Kai searched the business registry first.
Nothing.
He typed the na again, slower this ti, checking each letter.
Adrian Voss.
No active business license, retired license, suspension record, or transfer record. The search returned nothing.
He opened the property database, but it was the sa result. He worked through six databases in two hours, each one returning the sa empty field, and by the sixth search, Kai stopped thinking it was a mistake.
He tried to find a property transfer in an old system. A na in a newspaper archive. A tax form buried three years back.
Adrian Voss had left none.
Kai closed the laptop and sat with it for a mont.
Morning light ca through the kitchen window. The notebook was open beside him to the page with the na on it, one word in a field that had been too small to notice the first two tis he had read the docunt.
He opened a different laptop. Different database access. Sa search.
Sa result.
He was at City Hall by noon.
...
The records departnt had the specific atmosphere of every governnt office Kai had been in. Gray walls, fluorescent lights, the quiet efficiency of people doing careful work that nobody outside the building thought about. A man behind the counter looked up when Kai approached.
"Can I help you?"
Kai slid a paper across the counter with the na written on it.
The employee typed. Waited. Typed again. His brows ca together. He looked at the screen and then at Kai. "Nothing here."
"Search older records," Kai said.
The employee sighed and started typing again. "Are you sure the na is right?"
"I’m sure," Kai said.
The employee turned the monitor toward him. Empty. No entries, no errors, no indication that the system had ever contained anything under that na.
"No records," the employee said.
Kai looked at the screen for another mont. "Thank you," he said, and left.
...
He walked through the eastern district on the way to the coordination office and heard two hunters arguing outside a newly reopened gate.
"I don’t need a team," one of them said. He was young, recently awakened by the look of his gear, level notation just above E-rank threshold. "I can run this myself."
"The drop split goes five ways if you want entry support," the other said. "That’s the new structure for shared gates."
"That’s half my inco."
"That’s the system."
The first hunter looked at the gate and then at the split. Then back at the gate.
Kai walked past them.
The coordination office had been tracking hunters since the first week after the system went live, building databases from dungeon reports, forum activity, broadcast footage, and direct registration.
If any hunter had operated anywhere in Mythal, they had a record. The clerk who helped him was thorough. She ran the search twice and checked two archive systems.
There was nothing.
"It’s possible the person never registered," she said carefully.
"He was in the city before the system went live," Kai said.
She looked at him. Then, at the search result. Then she ran it a third ti.
Sa answer.
...
The library archive took another hour. The records assistant there was older and more patient and took Kai’s request seriously, working through three different search systems and one physical index that had not been digitized yet.
By the ti he walked back out into the afternoon, the folder he had brought with him contained nothing useful. Just copies of empty search results, one after another, each one confirming the sa absence.
Kai found a bench, sat down, and opened the folder across his knees.
He looked at the empty results.
A hunter could erase records. A businessman with resources could erase records. A guild with legal infrastructure could erase records.
But soone always misses sothing.
But Adrian’s records hadn’t been missed.
They had been hunted down. The kind of effort people only invested when they were genuinely afraid of what remained.
Kai closed the folder.
He had spent eight hours looking for Adrian Voss. That was the wrong approach, and he understood now why it was wrong. If soone had removed a person from every record in the city, then looking for the person in those records was never going to produce anything.
Sobody had removed him.
On purpose.
He needed to find soone who rembered Adrian before the cleaning happened. He stood up, put the folder in his bag, and thought about who in this city had been paying attention long enough and carefully enough to rember a na that no longer existed anywhere, official.
He started walking.
...
The retired journalist lived in the old district. The part of the city built before anyone cared how buildings looked.
Kai climbed the stairs and knocked.
The door opened after a minute, and an old man looked out.
Seventy at least, maybe older. Sharp eyes in a tired face, the specific sharpness of soone who had spent a career paying attention to things other people walked past.
He looked at Kai for a mont. "You’re Kai Rosefield," he said.
"I need information," Kai said.
The old man considered this. Then he stepped back and opened the door wider.
