Chapter Text
When Nico Minoru got home from yet another tedious day at school, she flopped down on her bed almost immediately upon entering her room. She was exhausted, and it was only Wednesday of the third week of school. She still had two long days ahead of her before the weekend. The one good thing about this particular afternoon was that she had no homework. Or maybe it was a bad thing, depending on how she looked at it. Sure, she didn’t have to put effort into yet another thing she didn’t care about, but she also didn’t have anything to occupy her thoughts until bedtime, or at least until her parents got home. She had been hoping that her parents would’ve gotten off work early today, as they sometimes did, so she could spend her time with them instead, but no such luck had come her way.
Pulling out her laptop, she scrolled through Netflix, trying to find some movie to watch to distract herself, but she couldn’t find anything that looked remotely interesting. Grabbing a random book off her to-read shelf, she settled for that instead, losing her mind in the fantasy world of the story. At least she tried to. She found herself zoning out before she had even finished the first page. It was one of those days again, and she really needed some company. But her parents wouldn’t be home for another two or three hours, Chase had lacrosse practice, Molly had dance, Gert had a club meeting, and Alex…well, she hadn’t really spoken to Alex in a while.
With everything in her, Nico wished that Amy was there. That meant that Alex would most likely be over and the two of them would be playing video games whilst Nico sat on the couch and watched them, throwing in an insult about their playing skills every now and then to try and disguise the fact that she actually liked to watch them play. Or maybe Alex would be busy with AV club, so Nico would wander into Amy’s room and hang out with her while she did her homework or something. But Amy hadn’t been here for a long time. Almost a year, to be exact.
Nico shook her head, trying to shake away her thoughts. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about her sister. Doing so only ever proved to ruin her day, sending her into a fog of darkness that no one had any hope of bringing her out of. She needed to do better this school year, try harder and show up to all her classes.
She knew it was too late now, though. Once her mind had wandered to Amy, she usually spent the rest of her day blaming herself for what had happened and wishing she could do something to make it right. So, she did what she normally did when she wanted to block out her thoughts and the rest of the world with them. She hooked her phone up to her stereo, blasted her music at an insane volume, and began to clean.
Cleaning her room helped her mind feel more organized. As she sorted through the items on the floor, it felt as if she were sorting through her thoughts as well. She put all the things she didn’t want to think about into one folder that she could close and file away at the back of her mind.
By the time she had reorganized the books on her bookshelf and put everything away in its rightful place, only twenty minutes had passed. She groaned. That was what happened when she had too many bad days in a row. Her room didn’t have enough time to get messy again. Most people would see that as a good thing, but Nico didn’t because she knew that, this time, she would have to clean out her closet instead.
Before she even opened the closet door, she went into the kitchen to grab a trash bag, knowing that she would need it for whatever she would find inside. She hadn’t cleaned her closet out in a long, long time, but she needed something to do today. She was determined not to be left alone with her thoughts.
When she opened the door, she saw all the things that she had shoved inside the closet in the past several months, all the things she didn’t want to throw away but didn’t have anywhere else to put. Old school notes on lessons she had found interesting, her Wiccan books, and what was probably too many pairs of black boots, to name a few. She knew that she would have to get rid of at least half of the things piled on the floor, though, before it looked neat in there. On a normal day, she would’ve groaned at the thought of the time this task would take, but she found that she was kind of grateful for it today because it seemed like her ability to focus on anything else had disappeared.
After making a pile of the things she wanted to keep and throwing everything else out for the better part of an hour, Nico saw something in the back of her closet that she hadn’t thought about in months. She suddenly remembered why she had never dared to clean her closet out before. It was a shoebox. It looked ordinary enough, but she knew the thing inside of it was anything but ordinary. She cringed when she saw the old Christmas candy sitting on top of the box, and she tossed it into the trash bag before reaching for the shoebox and opening it to reveal the object inside.
