Page 26 of Dark Knight

The last thing I expected when I got to our room was to see the door slightly ajar.

Lyric was too cautious for that.

I knocked lightly before pushing it open further only to find the entire room stripped bare. My breath rushed from my lungs as I took in the scene before me. Lyric was gone? Dread tore through me at the thought of what might have happened to bring about this situation.

The sheets were off the beds, leaving just the vinyl blue mattresses and the wood bed frames that were underneath. The desk chairs were still there, but everything else was gone.

It looked like we had just picked up and left and Welhurst staff were waiting on new students to move in. Honestly, something like this hadn't even crossed my mind as a possibility.

What happened to all of my things? What happened to Lyric? Did she take my stuff when she left? I had so many questions and not a single place to find any answers.

Even though someone had stripped the room bare, I knew there was one thing they wouldn't have touched, and that was the ceiling tiles. It was actually an idea I'd gotten from Lyric.

I'd noticed a couple times that one of the ceiling tiles above her bed was ajar just a little, and it was enough to make me think she might have been hiding something up there. I never looked at what it was because I respected her privacy. I had some things that were too precious to risk as well, so I copied her.

I pulled the desk chair over to the edge of the bed and lifted it, placing it on top of the mattress before climbing up to it. I braced it against the wall and climbed on top of it, hoping like hell it wouldn't fall or that the bed wouldn't move. Both were a possibility at this point, given how there was nothing else in the room to weigh things down or block them from sliding across the tile floor.

After taking a steadying breath, I popped my hands up over my head, my fingertips brushing against the tile. The styrofoam lifted easily, and I scooted it toward the center of the room. I stretched up onto my tiptoes, which was the most dangerous part of this whole thing, and reached my hand along the wall.

Glossy, slick photo paper slid under my fingers just before the single metal chain did. I grabbed onto both, pulling them free from their hiding spot before reaching the other direction, where I grabbed the other photo I had hidden.

It might have seemed silly, but I figured if somebody found one, they might not look for the other, so I had spread them out. Having retrieved what I needed, I put the ceiling tile back in place and gingerly climbed down off the chair, then off the bed. It only took a moment to put everything back where I had found it and wipe my dirty footprints off the mattress cover. That dark blue really showed everything.

I plopped down on the edge of the bed and looked at the three objects in my hand, two photos and a necklace. That was all I had taken with me when I ran from the cult. That and the clothes on my back, but I burned those the second I could.

The necklace was one of my mother's. It was one of the things that she had given up, hidden away. Like all of the women in the cult did–every piece of jewelry, everything that they ever owned. It all belonged to the Light Father. Any pictures that were taken belonged to him as well.

Photos were taken on two occasions, somebody's wedding day and when a girl got her first period. One picture was of my mother and father on their wedding day. They weren't in the cult at that point, but they gave the photo to him just the same. The second photo was of my mother and me.

I was thirteen at the time and terrified of everything. I'd never had my picture taken before. There were no baby photos of me. There were no cute moments growing up that had been captured like everybody else. This was the one and only photo of my life until I reached the age of sixteen.

The other photos, the very first photos that were taken outside of the cult, were police photos after I ran away. The difference in my mother between the two photos was astounding, especially given it had only been fifteen years or so.

Looking at the photo of the two of them and the one of my mother and me, I suddenly realized that I looked nothing like either of my parents. I knew that genetics were weird, but surely I should be able to see some resemblance to the people who were responsible for my existence.

They had created me and raised me, but they were also the people who destroyed me. I wasn't sure why I was so set on keeping these photos and the necklace. It wasn't like I had a burning desire to remember that part of my life.

Honestly, if I could have just popped into existence at the age of eighteen, that would have been great. No foster family, no high school annoyances, no cult. No expectations to be the Light Father's bride or to become the Light Mother. Just me being a normal girl going off to college.

I wasn't sure how long I sat there staring at the photos or turning the pendant in my fingers, but the sound of someone laughing snapped me out of the trance I had fallen into. I slipped the chain around my neck, fastening it quickly before shoving the photos in my pocket. I tucked the pendant into the t-shirt I was wearing, so it wasn't immediately obvious that I was wearing a necklace unless you looked closely.

When the laughter turned into voices coming down the hallway, I wasn't sure whether to stay in the room or to leave and talk to them. I needed to find out what happened to Lyric, but I had no idea how to do so.

The only thing I could think of was to ask other people in the dorm, but as far as I knew, it wasn't like Lyric and I made friends with anybody outside of each other. She had immediately joined the sorority, and I’d had no interest in anything except my studies.

I was so determined to get my grades up, to keep my scholarship, to get a good job, and to have a good life, that I had pushed everything else to the side. The only exception I had made was Cliff.

Lyric had showed me who he really was, and when we walked in on him raping a girl during a frat party, I knew that I couldn't even trust myself to make decisions about boys. Not yet, anyway, so I resolved to just focus on my studies. Life had other ideas, of course, since Sampson came knocking and everything I focused on and planned went out the window.

Sometimes it felt like fate or the universe was just laughing at me. Every time I thought something was going well, it got flipped on its head and life just got worse. I rushed out of the room once I realized the voices and laughter had passed, and that the people were heading toward the elevator, their voices drifting.

"Excuse me," I called out. "Do you live on this floor?"

The two girls turned and looked at me. "Yeah, we do. Why?" The one who spoke popped one of her hands on her hip and seemed to be ready for me to challenge her or something.

"Do you know what happened to the girls that lived in this room?" I jerked my head toward the room I had just come out of. They glanced at each other, as though deciding whether or not to share a big secret.

"They went missing."

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