8. Justin
JUSTIN
Rowan Hale.
The name is music to my ears. Because now Anonymous has weight. Shape. A place to stand.
The name lingers on my tongue like a sin I haven’t decided whether to confess or commit. I murmur it once under my breath—low, deliberate—then lean back in my chair as Goliath’s servers slip into their steady, mechanical chant around me.
The search builds itself, crawling through encrypted archives, municipal servers, all the little corners of the internet that think they’re locked.
The monitors bathe the room in a cold blue glow, tinting the shadows with the color of sleeplessness.
To anyone else, it’d look like a standard background check.
To me, it feels like peeling back the skin of an enigma, until I get to the bone.
I don’t know what he’s looking for yet—but I will. And now the writer’s on my radar for more than curiosity. He’s a variable, and I don’t leave variables unaccounted for.
The screen beeps, sharp and insistent, dragging my focus back to it.
Lines of data begin to populate beneath a grainy school yearbook photo, neat and clinical.
I frown.
Because the face staring back at me isn’t what I expected.
It’s a girl.
Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Hair pulled back too tight, expression guarded, eyes already tired in the way only girls learn to be. A high school portrait, all neutral backdrop and forced stillness, her name printed clearly beneath the photo like a quiet accusation.
Rowan Hale.
I shake my head and rerun the check. Once. Then again, slower this time, as if that might change reality. It doesn’t. The same profile fills the screen. The same photo. The same immutable line of text confirming what I don’t quite believe yet.
There is only one Rowan Hale enrolled at St Augustine’s University. And she’s a woman.
I let my gaze linger on the picture again. She’s pretty in an unassuming way. All-American. Girl-next-door enough that people would think her ordinary.
But it isn’t her looks that hold my attention. It’s the pull.
There’s something about her that doesn’t announce itself but refuses to be ignored.
An invisible gravity. The kind that draws eyes and focus, draws trouble.
You don’t notice it at first—you feel it.
Like a pressure behind the eyes. And I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about her that peaks my curiosity.
I lean back in my chair and study the screen.
I read the data the system gives me, scanning the lines slowly, digesting the girl’s life story. Or what there is of it, anyway.
Name: Rowan Adair Hale
Age: 21
Faculty: Law
Affiliations: None known.
The rest of the file is frustratingly ordinary.
Enrollment. Course load. Information so generic I could’ve pulled it from an online bio—if she had one.
But she doesn’t. Rowan Hale is a ghost on social media, which is the first red flag.
What twenty-one-year-old university student doesn’t have a social media presence?
No photos. No posts. No digital trail worth following.
Even her footprint is deliberately thin. And that’s the problem. People don’t erase themselves unless they have something to hide.
I keep going.
Residence: Single-bedroom converted walk-up off campus.
Parents:
Father: Unknown
Mother: Deceased
I continue. And nothing. The search ends there. Which is unusual for Goliath, because our search engines are second to none.
In 2025, that’s not normal. It’s a red flag the size of a flare.
Everyone leaves traces. Even people who try not to. Cached pages. Forgotten accounts. Friends who tag you anyway. Facial recognition hits pulled from a stranger’s post in the background of a bar photo.
Rowan Hale is a ghost.
I run the search again through a different filter. Deeper. Paid databases. Academic records. Government-adjacent crawlers that cost more than most people make in a year.
Still I get nothing.
Her digital footprint doesn’t just look curated—it looks intentionally starved. As if someone went through her life with a scalpel and removed everything unnecessary. Or as if she never fed the machine to begin with.
Both possibilities bother me.
“What are you hiding, Rowan Hale?” I murmur to the empty room.
I scroll past the basics again, irritation tightening behind my eyes. Whatever’s driving her isn’t public. It’s personal.
I close the file and stare at the dark screen long enough to see my own reflection looking back at me, sharp-eyed and unsettled in a way I don’t enjoy.
People don’t just disappear from the internet by accident. And they don’t wander into my life without a reason.
Rowan Hale has one. I just haven’t found it yet. And that makes her dangerous—not because she’s loud or reckless, but because she’s disciplined enough to move unseen. Because she understands restraint, and she knows how to wait.
I don’t like unknowns. I especially don’t like them when they keep showing up on my doorstep.
But if the internet doesn’t know her, I’ll learn her the old way.
Piece by piece. Step by step.
Everyone leaves a trail eventually. And when Rowan Hale finally does? I’ll be there to see exactly where it leads.