A staff with a circular top that looked sort of like a miniature version of a quidditch hoop from Harry Potter. The Staff of One, Amy had called it. Apparently, it held some sort of magic abilities, but Nico had yet to see any. Amy had stolen it from the Church of Gibborim.
Nico had forgotten all about the Staff. Or rather, she had been trying her hardest to forget about it by throwing all of her focus into doing homework or studying for the tests she had in school, by spending as much time as she could with her friends or her parents. She couldn’t change the past, and she was trying her hardest to move on. Holding the Staff in front of her now, though, she felt all the memories from that night flying back to her full force.
She sat up with a jolt as the door to her room opened, ready to scream until she realized it was only her sister. She looked over at the clock on her nightstand. 1:23 AM.
"What the hell, Amy?” she groaned. “I’m not in the mood for one of your games right now.”
“This isn’t a game.” Amy practically shoved the object she was holding into Nico’s hands. “I stole this from the Church of Gibborim. It’s called the Staff of One.”
"Wait, you—”
“They already know I took it. It’ll be much safer with you,” Amy said in a rush, cutting Nico off. “I have to get to Alex’s house, so I’ll see you in the morning. Keep the Staff safe. It’s magic.”
And Amy was gone. Nico wondered if Amy wanted her to follow, if she had made up some grand new mystery for them to solve because she couldn’t sleep. Nico had been asleep, though; in fact, she was still trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes. She wasn’t in the mood to play games. Inspecting the object in her hands, Nico wondered where the hell Amy had even gotten it. Maybe she had been going through their mother’s antiques closet.
Rolling her eyes at her sister’s antics, Nico threw the relic into a shoebox in her closet before climbing back into bed and pulling the covers over herself once more. She hoped she would be able to fall back asleep easily, annoyed that her sister had woken her up in the middle of the night when they both had school the next morning.
Well, Nico had school the next morning.
Amy never had to go to school again.
Nico couldn’t help but blame herself for being annoyed with her sister and ignoring her instead of trying to talk to her and stop her from going out in such a rush. If Nico would’ve taken her seriously, she could’ve stopped her from going to Alex’s house that night, kept her away from the roads and safe from the car that had killed her, the car that had surely been driven by someone from the Church of Gibborim trying to recover their stolen property. Amy had needed her help, and Nico had brushed it off like it was nothing. How could she not have seen that Amy was in trouble?
Not for the first time, Nico made her way to Amy’s room, leaving her closet and the Staff of One forgotten behind her. No matter how many times she searched the room, she always found herself trying again. She wouldn’t believe Amy hadn’t left some sort of clues indicating what she had been doing. Amy might’ve wanted to keep her search a secret while she was alive, but she had to have known the dangers of whatever she was doing, and there was no way that she wouldn’t have wanted someone else to know, someone who had a chance of doing something about it. Nico might not have taken the time to help Amy that night, but she could avenge her death now by bringing down her killer. If only she had more to go off of than a couple of sentences spoken to her at 1 AM.
Even though she already knew there was nothing to find, Nico searched the obvious places first, in the drawers, under the bed, and in the closet. Then, she moved onto the more difficult places, such as behind the dressers, nightstand, and the headboard of the bed.
She paused when she saw the multitude of wristbands that Amy had gotten solving escape rooms around Brentwood, remembering how quickly her sister had been able to work through the puzzles while Nico herself remained stumped, more often than not. She hadn’t set foot in an escape room since before Amy had died.
Shaking the thoughts away, she moved over to the air vent, pulling it off the wall and looking inside, but Amy was too smart for that. Nico knew that Amy was too smart for anyone and that the older girl’s secrets had most likely died with her. If Amy actually had hidden any clues as to what she’d been up to in here, Nico probably had no hope of ever finding them.
But that never stopped her from trying.
After searching for at least half an hour to no avail, Nico grabbed one of the hairbrushes off the vanity and forcefully threw it onto the bed, watching as it bounced off and onto the floor.
