Chapter 2

I stared at her intently.

Chloe smiled, then viciously squeezed my right arm until I cried out in pain before letting go.

"You can't win, Elana." Chloe looked satisfied at my pale face from the pain, then left surrounded by her entourage.

The classroom was soon empty.

I dragged my fractured right arm out of the academic building. Relying on memory, I snuck into the building materials storage room in the basement of the engineering school. I randomly found some construction supplies to stabilize my fractured arm.

Would it leave me disabled? Would the bone set wrong? I didn't know. When your bank account balance is in single digits, disability isn't something you're qualified to worry about.

Three days later, I returned to the corridor outside the advanced Mechanical Dynamics lab class.

The originally noisy classroom fell into dead silence the moment they saw me.

Then, "splat"—a half-drunk cup of coffee hit me squarely on the head. Ice and sticky liquid ran down my hair into my collar as laughter erupted from the crowd.

"Good Lord, this sewer-stinking bitch actually has the nerve to come back?"

"Looking at that plastered arm, doesn't it look like a disgusting mutant freak?"

Professor Evans walked to the podium and tapped the blackboard to stop the chaos: "Quiet. Today's micro-power system project will be conducted in groups of four. Use the lab resources to complete an innovative converter assembly—this accounts for thirty percent of your final grade."

Students quickly began forming groups. Not a single group was willing to accept me. Even the few working-class students who occasionally borrowed my class notes looked away guiltily when they met my gaze.

Seeing me left out, Professor Evans said: "Miss Sterling, your group is short one person. Davis will join you."

A flash of displeasure crossed Chloe's face, but she immediately put on a smile: "Of course, Professor."

But as soon as I walked toward their workstation, Tyler, who was in Chloe's group, suddenly thrust out both hands and shoved my shoulders hard.

My right arm's cast slammed heavily into the table corner, the pain nearly bringing me to my knees.

"Stay away, you stinking thief from the slums." Tyler spat at my shoes. "Who knows if you're carrying some disease you're too poor to treat? Don't let your filthy hands that dig through trash cans touch our group's high-precision capacitors."

The girl next to her, Zoey, went even further and threw a handful of discarded screws at my face.

"Do you understand? We're using aerospace-grade variable resistors specially supplied by Sterling Corporation." Zoey mocked. "If you damage even a millimeter of it, you couldn't pay it back even if we harvested all your organs. Go eat dust in the back, you cheap plagiarizing whore."

Chloe stood to the side, casually shaking her water bottle, enjoying my predicament.

I turned around and walked straight to the back of the lab—to the metal recycling bin filled with discarded experimental materials and scrapped parts.

Because I was ostracized, I could only forcibly assemble this garbage—what they saw as waste—on an old spare table.

Three hours later, each group began submitting their work.

Tyler proudly carried their group's gorgeous model—built with expensive materials—to the podium. When I walked over and placed that "piece of junk" made of scrapped circuit boards and copper wire wrapped in tape on the scoring tray at the teacher's desk, Tyler doubled over with exaggerated laughter.

"What is this? A homeless person's excrement?" Tyler slammed his knee into my uninjured left leg. "Elana, have you gone crazy from poverty? Sticking a bunch of junk together—do you really think the university is the garbage recycling center from your slum neighborhood?"

"I think the water in her brain hasn't dried yet." Chloe said in a voice only we could hear, mockingly. "Submitting this hopeless garbage—you're not just insulting yourself, you're insulting the professor. Get ready to pack your bags and get out of school, you plagiarizing dog. This is what you get for going against me."

Sharp pain shot through the top of my foot, but I forced myself not to cry out.

In their eyes, this ugly shell pieced together from scrap metal was a joke. But these idiots had no idea that hidden inside was an absolutely innovative structure that could miraculously increase micro kinetic energy conversion rates by forty percent.

"Whether this is garbage or not," I ignored the excruciating pain in my foot and looked coldly at Chloe, "you'll understand when we do the power test."