I didn't sleep at all.
Couldn't, even if I wanted to. My brain kept replaying the flashlight, the message, the chill in that room. I sat cross-legged on my bed, watching Chiamaka's phone until the battery gave its final blink and died.
I then decided to reopen the encrypted file.
Still locked.
I downloaded a basic brute-force cracker — something I never thought I'd use outside a hackathon — and let it run.
But still nothing.
Whoever sent this file was serious. The encryption wasn't just strong. It was deliberate. Built like a vault — meant to keep something deeply hidden.
But why would they send it to me?
I couldn't make sense of it. I wasn't anyone — just a final-year S.E. student with a decent GPA and a buggy app.
But I had one person I could run to — Someone who never judged me, even when I broke things beyond repair.
So I packed my laptop, put on my hoodie, and walked across campus to Femi's place.
It was barely 7 a.m. when I knocked—Three sharp taps.
He opened, squinting. "Ada? You okay?"
"No," I said, stepping in. "And I need help."
"Come on it, it's a bit messy tho".
Messy was an understatement; Femi's room was a mess of tangled cables and empty energy drink cans. Brushing aside a mechanical keyboard, he sat down and motioned for my laptop
"This file — msg.enc — Someone emailed it to me right before Chiamaka disappeared."
He sat up straighter as if the statement brought him to his senses.
"She's missing?"
"Gone?" He asked.
"Her phone was cracked, flashlight on, and she left a message." I hesitated, then added, "It said, 'He said your name.'"
Femi blinked, and i could see the color draining slightly from his face. "Show me."
He ran the file through a hex viewer, frowning.
"This isn't just encrypted — it's booby-trapped. There's embedded code, likely something that runs silently once opened."
"Like a virus?"
"Like a beacon," he corrected. "This is called home. Whoever sent it knows you opened it."
The pit in my stomach widened.
Femi zoomed in on a line of the compiled junk code. "It's a proxy relay. Hidden deep. Someone's tunneling through your system. And using your app — FaceTrace — as the channel."
My mouth went dry.
"You're saying… FaceTrace was hijacked? My final year project hijacked."
He slightly nodded. "The attendance system has been recording and forwarding student biometric data. All of it. You just didn't know."
He clicked open a log dump. IP pings. Nodes. A single signature stood out:
HexKey9Z
Femi froze.
"What?" I asked.
He didn't speak. Just opened a file from an old case folder on his desktop: CampusNet Breach 2022.
There it was.
Primary exploit signature: HexKey9Z.
"That breach took down half the university systems last year. Everyone thought it was a random exploit."
"But it wasn't?"
Femi looked at me. "It was a test run. And whoever it was… they're back. And now they've used you."
My hands were shaking.
I wasn't just a pawn. I was the breach.
And Chiamaka might've paid the price for it.
Femi closed the logs. "We need to move. Whoever's behind this — they're watching. And they're not done."
"Where do we start?" I asked.
Femi paused. Then he opened a folder labeled "Red Sites." He clicked on a dark web browser and pasted a string.
"Welcome to the breadcrumb trail," he muttered. "We follow it carefully — or we disappear just like she did."