Morning light spilled through the mist as Ed followed a tall woman in a dark trench coat out of the A.R.C. garage.  

**Monna Larkins**—R-Division senior investigator, known throughout the Foundation for her impeccable record and her unshakable calm.  

And, as Hoffman had muttered once, “Too damn pretty to still be alive in this line of work.”

Monna turned to him with a playful smirk. “You’re the new one Hoffman nearly got killed by a book, right?”  

Ed frowned. “News travels fast here.”  

“In this place, everything travels fast—except explanations,” she said, adjusting her gloves. “Come on, rookie. Today you’re with me. Routine inquiry. Low threat level… probably.”  

They drove through the city for an hour, crossing from glittering downtown streets to the gray veins of forgotten districts. Their first stop: a decaying apartment block, windows shattered, doors boarded up, air thick with mildew and memories.  

“Three disappearances reported here last month,” Monna said, stepping over broken tiles. “Residents heard noises—voices—then found rooms empty. Foundation cleared the case, called it residual manifestation. Still, something feels off.”  

She knelt beside a wall, tracing her fingers over faint burn marks that spiraled like writing. “See that? Entropy pattern. Weak, but not gone.”  

Ed crouched beside her, scanning the symbols. “Does it mean something?”  

“Not anymore. Whatever happened here… moved on.” She stood and dusted off her hands. “Let’s go. Next stop.”  

The “next stop” turned out to be a small city park—children laughing, dogs barking, couples chatting beneath trees.  

It felt… normal. *Too* normal.  

Ed followed her along the path, confusion building. “You’re sure this is connected?”  

Monna shrugged, sipping from a paper cup of coffee she’d somehow acquired along the way. “Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes anomalies hide in the ordinary. Sometimes they don’t. You’ll learn that soon enough.”  

They sat on a bench for a while, watching the world go by. A breeze stirred the leaves. For a brief moment, Ed almost forgot where he worked.

Then they moved again—to a string of restaurants downtown, one after another. Old buildings, polite owners, nothing unusual at first glance. Yet Monna checked every place as if the air itself could lie.  

By mid-afternoon, Ed’s patience was thinning. “Agent Larkins… are we just sightseeing?”  

She grinned, tilting her head. “You’re impatient. That’s good—it means you’re still human. But investigation isn’t about chasing monsters, kid. It’s about *waiting* for them to blink.”  

He raised a brow. “You mean this is all normal?”  

“Exactly.” She tossed her coffee cup into a bin and started walking again. “Most days in A.R.C. are like this—dust, silence, and the nagging sense that something invisible is watching you. You chase shadows until, one day, one of them turns around.”  

Ed followed quietly, the weight of her words settling in. The adrenaline of his first mission was gone, replaced by something colder—patience, uncertainty, discipline.  

As the sun dipped behind the skyline, Monna stopped beside their car, turning to him with a faint smile. “You did fine, rookie. No one died, no one went mad. That’s a successful day around here.”  

He tried to laugh. “That’s the standard?”  

“That’s survival,” she said, opening the driver’s door. “Get used to it.”

As the car pulled away, Ed glanced back at the fading cityscape. To anyone else, it was just another day.  

But to him, every window, every shadow, every whisper of wind could be hiding something the world wasn’t meant to see.

And somewhere deep inside, the memory of the whispering book still stirred—waiting, patient as ever.