Mira Chen POV
The health inspector never came.
That was the cruelest part — they never actually filed the report. They just held it over my head like a blade for three months, making sure I knew it was there every time I thought about fighting back.
Smart. I had to give them that.
The first time I drafted a formal email to the school board, an anonymous message arrived within the hour: "Nice draft. Send it and the inspector gets called tonight."
My email was hacked. Had been since October.
They'd been reading everything.
So I stopped writing things down. Stopped emailing. Stopped filing reports. Stopped asking teachers for help after two more of them responded to my complaints by suddenly finding problems with my work that hadn't existed the week before.
I went quiet.
And the Trinity, mistaking quiet for surrender, got louder.
October was the emails.
Every morning I'd wake up to find my inbox flooded — unsubscribe me from hundreds of mailing lists, signing me up for others. Academic journals, spam, adult content sites that left my face burning even though I deleted them immediately. The goal wasn't the content. The goal was making my inbox unusable so I missed real emails — assignment updates, schedule changes, a scholarship check-in from the board I almost missed entirely.
I started a second email account. A secret one. Kai was the only person who had it.
October was also Marcus's new project: a recurring video series, posted to the Ashford Insider chat, called "Scholar Watch." Me eating alone in the dining hall. Me walking the long way around the courtyard to avoid the main path. Me in the library, not knowing I was being filmed through the shelves, mouthing words while I studied.
The captions were always short. Clinical. More brutal for it.
Still here. Still trying.
Day 47. She ate a sandwich alone for the 38th time.
Somebody tell her the library closes at 9.
I knew about them because Kai showed me once, thinking I should know. I made him promise never to show me again. But I knew they existed. Three hundred and forty-seven students watching me eat a sandwich. Commenting. Laughing. Moving on with their day.
You learn to build walls fast when you have to.
November arrived with Victoria's specialty: the physical campaign.
Not every day — that would have been too obvious, left too much evidence. Just often enough to remind me that my body wasn't safe either.
The stairs incident was a Tuesday. I was carrying four textbooks and my laptop, coming down from the second floor, when Victoria's foot appeared from nowhere and caught my ankle mid-step. I went down hard — hands, knees, books scattering across twelve steps, laptop skidding to the bottom with a crack that made my stomach drop.
Students scattered out of the way. Some gasped.
Most laughed.
I lay on the stairs for two seconds — just two — before I made myself get up. Picked up every book. Picked up my laptop. Didn't check if the screen was cracked until I got around the corner. It was. A hairline fracture across the bottom left that spread a little more every day until it was half the screen.
I couldn't afford a new one. I used it broken for six weeks.
Sebastian had been at the top of the stairs when it happened.
He'd watched me fall.
He'd watched me get up.
He'd walked past me on his way down like the staircase was empty.
That was the thing about Sebastian that three months hadn't made easier to understand.
Victoria was cruel in ways that made sense — calculated, territorial, protecting something. Marcus was cruel the way some people are entertained by cruelty, simple and straightforward. But Sebastian—
Sebastian watched.
He was always there, always nearby, always at just the right angle to see exactly what was happening to me. And he did nothing. Not participating most of the time — not anymore, not since the first weeks. Just present. Just watching with those grey eyes that gave away nothing.
Once, in Advanced Literature — the one class I still loved because Professor Hale didn't let social politics interfere with the work — Sebastian had answered a question about a text we were studying, and it was wrong in the same specific way it had been wrong on the first day. Incomplete.
I had kept my hand down.
He'd looked at me afterward. Like he knew.
I'd looked away.
Don't give them anything, I reminded myself. Even the small things. Especially the small things.
By late November I was running on four hours of sleep and pure stubbornness.
My grades were still perfect. That was the one thing they hadn't managed to take — I'd adapted my study system three times, moved hiding spots in the library four times, started submitting assignments through three different channels so there was always a backup record. Professor Wells had quietly dropped the plagiarism accusation after I'd presented my timestamped drafts. He'd never apologized. I hadn't expected him to.
Mom called every Sunday. I had the performance down to an art form by now — cheerful, vague, lots of questions about the restaurant so she'd spend most of the call talking. She'd mentioned the strange slow period in November, how some regulars had stopped coming in. A new competitor had opened nearby, maybe, she said. Happens in business.
I knew exactly what had happened. I hadn't told her.
What was the point? She couldn't fix it. It would only scare her. And she had those ginger-and-sesame-oil hands and that absolute certainty — my daughter is going to change our lives — and I couldn't take that from her. Not yet.
Not yet had become my whole philosophy.
Not broken yet. Not leaving yet. Not done yet.
That night — a Wednesday, late November, the kind of cold that crept under the door — I was at my desk finishing a Chemistry problem set when my phone buzzed.
Unknown number. The same format as the messages before.
I opened it already bracing.
Four words.
"Toilet. Tomorrow. 3pm."
I stared at it.
Then the second message arrived.
"Don't be late. Or what happens to the restaurant will be so much worse than one-star reviews. We're talking licenses. Health codes. Immigration paperwork irregularities."
I read it twice.
Immigration paperwork.
My mother had worked in this country for sixteen years. She had every document, every renewal, everything perfectly filed. I knew that. But I also knew that accusations — even false ones — could freeze an account, trigger an audit, cost thousands in legal fees she couldn't afford while it got sorted out.
They knew that too.
I set my phone face-down.
Sat in the silence for a long time.
Ninety days. Three months of this. Ninety days of walls and workarounds and perfect grades and broken laptop screens and eating sandwiches alone while three hundred and forty-seven people watched and laughed.
And now this.
A summons. A toilet. A threat against my mother's whole life if I didn't show up and let them do whatever they had planned.
I thought about not going.
I thought about Kai, who'd warned me two weeks ago that something was coming — something bigger, something Victoria had been quietly building toward for months.
I thought about Richard Ashford's voice through a three-inch gap in a door: "The Chen girl is a complication, not a threat. She'll be gone before Christmas."
I looked at tomorrow's date on my phone calendar.
December was four days away.
I wasn't gone yet.
My phone buzzed one last time. Third message. Unknown number.
But this one wasn't a threat.
It was a single photo.
Me. In my dorm room. At my desk.
Taken through my window. From outside. Tonight.
Right now.
The Chemistry problem set open in front of me in the photo. The broken laptop screen. The single lamp.
I spun to my window. Dark courtyard below. Nobody visible.
But someone had been there. Was maybe still there.
They weren't just in my email. They weren't just in the hallways.
They had been watching me in my room.
I stood up. Pulled my curtain shut with shaking hands.
And somewhere outside in the dark, a light flickered — brief, deliberate — and went out.