Nicklaus killed off the 3D game on his phone. At thirty, he already felt too old for the modern tech's shenanigans. His attempt to soothe his throbbing temple by snuggling against his pillow took him straight to the sweet valley of sleep.

A shuffle in the room woke him up. It was Maud, sitting down at the desk with his PC, by the foot of the single bed Nicklaus was lying in.

Nicklaus let out a sigh. In the confines of his personal time, the fact that he was crashing in Maud's den for a week always slipped his mind. His own apartment in Orangetree was being salvaged from a flooding caused by busted plumbing.

"What are you looking at this late, Maudie?"

Maud turned his head with a snark face. He had begrudgingly allowed his coworkers to give him a nickname for convenience, but he drew the line at Maudie. There was just too much sugar in the sound of that name. He decided to put off airing his disapproval as Zallago's arm bulge was in full display glistening in the yellow light of the bulb.

"It's only 4pm, dude. It's half-day remember? I gotta work at something. Go back to sleep or whatever."

"I think I would go for a bite if you don't mind."

"Yeah, sure. But I won't be buying groceries anymore. So serve yourself. And leave my Gatorade alone."

As Zallago creaked and heaved the bed and left the room, Maud closed the door after him, though he didn't dare lock it. He would never admit, but the figure of that Russian-Italian screamed violence even if the man pretended to be sweet in person.

Maud had duly filed his report of coming up short in the search regarding that brown girl yesterday. The supervisor was still troubling him about it though. A source had reported someone inquiring about Nicklaus and co's activities at St. Felipe Crescent and the description seemed to match the illustration they had given him before. At work, Maud pretended to be busy with a networking problem at another branch to avoid using the company's network. If he was being forced into something morally dubious, he at least would like to be a few steps ahead of the agency.

Maud opened the Tor browser and applied his pet image search algorithm to rake through all the public records imaginable as well as forums, message boards, and directories embedded deep on the darknet. Next he added each of the cities that this person was allegedly associated with - there were quite a few - for more focused searches.

Nothing.

He opened his photo editor then and set to work. He used some of his predesigned options for simple disguise changes such as hair color and style, accessories and make-up, etc. He would feed each tweaked look it into his searches but none led anywhere. Next, he morphed the original image with various possibilities of reasonable plastic surgery, but again to no avail. At last he switched back to the original trying to think outside the box.

"Hey, isn't that the brown chick? I thought you were done with that."

Nicklaus had slipped back in. It was no use being secretive with him now. Maud turned his rotating chair towards him.

"What's your idea on this whole thing? Where do you stand?" He pointed toward the screen with the girl's image.

"I'm with you, man," Nicklaus replied. "I mean, it's just creepy. Except …" Nicklaus crunched into an apple as he plopped down near the foot of the bed.

"What's that?"

"I mean, maybe if her parents were some huge defaulters or fraudsters and they left things to her or something." Nicklaus shrugged a shoulder as he munched some more.

Maud was pleasantly surprised. It was quite an idea. But nothing could be done without a name.

"What's her name?" Nicklaus asked shooting the apple core into the bin in the far corner. The bin whipped a little with the force of his throw then stopped.

"That's the problem, dude. Nega didn't even give me a name. The girl's unsearchable." Maud tapped a beat on the desk.

"How they got you looking at it again? Did they tighten up your strings to get you going?" Nicklaus laughed absurdly at his stupid joke.

Maud shared the new information with Nicklaus - that of the big dude's own team being inquired upon yesterday by someone who looked awfully like this girl.

"So she is real!" Nicklaus blurted like an excited child.

Maud wanted to blow him a raspberry but didn't. "Seriously? You thought we were searching for diverse anime characters?"

"C'mon, man. Don't think I'm stupid. Whatever the deal with the girl, whatever they got against her, seems a bit more believable if she's indeed looking for us."

"One, it may not be the same girl. Both sound like hearsey reports to be honest. They don't have a real picture. They don't have a name. It all sounds gobbledygook to me."

"Seven Realms don't trade in no gobbledygook."

Maud turned his chair again and looked at Nicklaus hard. The Italian-Russian was smarter than what he purported to be.

Their collections agency Brioni Collections was rumored to have fallen into a deal with Instant Collections, a much larger agency specializing in real estate debts and who usually served the behemoth that was the Seven Realms Developers. The rumors had started as soon as Brionni had announced their own change from general collections to a focus on real estate about a year ago.

Recently, a wind of a merger already completed under wraps had picked up again after Brionni's CEO, Cramer Gillespie, was spotted in Seattle's First Hill neighborhood a couple of times. While Brionni's main branch was in South Carolina, Instant Calculations head quarters were in First Hill, in the same compound as the Seven Realms Inc building.

And Seven Realms indeed did not trade in gobbledygook. They were widely known as the most on task in the country. Their rate of defaulting and foreclosures in the properties they had developed and sold was consistently low on the annual lists. Their rentals were also the most successful. As was their five year frequency of the fully paid-off properties that they had developed across the country.

This could be a case that had trickled down from up there in the chain of influence.

On a hunch, Maud opened a regular browser and opened his Brionni account. A fresh email from Nega Friedrich waited atop his inbox. It read:

See if the girl is Sundel Agarwal.

***

Roxie stared at the computer screen, wishing her eyes to tunnel into cyberscape and dig some gold particles out of the vast desert of trivial information.

