The coffee shop didn't have music. Only the sound of the grinder, the hiss of the milk steamer, and the low murmur of a man two tables down, complaining into a phone.
Anaya Rao sat by the window with her back to the room, laptop open, a chipped porcelain mug steaming at her side.
The rain outside wasn't romantic. It was blunt—ugly. The kind that made the streets smell like rust and leftover curry.
Her eyes were dry. She hadn't really slept—not since the Linton case wrapped five days ago. Officially, the victim had jumped. Unofficially, she didn't buy it.
She sipped her coffee—too hot, too bitter, just how she liked it—and clicked into a thread buried three layers deep in a forum she hadn't visited since college: MaraudNet.
It was a digital ghost town. Black background. Neon-green text. No ads. No likes or hearts or reposts. Just threads with cryptic names like My Apartment Has Too Many Doors and The Roommate Who Isn't.
She wasn't sure why she clicked on the one titled "Story_001 – Character Study Begins." Probably the clean title. No emojis. No clickbait. Just... structure.
She scrolled past the empty comment field.
The story began without a title, without an introduction.
> "The water had long since gone cold. He didn't mind. He lay still in the bathtub, eyes open, staring at the cracked ceiling. His wrist, laid over the porcelain edge, dripped slow, deliberate notes into the pool. Next to the sink, a handwritten note rested, curling at the edges. On it, in perfect cursive, a single sentence:
Find the answer, or find the same end."
Anaya paused. That was a choice sentence. Whoever wrote this had skill. But it wasn't the quality of the prose that unnerved her—it was the precision.
She leaned in, scrolling slowly. The description of the apartment was oddly specific: a rusted towel rack, a yellow toothbrush with bristles bent backward, a bottle of lavender dish soap on the windowsill instead of hand wash.
Weirdly—normal.
The victim had no name. Neither did the narrator. The voice was calm. Almost smug. The story ended with the doorbell ringing—and the line: "Let them find what I left behind. I want them to understand. I want them to see how well I write."
No comments. No likes. No posting date.
She clicked the username: TheStoryteller. It led nowhere. Not even a profile.
The coffee had gone cold. The man with the phone had left. The shop was quieter now, just a barista wiping down a countertop, humming something tuneless.
Anaya stared at the screen, then clicked save. She had no reason. Just a faint itch between her shoulders.
---
After some hours...
The police station smelled like printer toner and leftover samosas. Anaya sat at her desk with her headphones around her neck, not playing music. The hum of evening shift buzzed in the background—detectives arguing over a football game, someone shouting at a copier jam, the occasional shriek of a fax machine, still inexplicably in use.
She had the forum post open again.
She read it slower this time, sentence by sentence.
> "There was no struggle. That was important. He had planned this."
The writer described the man's skin tone as "sallow, but unblemished, except for the soft pinkness around the cuts." The way the water soaked into the man's body, how the blood clung to the surface like oil. Too vivid. Too correct.
Anaya had been to enough death scenes. Most writers made it too dramatic. But this? This felt like a field report dressed up in velvet prose.
> "On the windowsill, a houseplant wilted. Not from neglect, but from resignation. It had simply given up before he did."
She paused there.
No one writes that unless they've seen it. Houseplants don't resign. But it's exactly the kind of thing you'd notice standing in the doorway of a real apartment, trying not to throw up while a corpse soaks silently in the next room.
She opened the file she'd saved earlier and printed a copy.
The printer behind her coughed out the pages with sharp clicks. She leaned back, eyes drifting toward the station's small wall-mounted TV—news on mute, a breaking banner scrolling across the bottom in red.
> BODY FOUND IN EASTSIDE APARTMENT. POLICE INVESTIGATING POSSIBLE SUICIDE.
She blinked.
The picture was grainy. Zoomed in from street level. An ambulance parked in front of a tan three-story walk-up. Third-floor window partially open. A cop walking out with a clipboard.
Anaya froze.
The building was familiar. Not from the photo—but from the story.
> "A third-floor walk-up with iron railings and a blue door. Mail piled beneath the slot. No sound from within."
She stood up. Walked to the printer. Pulled the warm pages off the tray.
The last line of the story stared up at her like a dare:
> "Let them find what I left behind. I want them to understand. I want them to see how well I write."
She whispered to no one, "Jesus…"
And then louder, to herself this time: "It's not a story."
She hurriedly left for the crime scene.
---
By the time she reached Eastside, the scene was nearly cleared.
The crowd had thinned to a few nosy neighbors and one man in gym shorts walking his dog in deliberate, slow loops. The building matched the description exactly—third floor, iron rails, paint peeling around a blue door like it was molting.
