red powder on the glass plate for a long while.
The powder did not scatter like ash.
When it caught the light, it clung in a very thin layer.
Erka put out the lamp.
Once the light died, the red powder looked like ordinary dust.
“You can’t see it when the light’s off.”
“They probably made it that way on purpose.”
“What?”
“It’d be troublesome if it could be seen at any time.”
Erka looked at me.
“You have that face like you know something again.”
“A guess.”
“I hate that word.”
“I hate your expression too.”
Mia said quietly from by the door,
“I hate both of you.”
“Why are you butting in?”
“The smell is strong.”
Mia rubbed the tip of her nose.
Ever since the thread had been heated slightly, the smell remained in the room.
Dried herbs.
Wet cloth.
Oil.
And a slightly sweet scent.
I rubbed beneath my nose once with the back of my hand.
It was an unpleasant smell.
It was not overpowering, but it lingered.
Erka carefully covered the glass plate with a cloth.
“I’ll take a closer look at this.”
“Take it with you.”
“I would even if you didn’t say so.”
“Don’t burn it.”
Erka’s eyebrow rose.
“I just told you. It leaves a mark if it burns.”
“That’s why I said it.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Sometimes.”
“Should I really hit you?”
“Get in line.”
Beside us, Mia raised her hand ever so slightly.
“I bite.”
“Put your hand down.”
Mia lowered her hand.
Her expression did not really lower with it.
Erka put the glass plate into a metal box.
Click, went the lock.
“What are you going to do now?”
“People.”
“People?”
“We need to find the student who went down the stairs.”
“Do you know their name?”
“No.”
Erka sighed.
“Then how are you going to find them?”
“We start by looking for people who aren’t where they should be.”
“What does that mean now?”
“We check classes, the dining hall, and rooms to see if anyone has disappeared.”
Mia’s ears moved.
“Disappeared.”
“Yeah.”
Erka held the metal box against her chest and thought for a moment.
“Then we should look at the documents first.”
“Serena is looking at them.”
“The duke’s daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“That really is a strange combination.”
“I know.”
“Everyone around you is strange.”
“That includes you.”
“I’m normal.”
Mia shook her head.
“No.”
Erka immediately looked at Mia.
“What do you mean, no?”
“You smell strange too.”
“Don’t talk about my smell.”
“Why?”
“Because it feels unpleasant.”
Nice.
This side was not normal either.
I opened the laboratory door.
Students were passing by the corridor in ones and twos.
It was almost time for classes to begin.
“Now, let’s go to class.”
“Are you trying to go alone again?”
Erka asked at once.
Mia looked at me too.
I looked at the two of them for a moment, then answered.
“Go to class.”
“What about you, Senior?”
“I’m going too.”
Mia’s eyes narrowed.
“Is that a lie?”
“Half of it.”
“Then the other half?”
“I need to go into class and check if anyone doesn’t show up.”
Only then did Mia nod.
“I want to look too.”
“You just go to your class.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I wouldn’t believe you even if you said you did.”
“Then I’ll attend your class with you, Senior.”
“No.”
Mia’s tail drooped.
“Why?”
“You’ll stand out if you stick to me.”
“I’ll stay small.”
“Your ears aren’t small.”
Mia touched her own ears.
She looked a little downcast.
“I’ll call you later.”
At that, her ears lifted slightly again.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Good.”
“You’re still using that?”
“Yeah.”
Beside us, Erka muttered quietly,
“You’re both exhausting.”
You’re no easy case yourself.
I swallowed those words and stepped out into the corridor.
About half the students had already entered the common class.
I sat in a seat at the back.
The professor had not yet arrived at the front of the blackboard.
The students were all chatting among themselves.
I took a blank sheet of paper out of my bag.
I had no intention of taking notes.
I looked over the seats from the left.
Three empty seats.
One of them was a seat that had been empty in the morning as well.
The top of the desk was too clean.
No books.
No inkwell.
No bag.
And yet the chair had been pushed in neatly.
The professor entered.
The students fell silent.
The professor opened the attendance book.
I picked up my pen.
I made a single dot on the paper.
“Arbel.”
“Yes.”
“Rodin.”
“Yes.”
“Kyle.”
It was an empty seat.
The answer came from the front.
I did not raise my head.
A student in the front row on the right had raised his hand.
Kyle?
Was that the name of the seat that had been empty in the morning?
The professor called the next name without showing any concern.
I looked at the student who had just raised his hand.
Brown hair.
An ordinary uniform.
A faint red mark near the nape of his neck.
He had his head lowered and was fiddling with his writing tools.
The problem was not that seat.
The desk at the empty seat I had seen was still empty.
Then had the empty seat I saw in the morning not been Kyle’s?
