The door clicked shut behind her as she stepped out of the examination room, the sound softer than it should have been in a corridor that was already carrying too many other sounds.
She glanced down at the paper in her hand, just long enough to register the clean alignment of text, her name at the top, the standard identifiers beneath it, and the absence where a supernatural classification would have been, the space reading simply as human.
Her fingers tightened once, then she crumpled it in a single motion and dropped it into the nearest bin without slowing her stride.
Alright. Glad that's out of the way.
The hallway was crowded in a way that didn't belong to mid-morning, students clustered in loose groups, voices low but constant, the energy of something unusual still settling into something that could be talked about.
Two girls broke off from one of the clusters as she passed, their expressions open, curious in a way that wasn't unkind.
"Aiva, hey," one of them said. "Did you already—?"
"Yeah," Aiva said, her smile automatic, warm enough to land. "I'm good, just heading somewhere quiet."
"Oh, okay," the other girl said, hesitating like she wanted to ask more. "Was it—?"
"It's fine, I'm only human." Aiva said with a giggle, still smiling, already moving. "I'll catch up with you later, alright?"
They let her go.
She didn't look back.
The student council room was supposed to be empty.
That had been the plan.
She pushed the door open, already letting her shoulders drop a fraction in anticipation of silence.
Bryce was sitting at the table.
Laptop open, posture forward, one hand resting against his mouth as he read something on the screen with an intensity that made the rest of the room feel secondary.
The small release she'd been holding onto didn't happen.
Of course.
The thought came and went without heat, just the quiet, specific deflation of it, the realization settling into place without asking permission.
She stepped inside anyway.
Bryce looked up as the door closed, the focus in his eyes shifting just enough to register her before settling again.
"Aiva," he said.
"Bryce," she replied, her tone even.
She moved to the other side of the table, setting her bag down, choosing a seat that gave them space without making a point of it.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
He didn't hesitate.
"I'm sure you already suspected this, but the principal didn't report this," he said, turning the laptop slightly as if the angle mattered even though she couldn't see the screen from where she was. "There's no prior notice on file with the state. No scheduled audit, no flagged discrepancy. This came in externally."
Aiva leaned back slightly, letting the information settle without interrupting.
"She had no idea?" she asked.
"None," Bryce said. "I checked through my father's office. Anything that passes through the education board at this level intersects with the mayor's network somewhere. There's nothing. No record of her initiating this."
"So someone else did," Aiva said.
"Yes," he said. "An anonymous report."
He tapped something on the keyboard, the motion precise, controlled.
"It was routed," he continued. "Multiple relays, deliberately obscured origin. Whoever sent it understood how the system flags and tracks submissions and worked around that."
Aiva watched him, the way his attention narrowed around the problem, the rest of the room falling away for him in a way that was familiar.
"You can't trace it," she said.
"No," Bryce said. "Not from this end."
There was a small pause, not empty, just the space where something else might have been said and wasn't.
"Then what do you have?" she asked.
"A contact point," he said. "A terminal node where the report entered the system in a way that couldn't be masked. It's not enough to identify the sender, but it's enough to confirm intent."
Aiva tilted her head slightly. "Which is?"
"That this wasn't accidental," he said. "It wasn't a misfiled concern or a routine check triggered by irregular data. It was deliberate."
His gaze flicked up to meet hers for a second, then back to the screen.
"They wanted this to happen," he added.
Aiva let out a slow breath, her hands resting loosely in her lap, the tension in her shoulders settling into something quieter.
"And we don't know why," she said.
Bryce's jaw shifted slightly, the only visible sign of frustration.
"No," he said. "And that's what I'm dying to figure out."
She nodded once, absorbing it without pushing further, the weight of it sitting between them without needing to be named.
Meanwhile, the notice board was drawing a crowd before he even saw the screen.
Clusters of students stood in uneven lines, some leaning in, others hanging back, the low hum of voices carrying the specific tone of people reacting to something they hadn't expected to see.
Chloe was already there.
