The cafeteria at Manhattan Elite Prep was a massive, glass-domed atrium. It looked more like a five-star restaurant than a high school lunchroom.

Elia walked in, carrying a plastic tray with a dry sandwich and an apple.

She found an empty table in the far corner, near the trash cans. She sat down and took a bite of the apple.

Across the room, at the center VIP table, Geri was furiously typing on her phone.

Suddenly, a synchronized chorus of notification chimes echoed across the cafeteria.

Hundreds of phones buzzed at the exact same second.

Elia chewed her apple slowly. She watched as students pulled out their phones.

Within ten seconds, the ambient noise in the cafeteria completely died.

Then, the whispers started.

Heads snapped up. Eyes darted across the room, locking onto Elia sitting in the corner.

At the VIP table, Brenda Kowalski stood up. She held her phone high in the air.

"Listen to this!" Brenda shouted, her voice carrying over the noise. "Anonymous post on the school forum! 'The Truth About the Trash in Class 10.'"

Brenda cleared her throat and began reading loudly.

"'Elia Chapman isn't just a dropout. She was expelled from three different schools in the rust belt for violent assault. And how did a broke orphan afford the tuition here? Word is, she has an older sponsor. A sugar daddy who likes them young and dirty.'"

The cafeteria erupted.

Loud jeers, whistles, and disgusted groans filled the air.

"Whore!" someone yelled from the back.

"Go back to the streets!" another voice chimed in.

Elia sat perfectly still. She didn't stop chewing her apple. Her face betrayed absolutely nothing. But beneath the table, her stomach clenched, a cold, hard knot forming in her gut.

Geri sat at her table, delicately sipping a sparkling water, a serene, victorious smile on her face.

Three boys from the football team stood up. They wanted to impress Geri.

They grabbed their open cartons of chocolate milk and swaggered over to Elia's table.

The cafeteria quieted down, watching the confrontation.

The lead boy, a massive linebacker with a cruel smirk, stopped in front of Elia.

"Looks like your sugar daddy forgot to buy you a decent lunch," the boy sneered.

He tipped his carton forward.

The thick, brown milk poured out, splashing directly onto Elia's tray, soaking her sandwich, and splattering across the front of her black hoodie.

The boys burst into loud, obnoxious laughter.

"Oops," the boy mocked. "My hand slipped."

Elia looked down at the brown liquid dripping from her clothes onto her jeans. The cold wetness seeped through to her skin.

She slowly placed the apple on the ruined tray.

She reached out and picked up the dull metal butter knife resting next to her plate. It wasn't sharp, but in the hands of someone who understood human anatomy, it didn't need to be.

She stood up.

The boy puffed out his chest, stepping closer to intimidate her. "What are you gonna do, trash?"

Elia moved faster than the human eye could track.

Her left hand shot out, grabbing the front of the boy's heavy varsity jacket. With a violent, twisting motion, she used his own forward momentum against him.

She slammed him face-down onto the hard plastic table.

CRASH.

The table groaned under his weight. The boy let out a shocked gasp, the breath knocked out of his lungs.

Before his two friends could even react, Elia drove her knee into the small of his back, pinning him down.

Her right hand came down.

She pressed the blunt, rounded edge of the butter knife directly against the boy's throat, slotting it perfectly against the fragile cartilage of his windpipe.

The cafeteria went dead silent. The laughter was choked off instantly.

The boy under her froze. He could feel the heavy, unforgiving pressure of the metal digging into his airway. He started trembling violently.

"Let him go!" one of his friends yelled, taking a step forward.

Elia didn't look at the friend. She pressed the knife a millimeter deeper into the boy's skin.

"Take another step," Elia whispered, her voice carrying clearly in the silent room. "And I'll show you exactly how much pressure it takes for a blunt blade to crush a trachea."

The friend froze, his eyes wide with terror.

Elia leaned down, her lips inches from the pinned boy's ear.

"If you ever come near me again," she said, her voice devoid of any emotion, "I won't stop at just cutting off your air."

She released his jacket and stepped back.

The boy scrambled off the table, gasping for air, clutching his neck. He backed away from her as if she were a demon.

Elia dropped the knife onto the tray. It landed with a loud clatter.

She looked across the room, directly at Geri.

Geri's face was chalk-white. The victorious smile was gone, replaced by genuine, visceral fear.

Elia picked up her canvas bag. She walked out of the cafeteria, leaving a path of terrified silence in her wake.

She walked into the nearest empty bathroom and locked the door.

