8:05 AM – Precinct 41, Lower East Side

  The morgue always felt too cold, but this morning it felt personal.

  Officer Brennan stood still, arms crossed tightly over his chest. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a pale, sickly glow over the steel tables and tiled floor.

  A wheeled gurney sat in the center of the room, an empty black body bag lying open on it like a peeled-back envelope.

  No body.

  "She was here," Brennan said flatly, voice hoarse with disbelief. Lin was silent, staring at the empty space in the bag.

  “You think someone moved her?” Brennan asked. His voice cracked slightly. He cleared it, tried again. “Like the medical examiner? Maybe the coroner came in early?”

  Lin shook his head. “They don’t even clock in until nine. You know that.”

  "Tell me I'm not losing it. Tell me you saw her too,” Brennan added desperately. After all, explaining to their superiors that a body went missing is a task no officer wanted to experience.

  Officer Lin, leaning against a nearby counter, nodded slowly. He looked just as rattled. "I saw her. Blonde. About sixteen. We found her on the side of the road out near Sycamore Avenue, just past the edge of the suburbs last night. She had on boots and a light coat. I swear we carried her into the car ourselves.”

  Brennan rubbed his temples, trying to will the fog from his mind. He hadn't slept well, none of them had.

  The cold had done something to the whole city. It wasn’t like the usual cold weather they all grew up with. Cars were frozen in driveways, people lined up for emergency blankets, and pipes burst all over town.

  But this: this was stranger than a burst pipe.

  "She was dead," Lin said. "I checked myself. No pulse. Skin like ice. It was clear hypothermia."

  "No ID at first," Brennan muttered, pacing slowly around the gurney, thinking it might cough up some answers if he stared hard enough.

  "No, but then I found her school ID," Lin said. "Inner pocket of her coat. Plastic sleeve, with a name and photo. Celia Goldberg. Sixteen. St. Edda's Academy." He held it out to Brennan.

  Brennan stopped pacing as he looked at the pretty, blonde girl in the picture. There was no doubt: he saw that hair and those eyes last night, half buried in snow.

  "You sure it was her name?"

  "I'm sure. It had her address on the back. Some kind of emergency contact card."

  They fell silent again, the morgue stretching quiet and cold around them.

  "So," Brennan said after a beat. "We're saying someone broke in here and... took her?"

  Lin raised an eyebrow. "Without triggering the alarm, or being seen by security?"

  "No way she got up and walked out."

  Lin gave Brennan a long look. "You want to stake your badge on that?"

  Brennan looked back at the body bag, his jaw tightening. There was no blood. No signs of disturbance. Nothing broken, nothing stolen. Just an empty gurney. Just a missing corpse.

  “Okay,” Brennan said at last, his voice rough in the sterile hush of the morgue. “We call the house.”

  Lin turned his head slowly. “What?”

  “Her house,” Brennan repeated, still staring at the empty metal slab like it might suddenly grow a corpse. “We call the number on the back of the ID. Ask if Celia Goldberg made it home last night. Maybe it’s a mix-up. Maybe she’s got a twin. Maybe someone mislabeled the bag. Anything.”

  Lin didn’t answer right away. He stood beside the autopsy table with his arms folded, the fluorescent lights casting a pale, flat sheen on his face.

  Brennan glanced at him. “You have a better idea?”

  Lin sighed, raking a hand through his short hair. “I just think… if we’re going to call, we don’t do it yet.”

  Brennan’s eyebrows lifted. “Why the hell not?”

  “We’ve got a backlog the size of a small country,” Lin muttered. “Between the grid failures, the black ice pileups, and a hundred people reporting frozen pipes or busted heating units, we’re going to be stuck doing paperwork until the end of the week. I’ve already got seven reports flagged from last night, and that’s just from our precinct. If we call now and this turns out to be nothing—”

  “Nothing?” Brennan snapped. “You saw the same thing I did. We brought in a sixteen-year-old girl. Dead from exposure on the side of a goddamn road. We zipped her up, tagged the bag, logged the transfer. We don’t just lose a corpse.”

  Lin exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. And we also don’t just hallucinate one either. But if we’re both here, and the bag’s empty, what else do you want me to say?”

  Brennan looked back at the bag. “So what, we just wait? Pretend this didn’t happen?”

