Glitches in our hearts and glitches in our bodies,
Hand raises with a rose when I want it to push the ladder from under your feet.
Dark edges seemed to fog up with every step, moving forward enquired a better requirement of more than five senses. Once in a while, we would hear a creak, then some metallic bass. The slightest movements of hands for a better grip had their sounds reverbing like the inside of a metal tank. None of us knew where we were going. It was a climb of some stairs at first, then we were walking before reaching another staircase. One slide-down of the door disconnected us from the world entirely. It was just another world of darkness, maybe not darker than the one we lived in.
Torchlights did only so much help to let us through. Shades of dark greys and whites tiled across both the walls on our sides, dotted by several holes that grew more irregular with our advancement. Tints of fading wall art would narrate lonely outcasts' past time in this place if it hadn't been hidden this way.
Neo's strutting gait held smaller steps, nonetheless, he walked fast. The staircase that led us was short, digging down to somewhere with a depth of pitch void. The flights were taller than usual, prevailing a risk to fall down and never be able to reach up. I was gingerly placing every foot. When I was finally at a place presumably I could provide a name to, Neo was already looking around in crevices with a hawked gaze.
"Rather messy than a place which is used more frequently," He opined, "Funny smell too."
"There-" I stared at the plasma screen placed at a near corner of the hall room, "The whole CCTV view of the house."
"Look at this," he said. He was busy fervently throwing open one of the trash bags stashed in an obscure corner, revealing a jumble of Ammos and shotguns, "Mossberg 590, and oh- Remington! All houseful hefty ones. They sure follow the trends."
"Collect the fingerprints first. And hand me the camera." I scanned through the place in a quick glimpse.
Tiles with blotches of dirt ornating the ground, and a shabby low ceiling, fore was a microcosmic megalith of rusting steel and glass. It was like those stereotypical basements one would suddenly discover in an age-old mansion, with a hint of a modern touch, to say. There was a section of two and a half of the entire, the bigger ones each of at best nine feet length, curtained at the fusion by a stack of bandoliers hanging till the average chest height of a man. Three of the walls apparently had no existence of their own, one with a display of weaponry, another with the alignments of several photographs and notes that created a poorly constructed emblem of red strips hanging onto with vestigial remnant of adhesion. My shoes kept sinking into the placements of drain lines at one-foot intervals with what purpose they might be there for. I wondered who those people in the pictures were, but something ominous in the core of my mind scoffed, telling me that, half of them must have demised already from this world.
I traced my finger along a single line, proceeding upward towards the visage of a middle-aged couple taking a detour along the right, another of a man with evil brows with a red crosshatch drawn on his face to juxtapose the green of his iris. His face reminded me of someone. Maybe if I looked into the database, it wouldn't take me long to find out who it was. He looked like someone to be recognized, but the middle-aged couple, that benign show of their face had me knowing, the file of their unsolved case, if there was one, must be somewhere down the medley, squalor hanging onto it from negligence.
They sure knew not to leave back enough of the evidence whether it was their most secret and trusted hideout or not. Yet it took a few preserved dusty old drafts to have me enlightened with the conjectures of a few of their earlier exterminations. One significant case held info of a drug ring, the whereabouts of the kingpin annotated with a significant date that directly matched with one from my highlights. Neo wasn't so oblivious so far here either. The file was to go in our sack. The basement was a living architecture of evidence, maybe not enough to justify all of their done tasks, but enough to surmise the ones which didn't have any more proofs lying around the bush. The computer settled on one side was the most useless one of all the things. Coming with the password it was secured with, and there was not enough time to go over that at all.
"Does the name Chae Su Kyung click something in your mind?" I asked.
"Sounds familiar, but no."
"As far as I can recall, that gang leader who has gone missing for the past two years after the ambush at Bonfire Festival was this."
"Oh, yes, what did you find?"
"Apparently there's a contract signed between them and Chae Su Kyung, dated from last year. Strange."
"What does it say?"
"There're a lot of things written, uh-" I skimmed through the reams of paper, "It's gonna take whole half an hour to finish reading this."
"There's not much time. Let's keep it for now. We still have to go through many other things."
