Chapter 60 Kristen
I couldn’t sleep.
Not really.
I lay in the dark with the tablet’s glow flickering softly against the wall, the blue light scraping at my eyelids like a reminder I couldn’t ignore: something was wrong. Not just the file — not just Clarissa — not just Leo’s silence, or the way my own powers felt like a wound that hadn’t yet burst open. All of it was wrong in a way that pulsed beneath my ribs and refused to leave.
I sat up at the edge of my bed, legs curled up beneath me, and looked down at the document I had saved, the one I had taken a photo of before replacing the folder in the Dean’s office. The black bars stared back at me like open wounds on the page — entire swaths of text erased so completely it was as if someone had stepped into my past and painted over it, line by line, until nothing recognizable remained.
“What are you hiding from me?” I murmured to the tablet, not really expecting an answer. My voice was soft but laced with that dangerous kind of curiosity — the kind that didn’t go away no matter how many times I tried to ignore it.
The more I turned it over in my mind, the more certain I became that Phoenix Academy wasn’t just keeping secrets from me — it was hiding something fundamental about me. My file wasn’t redacted because of clerical error or some administrative fluke. It was deliberate. Intentional. And that made my blood run cold.
I thought about the faceless man from my dreams, the voice that taunted me and disappeared like smoke the moment I blinked.
I thought about Leo.
Not the way I was supposed to think about him. Not the tension and the looks and the half‑broken moments between us. I thought about what he wasn’t telling me. What he was protecting — or hiding. And even though part of me understood why he might be keeping his silence, another part of me resented it with a fierceness I had never felt before.
Then there was the sigil. Still no sigil. While everyone around me wore their assignment like a brand, mine had never appeared. Not a mark. Not a whisper of power. Nothing. And yet here I was, caught between worlds, running out of reasons why I should trust the people who kept telling me I had nothing to fear.
I exhaled slowly, my breath trembling a little as I slid the tablet aside and stood up. Sleep was gone now, replaced by a growing certainty that tonight was not about rest. It was about choosing how far I was willing to go.
I stepped out of my room and walked down the quiet dorm hallway, shoes silent on the soft carpet. Everyone else was asleep, immersed in dreams or exhaustion or denial. I envied them a little. I really did. But denial had never been an option for me.
By the time I reached the common courtyard just outside the dorms, the sky was turning a faint gray at the edges, like morning was creeping up behind everything I still wanted to ignore.
Anna was already there, sitting on a low stone ledge with a coffee in her hand, eyes scanning the upper windows of the dorm like she was looking for something or someone she wasn’t supposed to find. Her presence was like a beacon of calm in the midst of my restless storm.
“So,” she said without looking at me the moment I approached, “you didn’t sleep either?”
I braced my hands on the ledge beside her and exhaled. “We need the unredacted version,” I said. No preamble. No hesitation.
She blinked slowly, her brow lifting. “You’re serious now.”
“Dead serious,” I said.
Her gaze slid up to meet mine, and for a long moment she didn’t laugh and she didn’t try to talk me out of it. She just studied me — the tension in my shoulders, the way my jaw was set, the way my eyes didn’t even bother looking like they were trying to downplay how awake I was.
Finally she exhaled and let the coffee rest in her palm like it was the only grounded thing in her universe at the moment.
“Alright,” she said. “Let’s talk about what we’re up against.”
I blinked, already bracing myself for the worst part.
“It’s not just encryption,” she began, like she’d been rehearsing this explanation for hours. “It’s live‑coded surveillance, adaptive firewalls, self‑healing protocols. They’re tied into both tech and arcane watch networks. They aren’t just protections; they’re defenses that respond. They evolve.”
I blinked. “That’s a thing?”
“In Phoenix?” Anna said with a nod. “Everything’s a thing.”
I exhaled, the words heavy in my chest. “So it’s not just text I have to read. It’s a damn fortress.”
She tapped the edge of her coffee cup against the stone ledge, eyes thoughtful. “If we try to brute‑force it, we’ll be flagged instantly. They’ll know who logged in, when, and exactly what we looked at. And don’t forget, part of that defense is reactive. It learns. Like an AI that trains itself to trap you.”
“That… sounds awful,” I said.
“It is,” Anna agreed. “Which means sneak‑in routes are theoretically possible, but not without massive risk. There are wards tied into the floor plans. Motion sigils. Reactive wards. And the database itself is living code.”
My mouth opened and closed like I was trying to swallow something far too big for my throat. “Living code,” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said, letting the phrase sink in, “like a program that can rearrange itself to protect itself. It’s not just lines of code. It’s something that watches patterns and adapts. If you touch the wrong sequence of numbers, it knows you did.”
I exhaled again, slower this time, as the implications slid into my awareness like ice under skin. So not only was the system incredibly secure, it was aware. It was alive in its own terrifying way.
“So brute force is out,” I said. “And going in blind will get us caught before we even type a single password.”
Anna nodded.
“So what,” I asked, frustration creeping into my voice, “we bring in a hacker?”
Anna’s grin came slow and deliberate, like she already knew I was about to hate this answer, but she didn’t care.
“Not just any hacker,” she said.
My head snapped up. “What do you mean by that?”
She leaned in closer, lowering her voice like something in the shadows might overhear us. “There’s only one person at Phoenix I think could help us,” she said.
I narrowed my eyes, skepticism knitting into my gut. “Who.”
Another pause. Then that grin again — the one that promised both trouble and, maybe, the first real lead we’d had in days.
“The new professor.”
The words hit like someone threw a rock through glass.
I stared at her, trying to parse what she even meant.
“What?” I said finally. “You’re joking.”
Anna shook her head, completely serious. “No. Trust me. He’s not just here to teach.”
“Teach what?” I said, incredulous.
“Whatever he’s here to teach,” she said with a cryptic shrug, “I don’t think it’s in the syllabus.”
I stared at her, mind turning over the implications I dared not voice yet. A professor with access, with arcane and technical aptitude, with no reason to be suspect except that suspicious chill he gave off every time he looked at me.
And maybe that was the point.
“Alright,” I said after a moment, a slow determination gathering in me like iron in the blood. “If you think he’s the guy, we approach him. Quietly. Carefully.”
Anna smiled then, a conspiratorial curl at the corner of her lips that meant she was already several steps ahead of me in plotting.
“Good,” she said. “Because if we’re going to do this — if we’re really going to find out what Phoenix is hiding and why my entire academic history looks like it was erased by someone with a vendetta — we’re going to need someone who understands both the technological and magical defenses.”
I exhaled, the weight of the night settling into my bones, sharp and burning with purpose.
So I nodded.
And with Anna at my side, I took the first step toward finding out who the new professor really was — and why he wasn’t simply here to teach.