CHAPTER 112: DISAPPEARED.

Sterling’s eyes cracked open to a room that tilted sickeningly sideways. The ceiling fan overhead spun in lazy circles, each rotation sending fresh waves of nausea through his gut. His mouth tasted like he’d been chewing on dirt mixed with bitter almonds, and his skull felt three sizes too small for his brain.

He tried to sit up. Failed. Tried again, this time managing to prop himself on one elbow. The living room swam into focus, the empty chairs, discarded teacups, and Rajesh face-down on the dining table like a corpse.

"Rajesh." His voice came out as a croak. "Rajesh!"

No response.

Sterling forced himself upright, his body screaming in protest. Every muscle felt loose, disconnected, as if someone had unscrewed all his joints and reassembled him wrong. He staggered to the table, grabbed Rajesh’s shoulder, and shook.

"Wake up, damn it."

Rajesh groaned, a low, rough sound, but didn’t lift his head.

The apartment was too quiet. No running water, no footsteps, no teenage voices heard anywhere at all. His gaze swept the room, landing on a piece of paper centered on the coffee table with deliberate precision. He lurched toward it, his legs still rubbery, and snatched it up.

*Tell my father I don’t need his protection. We’re safe now.*

No signature. No explanation. Just those twelve words that somehow managed to sound both defiant and final.

The message sunk deep. He’d lost her. Again.

Sterling pocketed the note and moved through the apartment on autopilot, his training kicking in despite the sedative fog. Kitchen first. Two teacups on the counter, still damp. He lifted one to his nose, chamomile, ginger, something else he couldn’t place. Something was wrong.

The trash bin yielded more, two clear plastic syringe caps, they had obviously been used for oral administration. He pulled an evidence bag from his jacket and sealed them inside. Next to the sink, a faint smear caught the dawn light. Iridescent, like oil on water, already dried to a crust. He scraped a sample onto a cotton swab and bagged that too.

Behind him, Rajesh finally stirred. "What... what happened?"

"We were drugged." Sterling’s voice was flat, professional. "How much do you remember?"

Rajesh lifted his head, his eyes bloodshot and unfocused. "Tea. She made us tea. It tasted..." He trailed off, pressing his palms against his temples. "God, my head."

"Can you walk?"

"Give me a minute."

Sterling didn’t wait. He moved to the bedrooms, both were stripped bare. Closets empty, hangers dangling off the rails. Drawers pulled out, contents vanished. In the bathroom, more nothing. Toothbrushes gone, toiletries cleared, medicine cabinet empty.

Then he saw it: a single dark hair on the white tile near the drain. He bagged it carefully, though he had no idea what good it would do. DNA testing took weeks, and they didn’t have weeks. They didn’t even have hours.

Rajesh appeared in the doorway, leaning heavily on the frame. "They’re gone."

"All three of them."

"How long were we out?"

Sterling checked his watch, 6:12am. The last thing he remembered clearly was finishing his tea around 3pm. Mira smiling as she collected their cups. "About 15 hours, maybe more."

"Fifteen hours." Rajesh’s laugh was bitter. "She could be anywhere."

Sterling returned to the kitchen, this time checking the trash more thoroughly. At the bottom, beneath crumpled tissues and food wrappers, he found it, a fragment of a label, torn but still partially legible. *...third dos... alchemic compou... oral admin...*

"Rajesh. Look at this."

Rajesh squinted at the scrap. "Third dose? Of what?"

"I don’t know." Sterling’s jaw tightened. "But she gave them something. The syringes, the note, she didn’t just drug us. She did something to them too."

"What, like poison?"

"Maybe. Or something worse."

They stood in the gutted apartment, surrounded by the absence of three human lives, and Sterling felt the investigation collapsing before it had even begun. No witnesses, no trail, no answers, just questions that kept multiplying like viruses.

He pulled out his secure phone. "I need to call her father."

---

9:15pm, New York

Captain Koker answered on the first ring.

"Sterling." Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered in the clipped tones of a man who’d been waiting by the phone.

"Sir, they’re gone." Sterling kept his voice level, but his hand tightened on the phone. "Mira, Raquel, Liam, all three vanished approximately fifteen hours ago. We were sedated."

Silence on the other end, heavy as a held breath.

"Tell me everything."

Sterling recounted it in precise detail, the tea, the drugging, waking to find the apartment stripped, the note, the syringes, the residue. When he finished, the silence stretched so long he thought the connection had dropped.

