3. The Predator's Club

The morning light cut through the thin curtains of Room 304, painting pale golden stripes across the floor. Su Ruo had been awake for an hour, lying motionless in her bed, running through the fragments of the previous night like a detective sorting evidence. Xia Mo's words echoed in her skull: "Room 304 was Su Wan's room too. Before she left."

It was a test. It had to be. No one at Greenleaf International Academy did anything without calculation. Xia Mo had revealed that she knew about Su Wan not out of kindness, but as a move in a game whose rules Su Ruo had not yet learned. The question was whether she was a player, a pawn, or something in between.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and dressed quickly in the academy uniform, the starched fabric stiff against her skin. Xia Mo's bed was already made, the corners tucked with the same military precision Su Ruo had noted the day before. Her roommate was gone, leaving behind only a faint trace of jasmine perfume and an unsettling silence.

The campus was alive with the sound of students heading to their first classes. Su Ruo walked with her head slightly bowed, her eyes scanning the pathways with the peripheral awareness of someone trained to notice what others ignored. She had spent a year preparing for this infiltration: self-defense classes, lock-picking drills, hours of memorizing the layouts of elite boarding schools. But no amount of preparation could fully simulate the sensation of walking into the belly of a beast that had already swallowed her sister.

Mei Xiang was waiting for her outside the literature classroom, leaning against the wall with the casual defiance that seemed to be her default posture. She was holding two paper cups of steaming tea and offered one to Su Ruo without a word.

"You look like you didn't sleep," Mei Xiang said, her burgundy hair catching the light. "Roommate trouble?"

"Something like that." Su Ruo wrapped her fingers around the cup, letting the warmth seep into her hands. "What do you know about Xia Mo?"

Mei Xiang's expression shifted, a flicker of something that might have been wariness or respect. "Xia Mo is a ghost story that walks around in human form. Her family was wealthy once—old money, the kind that came from shipping and trade before the war. But something happened. A scandal. Now she's here on a legacy scholarship, which means she has the name but not the bank account. The rich kids tolerate her because she's useful, but they'll never let her into the inner circle."

"Useful how?"

"She knows things. About everyone. It's like she has a map of every secret in this school tattooed on the inside of her skull." Mei Xiang took a sip of her tea and fixed Su Ruo with a pointed look. "If she's taken an interest in you, it means you're either valuable or dangerous. Maybe both."

The bell rang, cutting off further conversation. They filed into the classroom and took their seats, and Su Ruo spent the next hour half-listening to a lecture on Tang dynasty poetry while her mind churned through the information Mei Xiang had provided. Xia Mo as an information broker made sense. In a school built on hierarchies of wealth and power, knowledge was the only currency available to those who lacked the right family name. But what did she want from Su Ruo? And more importantly, what did she already know?

At noon, Su Ruo decided to accelerate her timeline. She had come to Greenleaf with a single objective: find evidence connecting the Hunter Society to the trafficking network that had taken Su Wan. But gathering that evidence required access, and access required risk.

She found the members of the Hunter Society exactly where Mei Xiang had pointed them out the day before—the same table at the back of the cafeteria, the same cluster of blazers and expensive watches and laughter that was just a little too sharp. Zhou Jizhong was at the center, as before, but today there was an empty chair beside him, as if the group were waiting for someone who had not yet arrived.

Su Ruo walked past their table on her way to the salad bar, close enough to catch fragments of their conversation. They were speaking in a mix of Mandarin and English, their words a coded blend of business jargon and slang.

"...the shipment from the border is delayed again. Customs is getting tighter."

"My father says we need to diversify. The Southeast Asian route is becoming too risky."

"The new batch of scholarship students arrived. Did you see the one in Building C? Could be exactly what the client in Dubai is looking for."

Su Ruo's hand tightened around her tray, but she kept her expression neutral. The "one in Building C." They were talking about her. She had been catalogued, assessed, and discussed like a piece of merchandise before she had even finished her first full day of classes.

She collected her food and sat at a small table near the window, positioning herself so that she could observe the Hunter Society in the reflection of the glass. As she ate, she watched Zhou Jizhong take out his phone and scroll through a series of photographs, tilting the screen to show his companions. The boys leaned in, their expressions a mixture of appraisal and amusement. One of them made a gesture with his hand, as if weighing something, and the others laughed.

