Cecilia and I sat on the bench at Break that Thursday, watching our friends play with another pebble-turned-football. The sun blasted the entire playground with its heat and extraordinary rays. It was a beautiful day.

The only problem was that something was clearly bothering Cecilia. We’d been dating nearly two months now, so it wouldn’t have been too far to ask her what was up. I had to know. Or, at least, I had to ask. I hated seeing her like that.

‘Hey,’ I said as I put my arm around her. ‘What’s bothering you?’

She glanced around nervously for a moment, as though checking to see if anyone was listening.

‘It’s…it’s Jeremy,’ she sighed finally.

‘What about him? Has he upset you?’

Cecilia didn’t respond for a moment, so I immediately backtracked.

‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t wanna,’ I soothed. ‘But I’m here.’

‘No, no, I wanna tell you,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s only right that you of all people know. But I don’t know how to say it. I’m probably over-dramatising it.’

‘I don’t care if you’re over-dramatising,’ I reasoned. ‘If it’s bothering you this much, it’s a problem.’

She smiled at me. ‘You’re great, you know?’

‘Thank you, but what is it, Cecilia?’

‘I haven’t heard from him since Monday.’

I would be lying if I said that this didn’t strike a chord in me. Of course, I hadn’t heard from Jeremy in a while, but we didn’t speak daily. Cecilia was his sister.

‘What was the last thing you heard of him?’ I tried.

Wordlessly, Cecilia pulled her phone out of her blazer pocket. I watched her open her messages and then Jeremy’s chat. She pointed at the bottom three messages.

Where are you?

Getting cig.

Then, two days after:

Jeremy???

Neither of us said a word for a moment.

‘Do you know where he gets his cigarettes from?’ I asked quietly.

‘Not from the Valley, I know that much,’ she said, not even hiding the worry in her voice anymore. ‘He said that they’re too expensive in the Valley. Do you know where else he could get them?’

‘Pretty much anywhere,’ I said, thinking. ‘But if he’s that concerned with the price, then he was probably in the Western Suburbs when he sent that message. A lot of stuff is really cheap there because it’s really low quality.’

‘Is that a dangerous area?’

‘Depends on where in the Suburbs he went,’ I replied, bringing up my mental map of the area. ‘There’s a really shady area of the Western Suburbs that everyone should stay clear of. Known for high crime rates, gangs, druggies, and all other kinds of bad stuff. If he were in the Western Suburbs and something bad happened there, he was most likely in that area.’

Cecilia looked down at the floor for a moment, and I panicked that I’d said something bad.

‘But Jeremy’s a strong wizard, right?’ I added. ‘If he is in a tight spot right now, he can get his way out of it, I’m sure.’

She still looked anxious, so I again tried to raise her spirits.

‘Jeremy probably uses spells we’ve never heard of on a day-to-day basis. Don’t worry. And if he’s struggling, we’ll find him and save him.’

‘Can you do that?’ she asked hopefully. ‘Can you send a search party or something?’

‘I can do it the second school ends,’ I assured her. ‘I am Prime Minister, after all.’

Cecilia turned on the bench and wrapped her arms around me. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ I whispered in her ear. ‘We’ll find him.’

I remembered sitting on the roof with Jeremy. It had been peaceful. Just the two of us staring at the night sky, talking like friends. We were friends.

‘Gods, get a room,’ Jay scoffed. I hadn’t realised that he had been so close.

Cecilia slowly pulled out of the hug and sat upright. ‘What do you want?’

‘I need you to send a message to Jeremy.’

I tried to signal to Jay to shut his mouth, but it didn’t matter. He’d already said it.

‘How come you need him?’ Cecilia asked quietly.

‘He told me we’d play pool after school today but didn’t tell me where to meet,’ Jay explained, his tone telling me that he had not even seen my signalling. ‘I was wondering if you could message him?’

I watched as Cecilia slowly pulled her phone back out, opened her messages with Jeremy, and began typing. Jay wouldn’t have been able to see what she typed from where he was standing, but I could see it perfectly fine.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Jeremy, come on.

Jay wants to play pool.

Where’s he gonna meet you?

Please just respond.

An uneasy feeling had crept into my entire body. It was overwhelming.

Four messages. She had sent four messages when she could’ve just sent one. She was desperate. She needed Jeremy.

‘We’ll find him, I promise’ I said quietly, so that Jay couldn’t hear me. ‘I’ll join the search myself if it takes too long.’

‘What if Maltor does have him?’ she replied, and then, louder, to Jay, ‘I’ve messaged him.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, grinning. ‘Let me know when he responds.’

As he hurriedly went back to play football, I answered Cecilia’s question.

‘If Maltor has him, then I’m gonna give him the fight of his life. I don’t care where Jeremy is, Cecilia, I’m gonna get him back. And if I have to take Maltor’s head to get him, I will. No questions asked.’

Cecilia looked worried to the absolute extreme. There was no possible higher level of distress to convey.

I felt horrendously bad as I could not think of what else to say to try and calm her. All that was really left was to get to the end of the day so that I could organise a search for him.

I’d never had to organise I search for anyone. The last time I could remember someone going ‘missing’ was when Jay had been kidnapped. No search party had been needed for him because Henry and I had immediately gone to rescue him.

That war felt like aeons ago. I almost missed it. The only downside to going back would be that I wouldn’t know Harvey or Cecilia.

Not only that, but my body was sick with worry for Jeremy. The two of us weren’t the closest, but for someone to just go silent for three days…it was concerning, to say the least.

In the little time I’d known Jeremy, he had seemed to care deeply for his sister. I was certain that he wouldn’t ignore her for this long out of his own will. Something had to have happened.

***

Cecilia, Stephen, and I all stood in the main area of the police station that evening, desperately trying to talk things over with the officer at the desk.