Then Koker spoke, and his voice had aged a decade. "The syringes. You said oral administration?"

"Yes, sir. We found the caps in the trash, and there’s residue that appears... unusual. Iridescent."

"Christ." he banged his fist on the table. "She actually did it."

"Sir?"

"The potions." Koker’s breath came rough. "My mother’s book. Mira stole it when she was twelve years old."

Sterling’s stomach dropped. "Potions."

"Alchemy. Real alchemy, not the medieval fantasy version. My mother was a master, she could change memory, perception, even..." He stopped. "I never taught Mira. I never wanted her to know. But she found the book in the locked library. I caught her with it once, told her it was too dangerous. She promised she was just reading it, just curious."

"And you believed her?"

"She was twelve, Sterling." Koker’s voice cracked. "What was I supposed to do, assume my daughter would grow up to use forbidden alchemy on her friends?"

Sterling closed his eyes. "The note says she doesn’t need your protection. What does that mean?"

"It means she thinks she doesn’t want me coming after her." Koker exhaled slowly. "If she used the third dose, the metamorphosis compound, then she didn’t just erase their memories. She changed them. Physically. Genetically. Everything."

Rajesh, listening with his ear pressed close to the phone, went white.

"Changed them into what?" Sterling demanded.

"Into whoever she wanted them to be. New faces, new identities, new DNA. Untraceable." Koker’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. "She’s made it so they never existed."

---

In his Manhattan study, Koker stood at the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the glittering sprawl of the city. The skyline stretched before him, a million lights representing a million lives, and his daughter had just erased three of them like chalk marks.

He turned to the desk, where a leather-bound book lay open, a replacement copy of his mother’s grimoire that he’d kept locked in a safe. The page was titled Metamorphosis: The Third Transformation. Beneath it, illustrations of human figures dissolving into fluid, then reforming into new shapes.

His mother had written in the margins: Use only in direst need. The changed cannot return.*

Koker slammed the book shut.

Memories surfaced unbidden. His Mira at twelve years old, standing in the library doorway with the book clutched to her chest, her eyes wide with fear and fascination. He’d taken it from her gently, too gently, he saw now, and explained that these recipes were dangerous, that people had died learning them, that she must never try them.

Apparently, all that fell on deaf ears.

She’d nodded solemnly. "I won’t, Daddy. I promise."

He’d believed her because he’d wanted to. Because it was easier than confronting the possibility that his daughter might inherit not just her grandmother’s brilliance, but her obsession.

Another memory flashed in his head, Mira at sixteen, a week after her grandmother’s funeral. She’d locked herself in her room for three days. He’d stood outside her door, hand raised to knock, then lowered it. Give her space, he’d told himself. She’s grieving.

Now he wondered what she’d been doing in there. Reading the book again? Practicing basic compounds? Planning?

On his desk, a framed photograph showed Mira at ten, gap-toothed and grinning, holding up a finger painting of their family. Three figures: Daddy, Grandma, and her. No mother in the picture, he’d sent her away already with his negligence. He’d raised Mira alone, with his mother’s help, and somehow that hadn’t been enough.

"I should have burned that book," he whispered to the empty room. "Should have thrown it in the fire the day Mother died."

But he hadn’t. He’d locked it away like a museum piece, a relic of a family tradition, and now his daughter had used it to commit the perfect disappearance.

His phone buzzed. Sterling again.

"We found a hair sample and some residue," the investigator said. "Should we send it for analysis?"

"It won’t matter." Koker’s voice was hollow. "If she completed the transformation, the DNA won’t match anything in any database. The hair you found is probably from before. It’s worthless now."

---

6:45 a.m., Mumbai

Sterling and Rajesh sat on the floor of the stripped living room, their backs against the wall. Around them, the empty apartment seemed to mock their failure.

"So what do we know?" Rajesh asked, his voice hoarse.

"We know Mira Koker drugged us, administered some kind of alchemical compound to Raquel and Liam, and disappeared with them hours ago." Sterling ticked off points on his fingers. "We know she left voluntarily, no signs of struggle, no forced entry. We know she planned this, probably for weeks."

"What don’t we know?"

"Everything else." Sterling’s laugh was bitter. "Why she did it. Where she went. What she turned them into. Whether it’s reversible."

"Is it? Reversible?"

"Koker didn’t say." Sterling pulled out the evidence bags, the syringe caps, the residue, the hair. "He just said they can’t return.

"What does that even mean?"

Sterling dragged a palm through his face. "I don’t know man, I don’t."