Chapter3
After school, I lowered my custom-encrypted phone.
The old man had given strict orders not to cause trouble while I was at school. But not causing trouble didn't mean I was going to just stand there and be a target.
One more tap on "send," and within five minutes, two black SUVs packed with heavy firepower would roll into the alleyway behind the school. They’d stuff those bottom-feeding street thugs into oil drums and sink them to the bottom of the Atlantic before morning.
"Come with me!"
A hand suddenly clamped onto my wrist. Maya’s palm was slick with cold sweat, but her grip was surprisingly strong.
"Don't go out the back." Her voice was shrill with sheer panic. Behind her thick lenses, her eyes were red with desperate urgency. "Even if you run fast enough to dodge them today, she'll just hire someone else tomorrow. You can't take on guys with knives all by yourself."
"So what's your advice?" I asked, my tone intentionally deadpan. "Call the cops? Tell a teacher?"
"No." Maya bit down on her bloodless lower lip, took a deep breath, and dragged me toward the basement stairs of the main building. "Just come with me."
I let her pull me along. We dodged the hallway security cameras and ducked into an abandoned computer lab in the basement, a graveyard for obsolete tech.
Maya let go of me and made a beeline for the single active server terminal humming in the corner.
Over the next three minutes, I was treated to a spectacular show.
The second she dropped into the chair in front of the monitors, every trace of that timid, cowering rabbit completely vanished.
She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, rested her fingers on the keys, and unleashed a torrential downpour of keystrokes.
"Sixteen seconds to bypass the school's firewall and splice into the municipal street cams." Maya stared dead at the screen, her voice as clinically detached as a machine.
"The dark web's onion routing is a bit more annoying. Needs to bounce through three offshore nodes." She murmured, half speaking to herself, half giving me a sitrep. "Done. Found the underground bounty board."
I stood behind her, watching the familiar obsidian skull logo pop onto the screen. A genuine spark of amusement flared in my eyes.
This girl, who couldn't even look people in the eye in the hallways, was a top-tier rogue hacker.
"Chloe paid the deposit using an anonymous account." Maya’s fingers flew across the keyboard. "But I reverse-traced her Ethereum wallet. Now, I'm going to hack into the third-party escrow pool, purge her contract, and mask it as a payment failure."
"Don't just refund it," I said smoothly, keeping my eyes on the monitor. "Reroute the funds straight into the public accounts of the city's homeless shelters. Since there's no transaction record to dispute, let her money truly vanish into thin air. When those thugs don't get paid, they’ll go looking for her themselves."
Maya's flying fingers paused for half a beat.
"Good point."
She slammed the Enter key. A bold red box flashed in the center of the screen: Transaction Void.
"Spoiled brats like her usually lack basic operational security. If she was stupid enough to place a dark web hit during school hours, her phone must've pinged the school's public Wi-Fi at some point." Maya swiftly cycled to another interface. "I piggybacked into her iCloud while I was at it. Let's see what else she's hiding..."
A hidden, encrypted folder popped up. Maya cracked the password in seconds and clicked on a video file.
The footage was slightly grainy, shot from a static angle—likely a phone hidden behind a potted plant.
In the video, a girl wearing the exact same cheap, dark-grey hoodie I had on today—even deliberately mimicking my slight slouch from behind—picked the lock to the principal's office with a wire. She then pulled a manila envelope stamped with "Final Exams" out of a filing cabinet.
Watching the clip, a cold sneer escaped my lips.
Chloe didn't need hard evidence. She just needed plausible deniability. In a school like this, one blurry video was more than enough to completely ruin someone.
"She deliberately paid a body double and framed the shot right in the camera blind spot." Maya hit pause and turned to look at me, her brow heavily furrowed. "She's planning to destroy your reputation and get you expelled."
I stared at the paused frame, lightly tapping my fingertips against my thigh.
"Since she loves showing off her videos so much," I said, shifting my gaze to Maya, "can you hijack the main projector in the school auditorium?"
Maya pushed her glasses up. A flash of deeply suppressed exhilaration glinted behind the lenses.
"If it has a screen and a network connection, I own it."
I looked down at this girl, swallowed by her oversized uniform, looking like a stiff breeze could knock her over.
"What do you want out of this, Maya?" I asked suddenly.
Maya froze. It took several seconds before she lowered her head, staring at the gaps between the keys.
"I don't want to be stepped on for the rest of my life. I want to get into Harvard." Her voice was quiet but resolute. "I want to walk out of this disgusting place with a clean slate, head held high, and never come back."
In my world, loyalty was bought with blood and cold hard cash.
But in that moment, I made a decision.
I reached out and patted her shoulder.
"Say the word, and those doors will be wide open for you."
I turned and walked toward the exit of the lab.
"Package all the 'good stuff' you found on her cloud. Tomorrow, we're giving her a grand premiere."
The next day. The weekly all-school assembly.
I stood in the very back row, still wearing that washed-out hoodie.
Chloe was stationed near the front, flanked by her usual entourage. She glanced back over her shoulder, a cold, purely anticipatory smirk touching her lips.
On the other side of the auditorium, Jace was lazily leaning against a handrail.
He surveyed the crowd with that detached, god-like complex of his. Of course he knew Chloe was going to pull something today. He was just waiting for the drama to unfold.
The principal marched up to the microphone at the center of the stage, his face dark as a thundercloud.
"Today, we will not be discussing academics, nor will we be discussing school honors."
"Just yesterday, an incredibly severe and appalling act of theft took place right here on campus! Someone broke into my office and stole the highly classified copies of your upcoming final exams!"
Chloe dramatically pressed a hand over her mouth in a fake gasp, though the malicious glee in her eyes was practically overflowing.
Jace shifted his weight, staring in my direction with morbid fascination.
"After a thorough investigation last night, the administration received an anonymous security tape." The principal's voice shook with unadulterated rage. "This kind of scum does not deserve to walk our halls! Roll the video!"
The massive projector screen slowly descended from the ceiling.
After a few harsh, electrical flickers, the projector hurled a blinding beam of light onto the white canvas.
Over a thousand pairs of eyes—including Chloe's perfectly lined ones—deadlocked onto the screen.
And from all the way across the auditorium, I caught a fleeting shift in Jace’s expression—
Not shock.
Disappointment.
He had been holding his breath for a bloody slaughter. But instead, it was just a boring, petty frame-up. He actually stifled a yawn.
On the screen, the video finally buffered.
Except, it wasn't Chloe’s painstakingly staged "exam heist" footage.
It was a clip she had never intended for the public eye...
