The power didn't just go out — it vanished. Swallowed and was replaced by a silence that screamed.
Femi was already moving — snapping his laptop shut, yanking cables like pulling out veins from a dying machine. "They're in. We've got to move and we've got to move now."
"Did you hear that?" I whispered, heart thudding.
The footsteps outside the window were slow. Deliberate. Not running. Not searching. Approaching — like they already knew we had nowhere to go.
I backed up instinctively. "You said we cloned the files. Can't we just — "
THUNK.
The door handle jerked. Once. Then silence.
I froze. He didn't.
Femi tossed a small flashlight my way and whispered, "Wardrobe. Go."
I hesitated. Then ducked in.
He followed just as the door creaked open.
We squeezed in together, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the musty dark. My pulse pounded like a hammer in my ears.
The door creaked open.
And a flashlight beam swept the room. You could hear heavy boots on the tiled floor.
Then a voice — distorted, mechanical:
"She's not here. But she left something behind."
Another pause. Something beep.
"Package secured. Phase 3 is a go."
Door closed and silence followed it.
Femi waited waited a full minute, then cracked the wardrobe open. "They're not students. This is pro-level. Someone's pulling serious strings."
We ducked into the old maintenance vent behind his desk. "This campus was built in the '90s," he whispered. "Some things never got mapped to the network. They can't track what they can't ping."
We crawled through dust and darkness. Ten cramped minutes later, we emerged into an old boiler room beneath the engineering block, and then I exhaled for the first time in minutes.
Femi checked the drive. "Still intact."
Then my phone vibrated. We still had no signal — but a single message had come through.
ZAINAB: Don't trust him. It's not what you think. Meet me where it all began.
My stomach twisted. "She's texting now?"
Femi read it, then tossed me a sharp look. "That number's not even registered."
Femi powered up an offline rig and slid in the cloned drive. "If they were watching your system, we might've caught their backtrail."
A screen flickered to life. Log files. Command snippets. Then — a folder.
Z-ARCHIVE.
A ghost log.
Inside where Audio logs. Voice samples. Direct messages. Chat transcripts. Screenshots.
Zainab's face. A voice — hers — whispering code phrases to someone offscreen. But the voice was off. Older. Sharper.
But then… something else.
He played a clip:
"Codename Wraith. Target engaged. Proxy planted."
"Wraith?" I repeated confused.
"She's not Zainab," Femi muttered. "That's not her. That's my old partner," he said, eyes dark. "She was kicked out of the dev circle for selling backdoors to private buyers."
"And now she's in my class?" I asked, stunned.
"No," he said grimly.
"She's using her face, her records. The real Zainab probably never made it past first semester."
I blinked. "What?"
"So she's what — using my app to… spy?"
"She's doing more than spying," he said. "She's building a system. Using your name, your code. And we just triggered her failsafe."
Suddenly — a ping. Not from the rig. From Femi's dead backup laptop.
It powered on by itself. No cable. No input.
"It has got to stop doing that" I said shalily.|
Then a feed appeared. Me. Sitting in the common room. Laughing.
Zainab beside me.
"I remember this," I whispered.
He didn't look at me. Just said, "They were watching even then."
Then a voice echoed from above.
Not a recording. Not a feed.
Live.
"Step away from the drive, Femi. She's not the only one they're watching."
We looked up.
A grate in the ceiling creaked open.
Someone was already inside the room.