CASE REDACTED

On a dark-stormy night in 2034, a woman arrives at the gates of St. Elora Orphanage carrying two silent newborns. Her clothes are torn, her face bloodless, her eyes fixed on something behind her that no one else can see. By morning she is found lifeless on the road beyond the chapel, the children still swaddled and breathing. No name is recorded. The infants are taken in by the sisters, logged as unidentified. They grow quietly, almost invisibly—never crying, rarely speaking, always watching. Six years later, the orphanage burns to the ground. Forty-seven people die—children, staff, and clergy. The building collapses inward, as though the fire began at its heart. No origin is discovered, no accelerant detected. The authorities call it an accident; the case is sealed. Only one line appears in the remaining documents, written in soot on the surviving wall: 'Father will come for us.' The tragedy fades into rumor, remembered only by those who still smell smoke when the wind changes. Twelve years pass. On June 13 2046, another catastrophe mirrors the first. Elridge Academy, a prestigious private school known for its discipline and brilliance, becomes a place of unthinkable silence. The fire begins without warning and ends within minutes. Out of six hundred students and staff, one hundred thirty-four survive. No trace of fuel, no forced entry, no pattern of cause. Survivors recall only fragments—the echo of bells, the scent of ozone, the sense that someone had been standing just behind them before the light went white. The investigators label the two events coincidence. Both cases are closed, stamped with the same bureaucratic mark that ends a thousand unsolved files: CASE REDACTED. A decade later, the story refuses to die. The remaining survivors of Elridge begin to vanish one by one. Some are found lifeless in their homes, others disappear without record. Police attribute it to stress, survivor’s guilt, coincidence. Yet someone—an unseen observer—keeps the files organized, the timelines precise, the tone unnervingly calm. Every retelling sounds too exact to be second-hand, too detailed to be official. As a handful of survivors meet to uncover what ties them together, they discover that memory itself has been tampered with. Dates shift. Witness statements contradict. Names are missing. Pages of reports appear rewritten in unfamiliar handwriting. Someone has been tending to the story, editing it, ensuring that the truth never fully surfaces.