Chapter 4 — Sorrell

The university's business registry database called itself, on its login page, "a helpful tool for tracking origins and institutional research." Mara had learned in her first week of Cultural Heritage that this particular phrase meant good luck.

She'd used it before, for real assignments—tracing ownership histories of donated manuscripts across three centuries, through estate sales and church records—the kind of slow, patient work she happened to be good at. Tonight she sat in the corner of the archive room, nine at night, the building quiet except for the low hum of the ventilation overhead and the occasional groan of old pipes somewhere behind the walls. A laptop and a coffee gone lukewarm sat in front of her, the paper cup gone soft at the rim from too much handling. The search bar kept returning nothing.

Sorrell Trust. No registered address. No listed trustees. The entity dissolved eleven years ago, the year after it opened, with no successor entity named anywhere.

She tried variations—Sorrell Foundation, Sorrell Family Trust, Sorrell Educational—each one returning fewer results than the last, until she hit a page that made it clear, in its own quiet database way, that it had nothing left to give her.

"You're doing the face," Cleo said, dropping into the chair across from her without asking.

"What face?"

"The one where you look personally wronged by the internet." Cleo turned her own laptop around—a half-finished article about campus parking policy neither of them cared about—and then leaned in to actually read Mara's screen. Her whole posture sharpened the way it did whenever she caught a whiff of a real story. "What are you even looking for?"

"My scholarship. The trust is paying for it. It's like it existed for exactly one year and then changed its mind."

"Sketchy."

"Very sketchy."

Cleo leaned further over the table, chin nearly on Mara's shoulder. "Have you tried the state filing office directly, instead of the university mirror? Sometimes they scrub stuff for privacy before it hits the public database."

"I have a name. I don't have a login for the state office."

"Hmm, I might." She said it with a nonchalant tone that indicated she absolutely did. It turned out to be leftover access from a media law professor who'd handed the whole department credentials the previous semester and never bothered revoking them.

It took another forty minutes. The state system ran on infrastructure that predated both of them, and it made them work for every scrap it gave up. What it finally surrendered wasn't much—the same dissolved filing, the same missing trustee names—but one new detail sat buried three screens deep: a processing agent's address, listed for the single year the trust existed, then scrubbed.

Mara wrote it down anyway. A street she didn't recognize, in a part of the city she'd never had reason to visit.

"That's not nothing," Cleo said, reading over her shoulder.

"It's nothing. It's an address that isn't even attached to the trust anymore."

"It's more than you had an hour ago." Cleo said it with the flat confidence of someone who'd built her entire personality around the belief that any lead beats no lead. Mara suspected it would either make her a great journalist or lead to serious trouble one day. Possibly both, and at the same time.

They packed up a little after ten, the archive room emptying around them. Mara was halfway through zipping her bag when Sloane Mercer appeared at the end of the row—the kind of appearance that looked like she'd been standing there a while, deciding whether to actually speak.

Mara had noticed Sloane before. Hard not to. She wore her clothes like some people wear a title: an oversized cashmere cardigan that likely cost more than Mara's entire wardrobe, with sleeves pushed up over one wrist adorned with thin gold bangles that remained silent as she moved, as if even the jewelry had been trained not to draw attention. She usually moved through a room like she already knew everyone in it and had already formed an opinion. Tonight she looked less like she was making an entrance and more like she'd genuinely wandered in looking for a book and gotten sidetracked.

"You're the one doing the project with Jude," Sloane said. Not a question.

"That's me."

"He doesn't usually take partners seriously." Her tone carried no real edge, which somehow made it land sharper than open hostility would have. "Interesting that he's actually shown up to two sessions."

"We have a due date. It's not a personality test."

Sloane's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Sure." Her eyes flicked to Cleo, then back, something assessing in the look. "I didn't expect the seat next to him to stay filled this long. That's all."

She was gone before Mara could decide whether it had been a warning or an observation dressed up to sound like one.

"Well, that was weird," Cleo said, watching her go.

"Very."

"Her family does business with the Haldens or something; old money circles all know each other." Cleo said it with the specific unbothered shrug of someone who hadn't grown up anywhere near those circles. "Don't let it get to you."

Mara hadn't planned to. Walking back to her dorm alone, coat pulled tight against a night gone sharper than she'd expected, she found that plan harder to keep than she'd thought.

The sheet from the state filing still sat folded in her coat pocket. She wasn't sure why she'd even written it down—a dead-end address tied to a dead-end trust, the kind of thing that would probably never matter. But some part of her, the part that had once followed a single water stain through four different owners over three weeks of an assignment nobody else had cared about, wasn't ready to let it go.

She pulled the paper out under a streetlamp and looked at it again, half hoping it would read differently this time.

It didn't. Same street. Same blank space where a name should have been.

A car alarm went off somewhere behind her, sharp and sudden, then cut out instantly. She flinched so violently that she almost dropped the paper, her heart slamming against her ribs before she caught herself.

Nobody was there. Just the empty street, the folded paper, and a name that refused to attach itself to anyone.

She shoved the paper back into her pocket and walked faster, hands buried deep, breath fogging faintly in the air now that the temperature had actually dropped. The dorm lights came into view two blocks up, warm yellow windows against the dark, and she didn't slow down until she was close enough to make out Calder House's ivy-covered stone; she didn't look back at the street behind her even once.