The locker room smelled of hairspray, ozone, and the cloying sweetness of synthetic vanilla body glitter. It was the scent of my sanctuary. Or, at least, it used to be.

  Now, it smelled like a cage.

  I sat on the edge of the blue bench, staring at the scuffed toes of my sneakers. My locker was open, a metal mouth waiting to swallow my secrets. Inside, buried beneath layers of practice gear and textbooks, Handy hummed silently.

  But I wasn’t listening to Handy. I wasn’t listening to the wolf, who was currently curled into a ball of misery at the base of my skull, whining about pack and loss.

  I was listening to the sound of my own heart hardening.

  My heart sounded like a clock. Tick. Tick. Gone.

  “Nikki? Earth to Major Tom?”

  Tessa’s face popped into my field of vision, upside down. She was hanging off the top of the locker row, her legs hooked over the metal frame.

  “You’re doing the ‘thousand-yard stare’ again,” she noted, dropping to the floor with a cat-like grace. “It’s very dramatic. Are we brooding about physics, or are we brooding about the mysterious boy who punched a drone?”

  “Physics,” I lied. The word felt heavy on my tongue.

  “Liar.” Cody Miller’s voice drifted from the doorway.

  Cody was sitting on the floor just inside the threshold, tinkering with the shattered remains of a hover-board, a soldering iron clenched between his teeth.

  “You’re not thinking about physics,” Cody said around the tool. He took it out, a wisp of smoke curling from the tip. “You’re thinking about Troy. You’ve got that look.”

  “What look?” I snapped, reaching for my bag.

  “The ‘I’m about to do something stupid and self-sacrificial’ look,” Cody clarified. “It’s the same face you make before you try a triple-twist without a spotter.”

  I froze. My hand gripped the strap of my bag until the leather creaked.

  They knew me too well. That was the problem with having friends who were actually observant.

  They saw through the pom-poms. They saw the cracks in the porcelain.

  I needed to seal those cracks. I needed to be seamless.

  If I was going to save Danny Troy, I had to be the villain. I had to be the girl who didn't care.

  “I’m not doing anything self-sacrificial,” I said, standing up. I smoothed down my skirt, checking my reflection in the mirror on the locker door.

  The girl looking back was pale. Her eyes were purple bruises of exhaustion. She looked fragile.

  Fix it, I ordered myself.

  I pulled my shoulders back. I tilted my chin up. The Ice Queen mask slid into place.

  “I’m making a tactical decision,” I announced.

  Tessa paused in the middle of applying holographic lip gloss. She capped the tube slowly. “Tactical? That sounds… unromantic.”

  “Romance is a distraction,” I said. My voice was steady. Cold. “And I have more important things to do than worry about romance. We have a championship to win.”

  Cody stopped soldering. He put the iron down. “What are you talking about, Nikki?”

  “Danny,” I said. The name tasted like glass. “He’s… too much. The drama. The brooding. The rogue drones dive-bombing the courtyard. It’s messy.”

  “Messy?” Tessa squeaked. “Nikki, he saved a bunch of freshmen! He punched a robot! He's a good young man!”

  “It was reckless,” I countered, turning to face them. I crossed my arms, building a wall between us. “He drew attention. He disrupted the status quo. And frankly? I don’t have time for it.”

  I walked to the mirror, pulling a tube of lipstick from my bag. War paint.

  “He's out. I’ve broken up with him. Or I told him we’re done.”

  Silence.

  The kind of heavy, suffocating silence that usually precedes a tornado siren.

  “You’re what?” Tessa whispered. She looked genuinely disappointed, her shoulders slumping.

  “You're giving him up? Just like that? Nikki, he looks at you like you hung the moon. You're throwing away something real.”

  “I’m choosing stability,” I said, applying the blood-red shade.

  “You’re lying,” Cody said. His voice wasn't playful anymore. It was hard.

  He stood up, abandoning the hover-board, and stepped into my space.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “I know you, Nikki. I know when you're scared. You think if you push everyone away, you’ll be safe. But you’re hiding something.”

  “I’m not hiding anything,” I lied, meeting his gaze in the mirror.

  “You are,” Cody insisted. “You’re hiding the truth. And acting like this? Cutting people off who actually care about you? It’s not going to make you strong. It’s only going to keep you away from having any happiness.”

  The words struck a nerve. Happiness. As if people like me could afford that luxury.

  “I don’t need a lecture, Cody,” I snapped, annoyance flaring hot in my chest. “And I don’t need you psychoanalyzing me. I need to focus on things that actually matter. Like my future. Like this squad.”

  “That’s not you talking,” Cody said quietly.

  “It is now,” I said. I zipped my bag shut with a vicious yank. “I’m leaving. I can’t listen to this anymore.”

  I turned my back on them. It was harder than turning my back on Danny. These were my friends. My real friends. And I was lying to their faces.

