The Justice Equity Collective operated from a converted textile warehouse in Ashport's old industrial quarter, a neighbourhood where the ghosts of looms and dye vats lingered in the smell of rust and chemical residue. The building's façade still bore the faded lettering of its former life—MERIDIAN TEXTILES CO.—but inside, the floors had been partitioned into cramped offices where young lawyers in inexpensive suits hunched over stacks of case files. The reception area featured a single wilting peace lily and a corkboard pinned with newspaper clippings of the Collective's modest victories: a successful challenge to a housing eviction policy, a ruling against warrantless surveillance in Vira neighbourhoods, a compensation order for a family whose son had been beaten in police custody.
Amir arrived on a Thursday morning with Elara and Josef, carrying a briefcase that contained the NP-4 classification notices from twelve families, the MERC Act's full text, and the FIB's internal circular that had established the bloodline sorting protocol. The junior associate he had spoken with on the phone, a young woman named Sefina Rao, met them in the lobby. She was small and sharp-featured, with dark circles under her eyes that suggested a chronic deficit of sleep, and she moved with the quick, nervous energy of someone who drank too much coffee and believed too fiercely in the cases she took.
"The senior partner will join us," Sefina said, leading them down a corridor lined with more wilting plants. "I've briefed him on the constitutional arguments. He's... cautious. But interested."
The senior partner was a man named Darius Cole, and he looked exactly as Amir had imagined a public interest lawyer would look after three decades of losing battles against the state: gaunt, grey-bearded, with eyes that had seen too many clients walk out of courtrooms with their hope crushed but their dignity intact. He shook Amir's hand with a grip that was firm but weary, and gestured for them to sit around a conference table scarred with coffee rings and the indentations of countless pens.
"Your argument is procedurally sound," Darius began, wasting no time on pleasantries. "The MERC Act's statutory language doesn't mention bloodline status. The FIB added that classification through an administrative circular. That circular has the effect of creating a discriminatory allocation of resources. Under Malicia's constitutional framework, particularly Article 17's equal protection clause, an administrative regulation that produces discriminatory effects can be struck down even without proof of discriminatory intent. That's your legal theory. It's a good one."
"But?" Elara said, sensing the hesitation in his voice.
Darius leaned back in his chair. "But the Supreme Court of Malicia has never been friendly to Vira claims. The current bench includes three justices appointed during the Voss administration—the same administration that pushed the MERC Act through Parliament with the bloodline language deliberately omitted to avoid constitutional scrutiny. Everyone knew what they were doing. The law says one thing; the circular says another. When challenged, the state will argue that the circular is a legitimate administrative tool for resource allocation, not a racial classification. They'll bring statistics showing that Vira cases are fewer in number and therefore don't require the same fast-track resources. They'll dress up discrimination in the language of efficiency."
"We know all this," Josef said, his voice tight with impatience. "Will you take the case or not?"
Darius exchanged a glance with Sefina. "I'll take the case. But I want you to understand what you're walking into. A lawsuit against the FIB will attract attention. The press will cover it. Your names will become public. The FIB does not take kindly to being sued—they have investigative powers, surveillance capabilities, and a long institutional memory. If there are skeletons in any of your closets, they will find them and they will use them to discredit you. I need to know: is there anything I should be aware of?"
Amir thought of the code he had discovered—VXC-7-8-2—and the map he had been constructing in his study, the pins marking disappearances across different cities, the pattern that was beginning to emerge like a face in a fogged mirror. He had not told anyone about this, not even Lina. It felt too fragile, too speculative, a private obsession that might dissolve under scrutiny. "Nothing," he said. "We're grieving parents. That's all."
Darius studied him for a long moment, and Amir had the uncomfortable sensation that the old lawyer could see directly into the hidden compartments of his mind. But Darius only nodded. "Then we proceed. Sefina will draft the petition. We'll file in the Supreme Court under Article 17, seeking a declaration that the bloodline circular is unconstitutional and an order directing the FIB to apply MERC's fast-track protocols to all outstanding NP-4 cases. The petition will name the twelve of you as representative plaintiffs. We'll also seek an interim injunction preventing the FIB from continuing to apply the bloodline classification while the case is pending."
The weeks that followed were consumed by the machinery of legal preparation. Amir attended meetings with Sefina to review affidavits, to compile evidence of the FIB's differential treatment, to document the phone calls that went unanswered and the case files that gathered dust. He learned the peculiar language of constitutional litigation—phrases like "strict scrutiny" and "disparate impact" and "suspect classification"—and he discovered that the law had its own poetry, a cold and formal poetry that could transform the raw wound of a missing child into the abstract architecture of legal argument.
At night, he worked on his private investigation. He had obtained, through a contact in the Rivermouth municipal records office, a list of all NP-4 cases filed in the northern district over the past decade. There were forty-seven cases in total, and thirty-two of them bore VXC codes in the corner. The codes were not perfectly sequential—there were gaps, numbers that should have existed but didn't—but the pattern was unmistakable. Someone, somewhere in the FIB's labyrinthine bureaucracy, was tracking these cases in a system that did not officially exist.
He began to map the disappearances geographically, pushing coloured pins into a large map of Malicia that he had mounted on the study wall. The VXC-coded cases clustered along a corridor that ran from the industrial suburbs of Ashport through the secondary cities of Rivermouth and Kalstead, and terminated at the port city of Tormouth on the eastern coast. It was the route of the old colonial railway, now mostly decommissioned, a corridor of rusted tracks and abandoned stations that had once carried textiles from the interior to the sea.
