Stir's mother continued her story, describing the events of the previous evening with agonizing precision for the officer. She explained that as he did every day, Stir had closed the cafe at exactly 9:00 PM and prepared to come home. He was a man of habit who never deviated from his schedule, knowing his mother was waiting for him. After locking the doors of "The Boys Coffee Shop," he was supposed to take the familiar ten-minute walk to their front door.
However, the walk that Stir had taken thousands of times before was one he would not finish on that fateful night. When 10:00 PM passed and the front door remained closed, his mother knew that something terrible had happened. She had walked the route herself, calling his name into the night, but she found no sign of her son or any indication of a struggle. Stir had simply evaporated into the humid air of 2070, leaving his mother with nothing but a silent coffee shop and a broken heart.
Sam Nicholas took meticulous notes, his mind trying to find a link between a retired grandfather and a young barista. He asked the mother if Arnold or Stir had ever known a man named George Gravitus, but she insisted they were just simple people with no famous connections. Yet, Sam couldn't shake the feeling that the name of the coffee shop—"The Boys"—held a significance he didn't yet understand. He left the house with a sense of urgency, knowing that the clock was ticking for both George and Stir.
The investigator spent the next several hours scouring the city's surveillance network, looking for any trace of George or Stir. He saw Stir on the cameras locking the shop at 9:00 PM, but the footage from the next street over showed no sign of the young man passing by. It was the same pattern as the Gravitus disappearances: victims vanishing in the gaps between the cameras. Sam was frustrated by the lack of evidence, feeling as though the perpetrator knew exactly where the blind spots were.
As Sam worked through the night, he began to look into the 2065 Russia-Japan flight crash that had claimed Arnold's life. He found that the investigation into the crash had been unusually brief and several files remained classified under international security protocols. He wondered if Arnold's death was a precursor to what was happening now, and if George Gravitus was also connected to that flight. The mystery was no longer a local matter; it was beginning to look like a targeted assassination of a specific group of men.
Sam returned to the precinct to coordinate a larger search effort, but his mind was interrupted by a new report from the field. A patrol unit had spotted something in the river that ran adjacent to the Gravitus estate, a location only hundreds of yards from where the boys had been playing. The officer on the radio sounded shaken, his voice cracking as he described the discovery to the dispatcher. Sam threw his car into gear, a cold dread washing over him as he sped toward the water's edge.