THE GIRL THEY THOUGHT HAD NOTHING

The courtyard erupted.

Students screamed as the helicopter blades slowed and the buildings went dark. Someone slammed into my shoulder. Another person grabbed my backpack.

I held on.

“Dad!”

My father’s security chief, Marcus Reed, reached me first. He pulled me away from the crowd while campus alarms began shrieking.

When the emergency lights came on, my backpack was still in my hands.

But the silver camera button was gone.

“They took it,” I said.

“Who?”

“I didn’t see.”

Marcus scanned the crowd. Veronica and Chase had disappeared. So had Graham Voss.

My father wanted me at a hospital. I refused until Dana copied Veronica’s livestream and secured my phone recording.

The university claimed the blackout had been an equipment failure.

Marcus found proof that it wasn’t. Someone had shut down the main system from a control room using Professor Lang’s access card.

We found Lang in his office, packing files into a leather briefcase.

He froze when my father entered.

“Nathan.”

“You watched my daughter get assaulted.”

Lang looked ashamed. “I tried to warn them.”

“You whispered while they poured chemicals over her.”

“I have a wife and two children. Richard Hale can end my career.”

“So you let him end hers?”

Lang sat heavily behind his desk.

“The bullying isn’t the real issue,” he said. “Amelia’s financial model uncovered something during the competition.”

I remembered Veronica’s proposal. It had been based on a university expansion project called Westbridge Tomorrow.

“The projections were false,” I said.

“Not merely false. The project was designed to move donor money into shell companies.”

My father’s expression hardened. “Whose companies?”

“I don’t know all of them. Hale controls some. Voss controls others.”

That explained why Voss had appeared with a fraud accusation ready.

“What did my model reveal?” I asked.

“That the university was hiding nearly sixty million dollars in liabilities. If Sterling Global completed its planned investment, your company would absorb the losses.”

My father looked at me. “You saved us from a trap without knowing it.”

Lang opened his briefcase and removed a flash drive.

“I copied the real accounts. That’s why they need Amelia blamed. If they make her look like the hacker, they can claim every document she found was altered.”

He handed me the drive.

A crash sounded in the hallway.

Marcus opened the door.

Chief Nolan lay unconscious beside the elevators.

The flash drive vanished from my hand as a masked person ran toward the stairs.

I chased them.

They reached the landing and tore off the mask.

It was Lily.

She held the drive over the open stairwell.