30

30
Mirella’s POV

We waited until the school emptied.

That was rule number one. If anyone else had stayed behind, we would have walked right into trouble.

Dante and I stuck to the plan. He kept one ear on the hallway while I slipped into the shadow of the old service door that led to the passage. Yuki texted last-minute updates from her spot near the front corridor like a heartbeat—short, steady messages. All clear. Door unlocked. Three minutes.

The passage lived up to its rumors: narrow, cold, with that feeling of being watched by the walls themselves. It smelled like old dust and metal. I moved slowly, one hand on the wall so I wouldn’t trip. Dante followed, his steps quieter than I expected. He looked about as nervous as I felt, but his jaw was set. That steadiness steadied me in return.

We reached the final hatch that led to the principal’s office. My heart thudded hard enough to hear it. I eased the latch and pushed the door open a fraction. The office light was off. Empty. For a second, relief brushed my face like a warm hand. Then I slipped inside.

Dante moved straight for the desk drawers like he’d done this a hundred times, though neither of us had. I went to the computer. The screen glowed at me like a dare. Password protected, of course. Classic. I tried a few obvious guesses—birthdays, the principal’s dog’s name, the school’s founding year. Nothing.

That’s when I noticed the sticky note wedged under the keyboard. I pulled it free with shaking fingers. The password was scribbled in messy cursive. Amateurs, I thought, and logged in.

Once inside, the email inbox looked like a maze. Thousands of messages. I filtered by the family name that Lila had used like it was a badge of honor. A few clicks later, the page filled with threads—emails with subject lines like Payment Confirmed, Transfer Completed, Thank You, Mr. P. and the worst one: Schedule for Reinstatement.

My hands went cold. Each message was a thread of proof: times, amounts, bank references, attachments. Contracts. Scans of checks. The female legion’s family forwarding confirmation emails and the principal responding with polite gratitude. This wasn’t rumor. It was paper and pixels and signatures. It was exactly what we’d needed.

I forwarded the relevant threads to myself, then opened my phone and photographed attachments, receipts, screenshots—anything I could carry. Dante’s fingers were in a steady rhythm on the locked drawer of the principal’s desk, where he’d promised to look for paper evidence. He picked a small lock like a magician with a trick. The drawer popped. Inside: printed contracts, stapled invoices with bank stamps, a contract with the family’s name and a signature.

“Take pictures,” Dante whispered.

My camera flickered, shutter clicking until my phone vibrated with the crowd of files. I felt like I could finally breathe. Proof, tangible and raw. Proof that the expulsion had been a transaction. Proof that the principal had been bought.

Then my phone anxiously buzzed: Someone’s coming. Get out now.

I didn’t need to ask who. Dante shoved the files back into the drawer and shut it with a click that sounded a lifetime long. I yanked the sticky note off the keyboard and slid the computer cover down. We stacked everything back where we’d found it—books, a pen, a paperweight—like we were unmaking our footsteps.

We moved blind. My hand found the passage handle. Dante followed. The door eased closed in front of us just as the office light snapped on and the principal’s footsteps came down the hall. The timing made my knees wobble.

We froze in the dark passage and held our breath. The office door opened, a shuffle of papers, the principal talking into his phone. I could hear him thanking someone, the words muffled through concrete. For a few minutes that felt endless, we crouched there while the world kept turning beyond our thin wall of bricks.

When the footsteps faded and the office door clicked shut again, Dante whispered, “Wait two minutes.”

We waited. My throat felt like cotton. When the quiet finally sat heavy and safe, we slipped out and climbed back into the empty school like ghosts. Yuki was there, as pale as sheet paper, but grinning. “Teacher just came in for late grading,” she mouthed. “You were lucky.”

Back at my room that night, I spread everything across my bed. Screenshots, photos of contracts, the emailed threads—files that smelled like gasoline and gasoline burns: proof that would set the whole place alight. I copied everything, duplicated folders, sent backups to Iris and Dante, Yuki and Helen, whoever I felt could be trusted. We didn’t keep originals vulnerable on one device. We made three copies, put them on three different drives, and uploaded one to a secure cloud with a burner email we’d set up for emergencies.