  But I had to.

  If they knew the truth—if they knew about the Black Box, about Pandora, about the fact that

  Danny was a target because of me—they would try to help. They would get involved.

  And they would get hurt.

  Tessa would get taken. Cody would get erased.

  I couldn't live with that.

  So I let them think I was shallow. I let them think I was cold. I let them think I cared more about a plastic trophy than a human being.

  It was the noble lie. The hero’s burden.

  It tasted like ash and cheap lipstick.

  “Handy,” I thought as I reached the door, needing a distraction from the hurt in Cody’s eyes. “Music. Loud. Something with a lot of bass. I need to drown out the guilt.”

  “Request denied,” the AI chimed.

  I stopped. My hand hovered over the door handle.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said denied. We have a situation, Nikki. And you need to listen. Now.”

  The urgency in his synthesized voice cut through my emotional fog. Handy wasn't snarky. He wasn't sarcastic. He sounded… alarmed.

  “What situation?” I thought. “Is it Pandora? Did they track us here?”

  “Drone wreckage,” Handy said. “I’ve been scrubbing the local feeds, trying to delete the footage of your boyfriend’s superhero landing. I accessed the school’s maintenance server to wipe the logs.”

  “And?”

  “And someone else was already there.”

  My stomach dropped. “Pandora?”

  “No. That’s the weird part. It wasn't corporate code. It wasn't the clean, military encryption I’m used to seeing from Moldark’s goons. This was… messy.”

  “Messy?”

  “Code looks wrong. Feral. Someone scrubbed the logs before I got there. It scrubbed the biometric data before I could even touch it. It deleted the ‘Asset Alpha’ tag.”

  I frowned. “Someone protected him?”

  “Or someone stole the data before Pandora could verify it. But that’s not the headline, Nikki. I recovered a fragment of the drone’s internal frequency log. The command signal.”

  “Who was flying it?”

  “That’s the question,” Handy said. “The signal didn't come from the school security hub. It didn't come from the Pandora tower.”

  A holographic waveform flickered in my vision, overlaying the door of the locker room. It was a jagged, red line.

  “It came from a short-wave burst,” Handy explained. “Highly localized. Low power.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the pilot wasn't in a control room miles away. The pilot was close. Within a two-block radius. Maybe closer.”

  A red line spiked on my HUD. Local signal. Short-range.

  Someone at the school?

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Unknown. The signature is masked. But Nikki… look at the frequency modulation. The rhythm.”

  I watched the line bounce. Up, down, pause. Up, down, pause.

  It looked familiar.

  “It matches the interference pattern we picked up from Danny,” Handy said. “The static.”

  My blood ran cold.

  “You think… Danny flew the drone?”

  “No,” Handy said quickly. “He was the target. But the signal that controlled the drone? It’s on the same spectrum as his scrambler. It’s related tech. Or…”

  Or what?

  “Or it’s the same source.”

  I leaned against the doorframe, my head spinning.

  If the drone was controlled by someone using the same tech as Danny…

  Was it a test?

  Or was there someone else? Another player?

  “I need to analyze the wreckage,” Handy said. “Physical access. The debris is currently in the janitor’s office on the second floor. If I can plug directly into the drone’s CPU, I might be able to trace the handshake back to the source device.”

  “The janitor’s office,” I repeated.

  “Nikki, this is critical,” Handy insisted. “If someone at this school is piloting hunter-killer drones, you are in immediate danger. We need to know who is holding the controller.”

  My hand tightened on the strap of my gym bag.

  I looked down the hallway toward the gym. Towards Coach, the pyramid, and the mindless, rhythmic safety of cheer practice. It was the easy way out. I could go there, bury my head in the routine, and pretend the world wasn't burning.

  But then I thought about the red line on my HUD.

  Someone was here. Someone close.

  If I ignored it, if I went to practice and pretended everything was fine, I would be flying blind. And flying blind was how you got dead.

  Worse, it was how you got the people you were trying to protect killed.

  “Cody said I was hiding,” I whispered to myself.

  “What was that?” Handy asked.

  “Nothing.”

  I let go of the door handle. I turned my back on the gym.

  I already broken up with Danny. The tears, the drama, the inevitable heartbreak—that was a problem for later.

  Right now, I had a job to do.

  “Handy,” I thought, my mind sharpening, the fog of guilt burning away under the heat of adrenaline. “Where exactly is the janitor’s office?”

  “Second floor. North corridor. Room 204. Why?”

  I adjusted my bag, feeling the reassuring weight of the hidden gear inside.

  “Because you’re right,” I said. “We need to know who’s pulling the strings.”

  I checked the hallway. Clear.

  I wasn't Nikki Nova, the heartbroken cheerleader.

  I was Nikki Nova, the hunter.

  And the hunter was going to work.

  “Cheer practice can wait,” I said, and started running toward the stairs.