The room looked not unlike a typical office. White walls with brown borders, grey carpet, dim lights, and only a small desk opposite the front door. The desk that the three of us stood at.

The officer in front of us, Deborah according to her nametag, was a stout woman with greying brown hair which she had tied into a bun. She stared scathingly at the three of us through her oval-shaped glasses with her piggy eyes that were coloured the same as her hair.

‘But he’s been missing for three days!’ Cecilia shrieked, squeezing my hand, perhaps not intentionally.

‘And if you suspect there to be a larger reason, miss, then I suggest you see someone in the military,’ Deborah argued back. She seemed to forget that the head of the military was right in front of her.

‘The police force is linked to the military,’ I said quietly. ‘If you want to be really technical, the police force is a branch of the wider military. You understand that, don’t you, Deborah?’

‘Of course, I understand, Prime Minister,’ Deborah said, not sounding as confident anymore. ‘But if you are so desperate to find this boy – ‘Jeremy’, was it? – then you have better luck with a search party organised by yourself.’

‘You foul, foul woman,’ Cecilia snarled. ‘How are you gonna feel if we find him dead in a ditch, huh?’

‘Sorry for your loss,’ Deborah scorned.

Cecilia looked so overcome with rage and annoyance that I was half surprised that she did not implode.

‘He’s my brother, you witch!’

‘Brother or not, I cannot help you. The police are not here to interfere with Confussée’s side.’

‘Then what in Titan’s name are you here for?’ Cecilia shirked as Stephen and I glanced at each other. ‘To look pretty?’

‘To fight crime, you foolish girl!’

‘This is a crime; are you blind? Jeremy’s gone missing!’

‘And you believe that it has something to do with the opposing forces of this war!’ Deborah yelled back, rising from her seat. This would have been a much more impressive move if she had been taller than Cecilia.

‘That is highly likely, ma’am,’ I interrupted calmly, trying to keep the roof on the building. ‘I think it should at least be taken into-’

She scoffed, cutting me off. ‘Serves him darn right if those people took him, if you ask me. I doubt it can be called a coincidence that they’re brothers.’

Nobody said a word for a moment. The three of us were simply too stunned to do so. Deborah immediately switched up.

‘What I meant was-’

‘Shut that fat gob of yours,’ Cecilia said, so quietly that I almost instinctively leaned closer. ‘I should’ve known it was hopeless to come here when I saw an overgrown rat sitting at the front desk.’

‘Greatest thing I’ve heard all day,’ Stephen said, grinning, as the three of us stood outside the police station. ‘‘Overgrown rat’.’

‘She looks like one,’ Cecilia scoffed. ‘Little bitch.’

‘We can speak to General Woodward,’ I suggested. ‘Or I can. You two don’t have to come.’

‘Yeah, would you mind shadow-travelling me home?’ Stephen asked. ‘Not to be rude, but I don’t feel like Woodward’s gonna be called an ‘overgrown rat’, so there’s not gonna be any entertainment value for me.’

I scoffed. ‘Yeah, I’ll take you. And what about you, Cecilia? You wanna come see General Woodward or should I go on my own?’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said immediately. ‘This is my brother we’re talking about.’

‘The brother we’re gonna find,’ I said quietly. ‘Alright, come on.’

I grabbed Stephen’s arm and took him home. We waved him goodbye before I immediately took me and Cecilia to the inside of the HQ. The same room that I had been in three months ago on my birthday.

Inside, as luck would have it, was General Woodward.

He seemed rather taken aback by my sudden appearance, but immediately took me seriously. His blue eyes stared down at me, flicking to Cecilia briefly.

‘Prime Minister…’ he began slowly. ‘What…what brings you here?’

‘The police were no help,’ I said sternly. ‘They told us to come here, otherwise, I would’ve left you alone.’

‘No help with what?’ he said, as a few other officers in the room looked around at us to see what was happening.

‘Cecilia’s brother has been missing for three days. Last contact with him was made on Monday evening at four.’

‘Do you know where he was or do you have any clue what could have happened?’

‘We know that he was getting cigarettes outside of the Valley – he thinks that they’re too expensive in the Valley,’ I began to explain. ‘Given that he seems to care that much about price, I would assume that he was in the Western Suburbs when he messaged Cecilia saying he was getting them.’

‘What’s his name?’

I glanced at Cecilia before responding.

‘Jeremy. Jeremy Confussée.’

I saw Woodward’s eyebrow twitch slightly as though he had been about to raise it, but he composed himself immediately.

‘What does Jeremy look like?’

‘Tall,’ Cecilia began immediately. ‘Five-ten I think. Blue eyes like Maltor, if you’ve seen him. Dark brown hair just like mine. He’s one of the kids that you recently employed. He’s officially been a soldier for about two weeks now.’

‘I know exactly who you’re on about now,’ piped up an officer from behind Woodward. It was a tall, slender man with a skinny face. A face so skinny that his blue eyes seemed to pop from it. His slick black hair either added to or took away from his cartoonish appearance. ‘I saw that boy take his test. Exceptional wizard.’

‘Yeah, he’s really good,’ Cecilia said wistfully. ‘He was top of almost every class at Apercaput.’

‘We’ll find him, miss, don’t you worry,’ Woodward said confidently. ‘If he did go to the Western Suburbs for his cigarettes, there’s a high chance that I’m thinking of the vendor he went to. Unless he really knew his way around those Suburbs, he likely went to him.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Cecilia sighed. ‘Please, just bring my brother back to me in one piece.’

‘We’ll do our absolute best, don’t you worry, Cecilia.’

I squeezed Cecilia’s hand gently. This was taking everything from her. For her sake, I prayed that Jeremy was safe and sound.