She pulled off her ruined hoodie, throwing it into the trash. She stood in her white T-shirt, staring at her cold, dead eyes in the mirror.

Physical violence was a temporary fix.

She pulled her phone from her pocket. Her thumbs hovered over the screen.

It was time to burn the forum to the ground.

Elia walked back into the empty Class 10 room. The heavy metal music was off.

She sat at her desk, her phone resting flat on the surface. Her fingers tapped the screen with terrifying speed.

The classroom door swung open. Cody rushed in, his chest heaving. He had followed her from the cafeteria.

"Holy shit," Cody breathed, staring at her with wide eyes. "You just took down a 200-pound linebacker with a butter knife. Are you insane?"

Elia ignored him. Her eyes were locked on the scrolling green code.

Cody walked over, leaning over her desk. He looked at her phone.

"What are you doing now?" he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"Taking out the trash," Elia replied coldly.

She launched a brute-force attack on the school's main server. The Elite Prep firewall was designed by top-tier cybersecurity firms, but to Elia, it was made of wet paper.

She breached the admin node in twelve seconds.

She accessed the backend of the anonymous gossip forum.

She ran a reverse-IP trace on the post that had started the rumor. The code stripped away the VPNs and proxy shields in a matter of seconds.

The source IP address flashed on her screen.

It belonged to a device registered on the school's Wi-Fi network.

Device Name: Geri's iPhone 14 Pro.

Elia's lip curled into a sneer. Sloppy. Stupid.

She didn't just delete the post. Deleting it wouldn't clear her name. She needed to destroy the source.

She opened a backdoor she had quickly installed in Geri's phone last night, taking advantage of the brief, vulnerable window when Gorge had ordered the townhouse's Wi-Fi router reset. She accessed Geri's voice memos.

She found a recording from yesterday afternoon.

Elia wrote a forced-execution script. She bundled the audio file with a highly aggressive pop-up virus.

She targeted every single device connected to the Elite Prep network. Phones, tablets, smartboards, even the digital clocks in the hallways.

She hit execute.

Cody watched as Elia's screen went black.

Then, a blood-red skull materialized in the center of her screen.

At that exact moment, a deafening, synchronized alarm blared throughout the entire school.

Every phone in the building vibrated violently. Every smartboard in every classroom snapped on, glowing blindingly bright.

The red skull appeared on thousands of screens simultaneously.

Then, the audio started playing. It blasted from the classroom speakers, from the phones in students' pockets, from the cafeteria PA system.

It was Geri's voice. Clear, shrill, and dripping with malice.

"I'm going to post that she's a whore," the recording of Geri echoed through the halls. "Make sure you guys comment on it immediately. Say she slept with an old man to pay tuition. I want that rust-belt trash expelled by Friday."

A second voice, one of Geri's minions, laughed. "You're a genius, Geri. Everyone will believe it."

The recording looped. Three times.

In the piano room on the second floor, Geri stared at her phone. The red skull glared back at her. Her own voice mocked her from the speaker.

The blood drained from Geri's face. Her hands started shaking so violently she dropped the phone onto the piano keys with a discordant crash.

Her perfect, innocent image. Shattered in ten seconds.

Back in Class 10, the audio stopped.

The red skull vanished. In its place, a single line of white text appeared on every screen in the school.

LIARS BURN.

Then, the school's entire server crashed. The Wi-Fi died. The smartboards went black.

The forum was permanently wiped from existence.

Cody stood frozen next to Elia's desk. He looked from the black smartboard to Elia's perfectly calm face.

His jaw hung open. "You... you did that. You hacked the whole school."

Elia picked up her phone and slipped it into her pocket. She leaned back in her chair, looking at him with dead eyes.

"I was playing Candy Crush," she said flatly.

Cody swallowed hard. He knew she was lying. He knew he was standing next to a monster.

Three miles away, in the back of the idling Rolls-Royce, Kane Wolf stared at his tablet.

The screen was frozen on the image of the blood-red skull.

His heart slammed against his ribs. The air in the car suddenly felt suffocating.

He knew that logo. Every intelligence agency in the world knew that logo.

It was L. The phantom hacker of the Dark Web.

"Lex," Kane barked, his voice tight with adrenaline.

Lex turned around from the front seat. "Boss? The school network just went completely dark."

"It's L," Kane said, his eyes burning with a dark, obsessive fire. "The hacker who probed our offshore financial servers and traced the necklace bounty two nights ago. They're inside the school."

Kane threw the tablet onto the seat.

"Drive to Elite Prep," Kane ordered. "Now."