Frustrated tears fell from her eyes as she slumped down against the vanity. When she’d had a bad day like this last week, she’d held in the tears, having spent the afternoon vigorously cleaning her room to keep herself from thinking about what she so desperately wished she could avoid. It felt good to finally let the tears fall, though. She was tired of holding them in.
She just wanted this day to be over so she could go back to forgetting tomorrow, forgetting her sister was gone and that she was too much of a failure to find any clues as to what Amy had been up to at the Church of Gibborim. Nico wanted nothing more than to find the person responsible for her sister’s death, but she had no idea how to even start when she didn’t know what Amy had seen that night, and Alex wouldn’t tell her anything.
Sighing in defeat, she let her head fall back against the leg of the vanity with a thump, and that’s when she heard it. A sound like that of a drawer springing open. For a moment, she allowed hope to blossom in her chest, but she quashed it immediately, preparing for disappointment. She had probably only knocked something off when she had hit it with her head.
She slowly turned around and gasped at what she saw. The middle drawer, the one that Nico had always assumed to be a fake, had popped open. Excitement fluttered through her as she looked closely at the piece of furniture behind her head. A tiny square of the white vanity was a tad darker than the rest of the material. A motion sensor. A motion sensor that had been slightly painted over to disguise it with the rest of the vanity. The paint layer was light enough that it could still register motion, but Nico knew that she probably had to have pressed up against it for it to have worked.
It was so very Amy. Even if anyone had noticed a slight difference in the paint before, the discrepancy probably hadn’t been given a second glance. Nico herself might have even noticed it before and written it off as nothing. If Amy had never wanted anyone to find whatever she had hidden in there, she had done a perfect job at hiding it.
Springing up from the floor, Nico hurried over to the drawer. Her shoulders slumped in disappointment when she saw that it was only a flashlight. The drawer had revealed what must have been her sister’s emergency flashlight. It made sense that she would have a flashlight if she had been sneaking out of the house at night. This must have been where she had hidden it.
Nico shook her head then. That couldn’t be it. Amy wanted to hide the fact that she had been sneaking out, yes, but she could’ve had a flashlight in her room for a variety of other reasons. Even if she had wanted to hide it, Nico knew her sister. A flashlight was something that Amy would’ve hidden in a shoebox in her closet, not in some secret, hidden-motion-sensor-activated drawer in her room. There had to be something more to it.
She grabbed the flashlight and inspected it closely, wondering if her sister had left some sort of secret message on it. But there was no writing of any kind on it at all. Then, she shook the flashlight, wondering if there was something hidden inside it. There wasn’t. That’s when Nico flipped it on to find that it wasn’t actually a flashlight at all.
It was a black light.
Something in this room had been written on in ink that could only be seen with a black light. Nico’s heart soared. Her sister had left a trail for her after all. Whatever Amy had started, she clearly wanted her sister to finish it or at least know about it. Nico knew that she would have to wait for it to be dark out before she could really use the black light, but she didn’t mind. She smiled the first genuine smile she had in a long time as she walked back into her room to finish cleaning out the rest of her closet. She had finally found something, and she couldn’t wait for dark.
Dinner was an awkward affair that night. Usually, Nico found herself filling her parents in on what had been going on with her that day, and they did the same. There weren’t any secrets in the Minoru household anymore, not after Amy’s death. They had all needed to be open and honest with one another to grieve for Amy together, and they’d all decided that talking to each other whenever they encountered a problem was better than trying to solve it on their own.
Her parents had implemented an honesty policy, and Nico had readily agreed to it, wishing that Amy had told her what she had been up to before it was too late. Nico felt that she couldn’t share her earlier discovery, though, so she didn’t really feel much like talking that night. Her parents picked up on her odd behavior, shooting each other worried looks throughout the meal, but thankfully they didn’t say anything.
Eventually, Nico excused herself under the pretense that she had a headache and wanted to go to bed early to sleep it off. She was also grateful that her parents didn’t point out the fact that it was only eight o’clock, and Nico didn’t usually go to bed until at least eleven.
