Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN BEHIND THE SHUTTER
Piper moved toward the shutter.
Mr. Hale caught her shoulder.
“Wait.”
“That’s my mother.”
“Evan’s recording just said the woman you know may not be your biological mother.”
“Evan was lying.”
“Then how did he know she disappeared?”
Piper pulled free.
Outside, the woman spoke again.
“Pip, listen to me. The box is connected to the old archive. If it opens, everyone in this building is in danger.”
Nell looked at the timer.
23:52:10.
“What is inside the archive?” she called.
Silence.
“Where is Evan?”
The woman did not answer.
Piper pressed both hands against the metal shutter.
“Mom, tell them you are Elena Vale.”
“I am the woman who raised you.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Rowan watched the exchange from several feet away.
He no longer appeared in control.
“Do not trust her,” he said.
Piper turned.
“You know her?”
“I know what she is capable of.”
“You work for my father.”
“I worked against him.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Officer Grant approached the shutter’s manual controls.
“The mechanism is locked through the central system.”
“Can you override it?” Nell asked.
“Not without triggering a full lockdown.”
“We are already locked down.”
“No. This is one corridor. A full lockdown seals every room and disables all exterior doors.”
Mr. Hale looked at Rowan.
“Why does a school have a system like that?”
Rowan smiled without humor.
“Because Westbridge was never built only as a school.”
The red lights flickered.
Somewhere beneath them, heavy machinery activated.
The floor vibrated.
The blue box displayed a new message.
EXTERNAL ACCESS DETECTED.
Piper’s mother cried out from the other side of the shutter.
“They are opening the lower level. Get away from the locker.”
A sharp metallic sound came from behind the lockers.
The entire row began sliding forward.
Nell stepped back as a narrow opening appeared in the wall.
Cold air rose from a staircase descending into darkness.
The entrance from Evan’s photograph.
A red emergency light glowed above it.
Piper stared.
“This was behind the lockers?”
Rowan closed his eyes.
“The old access tunnel.”
Nell held up the photograph.
“Evan was here three days after he vanished.”
Rowan looked at it.
“He was not supposed to survive that long.”
Everyone turned toward him.
Rowan seemed to realize what he had said.
Nell’s voice shook.
“What did you do to him?”
“I did not take your brother.”
“You knew someone did.”
“I tried to help him escape.”
“Then where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Nell grabbed the front of Rowan’s jacket.
“You are going to tell me everything.”
Officer Grant pulled her back.
Rowan adjusted his collar.
“Evan discovered the archive while repairing the school network. He believed it contained financial fraud. At first, he was right. Marcus Vale paid administrators to alter records for donors’ children. Expulsions vanished. Grades changed. Scholarship funds were redirected.”
Piper looked away.
Rowan continued.
“But those files were only the outer layer. Deeper in the archive, Evan found records of something called the Continuity Program.”
Mr. Hale frowned.
“What program?”
“A long-term behavioral surveillance project. Students were observed, manipulated and tested without their knowledge. Conflicts were created deliberately. Friendships were broken. Rumors were introduced. Cameras recorded the results.”
Nell thought of Piper’s draft folder.
The humiliations.
The names.
The payments.
“You used students as experiments?”
“I did not create the program.”
“But you helped run it.”
Rowan did not deny it.
Piper’s voice dropped.
“My videos.”
Rowan looked at her.
“Your father gave you targets and encouraged you to record them. You thought you were building an audience. In reality, you were collecting reactions.”
Piper shook her head.
“He never gave me targets.”
“Who suggested the scholarship student series?”
“My media adviser.”
“Who chose the students?”
Piper said nothing.
“Who told you Nell would be interesting to provoke?”
Piper’s eyes filled with confusion.
Nell understood before she did.
Piper’s cruelty had been real.
But someone had directed it.
Someone had been feeding her victims.
The woman outside the shutter struck the metal again.
“Rowan, stop talking.”
He faced the barrier.
“You lost the right to command me when you left Daniel in the lower level.”
The corridor became silent.
Nell looked at the old identification card.
“Daniel Rowan is alive?”
The vice principal touched the silver ring on his hand.
“My name is Adrian Cross. Daniel was my brother.”
“What happened to him?”
“He discovered the program seventeen years ago.”
“And Elena Vale?”
Adrian looked toward Piper.
“She discovered it with him.”
Piper’s mother shouted from outside.
“That is enough.”
Adrian raised his voice.
“No, Celia. It was enough when you stole Elena’s identity.”
Piper staggered backward.
The woman outside the shutter was not Elena.
She was Celia.
A stranger had raised Piper under another woman’s name.
Nell looked down the hidden staircase.
From somewhere below, a phone began ringing.
The sound echoed upward.
Piper’s missing phone.
The one containing the recording.
Nell stepped toward the stairs.
Adrian blocked her.
“That sound is bait.”
“It may contain evidence about Evan.”
“It is designed to bring you down there.”
“Then it worked.”
Nell took the flashlight from Officer Grant’s belt and started descending.
Piper followed.
“You are not coming,” Nell said.
“That recording involved my family.”
“Your family planned to frame me.”
“And your brother apparently knew who my real mother was.”
Mr. Hale joined them.
Officer Grant remained behind to find a way through the shutter.
Adrian hesitated.
Then he stepped onto the staircase.
“I know the lower level.”
Nell aimed the flashlight at his face.
“And if you lead us into a trap?”
Adrian looked at the blue box in Mr. Hale’s hands.
“We entered the trap when you opened Locker 113.”
Below them, Piper’s phone stopped ringing.
A young man’s voice replaced it.
“Nell?”
She nearly fell.
It was Evan.
“Don’t come down,” the voice warned. “They made me call you.”
May you like
Then someone struck him.
The line went dead.
