Read Chapter 5: The Missing Sophomore

The knock came at ten past nine, a sharp, impatient rap against the oak door of Eliza’s staircase room. She’d been staring at the clay tablet, its cuneiform scratches mocking her from the desk, the weight of Whitmore’s threat pressing on her skull like a migraine. The knock came again, harder.

She opened the door to a young woman, perhaps nineteen, with the same dark, unruly hair and alert brown eyes as Tom. The same sharp cheekbones. She wore a threadbare anorak over a college scarf, and her hands were shoved deep into her pockets, fists clenched.

“Dr. Hart?” The girl’s voice was tight, brittle.

“Yes. And you are?”

“Viv. Vivienne Ashworth.” The name hit Eliza like a slap. Ashworth. Of course. She kept her face neutral. “Tom’s sister. Can I come in?”

Eliza stepped aside, and the girl walked in, scanning the room with a frantic, darting gaze before settling on the single armchair. She didn’t sit. “He’s gone. Tom. He hasn’t been to lectures in five days. His phone goes straight to voicemail. His flatmates haven’t seen him since Tuesday night. I’ve been to the police, but they say he’s an adult, he’s allowed to disappear for a few days. They’re not taking it seriously.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliza said slowly. “But I don’t understand. Why are you here? I barely knew your brother. I only spoke with him once.”

Viv’s chin trembled, but she forced it still. “Because you’re one of them now. The Archai. He—he talked about you. After the initiation. He said they’d brought in a new member, a woman, a classicist who’d fought her way in. He thought you were brilliant.”

Eliza’s stomach tightened. A brother of the society’s president, vanished. The threads were knotting together too tightly to be coincidence. “Tom was a member?”

“He joined last term,” Viv said, her voice dropping. “He was so proud. He’s always been obsessed with the old stuff—the Latin, the rituals, all that. I thought it was a social club, a bit of networking for his CV. But after he got in, he changed. He got secretive. Nervous. He’d come home and stare at the wall, muttering about ‘purity of intent’ and ‘the weeping stone.’ ”

The phrase jolted through Eliza. *The weeping stone remembers the sun.* The riddle Julian had posed at the initiation. “He said that? ‘The weeping stone’?”

“Yes. Like it was a place. A meeting place.” Viv’s eyes met Eliza’s, desperate and accusing. “You know it, don’t you? You’re in the society. You know where they meet.”

“I don’t,” Eliza admitted. “It’s… coded. I’ve been trying to work it out myself.” She felt a flicker of shame at the lie of omission, but the truth was worse—that she was swimming in the same dark waters as Tom, flailing for a light.

Viv pulled a crumpled photograph from her pocket and thrust it at Eliza. It was old, faded to sepia at the edges, a group of men in white tie standing before the grand stone fireplace of a Palladian hall. The faces were formal, smug, frozen in 1920. “I found this in Tom’s room. Under his floorboards. Hidden.”

Eliza looked closely. At the center, a man with a heavy mustache and watch chain. Behind him, barely in focus, a younger man with a sharp, intense gaze that seemed familiar, though she couldn’t place it. And in the front row, a boy of perhaps eight or nine, staring straight at the camera with unsettling directness. On his hand, glinting even in the faded print, was a ring.

“Do you recognize any of them?” Viv asked.

“Not by name,” Eliza said slowly. Her finger hovered over the boy. “But this ring… I’ve seen it recently. An owl intaglio. Small, gold.”

Viv’s face went pale. “Tom has one. He had it on the day he vanished. He said it was the symbol of the society. He never took it off, even in the shower.”

Eliza’s mind raced back to the initiation room, to Marcus’s trembling hand as Julian pronounced his expulsion. The ring glinting under the low lamplight. Marcus had worn it, and Julian had mentioned Tom’s disappearance with a casualness that now felt grotesque. A pattern was forming: members vanished, or were destroyed, and their rings—their symbols—remained. She pictured Marcus, his career shattered, his life in tatters. And now Tom, five days gone.

“Viv, has anyone else from the society spoken to you? Julian, perhaps?”

“Julian’s useless,” she snapped. “I called him. He said Tom was going through a ‘period of retreat,’ some soul-searching thing the society does, and that I shouldn’t worry. ‘He’ll return when the sun kisses the weeping stone.’ He sounded like a bloody cult leader.”

Eliza filed that away. Julian was deflecting, controlling the narrative. She studied the photograph again, the boy’s face. Those eyes. They were uncomfortably like the ones she saw in the mirror, the ones she’d inherited from a father she’d never truly known. She shook the thought loose. Paranoia was a luxury she couldn’t afford. “Can I keep this?”

Viv hesitated, then nodded. “It’s the only thing I have of him. Promise me you’ll find him. Promise me you’ll bring him back. You’re one of them now, so you know what they’re capable of.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Eliza said quietly. “But I’ll try.”

After Viv left, Eliza locked the door and spread the photograph across her desk beside the clay tablet and the transcript of the riddle. Three puzzles, three pieces of a single poisoned chalice. The boy in the photograph. The stolen charter. The vanished sophomore. And a dead man’s ring.

She pulled out her phone and texted Julian: *We need to talk. Tom Ashworth. The weeping stone.*

His reply came within seconds: *Midnight. The weeping stone will remember you. Come alone.*

She stared at the message. He was toying with her. He knew she hadn’t solved it, and he was dangling the answer like bait. She looked up the phrase one more time, her Latin training kicking in. *Lapidem plorantem.* A weeping stone. Not a metaphor for grief, but a geological one: stone that weeps. Water seeping through porous rock. In Oxford, there was only one structure that famously wept—the cloister fountain in St. Frideswide’s Quad, known in the eighteenth century for its slow, constant drip that kept the moss perpetually green even in summer. It was now sealed off, decommissioned after a 1970s renovation.

And beneath it, she remembered from a college history footnote, there had once been a small crypt, long bricked up. A crypt that would remember the sun—but only if a new entrance was cut.

She stood abruptly, heart hammering. She had to go now, before midnight, before Julian could set the scene. She had to find Tom, or his ghost, before the Archai buried the secret any deeper.

She grabbed her coat. The photograph went into her inner pocket. As she closed the door, she glanced back at her desk. The clay tablet lay there, untouched, unauthenticated. A forgery waiting to be exposed—or a truth waiting to be freed. Whitmore’s debt, Tom’s disappearance, Marcus’s fall, her own father’s ghost. They were all pointing at the same place now, a hidden door beneath the weeping stone.

The light in her room flickered, then died.

She heard the soft scrape of a shoe on the stone corridor behind her. She spun. No one. The corridor was empty, the gas lamps hissing their low orange glow. But she felt it, a presence, a breath held back. Someone had been listening at her door.

She moved forward anyway, into the dark, toward the answer.

For Tom. For herself.

She only hoped she’d be alive to bring back what she found.