Dr. Sarah Chen had spent three years, four months, and twelve days studying what wasn't there.

Her colleagues were kind about it, mostly. They spoke of grief in hushed tones when she passed in the corridors, nodded sympathetically when she requested yet another interlibrary loan for an obscure religious text. The Department of Comparative Religion had been extraordinarily patient, even when her research interests shifted from mainstream analysis to what they delicately termed "patterns of systemic omission."

Behind closed doors, they were less gentle. "Gone the way of pyramid theorists," she'd overheard Professor Williams mutter after her last faculty presentation. "Tragic, really. She used to do such promising work on Sanskrit prayer cycles." They thought she couldn't hear them in the faculty lounge, discussing whether she should be quietly guided toward a leave of absence. "First the face blindness, then losing her daughter, and now this obsession with... what did she call them? 'Infrastructural absences in religious practice?' Poor thing's lost the plot entirely."

The prosopagnosia didn't help. It's difficult to maintain academic relationships when you can't recognize faces, when every conference is a parade of strangers who insist they've met you before. But the condition that had plagued her since graduate school had become oddly useful now. When you can't trust your eyes to tell you who someone is, you learn to look for other patterns. The way certain academics seemed to fade from group photos. The way some papers accumulated citations despite no one quite remembering reading them.

The bell above Blackwood's Books barely made a sound when she entered. It was one of those shops that seemed bigger inside than physics should allow, its shelves reaching up into shadows that the dusty electric lights couldn't quite penetrate. Books were stacked in precarious towers that somehow never fell, arranged in patterns that suggested meaning without ever quite revealing it.

The owner, Ms. Blackwood (no relation to the expedition leader, she would always insist, though no one had asked), looked up from her ledger. Her eyes never quite focused on Sarah's face, but that was normal - people had trouble recognizing her as much as she had trouble recognizing them.

"The volume you requested came in," Ms. Blackwood said, reaching under the counter. "Third edition, as you specified."

"Thank you. The page numbers are different in this one - there's a reference I've been trying to track down about temple construction in Luang Prabang." Sarah ran her fingers along the cloth binding. Just an ordinary academic text, worn from library use. Ms. Blackwood merely nodded, already turning back to her ledger.

Sarah found herself wandering the aisles. She ended up in the children's section, fingers tracing the spine of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Li-mei had loved that book. Would still love that book, if— No. Sarah pulled her hand back. Three years, four months, and twelve days since the fever had taken her daughter. Li-mei had been three and a half, all pigtails and questions about butterflies. "But where does the caterpillar go, Mama? Inside the cocoon?"

The doctors had called it an autoimmune disorder, but their notes kept changing. Each specialist saw something different, each test revealed contradictory results. In the end, Li-mei had simply... faded. Not metaphorically - Sarah had watched her daughter become increasingly translucent in her hospital bed, had felt her grow lighter and lighter in her arms, until that final morning when the sunrise seemed to shine through her entirely. The death certificate listed 'complications from autoimmune response,' but Sarah had seen the doctor's hand shake as he wrote it, had watched the ink fade and reform into those words, as if the truth couldn't quite hold its shape on the page.

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That was when she started noticing the patterns. The way medical records could shift their meaning between readings. The way certain conditions appeared in literature but vanished from diagnostic manuals. The way some patients' files seemed to resist being archived, their symptoms described in terms that grew vaguer with each transcription.

Her father would have understood. In his Singapore antiquities shop, he'd specialized in objects that other dealers overlooked - pieces that seemed to resist classification. He would point to empty spaces on shelves and say, "Something important belongs there." She'd always assumed it was his way of teaching her about display aesthetics. Now, years later and half a world away, she wondered if he'd been trying to tell her something else.

Her academic focus had shifted gradually after Li-mei. What had begun as routine comparative religion research became something else entirely. She found herself drawn to the gaps in religious records, the unexplained absences in ceremonial texts, the carefully unnamed deities in otherwise complete pantheons. Every culture had its empty spaces - ceremonies that stopped being performed without explanation, temples whose purposes were conspicuously absent from otherwise meticulous records.

She kept a journal of absences. It was more rigorous than it sounds. Each entry carefully documented not just what was missing, but the shape of its missing-ness. The way other facts curved around the void, like light bending around an invisible mass. Some days she would open the journal to find entire pages had become blank, though the ink had clearly been there before. She started taking photographs of each page after writing. The photographs disappeared more frequently than the writings themselves.

The stacks at Blackwood's Books always seemed to rearrange themselves when she wasn't looking. Today she found herself in a narrow aisle of travel narratives, fingers tracing spines of leather-bound journals and expedition accounts. A slim volume, bound in faded green canvas, caught her attention. The spine was blank, but something about its placement between Burton's "First Footsteps in East Africa" and Stein's "Ancient Khotan" felt deliberate.

The binding crackled as she opened it. Inside, she found careful sketches of Buddhist temples, their proportions noted in the margins. There were drawings of artifacts too - bronze mirrors, ritual vessels, and fragments of stone tablets. What struck her were the small question marks beside certain items, as if the author wasn't quite sure they'd been there at all.

Only when she reached the final entry did she notice the date: June 12, 1908. And there, barely legible in the corner: "H.C., Inner Mongolia Expedition." Professor Herbert Clarke - the linguist who had vanished with the others. She knew his scholarly works, of course, but she'd never known he kept field journals.

One passage caught her eye: "The monastery's infirmary holds more empty beds than I'd expect. The monks speak of children who come to them ill, though I see no patients. MB says the local stories mention similar patterns across the region. When I asked about medical records, the abbot only smiled."

The next pages had been removed, though the binding gave no sign of tampering.

Sarah brought the book to the counter. Ms. Blackwood rang it up without comment, though her unfocused gaze lingered a moment longer than usual.

That evening, settled in her study with a cup of roasted green tea, Sarah reached for her journal. Her fingers traced the familiar patterns of scratches on its cover, navigating by touch to find the spot where the leather had worn smooth from handling. Each page held its own texture - the raised edges where ink had dried, the slight warping from tears she'd long since shed. She opened to a fresh page and began to write:

Today, I found something that wants to be understood. Perhaps the same thing that took my butterfly girl.