My hands shook more as I worked, not from fear now but from adrenaline and the sharp, raw edge of possibility. We had the documents that could topple a principal, that could make the board act, that could shred the cloak the female legion used to hide under. For the first time since Sophie fled the library, I slept that night with the kind of hope that felt like a live wire.

In the morning we met in our usual place and made a list. Names, phone numbers, outlets. If the principal was corrupt, the school board might be compromised too. If the board turned a blind eye, we needed a stage bigger than our campus. We needed people outside who would care—parents, reporters, education watchdogs, national outlets if we could get them interested.

Iris suggested the school board first, as a formal step. “We do it by the book,” she said. “Send the documents, file complaints. Give them a chance to act.” She folded her hands like the lawyer she pretended to be when she got nervous.

Dante shook his head. “By the book, we risk them burying it. The board and principal could conspire. Look what happened before.” He slammed his palm against the table with a soft, controlled force. “We go public. Press, local channels, education forums, anyone who cares about abuse of power in schools.”

Yuki, always the voice of a softer war, said, “We do both. We send it to the board, but we also give copies to every media outlet we can reach. Print, online, local TV—get enough eyes on it and they can’t sweep it under the rug.”

We worked that weekend like a machine. I wrote a summary of the evidence: a clean timeline of payments, dates of the female legion’s return, the conversations Lila had bragging about money moving, the files we’d pulled from the principal’s desk. Dante and Iris organized documents into clear PDFs so editors wouldn’t have to play sleuth. Yuki formatted the media email list. We attached a package—evidence.zip—and drafted short, sharp messages to send.

On Monday morning, my finger hovered for a second over the send button on my laptop. It felt like the moment before a plunge. Then I hit it, once, and watched the emails go out—newsroom addresses, education departments, parent associations, a few national watchdogs. We uploaded a mirror file to a secure cloud and posted a carefully worded anonymous tip to a journalist I’d once messaged about school corruption (I’d never expected to need him, but he’d replied with interest).

We didn’t announce it in school. We kept our faces blank, walked the halls like nothing had happened. But inside, everything buzzed. I braced and held my breath and tried to do homework, but the emails were out and there was nothing more to do but wait.

Dante put his hand on my shoulder just once when we met after class. “You did good, Mira,” he said. “We did good.” The words were small—weaponized with hope—and I swallowed hard, not trusting my voice.

Now we had to wait.

That’s the hardest part. Waiting makes you imagine every possible wrong thing. Waiting gives fear time to grow. Waiting lets people who want to bury the truth find the right cover for it.

I left my phone face-up on the kitchen table, vibrating every few minutes with unknowns. Iris paced. Yuki refreshed the inbox every ten seconds. Dante checked the news sites like a man watching a door.

We tried not to talk about what would happen if nothing came. We tried not to think about what would happen if the board buried it, or if the principal’s connections smothered the story before any parent or journalist saw it.

Still, we had what we came for. Paper and pixels, signatures and emails, voices that told the truth. If those files held the weight they seemed to, then the game had changed. If they didn’t, we’d pay for it, and the cost would be heavy.

So we waited. For a call. For a headline. For a reporter to ring. For someone to say what we all wanted to hear: We’re coming to investigate.

My phone buzzed—once—and my heart leapt like a bird. But it was just a message from a number I didn’t recognize, a short line that read, Do not be reckless. My hands cramped around the device. Threats had become a familiar soundtrack, but this one felt sharper, full of men who weren’t afraid to say things openly now that they could.

I swallowed and closed the message. Dante handed me a cup of coffee. We sat in silence, each of us thinking the same dangerous thought in different ways.

We’d taken a risk. We’d broken rules to expose a bigger crime. For once, we weren’t hiding. We had the evidence. Now the world needed to see it.

Now we just had to wait.

And hope it worked.