Ten years. That’s how long it had been since my sister Emma vanished. One moment she was dancing under twinkling fairy lights at her wedding reception, the next—gone. No farewell, no fight, no struggle. Just her wedding dress folded perfectly on a chair in her honeymoon suite, her shoes aligned side by side at the foot of the bed. As if she’d undressed for a ghost.
The police scoured every inch of the city. Drones flew over wooded areas. Search dogs combed through the hills. Her husband, Daniel, broke apart piece by piece in front of us. My parents aged ten years in ten days. I was the last to let go. Or so I thought.
A week ago, on a muggy July morning, I climbed into the attic of my parents’ home—something I hadn’t done since the early days of Emma’s disappearance. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Maybe a photo. Maybe closure.
Instead, I found a cardboard box tucked behind old holiday decorations. It was marked in fading Sharpie: College Stuff. I remembered it vaguely—Emma packing it up the summer she graduated from Columbia. I pulled off the lid and shuffled through the contents—textbooks, scribbled notebooks, a worn hoodie. Then I saw the envelope. Thick. Yellowed. My name—Anna—written in that unmistakable script: curvy, precise, a small heart above the “i”.
My hands trembled. I opened it slowly, half-expecting a blank page, a joke. But what I read chilled me to the bone.
Anna,
If you’re reading this, something has gone wrong. Very wrong.
I wish I could explain everything, but I can’t—not yet. Just know I didn’t leave because I wanted to. I left because I had to. There are things I discovered during college, things I never should’ve known. I uncovered something—an experiment, a facility. Hidden beneath our campus. I wasn’t supposed to find it.
I’m being watched. Even now, as I write this. If I vanish, follow the drawing. Go to the place. Bring no one.
Only you.
—E
Tucked behind the letter was a torn piece of notebook paper. On it, a crude map. A tree. A clocktower. A red X near the edge of what looked like the Columbia University grounds. A date scribbled beneath it: March 21, 2015—the day before her wedding.
I didn’t hesitate.
I booked a flight to New York that night. I hadn’t been back since her disappearance. Everything about the campus felt wrong now—too clean, too quiet. I followed the map step by step until I stood at the base of the old bell tower, long decommissioned, fenced off.
The tree from the drawing had been cut down, but its stump remained. The red X had been marked right behind it. I started digging—my fingers raw, my breath shallow.
That’s when I found it.
A steel trapdoor.
With my phone light, I followed a narrow staircase that spiraled down into the earth, cold and damp. At the bottom, a corridor lined with flickering fluorescent lights stretched into the distance. At first I thought it was abandoned, but then I heard them—footsteps. Voices. Mechanical hums. It was a facility. Still operational.
And then—through a small glass window—I saw her.
Emma.
Alive.
Hooked to wires, monitors blinking around her. Her eyes open, staring forward. Her body motionless.
I don’t know how long they’ve had her. I don’t know what they’ve done to her mind. But I know this: she’s not gone. And I am not leaving without her.
They took my sister once.
They won’t do it again.