The apartnt had been consud by its owner’s history. Boxes in every corner, newspapers in stacks that reached chest height in several places, photographs covering the tables and parts of the walls, a filing cabinet with one drawer that did not close all the way because of what was inside it.
The apartnt slled like old paper. Like a place where nothing had ever been thrown away.
Kai sat in the chair the journalist cleared for him, and the journalist sat across from him and waited.
Kai opened the notebook and turned it around.
One na.
The journalist looked at it. And sothing happened in his face that had not happened in any of the eight conversations Kai had conducted over the past several days. The journalist’s eyes widened.
Only slightly.
It was enough.
The journalist’s eyes narrowed before moving away from the notebook and staring at the wall behind Kai.
He said nothing and just waited.
The journalist looked back at the notebook before laughing. "Haven’t heard that na in years," he said.
Kai went still. After hours of dead ends, soone finally recognized the na. "So he exists."
The journalist laughed again, this ti with sothing that was closer to actual humor. "Depends what you an by exists," he said.
He stood up without explaining further and walked to the filing cabinet, the one with the drawer that did not close all the way. He began going through it, folders moving past, photographs shifting, the search taking long enough that Kai sat with the silence and let him work.
Eventually, the journalist found what he was looking for. A photograph. Old, worn at the edges, the image was slightly faded in the way of photographs that had been handled and stored and handled again over many years. He carried it back and handed it to Kai.
A groundbreaking ceremony. Twenty years ago, based on the clothing and the quality of the image. A crowd of people in formal wear, so of them holding shovels, caras going off at the front. Kai recognized two faces from guild history records. A third was a man who had been in the city governnt before the system arrived.
He looked at the background.
A man standing slightly apart from the main group. Not with the important people and not separate from them, just present, watching the ceremony with the neutral attention of soone who was there because being there was necessary and not because he wanted to be noticed. Dark suit. Plain face. The kind of person who occupied a photograph without drawing the eye toward him.
"That’s him," the journalist said.
"You’re sure?"
The journalist looked offended. "I spent forty years rembering people."
He tapped the photograph. "That’s him."
Kai studied the face before asking. "What happened to him?"
The journalist was quiet for long enough that the question had weight by the ti he answered it.
"Nothing," he said.
Kai looked up.
"Nothing happened," the journalist said. His voice had gone quieter than it had been. "He was around. He attended etings. He knew people. He appeared at events. He existed, the way anyone exists, the way you or I exist. And then one day he wasn’t around anymore." He looked at the photograph. "And then it was like he had never been here at all."
Neither of them spoke.
Sowhere outside, a car passed.
The apartnt felt quieter afterward.
Kai looked at the photograph again. The man in the background, who had been present at a groundbreaking ceremony twenty years ago and who did not exist in any record in the city, and who appeared three tis in a notebook that the Fixer had not known was dangerous when he handed it over.
The face was ordinary, and that was the part that stayed with him. Just a person standing in the background of a photograph, watching. Kai looked at the face for another mont.
Kai then looked at the journalist. "Who was he?"
The old man laughed not because it was funny but because it was difficult. "Depends who you ask."
Kai waited while the journalist leaned back.
"Businessman."
Pause.
"Investor."
Pause.
"Advisor."
Another pause. "Problem solver."
Kai frowned. "Which one was true?"
The journalist looked at the photograph. "All of them."
Kai humd before asking. "What did he do?"
The journalist fell silent for a long while; his gaze remained on the photo. "People asked him for favors."
Kai raised a brow. "What kind of favors?"
The journalist gave him a bitter smile. "The kind people don’t put in writing."
"So he was dangerous."
The journalist closed his eyes. "Nobody acted like he was."
Kai’s eyes narrowed. "But?"
"Nobody wanted to disappoint him either."
Kai nodded slowly before taking a quick picture of the old photograph with his phone, thanked the journalist, and left.
He walked down the three flights of stairs and back out into the evening city. He walked without direction for a block and then stopped and looked at the photograph on his phone.
A face with no records attached to it. A na that appeared in docunts and nowhere else.
Adrian Voss.
For the first ti since this investigation began, Kai had sothing real.
Then he started walking.
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