APIBAGS Chapter 34

Okay. Calm down. There's a saying about ghosts—that if you hear one speak and start acting scared and knowing about it, the ghost will latch onto you. Complete ignorance is the only viable policy.

"Strange," Kanna said. "There are signs of cooking but no sign of anyone eating."

That was probably some kind of offering. That's why there's no sign of eating—the ghost took it.

"Do you think Troy ate it?"

Daisy's right, actually. Come to think of it, Troy was lurking around up front earlier. He probably ate it as a drinking snack. Common sense says there can't be ghosts... Except we're inside a novel, so maybe there can?

"There doesn't seem to be anything more to look at here."

This is absolutely, categorically not because I'm scared and want to get out of the dining hall as fast as possible. We left—and another strange sound reached us from somewhere. This time it didn't seem like I was the only one who heard it.

"What is that?"

We followed the sound to a room tucked away in the deepest corner, the most hidden spot in the whole building.

"What's this room?"

"The director's office..."

The director's office being in the most out-of-the-way place—compared to other orphanages that embezzle funds and abuse children, this one must actually be on the more upright end. Then again, that's probably why Daisy still speaks of it so warmly.

Kanna pressed her ear against the door.

"It's coming from inside."

So the sound was coming from in there. Troy should be with Jelly—a burglar, maybe? Or one of the kidnapper's accomplices, hiding inside. They'd sensed us coming and ducked in here to wait.

I pressed my ear against the wood and listened. A scratching sound. Scritch-scritch. The sound of fingernails dragging slowly along the wooden wall.

But if an accomplice had hidden in here after hearing us approach, there'd be no reason to make deliberate noise and draw our attention. Was what was inside really an accomplice? Was it even a person at all? Having just heard the voice of a starved ghost minutes ago, everything seemed suspicious now.

"I... I can't go in."

"Are you scared?"

"...Yes."

Daisy was shaking her head, pale with fear. Maybe she thought a ghost might come out? Whatever it was, I was immensely relieved to discover I wasn't the only one shaking.

"I'm here. It'll be all right."

Once Daisy understood she wasn't alone in being frightened, she seemed to settle a little. Even someone with the skill to drop Troy with a single shoe to the back of the skull had reason to be scared when the opponent didn't follow the laws of physics.

"I'll open it."

And there was Kanna. Look at that composure. That unshaken bearing. True to form for a suffering heroine, Kanna seemed completely immune to situations like this.

Until the door opened, there was no knowing whether what waited inside was an accomplice or a ghost. Was this Schrödinger's Director's Office?

Kanna opened the door without hesitation. Inside, nothing. Nothing visible anywhere—and yet the scratching continued, undeterred. Oh god. It really was a ghost after all—!

My eyes were stinging. I was too scared to step inside.

"Stop, please—"

Daisy had it worse than me. Kanna paid no attention to the two of us vibrating in the doorway and began methodically opening every door in the room. Wasn't she scared at all...? As expected of a female lead, that nerve of her really was something.

And then Kanna opened the wardrobe, and something shot out.

"Hup!"

Right beside me, someone drew a sharp breath. Mine? I'd stopped breathing long ago.

"A rat?"

What had flown out of the wardrobe was, in fact, a rat. It shot past the edge of our vision and vanished. Pudding yawned at it serenely. A cat with zero interest in rats... I hadn't expected this to be the moment I truly felt, in my gut, that Pudding was not a real cat but a beastfolk.

"The rat must have been scratching at the wardrobe door."

Right. No sound now at all. Not a ghost, not an accomplice—a rat. The mortification of having been so wound up settled over me in a flat, deflating wave.

"Miss, look at this."

I stepped inside at the call. The moment I crossed the threshold, the air seemed heavier, pressing down, harder to breathe. Imagination, probably.

Where Kanna held the candle, something was illuminated on the floor. A familiar shape.

"A summoning circle?"

What was it doing here? I was still processing the absurdity when the memory of the paper Gabriel had shown me surfaced.

The convent priest had also managed a summoning after seeing Donau's painting. So the same thing must have happened here. This was the director's office—which meant the director everyone praised so highly had drawn this herself?

"Daisy."

I looked to her, thinking she might know something. Daisy was backing away. She didn't get far—she backed straight into someone standing behind her. She stumbled, too startled to scream, and Jelly caught her before she could fall.

"Jelly?"

"Jelly. Why are you here?"

