📍 Adewale Academy – Advanced Computer Science Lab
🕤 9:00 AM
The lab felt like the inside of a chilled vault—cold, sterile, humming with machines that cost more than entire staff salaries from Maka's old school. Rows of students in polished shoes and curated hairstyles sat at identical terminals like royalty observing a ritual.
Professor Durojaiye marched in, tie already crooked from stress, and said the two words guaranteed to cause an immediate spike in heart rate.
"Pop quiz."
A murmur rolled through the room. The overhead screen lit up with a monstrous block of code: bloated loops, redundant sub-functions, zero optimization. The kind of code that made you question humanity's evolution.
"First person to optimize it gets a five percent bonus," the professor added.
In the front row, the highborns reacted with casual confidence. Lekan—whose wristwatch probably had its own passport—leaned back and cracked his knuckles like a boxer about to enter the ring.
Maka didn't wait. Her fingers hit the keyboard with quiet violence. This—this chaotic mess—was familiar. It was the kind of code she'd fixed for community centers and thrift-store POS machines. The kind that people insisted was "working just fine" even while it wheezed like a dying goat.
She removed redundancies, rewrote the core logic, stripped out dead weight, and snapped it clean.
Ninety seconds.
Done.
She hit submit.
The professor's master console blinked. His eyebrows shot up. Then he let out a short, disbelieving laugh.
"Well." A pause. "It appears our lottery student has just outperformed all of you. A flawless execution."
Silence.
Then he narrowed his eyes at the dataset. "Though your… efficiency has flagged seventeen of our legacy security protocols as outdated. The board will not appreciate that. They see… innovation differently." His tone dropped. "Food for thought, Miss Okoro."
Respect flickered across a few faces—thin and brief, like a match flaring before the wind killed it.
Then Lekan let out an exaggerated snort.
Door shut.
Target acquired.
The room shifted from impressed to territorial. Maka could feel the recalibration happening around her like a battlefield adjusting to a new threat.
📍 Academy Dining Hall
🕛 12:15 PM
The dining hall was a cathedral of glass and polished steel, humming with noise. Trays clattered, laughter rose and fell, and the aroma of imported spices floated like perfume.
Her morning high had evaporated hours ago. Now she carried her tray like it was evidence of a crime.
She spotted a table with familiar faces—students from her class. There was one empty chair.
"Is this seat taken?" she asked softly.
The girl with perfect braids—braids so neat they looked copyrighted—didn't blink.
"It's saved," she said, sliding her designer bag onto the chair with the finality of a slammed door.
Across the hall, Temi watched. She sipped from a sleek bottle of imported mineral water, her expression unreadable. Calm. Poised. Dangerous.
Her eyes didn't say you don't belong here.
They said something worse.
You're not even significant enough to dislike.
Invisible.
Maka's throat tightened. She ate alone, listening to the invisible crack of the door she'd opened earlier being locked, bolted, and swallowed whole.
📍 Dormitory – Omega Wing
🕐 1:00 PM
Omega Wing was the forgotten corner of Adewale Academy—too far, too old, and too budget-friendly for anyone with a surname that opened doors.
Maka unlocked her assigned room, expecting quiet.
Instead, she walked into… joyous chaos.
Clothes hung from the bunk like modern art. Canvas boards leaned against the wall—some complete, others screaming in color. Music blasted from a speaker, the bass vibrating through the floor.
In the middle of it all was a girl wielding a paintbrush like a sword.
She froze when she saw Maka, then beamed. "You must be my new prison mate!"
She tugged off her headphones.
"I'm Layo. I paint emotions and fail chemistry. Welcome to Omega, home of society's almost-failures!"
Maka let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. "I'm Maka."
Layo eyed her single suitcase. "Ah! Minimalist queen. Me, I pack like a hurricane. You pack like enlightenment." She giggled. "I love it."
Maka placed her suitcase on the empty bed. Layo surveyed her with interest.
"This wing is a joke to the elites," Layo said, plopping onto her own bed. "But guess what? The main server hub for the entire campus is right under us." She tapped the floor. "Right here. Beneath my paint-stained toes."