The photographs, Su Ruo realized with a cold, sinking certainty, were of students. Girls. Their faces were being passed around like a catalogue at an auction.

She finished her lunch and slipped out of the cafeteria, her appetite gone. But instead of heading back to the dormitory, she turned toward the administration building. If she was going to understand how the Hunter Society operated, she needed to see the records. The school's database would have enrollment forms, scholarship applications, contact information for the families of every student who had ever disappeared. And if she was lucky, it would also have a trail of paperwork connecting those disappearances to the society that had catalogued them.

The administration building was quieter in the early afternoon, the reception desk empty and the hallways dim. Su Ruo had noted the layout during her meeting with Dean Chen: the main office was on the first floor, but the records room was in the basement, accessible by a stairwell that was not covered by the security cameras in the main lobby. She descended the stairs quickly, her footsteps muffled by the thick carpet, and found herself in a long, fluorescent-lit corridor lined with filing cabinets and locked doors.

The records room was at the end of the hall, secured by an electronic keypad lock. Su Ruo knelt and examined the mechanism. It was a standard model, the kind used in office buildings across the country, and its security relied more on the assumption that no one would try to break in than on any real technological sophistication. She took the lock-picking kit from her pocket—the hairpins that were not hairpins—and set to work.

It took her four minutes to bypass the lock. She slipped inside, closed the door behind her, and turned on the small flashlight she had brought. The room was larger than she had expected, filled with rows of metal shelves stacked with binders and file boxes. A computer terminal sat on a desk in the corner, its screen dark.

She started with the terminal. It was password-protected, but the school's IT department had made the same mistake most institutions made: the default administrator login had never been changed. She was in within thirty seconds.

The student database was organized by year and class, with photographs, contact information, and enrollment status. Su Ruo navigated to the records for the past three years and began scrolling. The names of missing girls leaped out at her like flares in the dark: Chen Yuting, last attendance date March 2022. Li Na, last attendance date September 2022. Wang Xiaofei, last attendance date January 2023. There were fourteen in total, all scholarship students, all from families that lived in remote provinces or small towns, all listed as "transferred" or "withdrawn" with no further explanation.

And at the bottom of the list, dated fourteen months earlier: Su Wan. Status: Withdrawn. Reason: Family relocation.

The lie was so brazen, so casually presented, that Su Ruo felt her hands begin to tremble. There had been no family relocation. Their parents were dead. Su Wan had been living with an aunt in a one-room apartment on the outskirts of Jiangcheng when she had earned her scholarship to Greenleaf. The aunt had reported her missing three days after she stopped answering her phone. The police had investigated for two weeks and then closed the case, citing a lack of evidence.

Su Ruo took a deep breath and forced herself to focus. She connected a portable drive to the terminal and began copying the records. As the files transferred, she searched for any documents related to the Hunter Society. The name did not appear in any official files, but she found a subfolder labeled "Extracurricular Associations" that contained a list of sanctioned student clubs. The Hunter Society was not among them. Whatever it was, it operated entirely in the shadows.

She was about to close the terminal when she noticed a second database, separate from the main student records. It was password-protected with a different, more sophisticated encryption, and it took her an additional ten minutes to crack it. When she finally broke through, she found herself staring at a ledger that was chillingly similar to the one Qin Ming had discovered on the SD card.

It was a list of names, dates, and destinations. Each entry included a physical description, a medical profile, and a price. The amounts ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, paid into offshore accounts that were listed in a separate column. And at the bottom of each entry, in a field marked "Referral," was a single name: "Zhou."

The Hunter Society was not a club. It was a brokerage. And Zhou Jizhong was the broker.

Su Ruo copied the ledger onto her drive and shut down the terminal. She was reaching for the door when she heard footsteps in the corridor outside. Heavy, deliberate, growing louder. She pressed herself against the wall behind a filing cabinet and held her breath.

The footsteps stopped directly outside the records room. A keycard beeped, and the lock disengaged. The door swung open, and the overhead lights flickered on.

Dean Chen stood in the doorway, her silver-streaked hair immaculate, her frameless glasses reflecting the fluorescent glare. She did not look surprised to see Su Ruo. She did not look anything at all.

"Miss Lin," she said, her voice as smooth and cold as polished stone. "I was wondering how long it would take you to find your way down here." She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, the lock clicking into place with a sound like a final sentence. "We need to have a conversation about your sister."