Inside the old three-story building, the hacker was no longer trying to break the encryption.
They'd already done that.
Callum's phone now lay open on the workbench like a dissected animal. Private folders decrypted. Logs exposed. Apps mirrored on multiple monitors. Every inch of data—photos, files, chats—was being scanned by a custom script that flagged anomalies.
It pinged twice.
One was a message Callum had never sent.
The other… was a folder he'd renamed just days ago.
\[Eira.V]
The hacker froze.
They hovered the cursor over the folder but didn't open it right away.
Something about it felt too deliberate.
Then, like flipping a switch, they dove in.
---
Eira's photos.
Not stalker-like. Not romantic.
Just moments—snapped from a distance. In class. On stage. Walking through the halls.
Each one labeled by date.
Each one had a short tag next to it: "why this angle?" "was she looking at me?" "don't delete."
The hacker leaned back in their chair, expression unreadable behind the mask.
They didn't expect Callum to be the sentimental type.
"I underestimated you," they whispered.
---
Back at the academy, Eira sat in the back corner of the library, her body perfectly still—but her eyes moved rapidly across the screen.
She was coding something. Quietly. Privately.
No one knew she could code.
And no one knew what she was doing now.
It wasn't for class. It wasn't for fun. It was a failsafe.
A tool she once promised herself she'd never use again.
But this wasn't a normal situation.
And that handkerchief being gone without a trace? That was her trigger.
---
Callum, across campus, was digging through physical files—yes, actual paper. There were still parts of the academy's internal records that hadn't been digitized. And that's exactly why he was here.
He wasn't looking for Eira.
Not directly.
He was looking for the person watching them.
And he had a theory.
A dangerous one.
He'd narrowed the list to twenty-three potential names. Most of them harmless.
Except one.
One name that never showed up on attendance lists, faculty logs, or even alumni books.
But still existed in the school's database under a dormant ID: Subject #K-01
Code name: "Mercer"
His blood ran cold.
That was Theo's last name.
---
That night, Eira opened her encrypted drive. Her fingers trembled slightly as she keyed in her access code.
There, in her secret folder, was a name she hadn't seen in years.
Kurtis Mercer
She stared at the file.
And whispered: "You shouldn't be alive."
---
Back at the abandoned building, the masked hacker finally removed the face covering.
Underneath wasn't Theo.
It was someone younger.
Someone with soft features and a cold expression that didn't belong to a teenager.
They picked up Callum's phone and smirked.
"You're smarter than I thought, Vance."
They opened the last photo Callum had saved—
It was a close-up.
Of Eira.
Mid-performance.
Her eyes wet. Her smile fake.
The caption underneath simply read:
"She's not what they think."