She had never tried to search for her parents' friends.

Well, she had once as a fresh kid-on-the-run, but she got easily confused and focused on surviving after that. But if the one person she had lately intuited to trust disappeared during the nights, kept mysterious files with scrambled titles in locked chambers, and either lived without any personal ID or kept it on his person at all times … how trustworthy could he be?

She couldn't continue the life of a recluse forever. She was stuck on a bad vicious cycle: find temporary shelter, get in trouble, get the hell outta there, look for next temporary shelter. It was time to stop and do something - get to the bottom of things. She was of legal age now, not a helpless kid. With a sigh of determination, she started tapping on the keyboard.

The internet remembered her parents well.

The first hit on Google was a website of the Rising Suns Group and a page dedicated to them. Her heart melted at the sight of their beautiful, loving faces displayed atop the page. They looked young, sharp, and very professional, happy and fulfilled. Their intelligent eyes beamed their kindness straight to the deepest recesses of her soul.

Rising Suns was holding annual vigils in their memory at the Blue Cheese Cottage - her cottage. She was mildly surprised as she realized the group had assumed she had been with her parents when tragedy befell them and they disappeared. It was just as well.

She was stunned as her real, original name leapt from the page. She had forgotten it.

It had been abandoned at such an early age and everyone she knew always called her Chanbeli anyways. She found a few mentions of her original name in local news at the time when Rising Suns had filed three 'missing person' reports. She recalled how, before the school year was to begin after her parents' last-ever visit, Mr. and Mrs. Chakarwati had informed her of her legal name change. It had been changed to Aruna Ragini - a name she never secretly accepted as hers - using signed forms her parents had left.

Jave, Hupe, and Gen. These three monosyllables were all she had in the way of leads into her family's past. Three vaguely remembered family friends, frequenters at the Blue Cheese Cottage and possible partners in whatever activities, her parents had been involved in during that time.

She found one Javelina Barton listed as the last co-author in a paper her parents had written with a number of their students. According to Google, Javelina Barton was faculty at the Biology Department at the University of Washington. But she had received her doctoral from the Margaret Mead University at Fruitvale, Idaho - the one her parents worked at. The lady looked nothing like the young girl with a beautiful smile in Roxie's memory, but it could be age.

There was no name on Rising Suns website or in the co-author lists on her parents' published papers, which could be the originator for 'Hupe.' However, there was a picture of a Dr. Hunovar Palladino alongside her parents in the Rising Suns archives. He was also a co-author on one of her mother's papers and taught Agriculture at Margaret Mead. When she located his name on the supervisory team for Javelina Bartin's doctoral thesis, Roxie knew she had found Hupe.

Her face fell when she hit on the news of a freaky car accident in Henderson, Nevada killing Dr. Hunovar Palladino immediately, three years ago. Before, he had been disgraced and forced to resign after illegal synthetics were found in the trunk of his car during a border crossing to Canada. The circumstances were highly suspect and it was largely assumed he had been fleeing from the DEA. This happened around the same time that her parents disappeared.

Roxie remembered Gen's face well - warm, friendly, round, always goofing around, cracking jokes and having fun. She immediately recognized him as the face of Genichiro Shang-Li, an Asian man in one of the group photos at a Rising Sun protest campaign. Hupe and Jave were in the photo as well. Genichiro was listed as a faculty at the International University of Taiwan, currently on leave. There was no other trace or mention of his ever having been in the US. But it was definitely the same face.

Roxie saved everyone's details in a file and attached it in a self-email. She also composed emails to Rising Suns, Javelina Barton, and Genichiro Shang-Li's addresses's posing as a researcher interested in the life and works of Sonya Motiwal and Vikram Agarwal. There was an off-chance that her old email provider won't be flagged as spam by their v-ledger settings and she would get a response.

"How are you doing, Roxie?" asked Ida's helpful voice, peeking in through the door of the room. "Need anything?"

Roxie logged out of her email and got up from the creaky chair with a smile. "I'm done. Thank you so much. I think I'll go now."

She had helped Ida carry some grocery bags upstairs to her apartment after their shifts got done together. Ida prepared vegetables for the dinner menu while taking care of her husband whose Parkinson's had left him bedridden. When Roxie mentioned her need to go to a library, Ida offered her the use of their own PC which her son kept working on his weekly visits from Sarasota.

"Don't be silly. Come have a bite with me." Saying that, Ida grabbed Roxie's hand and took her to the small dining table in her kitchen. Dinner was already strewn in palatable presentations.

"I cooked a separate dish for you. I know you're vegan." Ida made her sit in a chair before a platter full of linguini with spinach and cream.

"That's awfully nice of you, Ida." Roxie's thanks was sincere as she watched Ida take the seat opposite her.

"I have no idea where are you gonna run to after this," Ida ventured after they'd eaten in silence for sometime. "But my place is right here if you want boarding for the night."

"I don't want to be a bother to you with your husband and all." Roxie a shrugged a shoulder as she washed her pasta down with a glass of currant compote.

"Don't be silly." Ida smile waving a hand dismissing Roxie's hesitance. "You won't be in my way."

"That's okay. I have arrangements for a few more nights … I think. I'll see after that."

Later, sitting in Ida's backside terrace, with a hypnotizing view of the surf, Roxie smiled with genuine contentment she had rarely felt in the past ten years.

The day was being kind to her. Was the breeze about to turn?