This wasn't some romance fantasy development where he'd materialized specifically to catch a stumbling Daisy. I hoped. Did he abandon his post without knowing when Troy might wake up? I was preparing to say something about that when Jelly got his explanation in first.

"He insisted he had something he absolutely needed to say."

Jelly tilted his head, and from behind him—hunched in on himself—came Troy. Daisy's face crumpled at once. When Troy edged awkwardly toward Jelly and grabbed his sleeve, Jelly flicked his hand free as if brushing off dust. Troy curled his empty hand into a fist, then bowed his head.

"Daisy. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry... I couldn't stop my mother."

"What does that mean? Why are you bringing up the director?"

Troy opened his mouth as though carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders.

"My mother... she's the one who took the children."

"What nonsense are you talking about?"

Daisy repeated it back in a daze. The director? The director took the children, not Troy?

Was he stalling? Buying time with excuses?

"Stop lying."

"I know it's hard to believe. I understand that."

Troy stepped into the room and began going through the desk drawers.

"It should be in here..."

The drawer was stuck and he was fighting with it, so I just opened it for him. He'd barely come around from being knocked unconscious—probably still weak.

"Th-thank you."

Troy seemed embarrassed to have needed my help. He couldn't meet my eyes and directed his thanks to somewhere just past my left shoulder. I was standing right there.

Troy rifled through the papers until he found what he was looking for.

"Even more than before..."

More of what? I read the document Troy had found. Daisy was curious too—she stepped briskly into the room.

"What—what is this?"

"Proof that my mother sold children. I only found out these records existed not long ago."

What struck me first was the sheer volume of numbers. Figures I still couldn't contextualize properly, listed in a long column, with dates beside each one. Annual entries. At least once a year, sometimes twice—repeating, regular as seasons. These must be the prices. The ransoms.

So the culprit wasn't Troy at all. It was the director everyone described as so kind and compassionate?

I had made a significant error. I had completely forgotten the cardinal law of fiction: the person who seems least like the suspect is always the culprit.

"Director! Director!"

The director's thoughts had been elsewhere. It was only Ranen's voice calling to her that pulled her back. She turned. Ranen was gesturing with his eyes toward Mary—the one with something to say wasn't him, but the younger child.

"Director... my arm hurts."

"...I know."

When the director released her grip, the imprint of her hand was deep and livid on Mary's arm. Deep enough to bruise. The director pressed her fingers to her temple. She hadn't intended to turn violent yet—but things had stopped going as planned, and she had applied pressure without noticing.

Mary had been rubbing her arm when she suddenly tilted her head up toward the ceiling.

"Troy must have come again."

Her stupid, foolish son, going through the orphanage again. That child—he had never listened, not from the time he was small. The precise inverse of how tenderly Merai loved him. They say no parent can best their own child, but still.

"Troy?"

Ranen had heard the footsteps too. Hadn't Troy already come once while he was sleeping? Why was he back? He was still puzzling over it when he realized the footsteps weren't a single pair.

'He brought the guard with him. He came with people to find us.'

Troy must have brought the city guard. Ranen felt hope work itself in through a crack.

Only a few days ago, the director—trusted and loved all his life—had abruptly imprisoned the children underground and begun tending to them like livestock. At first Ranen had tried to believe it was some inexplicable prank, but seeing the man named Melek chained in the basement had made the severity of things undeniable.

Even then, the only ones who'd recognized that something was truly wrong were the older children—Yulma, Ranen. Children around Mary's age sensed the change but still reached for the director out of habit, the way a hand finds a familiar object in the dark.

That was probably why Yulma had said what she did to the younger ones—that they were going to be sold—trying to shock them into understanding.

'Will they find the basement?'

Ranen hadn't known, until now, that the orphanage he'd lived in his whole life had a basement. Troy had been searching only the upper floors since arriving; he clearly didn't know either. The director hadn't told even her own son about this place.

They'd need to search the director's office properly... But even if they found it, could they open it? Once, after the director had gone up to bring food down, Ranen had tried to follow her and escape. The door had been locked solid. Only the director knew how to work the mechanism.

"Looks like Troy brought someone along."

Unhappily, the director had reached the same conclusion.

'That child. Defying me at every turn.'

Merai hadn't told Troy about this basement. She'd been waiting until he was more cooperative, planning to explain when the time felt right. She'd believed, someday, he would understand.

"We need to hurry."

Before Troy and whoever he'd brought with him found the entrance, she had to finish. Merai clawed at her arm, restless and anxious. Fresh red lines traced themselves over old ones.