The next morning, the tape pinched.
It was the first thing she noticed, standing at her locker in the same spot as yesterday. A dull, persistent ache where the silver duct tape met the tender skin behind her ear. Not sharp. Just there. A reminder that wouldn't fade into background noise.
The whispers started just after first bell.
They weren't about the glasses. Not directly. They were a low current running beneath the usual hallway chaos. A glance, held a second too long. She caught fragments of the whispers.
"…heard her mom just…"
"…total meltdown, apparently…"
"…why she's so…"
The words never finished. They didn't need to. They were hooks thrown in her direction, hoping to snag a reaction.
Lyra kept her head down, but not in the cowering way they probably wanted. It was a tactical lowering. Her good eye tracked scuffed linoleum, backpack straps, the sway of a group of sophomore girls who fell silent and parted around her like she was a stone in a stream. She was mapping. Observing the network. Who was the source node? Mara, probably, at the center of her cluster by the water fountain. The signal had spread from there.
She felt no anger. Anger was a hot, messy fuel. What she felt was a cold, distant recognition. Ah. This is the new parameter.
Homeroom was a study in forced normalcy. Mrs. Danvers droned about the upcoming history essay. Lyra took notes, her handwriting even and small. The fractured lens turned the whiteboard into a cracked mosaic, but she could still see the important words. Causes. Economic tension. Powder keg. She underlined them.
Just before the bell, Josh Miller, who sat two rows over and had never once looked at her, passed a note to Liam Carter. It wasn't subtle. A folded triangle of notebook paper. Liam unfolded it, read it, and his eyes flicked to her. Not to her face. To the side of her head, to the taped temple. He smirked, a quick, ugly little thing, and nodded at Josh.
Economic tension. Powder keg.
She was the powder keg. They were waiting for a spark.
Lunch was its own ecosystem. The cafeteria roared with a chaos that had a strict, unspoken topology. Tribes at their tables. Lyra's table was in the back, near the overflowing recycling bins. It wasn't officially hers. It was just where the chairs were often empty, where the smell of old milk and bleach was strongest. The place for things that didn't fit.
She unpacked her bag lunch: a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, a bottle of water. The same as always. She took a bite of the sandwich. It was just paste on bread.
At the popular table, Mara laughed, a bright, ringing sound designed to carry. Chloe was leaned in, talking animatedly, shooting a glance toward the back of the room. The message was being reinforced.
Lyra chewed. She watched them not as people, but as components. Mara: the primary server, broadcasting status and influence. Chloe: a repeater, amplifying the signal. The others: clients, receiving and consuming.
Her own isolation wasn't a failure. It was a closed system. Secure. Impenetrable. It had its costs, but it had its defenses, too.
Then, her gaze drifted to the table by the window. The academic decathlon team. Quiet, focused, trading notes on calc problems. And there, between Ethan Choi and Sarah Mendes, was a folded newspaper. The Westwood Sentinel. Local, bi-weekly. Sarah was idly turning pages while Ethan talked.
Lyra's breath hitched, just a little. Her chewing slowed.
Sarah's finger stopped. She was looking at a page somewhere in the middle. Her eyebrows drew together. She said something to Ethan. He leaned over, looked, and his face went still. Not mocking. Something else. Pity? Unease? He reached out and gently turned the page over.
But Lyra had seen. She'd seen the top of the article. The headline wasn't clear through the fractured lens, but the photo beneath it was. Or rather, the absence where a photo had been. A column of text with a blank, white rectangle boxed in the middle. A standard placeholder they used when a picture was… unavailable. Or pulled.
Below the blank space, a sub-heading. A name. Her mother's name.
"…tragedy…" was the only word she could make out from here.
A cold trickle, like the first drop of ice melt, traced down her spine. It wasn't shock. It was the click of a puzzle piece she'd been trying to ignore finally snapping into place. The whispers had a source. A real, printed, tangible source. Someone had gone digging. Someone had found the ghost in the archive and given it new breath.
She looked back at her sandwich. The apple. The table by the bins.
The scandal had a ghost, and the ghost had a byline. And now it was here, in the cafeteria, turning a page under Sarah Mendes's careful fingers.
The bell rang, a shrill, mechanical salvation. The roar of the cafeteria surged as chairs scraped and backpacks were hauled. Lyra moved slowly, deliberately. She crumpled her brown bag into a tight ball, finished her water, and placed the bottle neatly in the recycling bin. She did not look at the newspaper table again.
Walking to chemistry, the hallway felt different. The whispers were no longer just noise. They had a shape now. They had a source document. They had a faded photo that wasn't there.
She adjusted her glasses. The tape pinched, a familiar, grounding pain.
Hostile network identified, she thought, the terminology a cool blanket over the chill inside. Source located. Threat is persistent, low-level. No direct action required.
But as she slid into her lab stool, the smell of old peanut butter still faint in her nose, a new parameter blinked silently in the cold logic of her mind.
Someone was trying to force a login.