PART 2: “My neighbor insisted she saw my daughter at home during school hours… so I pretended to go to work and hid under the bed.

It wasn’t the sound of rowdy teenagers playing truant, nor was it the giggling of kids sneaking fried chicken into a bedroom. It was a synchronized, hushed whisper of words I couldn’t understand, spoken in a cadence that made the hairs on my arms stand up. The footsteps moved down the hallway, stopping right outside Lily’s bedroom door.

My heart hammered against the floorboards so violently I was certain they would hear it. Through the narrow gap between the dusty floor and the hem of the bed skirt, I saw the door handle slowly turn. The door creaked open.

Four pairs of feet walked into the room.

Three of them wore standard teenage sneakers—beat-up Converse, muddy Nikes. But the fourth pair, leading the group, belonged to Lily. She was wearing her favorite white school sneakers, but she wasn’t walking normally. She was walking on her tiptoes, her movements stiff, almost mechanical, like a marionette being pulled by invisible strings.

“Is the perimeter clear?” a voice whispered. It belonged to a boy, his tone dripping with an unsettling, adult-like gravity.

“The mother’s car is gone. Her phone GPS is pinging at her office downtown,” another voice, a girl’s, replied. She tapped something digital. A tablet? A scanner? “We have exactly six hours before her routine shift ends. Proceed with the extraction.”

I choked back a gasp. My phone GPS? I had left my work phone plugged into the dashboard of my car, parked blocks away, but I had my personal phone in my hand. How did they know my routine? Who were these children?

“Lily, initiate the sequence,” the boy commanded.