No.
Had the name changed?
Had the seat changed?
Or had I been mistaken?
I did not like any of the three.
Attendance ended.
The professor began writing formulas on the blackboard.
Magical power control formula.
Circulation stabilization.
Recoil minimization.
I did not look at the blackboard.
I looked at the lower part of the lectern where the attendance book lay.
The professor had left the attendance book half-closed.
A single sheet of paper was sticking out slightly.
Not a single word the professor said entered my ears until class ended.
As soon as it was over, the students stood up.
I deliberately moved slowly.
The brown-haired student got up from his seat.
He gathered his books.
His gait was ordinary.
But the students around him neither avoided him nor spoke to him.
That was strange.
If they were in the same class, someone would usually say at least a word.
“What are you eating for lunch?”
“Did you do the homework?”
“Did you hear what the professor said earlier?”
There was none of that.
The student passed through the crowd and went out the door.
I did not follow right away.
Serena was right.
If I went around asking openly, I would stand out.
So I went out a beat late.
Students were mingling in the corridor.
Brown Hair went toward the dining hall.
I followed after him.
I did not get too close.
I kept my distance by watching his reflection in the corridor windows.
The dining hall was already crowded even though it was before lunch.
The smell of soup reached me first.
This time, it was thin potato soup.
The color was darker than in the morning, but the taste probably would not be very different.
The brown-haired student stood in front of the serving counter.
When the server saw him, he naturally held out a bowl.
“Again?”
Again?
I heard that from the back of the line.
The student smiled.
“Yes.”
His voice was quiet.
The server ladled out soup without another word.
He also placed a piece of bread on top.
I stepped out of the line.
Pretending to head toward the water barrel at the side, I looked at the record board beside the serving counter.
It was a thin board where meal quantities were recorded.
There were no names.
Instead, only student numbers and meal counts were written.
After the brown-haired student passed, the server drew a line beside one of the numbers.
A second mark.
Twice before lunch?
I picked up a water cup.
I drank a mouthful of tasteless water.
My throat felt even drier.
The brown-haired student sat by the window.
He ate his soup.
His pace was slow.
He did not touch the bread.
The plate soon emptied.
I narrowed my eyes.
It was strange.
The speed at which he ate did not match the amount that disappeared.
He lifted his spoon twice, yet half the soup was gone.
He wiped his mouth and rose from his seat.
There was not a single drop of soup left on the plate.
The bread had disappeared too.
I had never seen him chew.
I looked at the seat.
I could not tell by smell.
I needed Mia.
Just then, a short voice came from beside me.
“I saw.”
I turned my head.
Mia was standing beside the water barrel.
She had a cup in her hand.
“What about your class?”
“It ended.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
This time, she did not avoid my eyes.
It seemed to be true.
Mia looked toward the seat by the window.
“That person.”
“What does he smell like?”
Mia did not answer right away.
The tip of her nose moved very slightly.
“Thin.”
“Like that assistant earlier?”
“Similar, but different.”
“How?”
“The assistant only had it on the outside.”
Mia looked toward the empty plate.
“That person’s inside is far away.”
Another difficult thing to understand.
But this time, I got the feeling.
As if a person was there, but the person’s smell was not properly attached to their own body.
“What about the food?”
“There’s almost no smell of having eaten.”
I looked at the empty plate.
There was no soup or bread.
And yet there was no smell of having eaten.
Now even meals disappear like records.
“Mia.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t follow that student.”
Mia’s ears immediately drooped.
“Why?”
“Not now.”
“What about you, Senior?”
“I won’t follow either.”
Mia looked at my face.
“Lie.”
“This time it’s true.”
“Half?”
“Half.”
“Good.”
“It’s not good.”
I left the dining hall.
This time, it was the dormitory.
I had not confirmed who the vanished student was.
But there was something I could check.
Next was the room.
The corridor of the general dormitory building was quiet in the daytime.
Most people were in class or at the dining hall.
One student on duty was opening a window.
The old wooden frame creaked.
As I walked past, I checked the room numbers.
To match the seat that had been empty in the morning with the line in the attendance book, I had to first check the rooms of the students in the same group.
It had been like that in the game too.
School events never gave you the big name tag first.
I stopped at the end of the corridor.
One door was locked.
Many rooms were locked.
The problem was the doorknob.
There were no handprints.
A doorknob someone grabbed every day could not be that clean.
I lightly brushed the wall beside the door with the back of my hand.
Dust came away.
There was no dust on the doorknob.
Someone had wiped it.
Recently.
There was no light in the gap beneath the door.
No sound came from inside either.
The door of the room next door opened.
I immediately turned my body.