She flashed her badge at the officer posted outside.
"Rao. Homicide. I want a look."
The officer—a kid barely out of academy—looked surprised. "Thought this wasn't a murder."
She didn't answer. Just walked past him and up the stairs. The door to the apartment stood open. The yellow tape had already been cut once, hanging loose like a ribbon someone hadn't finished tying.
Inside, the air was thick with the kind of damp silence that lingers after death.
She paused in the doorway.
Everything was there.
The bathtub, still half-filled with red-tinged water. The body had already been removed, but the outline remained: faint rings on the porcelain where the skin had pressed. A towel rack hung crooked on one screw. A yellow toothbrush sat in a cracked plastic cup. And on the windowsill, just as described, a bottle of lavender dish soap.
Not hand soap.
Dish soap.
She stepped carefully into the bathroom, pulled a glove from her coat pocket, and lifted the small note still resting beside the sink. The edges curled just like in the story.
One sentence, printed neatly in blue ink:
> "Find the answer, or find the same end."
Her eyes skimmed the walls. No cameras. No wires. No laptop. No phone.
She moved into the main room. Empty except for a sagging couch, a wall calendar from last year, and a dying potted plant on the windowsill. Not dead. Not yet. But wilted.
She reached into her coat and unfolded the story she had printed. Held it up next to the scene.
Every single line matched. Word for word.
The window. The plant. The note. Even the slightly melted candle near the radiator was there, exactly where the story placed it: "melting from the heat of things unspoken."
She didn't breathe.
Whoever wrote this—whoever The Storyteller was—had either seen the body before anyone else… or had written it before it ever happened.
Neither option was good.
She folded the page slowly. Slipped it into her coat.
As she walked back into the hallway, her eyes scanned the other doors.
Closed. Quiet.
But someone had written this room into fiction. And whoever it was… they were writing again.
------
Back at the precinct, Anaya's screen glowed with the same dim green that had first caught her attention. The forum thread—MaraudNet—was open. She clicked refresh.
Nothing.
No thread.
No "Story_001 – Character Study Begins."
No TheStoryteller.
The entire page now held only one line at the top of the board:
> Welcome to MaraudNet. We hope you find what you deserve.
She stared, jaw set.
Clicking through the subforums yielded nothing but half-broken links and junk code. Threads about dreams that made no sense. A discussion on "invisible teeth." One titled The last sound you'll ever hear is wet paper tearing.
But the story—her story—was gone.
Anaya opened her browser history.
Blank.
She leaned forward, scrolling back. 4:18 PM—entry deleted. 4:19 PM—another line missing. The forum visit had vanished, along with the link.
She checked downloads. Still there—Story_001.pdf. She opened the file again. Same strange, cold prose. Same perfect details.
She hit CTRL+P and printed another copy, just in case.
As the machine began its slow chug, she whispered aloud, "This was posted. I saw it. It existed."
Her fingers flew across the keyboard—cached search engines, archived copies, even Tor mirrors. Nothing.
She stood and crossed the room to the printer.
The pages emerged slowly, rhythmically. Crisp. Warm.
She lifted the last sheet, flipped it over—and paused.
A line was printed on the back, one she didn't write. Not from the original file. Not in the text.
Just a single sentence, perfectly centered:
> "You made it this far. Let's see how well you write."
She stared.
The ink was fresh.
--------
Rain struck the windshield in soft pulses as Anaya sat in the dim glow of her dashboard. The precinct lot was nearly empty. Just a few scattered vehicles, their windshields fogged, their tires sunk deep into shallow puddles.
She held the fresh pages in one hand, flipping through them for the fifth time. The details were no less sharp now. If anything, they cut deeper.
She whispered the last paragraph aloud, the words curling into the space around her:
> "Let them find what I left behind. I want them to understand. I want them to see how well I write."
And then, beneath that, not from the document—just scrawled in her own mind now, etched there by that final wet-ink line from the printout:
> "Let's see how well you write."
She tapped the steering wheel, once. Then again.
There was a difference between coincidence and design. And whoever this was, they didn't want to be anonymous—they wanted to be read.
This wasn't a message.
It was a challenge.
She looked down at the file name on the corner of the page. In small font, just above the footer:
Story_001 – Character Study Begins
Not a character.
The character.
Anaya closed her eyes for a moment.
Then opened them slowly, letting the city's wet neon lights filter in through the glass.
She said, under her breath, "You want a character? Fine."
She folded the page, slid it into her coat, and turned the key in the ignition.
The engine hummed to life.
Somewhere out there, The Storyteller was already watching.
---
End of Chapter 1.