"Seriously?"
"My dad's a network engineer," Layo replied proudly. "I practically grew up crawling through server racks. I could map this place's wiring in my sleep."
She rummaged through a small box and pulled out a thin quartz crystal bracelet.
"Here. For you. Dad says quartz helps with signal clarity. Probably nonsense, but with the way this campus runs? Anything is possible."
Maka hesitated. Gifts were rare in her world.
She accepted. Wore it.
For the first time all day, the weight on her chest loosened.
📍 Dorm Room – Late Night
🕚 11:00 PM
Layo had fallen asleep in the middle of painting a sunset.
Maka sat hunched over her laptop, typing in the dim glow of the screen.
KudiSync was crawling.
Not slow.
Crawling.
She launched a test script. Packet loss. Delays. Interference.
Then she remembered Layo's brag—server hub below Omega.
Maka activated a deep network scan.
The results made her blood turn to ice.
Her connection wasn't just slow.
It was being choked.
An intelligent, adaptive throttle system monitored her activity.
If she worked on KudiSync, the system attacked.
If she opened unrelated tabs, it relaxed.
Like a predator studying prey.
She traced it, peeling back layers of encrypted authorization keys until she found the source.
A privileged admin node.
Codename: JAGABAN.
Her breath caught.
That name didn't whisper Adebayo.
It shouted him.
Log timestamps told the rest of the story:
The very first throttle attempt happened at 9:02:01 AM—
Eighteen seconds after she submitted her pop-quiz solution.
Her algorithm had embarrassed someone.
Her punishment began almost immediately.
She ran a projection.
A red graph peaked like a rising storm.
"72 HOURS TO CRITICAL FAILURE."
Her software—her lifeline, her community's digital bank—would collapse in three days.
A notification blinked.
User Report:
"Aunty Bisi's group failed again! This app is a scam! We will go back to our wooden box."
Maka stared at the words.
This wasn't technical anymore.
It was personal. Human. Real.
She closed her laptop with shaking hands.
📍 Rooftop Terrace
🕐 1:00 AM
Sleep refused her.
The server hum felt like mockery vibrating through the walls.
She needed air.
The rooftop terrace was quiet, washed in moonlight. Lagos glittered below—gold, silver, shadow.
She spotted a figure leaning against the railing.
Bayo.
He wasn't the arrogant prince right now. He stood alone, shoulders slumped, sketching on a tablet. The glow etched his face in soft angles, younger, almost fragile.
He sensed her. Instantly, the mask slid back into place.
"Can't sleep, scholarship student?"
She was too raw for games.
"The air here is thin," she murmured. "It's hard to breathe."
Bayo froze.
The smirk faded.
Completely.
"It is," he admitted quietly. "They build towers to reach the stars, but all they really do is block out the sun."
It wasn't poetry.
It was pain.
As he shifted, moonlight brushed against the edge of his collar—revealing a thin, jagged scar.
Old. Violent.
Hidden.
He caught her staring but didn't flinch. Instead, he held her gaze.
"Be careful who you trust here," he said softly. "Not everyone who offers to help wants you to survive."
His eyes drifted downward toward the quad—
the scene of her lunchtime humiliation.
A direct warning.
A strange one.
Almost… protective?
He turned to leave.
Something fell from his pocket—a sleek stylus.
He didn't notice.
He didn't come back.
When he disappeared down the stairwell, Maka bent and picked it up.
Cold metal.
Engraved with a stylized bridge over water.
The emblem of The Lagos Underground.
A rebel tech collective.
A myth.
A threat.
A lifeline.
She pocketed it slowly.
This was a choice.
A beginning.
A line drawn in shadows.
Bayo had given her—intentionally or not—a weapon.
Her enemy had shown his hand.
Her community was counting down to digital collapse.
Her future was under siege.
And the war had quietly begun.
Right here.
On this rooftop.
With a stolen stylus glowing in her palm like a question she wasn't ready to answer.