Why would missing Vira children be linked to an obsolete railway line? The question gnawed at him, and he began to research the railway's history, spending hours in the public library, scrolling through microfiche archives of old newspapers and municipal records. The colonial railway had been built by the Kelsar Trading Company, a quasi-governmental corporation that had been dissolved decades ago but whose successor entities still operated in shipping and logistics. The company had owned not just the trains and tracks but also a network of waystations, warehouses, and dormitories for workers—many of them Vira labourers who had been recruited under terms that amounted to indentured servitude.
One night, deep in the library archives, Amir found a reference that stopped his breath. A Kelsar Trading Company subsidiary, the Tormouth Child Welfare Society, had operated several orphanages in the eastern provinces during the colonial period. These orphanages had been closed after independence, but a brief news item from fifteen years ago mentioned that a successor organization, the Eastern Horizon Foundation, had been granted a license to operate international adoption services out of Tormouth. The foundation's director was listed as a man named Viktor Draven.
Amir wrote the name in his notebook. Viktor Draven. Former director of an adoption foundation with colonial roots, operating out of the same port city where the VXC cases seemed to terminate. It was a thread, thin and frayed, but he pulled on it.
He discovered that Draven had been forced out of the Eastern Horizon Foundation eight years ago amid allegations of irregularities in the adoption process. The allegations had been investigated by the FIB, but the investigation had been closed without charges. A brief press release from the FIB stated that "no criminal conduct was established" and that the matter was "administratively resolved." Draven had retired to a small town in the eastern hills, out of public view, and had not been heard from since.
The pattern was becoming clearer, but what it meant was still opaque. Were the missing Vira children being trafficked through an adoption network? Was the FIB's non-priority classification not merely neglectful but actively complicit? The questions multiplied faster than answers, and Amir found himself in a state of constant, low-grade agitation, his mind returning again and again to the map on his study wall, the pins that glowed like red stars against the geography of his country's hidden history.
The lawsuit was filed on the first Monday of December. Sefina and Darius had crafted a petition that was elegant in its legal reasoning, arguing that the FIB's bloodline circular created an unconstitutional classification that denied Vira families equal protection under the law. They had gathered affidavits from the twelve plaintiffs, documenting years of neglect, of unanswered calls, of case files that had never been properly investigated. They had compiled statistics showing that native-bloodline missing children cases were resolved at a rate nearly four times higher than Vira cases. The petition requested that the Supreme Court declare the circular void and order the FIB to reopen every NP-4 case with full investigative resources.
The filing made the front page of the Ashport Chronicle. The headline read: "VIRA FAMILIES SUE FIB OVER MISSING CHILDREN DISCRIMINATION." Below it, a photograph of Amir and Elara standing on the courthouse steps, their faces set in expressions of weary determination. Lina had refused to be photographed. She had barely spoken since Amir told her about the lawsuit, retreating further into the silent world she had constructed around herself.
The FIB's response was swift and predictable. In a press conference, the Bureau's director, a man named Harlan Cross, called the lawsuit "a politically motivated attempt to undermine public confidence in law enforcement." He insisted that the bloodline classification was a legitimate resource-allocation tool, not a racial category, and that the Bureau treated all missing children cases with equal seriousness. "The MERC Act requires us to prioritize cases based on investigative viability, not ethnic origin," he said. "The plaintiffs are confusing resource constraints with discrimination."
The case was assigned to a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Harland—the same Harland whose son, Amir had discovered during his obsessive research, was a student at an elite academy that received substantial funding from the Tormouth Development Trust, a charitable organization that listed the Eastern Horizon Foundation among its beneficiary partners. The connection was circumstantial, a gossamer thread linking the highest court in the land to the shadowy world Amir was beginning to uncover. He did not mention it to Darius or Sefina. It was too tenuous, too easily dismissed as the paranoid obsession of a grieving father.
The first hearing was scheduled for the second week of January. In the weeks leading up to it, Amir divided his time between preparing for the legal battle and pursuing his private investigation. He drove to Tormouth one weekend, walking through the old port district where the Eastern Horizon Foundation had maintained its offices until its closure. The building was now a shipping warehouse, its windows dark and its façade covered in peeling paint. He asked questions in the surrounding neighbourhood, showing Aisha's photograph to shopkeepers and dockworkers, but no one recognized her or remembered anything about the foundation's activities.
He drove to the eastern hills to find Viktor Draven, but the address he had obtained from property records led to a vacant house, its windows boarded up and its garden overgrown. A neighbour told him that Draven had moved away years ago and had not been heard from since. "He kept to himself," the neighbour said. "Never talked about his work. I think he wanted to forget."
Forget what, Amir wondered. What had Viktor Draven done that required forgetting?
The night before the first hearing, Amir sat in his study, staring at the map. The pins glowed in the dim light, a constellation of grief stretching from Ashport to Tormouth. Lina appeared in the doorway, a rare intrusion into the space she usually avoided. She looked thinner than she had a year ago, her eyes hollow and her hands trembling slightly as she clutched the doorframe.
"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice a whisper.
"Trying to find her," Amir said.
"The lawsuit won't bring her back."
"I know."
"The lawsuit won't even make them pay."
"Maybe not," Amir said. "But if I don't do something, Lina, I'll lose myself entirely. I'm already half gone."
She looked at him for a long moment, and something flickered in her eyes—not hope, exactly, but a distant cousin of hope, a recognition that he was still fighting, even if she had stopped. Then she turned and walked away, her footsteps soft on the hallway floor, and Amir was left alone with his map and his codes and the terrible suspicion that the lawsuit was only the visible tip of a much darker iceberg, a shape whose true dimensions he had only begun to glimpse beneath the surface of the legal fiction they were constructing.
The hearing would begin at ten o'clock the next morning. Amir did not sleep. He sat in the study until dawn, his eyes fixed on the photograph of Aisha, and he made a silent promise to a child who would never hear it: I will find the truth. Whatever it is, whoever it hurts, I will find it.
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