They kissed her goodnight and allowed her to retreat into the confines of her room. She retrieved the black light from where she had stored it underneath her mattress, ready to hurry into Amy’s room and see what her sister had left for her, but she heard someone walking down the hall and cursed under her breath. She couldn’t risk her parents seeing her sneaking in and out of Amy’s room, so she resolved to wait until she was sure they had fallen asleep.
At midnight, Nico finally opened her door again, slipping out of her room with the black light and sneaking down the hall into her sister’s room. She hadn’t heard her parents go to bed yet, but she knew that it was safe to assume they had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room and probably wouldn’t be moving for another hour or two.
The first thing she did inside her sister’s room was shut the blinds that she had opened earlier, to block out the moonlight. Then, she turned on the black light, both eager and apprehensive to find out whatever her sister had been hiding in the last few months of her life. Why she had truly been killed.
Shining the beam around the room, Nico froze when the mirror lit up with whitish ink. There was writing on the mirror—notes—a long list of what appeared to be names. Upon closer inspection, Nico realized that they were members of the Church of Gibborim. She knew that Amy had been snooping around that place for a while before she had died, that it hadn’t all started that night, but she hadn’t had any definitive proof of that until now.
Each name on the mirror had an age written next to it and the date that each person had joined the Church. Nico stifled a gasp, not wanting to risk waking her parents up, when her eyes fell to what was written beneath each name on the list. The date each person had been reported missing. Each one of these people, all teens, had gone missing, most of them not long after they had joined, and she knew in her heart that they had probably never been found. Did that mean the Church was killing teenagers?
Quietly, Nico snuck back to her room to grab a notebook and pencil out of her backpack before heading back to Amy’s room and shutting the door behind her. She was going to write down each and every one of those names so that she could research them online later and look further into their cases herself. There were eleven names in total on the mirror, and it looked like these people had all gone missing around the same time of year.
As she finished writing down the last name, Nico looked over her own list one more time, making sure that it matched the list on the mirror. She knew this was why her sister had been killed, for knowing all this information. She just didn’t understand why it had mattered to Amy so much. Everyone had heard the rumors of families losing people to the Church, never seeing them again once they joined, but Nico had always thought that was because they had been brainwashed by the cult. She had never once thought to look into it or that the Church might have been committing secret murders. What had even gotten Amy interested in the Church in the first place, and why had it been so important to her to expose them?
She thought back to when Amy and Alex had been taking that online class about hacking a while ago. What if they’d tried hacking into the Church of Gibborim just to see if they could, and they found something that they couldn’t turn their backs on? Would Nico really be able to just ignore the fact that an organization was possibly killing a teenager every year if she had been in their position? Could she ignore it now that she herself had stumbled upon it?
Of course, she would research the information herself when she got back to her room; she had to make sure this wasn’t all some big misunderstanding. In her heart, though, she knew that it wasn’t. Amy was dead because of it. She must’ve stumbled upon something huge one night when she had snuck into the Church—because she had been sneaking in. The code to the Church’s alarm system was written in the bottom right corner of the mirror, along with the words, Who is the glowing girl?
Now, Nico was even more intrigued. There was a girl inside the Church that had glowing skin? Was she one of the kids on the list or someone else entirely? Clearly, that was something that Amy hadn’t had the time to figure out.
Nico wondered what the hell was going on inside that building. She couldn’t help but feel that she owed it to Amy to find out. Her sister had left her this information for a reason. Amy had wanted Nico to know about this, despite what Alex thought, and she didn’t know if Amy had left it for her because she thought Nico deserved to know the truth about what had happened to her or because she hoped that Nico would continue what she had started, but Nico knew what she was going to do with it. She could already feel that familiar excitement thrumming through her veins that she used to get when she and Amy would solve pretend mysteries as kids. There was no way she was going to be able to rest until she at least had a look around for herself, and that’s when she knew.
She was going to sneak into the Church of Gibborim.