  “I’m saying… maybe we give it a few hours,” Lin said carefully. “Get through the immediate chaos. Do the boring stuff. And if she doesn’t show up, we call the number.”

  Brennan scoffed. “You really think waiting a few hours is going to make a dead body reappear?”

  “No,” Lin said. “But I also didn’t think I’d ever see one disappear either. So my sense of reality’s already pretty damn flexible right now.”

  The silence between them grew heavier. Behind them, the hum of the morgue fridge kicked on, a low mechanical groan echoing off the walls.

  Finally, Brennan spoke, softer this time. “You think someone moved her and forgot to log it?”

  “I don’t know,” Lin admitted. “But I know what I saw. What we saw. She was 100% dead.”

  He didn’t say the word ghost. Neither of them did. But it hung there, quiet and waiting, like the slab.

  Brennan rubbed his temples, then nodded stiffly. “Fine. This afternoon.”

  Lin nodded back, more out of unease than agreement. “This afternoon.”

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  “And if she’s not home?”

  Lin didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  —-----

  Aaron had never made cocoa for himself until that afternoon.

  Celia usually did it. She had this sixth sense about it: knew just when he needed it, knew how to make it right.

  Not the microwave sludge he was drinking now. No cinnamon. No whipped cream. Just hot water, powder, and regret.

  The kitchen was filled with soft afternoon light filtered through frost-rimmed windows. Outside, the world remained frozen.

  Cars and shrubs sparkled with ice. Even the birds were quiet. Inside, Aaron sat hunched at the kitchen table, elbows braced, palms wrapped around the mug.

  He did his best to hide it from Celia that morning, but he had a rough night.

  College pressure pressing in from all sides. His classmates celebrating their Ivy acceptances, flashing acceptance letters like badges.

  Aaron had smiled, nodded, and laughed along with them. He didn’t tell anyone that he hadn’t even filled out a single application. He didn’t know where to start.

  Usually, the walk home with Celia was uneventful. Quiet. But today’s walk home had been different.

  Celia hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t even looked at him. She walked a few paces ahead, like a shadow wearing her clothes. She hadn’t asked about his day. Hadn’t made cocoa. Just gone straight to her room, the door closed tight.

  It had been strange.

  The ring of the landline made Aaron jump, sloshing hot cocoa over the rim of his mug and onto his wrist.

  He cursed under his breath, wiping it off on the sleeve of his black sweater. The sound was jarring. Not just because it was loud in the silence, but because he hadn’t heard that phone ring in months. Maybe years.

  The dusty wall-mounted unit sat crookedly on the kitchen wall beside the fridge, next to a calendar from two years ago no one had ever taken down.

  Who the hell still called landlines?

  He set his mug down carefully on the counter, the taste of weak chocolate still bitter in his mouth, and crossed the linoleum floor with slow steps.

  The receiver felt heavier than it should, slightly sticky with old kitchen grease. He cleared his throat and pressed it to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  There was a beat of silence on the other end. Then, a voice: low, professional, with a clipped, flat tone.

  “Good afternoon. This is Officer Brennan, calling from Precinct Forty-One. Is this the residence of Celia Goldberg?”

  Aaron blinked. “Yeah. This is her house. I’m her stepbrother.”

  A pause. Then, “Thanks for confirming. Sorry for the sudden call, but we wanted to check in about something. We found a school ID last night. It belonged to Celia Goldberg. We wanted to ask if she made it home safely.”

  Aaron’s heart thudded, slow and heavy in his chest. His brows pulled together. “Why?”

  Another silence. Shorter this time. Then Brennan’s voice dropped, the tone shifting. “Because we found a girl last night. Near the suburbs. Blonde. Sixteen, according to the ID. From St. Edda’s Academy. She was wearing a light winter coat and boots. Looked like she’d been out there for hours.”

  Aaron gripped the phone tighter. “Out where?”

  “Collapsed on the side of the road. We believe she froze to death.”

  He felt something cold crawl up the back of his neck.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we brought in a body last night. One that matched the ID exactly. Photo, name, everything. We’re trying to confirm if it was a mistake. Maybe she came home after all. Maybe it was someone else.”

  A thick, heavy pause stretched out between them. Aaron looked at the ceiling. The house was quiet. But he knew she was up there.