She stood slightly off to one side of the main cluster, her posture straight, her gaze fixed on the screen without any outward reaction.
Adam stepped up beside her.
She didn't look at him.
He followed her line of sight.
The screen was larger than the standard boards used for announcements, the interface clean and functional, a list broken down by year, then class, then names in alphabetical order.
His fingers hovered for a second before he navigated to second years.
The list shifted.
Names filled the screen in neat rows, each entry carrying the same structure, the same weightless presentation of information that didn't acknowledge what it was doing to the people reading it.
Adam's eyes moved down the column.
A.
Abigail Thorne.
The name caught for a second, familiar in a way that slowed the motion just enough before he kept going.
The next line.
Name: Adam Greene
Class: 2C
Type: Werewolf
It landed.
Not like a shock, not like something new, but like a point of recognition that refused to pass through cleanly.
His name looked the same as it always did.
Same letters.
Same order.
Nothing about it marked it as different from the other names around it.
And then the column in the end.
Type: Werewolf.
It wasn't emphasized.
It wasn't highlighted.
It sat there in the same font, the same size, the same alignment as everything else.
Just another piece of data.
Adam's gaze stayed on it longer than it needed to.
"...that's him, right..." he caught
"...I didn't think..."
"...makes sense, though..."
His name moved through the noise in pieces, caught and carried by his hearing before he could stop it.
"...Greene..."
"...werewolf..."
"...seriously..."
He didn't turn.
He didn't need to.
The awareness of being looked at came without confirmation, a subtle shift in the space around him, the way conversations bent slightly, the way people recalibrated what they were seeing in front of them against what the screen had just told them.
He exhaled slowly, forcing his shoulders to stay loose.
It's just a list.
The thought didn't hold.
Chloe shifted beside him, a small movement that broke the moment without commenting on it.
Adam stepped back from the screen.
Bryce and Aiva were coming down the corridor.
He moved toward them without waiting for Chloe to follow.
"It's bad," he said as he reached them, his voice low, controlled. "They put everything up. Names, classes, types. It's all there."
He glanced at Aiva, something in his expression softening slightly.
"Hey," he added. "I don't know how you're... I mean, sorry. This is... yeah."
Aiva met his gaze, her expression steady.
"I'm okay," she said quietly. "I tested human."
Adam blinked once.
"What?" he said.
"I controlled my Lumen output," she said. "Reduced circulation to what a human can normally circulate so the device didn't pick up anything above human thresholds."
For a second, the weight in his chest shifted.
"That's..." he let out a small breath, something like a laugh that didn't quite form. "That's actually kind of insane."
Aiva's lips curved slightly. "It worked."
"Yeah, it did," Adam said. "That's… that's good. Really good."
There was relief in it.
Clear.
Simple.
Something in this had gone right for someone he cared about.
Bryce stepped in beside them, closing whatever brief conversation he'd been having with someone else, his attention already returning to the group.
Adam opened his mouth, something else forming, the edge of a thought about how that could matter, how it might,
Aiva's hand moved.
One finger lifted, resting lightly against her lips, the gesture small, almost casual, but placed with exact timing.
It cut him off before the words left his mouth.
For a second, he just looked at her.
The message was clear.
Not here.
Not now.
Not like this.
Adam closed his mouth.
The thought collapsed back in on itself, unfinished, redirected.
Right. Yeah. Not smart.
He nodded once, a small, almost imperceptible motion, and shifted his focus.
Chloe joined them then, stepping into the edge of the group without announcement.
"It's public," she said, her voice flat, stating what they all already knew. "Searchable even."
Bryce's gaze flicked briefly toward the board, then back.
"This is fucked up," he said.
"Tell me about it" Adam asked before shifting his weight, glancing once toward the board, then back to them.
"So who even does this?" he asked. "Like, who goes out of their way to make this happen?"
Bryce's expression tightened slightly, not in emotion, but in focus.
"There are a few possibilities," he said. "If the report was routed the way I think it was, then whoever submitted it—"