Page 79 of Shattered Jewel
Elara watches Kaspian warily as he activates it. His green eyes lower with an eerie calmness as he begins to type with one hand, refusing help, the sound of the keys clicking adding to the sounds of her late brother’s room being pilfered.
Again.
If it breaks Elara’s heart to see us put a dent in Maverick’s formally preserved space, none of it shows on her face. Likely a trait she gained by spending time with us.
Any man falling for her would be saddened by that fact, but I’m glad for it.
The screen flashes alive, casting a blueish hue over Kaspian’s intense expression. He leans in, reading something that prompts a low curse to slip out.
“What is it?” Wilder abandons his search and moves closer.
Kaspian doesn’t answer immediately, his hand flying over the keyboard once more. Screens pop up and vanish in rapid succession before he finally leans back.
From the corner of my eye, Elara and Sasha exchange a furtive glance before they make their way toward us. Their presence is both comforting and unnerving, a potent mix of familiarity and fear that sets my senses on edge.
“Is there something we should know?” Elara finally asks, her attention fixed on the screen.
Kaspian doesn’t look up from his work.
“Possibly,” he replies cryptically. His face is a mask of concentration, the whites of his eyes reflecting the changing colors from the screen as he rapidly sifts through Maverick’s encrypted files.
“For all we know, this could be another dead end,” Cav muses from his post near the door, striking a note of skepticism among us. His hands are tucked in his pants pockets, blue eyes sharp as they move between us all.
The mild burns on his arms bloom red in the artificial light of the room, seemingly as angry as the expression he’s worn since extricating himself from a caustic ambush.
Elara bristles at his words. “So far, Maverick’s given us the most evidence against the Sovereigns.”
“He’s also the one who broke the jewel in half and played hide-and-seek with us,” Wilder states.
Elara frowns at him.
“Fuck, this isn’t good,” Kaspian says.
I ignore the surge of adrenaline that floods my veins and instead move closer to the computer. The image there causes my heart to stutter.
It’s a map—a detailed layout of Titan Falls as it is today—but it’s not the geography that has my blood running cold.
There are red dots scattered all over it.
“Missing persons,” Kaspian murmurs, answering our silent question. “Each dot represents a missing person case in Titan Falls.”
Elara swallows audibly, her hand shooting out to clutch Sasha’s. Their knuckles blanch as they grip each other, their eyes wide and fixed on the horrific constellation illuminating the screen.
“Maverick was tracking them,” I surmise. “And look at the dates... this has been happening for decades.”
“More than that,” Cav interjects, his eyes squinting as he studies the map from over my shoulder. “Some of these cases go back to the late seventeen hundreds.”
“When Sarah Anderton was alive,” Elara whispers.
The sudden silence in the room is deafening, underscored by the steady hum of Maverick’s computer and the fast breaths of Elara and Sasha.
“What was Maverick looking for?” Wilder asks, breaking the eerie lull. “Why all these people?”
“Not people,” Sasha says, her voice strained. “Women. Look.”
She points shakily to a sidebar on the screen, populated with thumbnail photos of the victims staring back at us. All young, all beautiful, all gone without a trace. With a quick glance at the information attached to each woman’s photo, their ages and dates of disappearance become horrifyingly clear.
“They were all university students,” Elara says, her voice flat. “All around our age when they... disappeared.”