Part 6: The Vanishing Point
Summary:
Riven knows someone lived in this body before him — someone ignored, forgotten, erased. But the silence left behind feels unnatural. Like a deliberate absence. And the more he moves through this city, the more he realizes… someone went to great lengths to make sure no one would come looking.
---
Riven left the shelter before dawn.
No reason.
Just a gut feeling.
The air was cold. A wet breeze pulled at the corners of his jacket as he crossed the empty street and vanished down another alley.
He didn't have a destination.
He just wanted to move.
---
The streets were quieter today. Fewer sirens. Less traffic.
Even the ads felt subdued.
He walked through three boroughs by the time the sun fully rose, weaving through old rail lines, under bridges, past shuttered schools.
No one looked at him.
He was good at that now — passing unnoticed.
But something about today gnawed at him.
Like the quiet wasn't just a coincidence.
---
Mid-afternoon, he stopped at a city-run data terminal near an old civic center. They were free to use — basic records, housing information, school registries.
He typed the name: Riven Dax.
Then clicked enter.
Nothing.
He tried again — school district logs, missing person reports, social services.
Nothing.
No emergency calls.
No flag.
No withdrawal notice from his high school.
No last login from his student account.
No medical record in the city database past his 16th birthday.
It wasn't just quiet.
It was scrubbed.
---
He leaned back in the cracked plastic chair.
There it was again — that hollow in his stomach. Not hunger.
A sense that someone had erased this kid before he even died.
The kind of silence you didn't get by accident.
---
He looked at the screen again, lips tightening.
> Why would someone make him vanish?
---
He logged off. Walked fast. Shoulders tight.
By the time the streetlights flicked on, he was back in the trainyard again — moving between shadows, avoiding lines of sight.
That's when he felt it.
A flash of heat. Not on his skin — under it.
A flicker of… wrongness, deep in his gut.
The wind shifted.
Something scraped metal two blocks away. A sound just a bit too clean to be trash.
He didn't turn toward it.
He kept walking.
But slower.
More alert.
---
He didn't have proof yet.
But the silence was too sharp.
Too shaped.
---
And whoever — or whatever — made Riven Dax disappear...
might have just realized he came back.
---