They raced back to the Airbnb in a swirl of panic, silence heavy between them. The photo had confirmed it—this wasn’t random. Someone was watching. Someone knew who they were.


Tamika locked the front door while Keenan checked the windows. Zariah paced, phone in hand, but still no signal. No bars. No Wi-Fi. Even Marcus’s hotspot was dead.


“Y’all feel that?” Tamika asked. “Like we’re being boxed in?”


“We are,” Marcus said grimly. “This is part of the pattern.”


“What pattern?” Zariah snapped.


Marcus pulled out a manila folder from his backpack and dumped its contents on the kitchen table—newspaper clippings, death records, photographs. “I’ve been researching the Beale Street disappearances for a year. Every time the city celebrates Black progress—Juneteenth, civil rights anniversaries, historic jazz nights—someone dies. Always a musician. Always in a symbolic way. Instruments as weapons, blood used as ink. The press never links them.”


Zariah sifted through the files, her fingers trembling. “How did we not know?”


“Because we were never supposed to,” Marcus said. “Our parents didn’t tell us because they were scared. But we were born into this.”


Keenan held up an obituary from 1983. It was his uncle—musician, activist, killed in a “freak accident” involving a broken trombone slide.


“I used to think it was coincidence,” he said. “But this... this is a purge.”


That night, the house grew cold. Too cold for a Memphis summer. Power flickered. The radio turned on by itself—low jazz humming through static.


Zariah stood, heart pounding. “He’s near.”


Marcus looked at the window. “Where’s Tamika?”


They found her upstairs.


Or what was left of her.


She was slumped in the hallway, her body bent backward over itself, eyes wide and glassy. A broken flute had been driven through her chest like a crucifix. Blood pooled beneath her, forming a spiral that matched the one from Club Euphoria.


On the wall above her head, scrawled in that same red ink:


“Three Remaining. The Solo Ends at Midnight.”