At St Augustine's Academy, Olivia, Max, and Laura notice their study notes disappearing from the library one by one, and the clues only get stranger after dark.
It should have been an ordinary revision session.
Olivia, Max, and Laura always met in the school library after lessons, claiming the same corner table near the tall windows and spreading out their notes for the exams ahead. St Augustine's Academy was the sort of place that made even silence feel expensive: old stone walls, creaking floors, rows of dark shelves, and windows that looked out over the river below the hill. Everything in the building seemed to carry a history of its own.
The library was no different. Some of the books were so fragile the librarian made students wear gloves before touching them, as if the pages might crumble under a careless breath. Olivia usually loved that kind of order. She liked knowing where everything belonged. Max only pretended to be bored by it, while Laura could vanish into a book for an hour without noticing anyone else had moved.
That afternoon, though, the table felt wrong.
Olivia was the first to notice the gap where her maths notes had been. She had set them on top of her workbook, a neat stack of lined paper covered in colour-coded formulas, and now they were simply gone. No torn edges. No dropped pages on the floor. No sign that anyone had touched the table at all.
"Did one of you move these?" she asked.
Max looked up from his history notes and gave her a grin that was meant to be reassuring. "Unless your maths has developed legs, no."
Then he froze.
His own notes were missing too.
Laura frowned and reached for the biology pages she had been using to quiz herself. They were there one second, gone the next, as if the table had swallowed them whole. She checked beneath her textbook, then under the table, then around her chair. Nothing.
For a few seconds, nobody spoke.
The air in the library seemed to tighten around them. The room was quiet except for the low tick of the old wall clock and the faint rustle of pages somewhere deep among the shelves. Olivia glanced toward the desk where the librarian sat behind his computer, but he did not look up when they crossed the room to report what had happened.
He listened with a tired expression, then shrugged it off. Probably a prank, he said. One of the younger students. Nothing worth making a fuss about.
But the way he said it made Olivia's skin prickle.
No one had passed their table. No one had brushed past them. And the library entrance had been in clear view the whole time.
Back at the table, Max was already looking around with the sharp, restless focus he usually saved for trouble. Laura had gone quiet, her fingers pressed to the edge of her chair. Olivia opened her mouth to tell them it was ridiculous, that there had to be a simple explanation, but the words died when she noticed the black dome camera above the far shelf.
Its little red light was off.
So was the one near the door.
One by one, they checked the others. Every camera in the library was dead.
The librarian had locked up for the night. The students had been told to stay inside until morning because of a staff meeting in the main building, and the side door was secured from the outside. That left only the long, echoing rows of shelves and the three of them alone in the half-dark library.
Max lowered his voice. "Tell me I'm imagining this."
Olivia didn't answer. Her missing notes were still missing. Laura was staring at the shelves nearest the back wall, as if she had heard something move there.
Then, from somewhere between the books, came the soft sound of paper sliding against paper.