  “She’s home,” he said finally, his voice a bit thinner than he liked. “She walked home with me just an hour ago. She’s upstairs in her room.”

  Brennan hesitated on the other end. “You’re absolutely sure?”

  Aaron swallowed. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  In the background, he heard another voice—another officer, probably—asking something he couldn’t quite catch. Brennan muttered a response under his breath, the words muffled and indistinct.

  “Well… alright,” Brennan said, with a reluctance that didn’t sit right. “Thanks for your time. If anything changes... please let us know.”

  “Yeah,” Aaron murmured, barely audible. “Sure.”

  He hung up slowly, placing the receiver back on its cradle. He stood there, one hand on the phone, the other still damp from the cocoa spill. A dull hum from the refrigerator was the only sound in the kitchen now.

  A girl. Dead. With Celia’s ID.

  Dead.

  And yet…

  She had walked home with him just an hour ago. Her boots crunching in the snow. The way she didn’t say a word, didn’t even glance at him. That silence that wasn’t like her usual coldness: it was… hollower. Like she wasn’t really there.

  He hadn’t thought much of it. She was moody sometimes. But now…

  His thoughts tripped over each other, grasping for logic. Maybe it really was a mistake. Maybe someone had stolen her ID. Maybe it was a lookalike. Maybe…

  Upstairs, a floorboard creaked again. That same slow, dragging creak from earlier.

  Aaron turned his head toward the ceiling.

  She was up there. Still hadn’t come down. Still hadn’t said anything to him since they got home.

  He should go up there. Check. Just to prove to himself that it was all fine. That she was real.

  But his feet didn’t move. His legs felt like they were filled with concrete.

  The chill sliding down his spine wasn’t from the cocoa. And it wasn’t from the cold.

  After talking to Celia, Aaron closed the door behind him with a soft click.

  He stood there for a second on the other side, hand still resting on the knob, as if maybe, if he just waited long enough, he’d hear something. Some slip-up, a sigh, a whisper, anything that might explain the weird static under his skin.

  But the room stayed silent.

  No movement. No breath.

  Just the muffled hum of the house’s old heater kicking in down the hall.

  He turned and walked back toward his own room slowly, his footsteps quiet on the carpeted floor, thoughts spinning faster than he could keep up with.

  She didn’t remember. In fact, it was like she couldn’t remember anything.

  Celia Goldberg, the perpetual honor roll student, early riser, compulsive planner, triple-notification setter, didn’t remember where she was last night.

  That Celia couldn’t remember?

  He didn’t believe her. Not really. And it wasn’t just the answer that unsettled him. It was the way she said it. Like it was practiced.

  And her eyes. Something was wrong with her eyes.

  They looked like Celia’s, sure. It was the same sharp blue she always had. But they didn’t feel like hers. Just a blankness that didn’t belong on her face.

  She hadn’t blinked much either.

  And maybe that was nothing.

  But maybe it wasn’t.

  Aaron rubbed a hand down his face and shut his bedroom door behind him. The air in here was cooler, untouched. Safer, somehow. But even in the quiet, the doubt kept creeping in.

  Because here’s the thing: he knew his stepsister. Knew her moods, her rhythms, the way she filled a room. The way her presence demanded space even when she said nothing at all.

  The girl in the next room didn’t demand anything.

  She occupied space, sure. But she felt like a placeholder. A stand-in.

  Aaron sat down on the edge of his bed, the mattress creaking beneath him. He stared at the crack in the ceiling paint, the one Celia had once joked looked like a witch’s finger pointing toward hell. He almost laughed.

  Almost.

  Instead, his gaze drifted to his phone on the nightstand. He picked it up, the screen lighting up with his reflection for a second too long before switching to the lock screen.

  He opened his texts. No new messages. No reply from the one he’d sent her last night—text me when you see this.

  Sent at 11:46 p.m. Still marked unread.

  But she’d walked in the door right after him. Said nothing. Went straight to her room.

  Aaron’s fingers hovered over the screen, then pulled away.

  What would he even say?

  Who are you?

  He shook his head and stood up again. The floorboard groaned beneath his foot.

  In the hallway, the air felt colder. Quieter.

  And behind Celia’s door, he thought he heard movement again. The whisper of something shifting, too slow, too careful. Like someone pacing not to think, but to remember how.

  Aaron turned away, chest tight.