from the charging stand beside the refrigerator.
I looked at Lila.
She smiled wider.
That was when I knew this wasn’t just cruelty.
It was coordinated.
They needed me to miss the defense.
What they didn’t know was that Professor Shaw and I had prepared for exactly one possibility: interference.
Three months earlier, after an attempted breach of my university account, he had insisted I install an automatic emergency protocol. If I failed to check in by 7:45 on defense day, the system would send my location, archived messages,
