The cyber division office smelled like instant ramen and old wires. A tech named Boman sat hunched at a workstation cluttered with sticky notes, cracked USBs, and three monitors stacked like a shrine. His beard looked unfinished, and he was wearing a hoodie with 404: Morals Not Found printed across the chest.
He glanced at the folder Anaya slid onto his desk.
"Missing person?"
"Not quite," she said, sitting down without asking. "I want you to trace an account. I've got the forum post, the filename, and the username."
He picked up the folder, flipped through the printouts.
"MaraudNet?" he muttered, eyebrows raised. "Thought that graveyard shut down five years ago."
"It's live again. For now."
He cracked his knuckles and turned to the nearest screen. "You want a trace on this 'TheStoryteller' handle?"
She nodded. "User profile, location, anything."
Boman sighed. "These kinds of sites are like ghosts. No SSL, no public registrars. Half their content is cached in weird, rotting backchannels."
She didn't reply. Just stared at him.
He sighed louder. "Alright. Let's dance with the dead."
His fingers flew across the keyboard.
She watched the screen—IP logs, server hops, packet trails, digital noise.
"Jesus," Boman muttered after a minute.
"What?"
"There's no login metadata. No cookies. No access timestamps. Either this guy's a god-tier ghost, or…"
"Or what?"
He leaned back. "Or this account wasn't created in the usual way."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean it doesn't exist in the database. I checked the backend. There's no user entry called 'TheStoryteller.' But the post is there. That story? It's real. But it was posted by no one."
Anaya frowned. "Anonymous post?"
"No. Anonymous would still leave a trace. This one reads like it was injected into the site's code manually. Like someone bypassed the user system entirely."
"So it's not even part of the forum?"
Boman nodded slowly. "It was stitched in. Like a scar."
She sat back in her chair.
Boman turned in his seat. "You dealing with some kind of manifesto writer?"
"I don't know," she said. "Yet."
He raised an eyebrow. "You want me to keep digging?"
She paused.
Then: "I want to know if this guy's ever posted before. Anywhere."
Boman gave her a tired smile. "You're asking me to find a ghost."
"Exactly."
/////
Boman had been typing for almost twenty minutes. His desk was quiet except for the soft clicking of keys. Anaya sat beside him, sipping bad coffee and staring at the glowing screen.
"Okay," he said finally. "I found something."
He turned one of the monitors toward her. On it was an old version of the MaraudNet site. The colors looked faded. The text was harder to read.
"This is a snapshot from four years ago," he explained. "Someone saved the whole site back then, like an online time machine."
Anaya leaned closer. "Are there more stories?"
"Yeah," he said, scrolling slowly. "Five of them. No usernames. No dates. They look like they were just dropped in."
He clicked the first one open.
It was short. Half a page. A man locked in a storage unit. No food. No water. The last line stuck with her:
"There was an ice tray near him. Still frozen. Still full."
She shivered.
"Anyone report a death like this?" she asked.
"No idea," Boman said. "Nothing came up on the usual searches. It might've never been found. Or reported. Or maybe… no one cared."
He opened the second one.
"She drowned in three inches of water. In the sink. Head down. Knees folded. Like she was praying."
Anaya swallowed. The style was exactly the same. Quiet. Creepy. Full of tiny details no one would make up.
"These aren't stories," she said. "They're... reports. Like someone watching real deaths and writing them up like fiction."
"Or planning them," Boman added.
She looked at him.
He nodded. "Think about it. These sound like rehearsals. Each one gets a little sharper. A little colder. Whoever wrote these... was practicing."
Anaya sat back and stared at the screen.
These deaths weren't famous. They weren't even noticed. But someone had seen them. Someone had written them down.
Boman printed out the five old stories. Anaya spread them across the table like crime scene photos.
Each story was darker than the last. Not louder. Not bloodier. Just smarter. Quieter. Cleaner.
In one, a man was found hanging in his own closet, dressed in someone else's clothes.
In another, a woman lay on her balcony under a sheet of plastic, perfectly still, her hands folded over her chest like a funeral pose.
The final one was the worst.
It described a man who stopped answering his phone for three weeks. His neighbors didn't check. His job didn't notice. When someone finally knocked, the apartment stank of vinegar and rot. The story ended with this line:
4 "He died alone, but not unnoticed. I noticed."
Anaya felt her stomach turn.
She pulled out her phone. Scrolled through old cases. Then she found it.
"Boman," she said, her voice low. "This one... we had this case."
"Yeah?"
"Three months ago. Dehydration. Apartment locked from the inside. No signs of struggle. We marked it as natural death. No crime."
"Looks like someone disagreed," Boman said.
She nodded slowly.
He was right.
These weren't just stories. They were practice pages.
The Storyteller had been perfecting his voice. Testing ideas. Picking victims no one would look into.
Until now.
Until her.
Anaya sat alone in the evidence room, the lights dim, the stories spread out in front of her.
She read them again, one by one.
The early ones were cold and distant. Descriptions. Details. Like someone writing in a notebook, learning how to tell a secret without being caught.
But the last story felt different.
"You would've missed the sound behind the wall, too."
"You never notice the dust unless you're looking for it."
Not he or she.
You.
Anaya froze.
It wasn't just a story. It was talking to someone.
She grabbed the other printouts and flipped through them fast. The older ones didn't have that. No second person. No direct address.
Just the final one.
Like the writer had found their audience.
Like they'd chosen a reader.
She whispered the words out loud:
"You never noticed the sound behind the wall, did you?"
And for a second, she didn't feel like a detective reading a file.
She felt like someone being watched.
She picked up the latest story—the one that matched the real crime—and flipped to the last page again.
"Let them find what I left behind. I want them to understand. I want them to see how well I write."
Anaya sat very still.
The stories weren't just messages.
They were letters.
–––
End of Chapter 2.