Chapter 2

Agent Davies looked at me from across the sterile table of the interrogation room, his face a mask of tired disappointment. He wasn' t a real agent anymore, not since he' d retired from the FBI five years ago, but he still carried himself like one. He was Sarah' s mentor, the one who' d gotten her into the top programs, the one who' d looked more broken than my own father at her funeral.

"Let me get this straight," he said, his voice a low gravel. "A group of the nation' s top tech prospects, kids who could write their own ticket to MIT or Stanford, decided to protest a programming competition by… uploading a virus that replaced the entire contest' s website with a repeating video of a dancing cat."

I didn't answer. I just stared at the table. He was talking about something that happened two years after Sarah vanished. A group of us, all prodigies who knew what happened to her, were terrified. We saw the pattern. The best and brightest were being targeted. So we decided to get ourselves blacklisted.

"The board wanted to let you all off with a warning," Davies continued, leaning forward. "They understood it was a prank. A very, very sophisticated prank, but a prank nonetheless. They were willing to sweep it under the rug."

He paused, waiting for me to say something. I stayed silent.

"But you didn' t want that, did you?" he pushed. "Your group' s spokesperson, a kid named Leo, he stood up in front of the disciplinary board and demanded you all be suspended. Not just suspended, but banned. Banned from all national competitions for five years. He said you were a menace."

I remember Leo saying that. We had all agreed to it. We wanted the harshest punishment possible. We wanted to be branded as delinquents, as uncontrollable liabilities. We thought it would make us undesirable. We thought it would make us safe from whatever took Sarah.

"That' s insane, Ashley," Davies said, his voice softening just a little. "You were deliberately trying to ruin your own futures. Why? Why would you do that?"

"We were scared," I finally whispered. "We thought if we weren' t the best anymore, we' d be left alone."

Davies sighed, a long, weary sound. "That' s what I thought. But you need to understand something. The people you' re dealing with, if my theory is right, they don' t care about a mark on your permanent record. They don' t recruit through official channels. Your little stunt, getting yourselves banned… all it did was take you off the official grid. It made you easier to watch, easier to isolate. You thought you were hiding, but you just walked into a smaller, darker room with no windows."

A chill went through me. He was right. Our grand plan to save ourselves had been laughably naive.

One of the kids from our group, a girl named Maya, had escalated things even further. A week after we were all banned, she walked into the server room of the tech company that sponsored the competition and physically smashed three server racks with a fire extinguisher. She didn't try to hide it. She waited for the police to arrive.

She wanted to go to juvenile hall. She told me on the phone the night before she did it. "They can' t get me in there," she' d said, her voice trembling but determined. "It' s the only place they can' t reach."

And it worked. She got sentenced to eighteen months. She served her time, got out, and disappeared into a quiet life, working at a library. We all thought she was the one who had truly escaped. Our plan had succeeded, in a way. We were all scattered, our potential officially squandered. The immediate threat seemed to recede.

After that, I doubled down on my own plan. I finished my boring business degree. I got my boring job. The years passed, and the fear faded into a dull background ache. I let myself believe I had outsmarted the monster. I was just Ashley Miller, insurance analyst. I was nobody special. I had successfully dodged the bullet that had been aimed at me since birth. I was confident, almost arrogant in my belief that I was finally, completely safe. That confidence felt like a shield.

But sitting here now, with the memory of that cursed email burning in my mind, I knew that shield was made of glass. And it had just been shattered.