The day after the emergency assembly, Queen's Crest didn't breathe.
It watched.
Every hallway, every corner, every whispered conversation carried suspicion thick enough to choke on. Even the portraits seemed to lean out of their frames, listening, judging, remembering.
No announcements. No bells. No chatter. Classes went on, teachers pretended everything was fine, but you could feel it like the whole school was strung up on invisible wire. One wrong move, and something would snap.
Amara noticed it first.
Someone was deleting things.
Files. Records. Names. Photos.
"Look," she whispered to the girl next to her, sliding her tablet across the lunch table.
The prefect archives they all had access to those squeaky-clean, transparent, very official but were missing two names. Senior girls. Important ones. One had even been Head Girl.
"Where did they go?" the girl asked, voice trembling.
Amara didn't answer. She was already up, her chair scraping against the floor.
She moved fast. Too fast. Something wasn't just missing, it had been wiped. Deleted clean. Rewritten like it was never there in the first place. And whoever did it had system-level access.
She was halfway to the IT lab when a girl she'd never spoken to before.....dark-skinned, glasses, soft voice just stepped into her path.
"You shouldn't be walking alone," the girl said. "Not today."
"Excuse me?"
The girl glanced around, then slipped a folded piece of paper, actual paper into Amara's hand and walked off like nothing happened.
Amara unfolded it.
It wasn't a note.
It was a map.
Not of Queen's Crest.
Of what was underneath it.
---
Author's Note – Nervous laughter 😅
Okay. Okay. First of all hi. peeks out from emotional bunker
If your jaw just dropped, same. I've been sitting on this twist like a villain in a swivel chair for WEEKS.
This story was never just about Adrian and Amara playing detective it's about what's buried under their feet.
That paper? Handwritten. Which means no digital trace. Which means somebody doesn't want to be found. Which means we're officially off the deep end, baby.
Alright. Deep breath. Back to the chaos.
---
Adrian didn't go to class.
He couldn't.
He sat in the east library wing, staring at a photo above the genealogy shelves.
Queen's Crest, 1952. The founding day. Seven people four men, three women. One of the women was visibly pregnant.
He blinked. That hadn't been visible before.
He climbed up on the reading bench and leaned in. Under the frame, barely there was a small, carved symbol: a triangle, three dots.
His chest tightened.
He'd seen it before. In his father's office.
That day.
The day his father told him, "You were never supposed to know."
And Adrian had said, "But I do. I know who she was."
His father's silence had said enough.
He thought that truth meant freedom. That once he knew, he could leave Queen's Crest behind.
But standing there now, eyes fixed on that carving, Adrian realized he wasn't out.
He was right where they wanted him.
Still playing their game.
---
In Room C-5, Toni's old room two juniors whispered while sorting books.
"Do you think she found something she shouldn't have?" one asked.
"Definitely," the other replied. "But what?"
The ceiling creaked. Once. Twice.
Then again.
The first girl climbed on the bed, pushed aside a panel and froze.
Dust. Wires.
And a tiny, blinking lens.
A camera.
They screamed.
No one came.
---
Meanwhile, in the west wing, Amara met the mystery girl again.
Her name was Chinelo. Year eleven. ICT prodigy disguised as a quiet nobody.
"You're asking the wrong questions," Chinelo said, leading Amara into a forgotten supply closet. "Stop looking for people. Start looking for patterns."
"Patterns?"
"Yeah. Not who's in charge, but how they stay in charge."
She unrolled a cracked tablet and pointed to a map.
"This," she said, tapping a shaded zone, "is where the security footage stops."
Amara frowned. "Stops?"
"Glitches. Four minutes, every two nights. Always different locations. Always the same timing."
"And?"
"Last night, someone moved during the glitch. I caught them on mirror footage."
"Mirror?"
"Reflection from the music room window."
She tapped the screen.
There a blurred figure. A man.
Amara's stomach dropped.
It looked like Adrian.
But taller. Broader. Off.
"You think—"
"I don't think anything yet," Chinelo said. "But that symbol you found in the library? There's another. In the Headmistress's office."
Amara froze. "How do you even know that?"
Chinelo smirked. "Because I used to clean it."
---
That night, Adrian lay awake in the dark, the photo burned into his mind. The pregnant woman. The symbol. The words his father once said.
He got up, opened his closet, and pulled out a red envelope.
Inside: a faded, unsigned letter.
"You will arrive at Queen's Crest with clean hands and a clean mind.
But if the truth finds you before you are ready, you must choose:
Dig deeper and risk exposure.
Or bury it… and become one of us."
It had come with his admission letter. Back then, he'd thought it was a prank.
Now?
It read like prophecy.
And Adrian was already living it.
---
At 3:43 a.m., the glitch hit again. Cameras 3A, 3B, and 4D all went dark for four minutes.
But this time, Chinelo was ready. She rerouted mirror footage to a hidden server.
What she saw made her blood run cold.
Not a man.
Not a student.
A woman.
Old. Limping. Wearing the original Queen's Crest uniform.
In one hand, a key.
In the other, a list.
Ten names.
Nine were crossed out.
The last one still clear, untouched.
Amara Okonkwo.