Elia walked back into the empty Class 10 room. The heavy metal music was off.
She sat at her desk, her phone resting flat on the surface. Her fingers tapped the screen with terrifying speed.
The classroom door swung open. Cody rushed in, his chest heaving. He had followed her from the cafeteria.
"Holy shit," Cody breathed, staring at her with wide eyes. "You just took down a 200-pound linebacker with a butter knife. Are you insane?"
Elia ignored him. Her eyes were locked on the scrolling green code.
Cody walked over, leaning over her desk. He looked at her phone.
"What are you doing now?" he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.
"Taking out the trash," Elia replied coldly.
She launched a brute-force attack on the school's main server. The Elite Prep firewall was designed by top-tier cybersecurity firms, but to Elia, it was made of wet paper.
She breached the admin node in twelve seconds.
She accessed the backend of the anonymous gossip forum.
She ran a reverse-IP trace on the post that had started the rumor. The code stripped away the VPNs and proxy shields in a matter of seconds.
The source IP address flashed on her screen.
It belonged to a device registered on the school's Wi-Fi network.
Device Name: Geri's iPhone 14 Pro.
Elia's lip curled into a sneer. Sloppy. Stupid.
She didn't just delete the post. Deleting it wouldn't clear her name. She needed to destroy the source.
She opened a backdoor she had quickly installed in Geri's phone last night, taking advantage of the brief, vulnerable window when Gorge had ordered the townhouse's Wi-Fi router reset. She accessed Geri's voice memos.
She found a recording from yesterday afternoon.
Elia wrote a forced-execution script. She bundled the audio file with a highly aggressive pop-up virus.
She targeted every single device connected to the Elite Prep network. Phones, tablets, smartboards, even the digital clocks in the hallways.
She hit execute.
Cody watched as Elia's screen went black.
Then, a blood-red skull materialized in the center of her screen.
At that exact moment, a deafening, synchronized alarm blared throughout the entire school.
Every phone in the building vibrated violently. Every smartboard in every classroom snapped on, glowing blindingly bright.
The red skull appeared on thousands of screens simultaneously.
Then, the audio started playing. It blasted from the classroom speakers, from the phones in students' pockets, from the cafeteria PA system.
It was Geri's voice. Clear, shrill, and dripping with malice.
"I'm going to post that she's a whore," the recording of Geri echoed through the halls. "Make sure you guys comment on it immediately. Say she slept with an old man to pay tuition. I want that rust-belt trash expelled by Friday."
A second voice, one of Geri's minions, laughed. "You're a genius, Geri. Everyone will believe it."
The recording looped. Three times.
In the piano room on the second floor, Geri stared at her phone. The red skull glared back at her. Her own voice mocked her from the speaker.
The blood drained from Geri's face. Her hands started shaking so violently she dropped the phone onto the piano keys with a discordant crash.
Her perfect, innocent image. Shattered in ten seconds.
Back in Class 10, the audio stopped.
The red skull vanished. In its place, a single line of white text appeared on every screen in the school.
LIARS BURN.
Then, the school's entire server crashed. The Wi-Fi died. The smartboards went black.
The forum was permanently wiped from existence.
Cody stood frozen next to Elia's desk. He looked from the black smartboard to Elia's perfectly calm face.
His jaw hung open. "You... you did that. You hacked the whole school."
Elia picked up her phone and slipped it into her pocket. She leaned back in her chair, looking at him with dead eyes.
"I was playing Candy Crush," she said flatly.
Cody swallowed hard. He knew she was lying. He knew he was standing next to a monster.
Three miles away, in the back of the idling Rolls-Royce, Kane Wolf stared at his tablet.
The screen was frozen on the image of the blood-red skull.
His heart slammed against his ribs. The air in the car suddenly felt suffocating.
He knew that logo. Every intelligence agency in the world knew that logo.
It was L. The phantom hacker of the Dark Web.
"Lex," Kane barked, his voice tight with adrenaline.
Lex turned around from the front seat. "Boss? The school network just went completely dark."
"It's L," Kane said, his eyes burning with a dark, obsessive fire. "The hacker who probed our offshore financial servers and traced the necklace bounty two nights ago. They're inside the school."
Kane threw the tablet onto the seat.
"Drive to Elite Prep," Kane ordered. "Now."