"Forty-five minutes of their meeting, we still can utilize fifteen more minutes, I think. I was wondering-" I stood at the center of the zone, taking my time for final conclusion, "Can we be leaving anything important behind?"
"Maybe, maybe not. But we don't have a choice. There's not enough time to look through everything. We can come back later, of course."
"Right...It did fit in one piece after all, what I had suspected, the architectural flaw of the dorm."
"I'm astounded- the way that staircase leads to this basement, how did they manage to devise this place?"
"They didn't. It was already here, by the time this was constructed. Or later constructed. I looked through past information- they were the ones who proposed to move to this dorm, whereas the company was planning to shift them to somewhere else with better accommodation. This dorm had gone through a renovation about three months right before they had moved in. What I assume is, there was a direct entry to the basement before, which was cemented and then this alternate route was created."
"If that is so...wait. There can be more places like this in the house."
"I don't think so. This should be the only hideout."
"Who was the last owner of the house?"
"I checked about the guy. He was clean. I got an inkling...that, maybe he is not the one we should go after. There has to be more to meet the eye than this."
"We gotta go now though. We have to leave before the meeting ends, at least."
"I know, but still now, something doesn't feel right."
"As in?" He turned around with a perplexed look.
"I don't know...This-" I pointed at the staircase, "...Yes, it's a smart place for a hideout, and not anyone would find it out so easily. Maybe I wouldn't have had either if luck hadn't favored me. But, Neo- look at this place. From how much I have known BTS by now-"
"What are you thinking, Y/N?"
The minute hand weirdly kept on ticking in my head, jittering back and forth in a simple harmonic pace, prodding my train of thoughts to fit in one shape. We found more of the info regarding what they might have been doing after coming to their own world of crime, but, where was the trace from where, when, and how had they started all this? The more I wanted to go after the roots to their start, the mistier it seemed to grow. They had been leaving in this place for two years now, and it had been four years of their debut. Some of them knew each other before that. And some of them found others out through incidents. Seacrets intrusion was one of them. How they found out Jungkook. But Jimin? The least I knew about of all, how did he get into this mess?
That someone they were talking about on that night of the mission, the one they took orders from- I knew he was the root of their start. Or a big connection to that, at least. He. The one that shuffled them all together, the one that still had them going this wrong journey when they had all the chances to veer towards the right a long time ago before all the spirals of wrongdoings they did stitched up more to create that emblem of red strips on their wall, and of theirs in the police department. There was this and that, but not the exact thing I was looking since I had started searching in here. How could there be no direct clue or whatsoever in the first place in this wrecking, rickety hide-and-seek place of theirs? Not a name, then maybe a place where the seven and their boss met, a messenger- how could there be-
"We looked here- and here- what about- did you look over there?"
"I did. Found some files but a few are totally new with blank pages. Rest had not much useful thing in there. What is the thing you are looking for? You need to elabortae me more on the topic."
I couldn't. "Let's not look over anything. Go through these boxes again."
Where did they come from and where were they going? What was their next big plan? If they had any big plan soon...
"Uh- there are a few torn piece of notes over here. Seems discarded. But since you are insisting to be thorough -"
"Let me see." I assembled the shreds to see a few lines of marks written on the yellow. The handwriting was unclear, the blocky font of the letters had me thinking, perhaps it was Jungkook or Jimin. Or Seokjin? But what the sentence said was fair enough to lose my resolving power of attention.
Mastermind High School
My orbs wavered for a second.
The school.
That was where I had gone to. And that was where-
"Y/N!"
It was only a second afterward, my brain went nuts.
With them soon to have a concert in my country, and a school name in this paper, tied to my identity-
I was just now wondering about this next big game.
Now.
What the freak were they planning?
"Hey Y/N!"
A clammy feeling instantly crushed in, I didn't want to dissolve into the apprehension yet, but the oddly ticking minute-hand had now stopped juddering, and instead, it was my body shaking at its best with the discovery.
What errands did they have with the school of my nightmares? No. It wasn't possible for them to know this much about me or-
"Hey, Y/N? I've been calling for years. Can't you hear me?" Neo's loud bright voice almost had me flinch.
"W-what happened?"
"Come over here fast. Look what I found!"