The rain came without warning.
By mid-afternoon, the sky cracked open and poured itself across the entire campus. Students scrambled beneath their jackets and bags, laughter echoing off the stone as they dashed between buildings. I watched from a classroom window as puddles formed along the walkways, the kind that reflected everything—buildings, faces, lies.
It was fitting, really. Even the sky looked like it knew how dirty the truth beneath our school had become.
After class, Ethan and I made our way through a back corridor that connected the library to the gym block. Our goal wasn't practice—we were headed to the maintenance hallway where the campus server feeds converged before disappearing into underground conduits. We'd learned something new from the node beneath the bleachers: the data didn't end there.
It went deeper.
And if this place really was a nest of hidden observation, then somewhere, someone was storing everything.
Henry met us by the old laundry room, damp hair plastered to his forehead. "I checked the west fuse panel," he whispered. "Someone's rerouted the power line between midnight and four a.m. every Thursday. No explanation on the schedule."
"That's when they scrub," Ethan said.
Henry blinked. "Scrub?"
"Edit the records," Ethan clarified. "Rewrite logs, remove traces. Consolidate footage."
"Meaning this is bigger than just spying," I said. "They're curating reality."
We followed a narrow service tunnel lined with rusted pipes. It smelled like iron and mold. About halfway through, Ethan stopped suddenly and pulled us into a dark alcove.
Footsteps.
Heavy ones.
We held our breath as a security guard passed by. Except he wasn't one of the usual guards. His uniform looked unofficial—no school crest—and his flashlight was military-grade. Whoever he was, he wasn't here to check water pressure.
Once his steps faded, Ethan exhaled slowly.
"That's one of theirs," he said.
"We need to move," I whispered.
We navigated deeper until we reached a grated door. Beyond it: a locked utility room glowing with blue light from a stack of humming machines. The servers.
We didn't have the tools to break in yet. That was tomorrow's plan.
Today was only reconnaissance.
And yet… just seeing it was enough. The size of it. The hum. The rows of blinking data lights. Evidence that this wasn't just some teacher's pet project. This was organized. Funded. Operated.
"Look," Henry whispered, pointing.
On the steel door was a familiar symbol etched into the metal—the same symbol we'd seen behind the bleachers and on Bennett's old documents:
Δ (the red triangle)
It sent an involuntary shiver down my spine.
We backed out the way we came, silent as ghosts. When we resurfaced at ground level, the rain had softened to a drizzle and the sky was turning a bruised purple. Students were already heading home. The world looked peaceful again.
But we knew better now.
"They're everywhere," Henry muttered.
"Which means," Ethan said, "we walk a thinner line from now on."
The warning line.
One wrong move—one file accessed, one camera caught, one suspicion triggered—and everything could collapse on us. Expulsion would be the best outcome. Detainment… silence… disappearance… we didn't know how far this system reached. Only that it didn't play nice.
That night, back in my room, I laid out everything we had on the floor: the Red List, the ID card, the archive files, Ethan's maps, the photos, the triangles.
It hit me how far we'd come—and how far we still had to go.
"This is it," I wrote in my notebook. "We either pull the curtain back… or get pulled under with it."
Tomorrow, we would return to that server room.
Not to observe.
To breach.
And after that, everything would change.