Sarvani Patel lives a double life.
At day, she is a Harvard Law student- diligent with the hope of helping to create a fair justice system. But come sun down, she goes about her goal in a hands-on way. Working with a hacker protege, Sarvani is the c...
The police did as we suspected, arresting the men involved and taking care of the girls. We were able to save a dozen. To get a dozen girls out of it. Emily. Her face was imprinted in my mind. Not the tears- but her strength. From police reports, I found out that she lives alone, with no immediate family. It was so easy for her to slip away- get taken- and no one noticed. She would have gone under police radar. So many girls are far below, gone with no one to report on them.
The dozen girls should feel like a victory. And maybe on some other day, it would have. Maybe a month ago, this mission would have brought me that adrenaline high that lasted days. But I can't feel success in this. A dozen girls was hardly fractional compared to two hundred.
And my aunt.
It's been two days since I walked into her wrecked apartment. It's been two days since the police started searching. And still- nothing.
Amy had called me a few times, begging for information she believes I have. It made me grow suspicious. If my aunt had easily known that I am the Vigilante, would Amy find out in the process? I had put it on myself, letting the police be involved in a case I am working on. There was an obvious danger to working so closely with them, which is why I avoided anything the police could handle. But things have changed since I was a play pretend hero who could afford to stay off police radar. Getting found out was slowly becoming a larger and larger possibility, every move I make could slip me up, easily reveal my identity. But I have other things to worry about, bigger things. So I bury this problem with my deteriorating grades and health, because maybe there won't be a Sarvani Patel to be found by the police after this.
I skipped my classes today, opting to stay at Ace's bar. I had taken the original documents from my aunt's apartment. All these names of girls taken, that my aunt had documented. I found the names of all the girls the police found last night on their database. I scratched them off of my aunt's list but it did nothing to hide that hundreds of other girls were still gone.
My thumbnail scraped against the pad of my index finger as I tried to piece together a blank puzzle, every piece made out of a different material and I had no idea what the end picture looked like. The lists on my lap crumble as I look over them another time, every address and age, as if there would be a clue inside there somewhere.
To make things more frustrating, my aunt left behind one more thing. A scrap of paper with the number thirteen written on it. A single number.
I looked through all the number 13 streets I could find, checking to see if there were any sktchy houses or buildings Epifano could have taken to. Damn near nothing.
I am running out of time and I have nothing.
Emily had given me one piece of information. She heard ocean sounds. I could mark it off as some sort of hallucination, a way of coping with all she was going through. But then I'd have nothing.
Ocean sounds.
There were beaches in Massachusetts, ones that I hardly go to. But why would Epifano horde stolen girls out at a beach? It didn't make sense.
Until it did. Because a conversation with Amy rings in my head, not on her calls but the day my aunt was taken. She had a vital piece of information and she didn't even know it. And she had freely given it to me.
"Aaleyah!" I call, and she looks up at me.
"We need to search into the Boston piers."
♤
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
