By Monday morning, the air in school felt sharper. Maybe it was only in my head, but I swore more teachers lingered in the halls than usual, eyes sweeping a little too casually, catching faces just a little too long.
"They definitely know something happened," Henry muttered under his breath as we headed to homeroom.
Ethan didn't respond. He'd barely slept, spending the whole night breaking down the data we extracted from the server room. His eyes were red, movements slower—but his mind was sharper than ever.
During first period, I felt it: the shift. The principal herself made rounds, stepping into random classes. Guidance counselors called students out one by one under the guise of "routine wellness interviews." Security guards we'd never seen before stood near the main gates.
The system was reacting.
We sat low and quiet, pretending to be obedient students, while inside our heads every alarm was screaming.
At lunch, we met in the south stairwell landing where the cameras didn't reach. Ethan opened his notebook.
"They've initiated defensive protocols," he said, keeping his voice low. "Logs show heightened surveillance only on certain students since Sunday. Three of them are on the Red List."
"Anyone else?" I asked.
He hesitated for half a second. "Us."
Henry kicked the wall lightly. "Knew it. They're onto us. What's the move?"
"Not panic," Ethan said. "We let them think we're still guessing. Meanwhile we trace upward."
He spread out several printouts on the ground. They weren't files from the school, but financials—donation routes, scholarship funding lines, investment portfolios linked to the school's parent trust.
"This program is too expensive to be funded by tuition alone," Ethan continued. "Someone outside is backing it. Possibly multiple parties. But there's one key name that keeps showing up on the funding agreements."
He tapped a single signature, repeated across a dozen photocopied contracts.
Victor Harrow.
The chairman of the board. A man none of us had ever met—rich, secretive, philanthropic in the public eye, but almost invisible on campus.
"He's the money," Ethan said. "Bennett, the trials, the Red List, this entire behavioral surveillance model—it all funnels back to him."
"So what—he uses the school as some kind of lab?" Henry asked. "To test what? Mind control? Future leaders? Soldiers?"
"Influencers," Ethan said calmly, "placed in strategic positions across universities, corporations, politics. He builds them young, monitors their personalities here, then moves compliant ones upward through 'scholarships' and 'placements.' Noncompliance is purged."
I felt something dark and cold settle in my stomach. That's what they tried to do to me. When I broke, they tossed me aside and moved on.
"Then Bennett wasn't a mastermind," I said softly. "He was just a mid-level handler."
"And there are others," Ethan confirmed.
We fell silent, each of us processing the new scale of the battle we were stepping into. This was no longer about fixing our school. This was about taking down something far bigger, a system built on manipulation and silence.
Henry cracked his knuckles. "So what next? Hit Harrow directly?"
"Not yet," Ethan said. "We need leverage. Irrefutable evidence. Internal comms. Video. Something they can't bury. Once we go public, we won't get a second chance."
"And until then?" I asked.
Ethan looked at us both with a seriousness I'd never seen in him before. "Until then, we play along. Go to classes. Smile. Let them think we're just kids again."
The bell rang overhead.
We parted ways and slipped back into the façade of normal life.
Smiling. Laughing. Pretending.
But now we knew their name.
Now we knew their purpose.
And somewhere in the shadows above us,
Victor Harrow was watching.
What he didn't know was that we were watching back.
And we were done playing by the rules.