Just then, Mia was walking from the end of the corridor.
At this point, wasn’t she basically following me around?
The student who came out of the next room blinked when he saw me.
“Is something the matter?”
I said casually,
“Ah, I got my friend’s room wrong.”
“Ah.”
The student did not think much of it.
I took one step back.
Mia took the briefest sniff at the locked door as she passed by.
Then she stopped.
After the student in the next room disappeared, Mia spoke in a low voice.
“Here.”
“Why?”
“It’s strange.”
“Does it smell?”
Mia shook her head.
“No.”
She looked at the gap under the door.
“It smells too little.”
Her words were short.
But that one sentence was enough.
A room someone lives in has a smell.
Dust.
Cloth.
Sweat.
Ink.
Soap.
No matter how clean a person is, the place where they live leaves traces.
But it smelled too little.
I looked at the doorknob.
It was clean.
The hallway floor had an ordinary layer of dust.
Only the area in front of the door had been wiped, very thinly.
“Anyone inside?”
Mia shook her head.
“No.”
“Was it originally an empty room?”
Mia lowered her head close to the crack in the door.
“No.”
“Why?”
Mia pointed under the door with her finger.
A tiny bread crumb was caught in the gap.
A piece that had dried hard.
I bent down and looked at it.
A trace that someone had lived there.
But there was no smell.
They had wiped away even the traces of a person being there.
I took my hand off the doorknob.
I shouldn’t open it now.
It was daytime in the hallway.
The student next door had just left.
The student supervisor was also not far away, fiddling with a window.
If I picked the lock in a place like this, I’d look like a suspicious bastard before I even got to see inside the room.
I was already suspicious enough, sure.
But becoming the kind of suspicious bastard who was easy to catch was a different problem.
I looked at Mia.
Mia was still looking at the gap in the door.
Her ears were laid low.
“Let’s go.”
“You’re not opening it?”
“Not now.”
“Later?”
“Yeah.”
Mia looked at the door for a little longer.
“No smell.”
“I heard you.”
“But there’s bread.”
“I saw it.”
“Strange.”
“That’s why we’re opening it later.”
Only then did Mia nod.
“Good.”
“Is that phrase yours now?”
“Yeah.”
“Shameless.”
Instead of answering, Mia flicked the tip of her tail just a little.
I couldn’t tell if it meant she liked that or if she was teasing me.
We left the hallway as we were.
As I walked, I memorized the room number.
West general building.
Third floor.
Past two pillars, on the right.
The moment I wrote it down on paper, someone could see that paper.
It was better to keep it in my head.
It had been the same in the game.
Hidden events weren’t marked kindly.
They didn’t appear on the map, and they didn’t pop up in the quest window.
I stopped while going down the stairs.
Mia stopped immediately too.
“Why?”
“We need to call Erka.”
“Again?”
“Because we have to pick a lock.”
Mia’s ears folded a little.
“I can’t pick locks.”
“I know.”
“I can break it.”
“That won’t do.”
“Too bad.”
She looked genuinely disappointed.
Sometimes she was seriously scary.
I caught Erka near the experiment building after class ended.
More precisely, she saw me before I caught her.
She was holding a metal box in her arms.
The shadows under her eyes were darker than before.
“Again?”
“I haven’t even said anything yet.”
“Your face already says again.”
“Looks like I’ve reached the realm of speaking with my face.”
“That’s not it. You always bring trouble with the same expression.”
“I need to open a door.”
Erka stopped walking immediately.
“No.”
“You didn’t even ask what door.”
“Generally, asking only makes me hate it more.”
“A dorm room.”
Erka’s eyebrows rose.
“Whose room?”
“A room that’s likely to belong to a missing student.”
At those words, some of the irritation left Erka’s face.
Not all of it.
Instead, something else came in.
A calculating look.
“What’s your basis?”
“The doorknob is too clean.”
“That’s all?”
“The floor in front of the door was wiped too, and apparently the room smells too much like nothing.”
Erka’s gaze went to Mia.
Mia nodded.
“Too much like nothing.”
“I really hate that explanation, and I hate it even more because it’s sometimes right.”
Erka let out a short sigh.
“And?”
“There was a bread crumb in the crack under the door.”
“Ah.”
She understood immediately.
“There are traces that someone lived there, but only the smell is gone?”
“Yeah.”
Erka adjusted her grip on the metal box.
“When?”
“Before dinner.”
“Before curfew?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the time when the number of people around is the most awkward.”
“That’s why it’s good.”
“What’s good about it?”
“If it’s too late, there’ll be patrols. If it’s too early, there’ll be eyes around watching.”
Erka bit her lip once.
She had the face of someone who didn’t like it, but had nothing to refute it with.