POV: So-min

The bell for the second period rang, flooding the hallways once again with the roar of moving students. I didn't reach for my phone. If the tracker was mirroring the school’s boundary nodes, any cellular transmission or local Wi-Fi ping from my device could be logged, mapped, and analyzed.

Instead, I used the oldest network in the world: physical proximity.

I navigated the crowded central staircase, keeping my pace steady and my eyes fixed straight ahead. I knew exactly where Da-eun and Rora would be moving—the hallway intersection between the science wing and the main library. It was the highest-density foot traffic zone on campus, a perfect acoustic and visual blur.

As I rounded the corner, I spotted them walking toward the lockers. I didn't slow down, and I didn't call out their names.

I cut right through the space between them, my shoulder brushing lightly against Da-eun’s arm. As I passed, I slipped a small, crumpled piece of standard notebook paper straight into the open side pocket of her blazer.

I kept walking, turning the corner toward my next class without a single backward glance.

Inside her blazer pocket, Da-eun’s fingers closed around the paper. A few minutes later, tucked safely inside a bathroom stall with Rora guarding the outer door, they smoothed out the note. It wasn't written in Korean or English. It was a simple, hand-drawn logic gate diagram we had learned in our early tutoring days, masked as a messy math doodle.

[ EXT_NODE_01 ] ---> ( MIRROR ) ---> [ UNKNOWN MAC ]
                 ⚠️ DISCONNECT ⚠️

Beneath the diagram, a single sentence was scrawled in messy shorthand: The fence has an extra eye. They are cloning the security feeds in real-time. Do not use the airwaves.

Rora stared at the note, her face turning pale. "The sedan isn't just watching," she whispered to Da-eun over the top of the stall door. "They've hijacked the school's perimeter grid. If we even look toward the utility shed again, they'll see it before the Kims do."

"Then we change the frequency," Da-eun said, her voice dropping into a hard, determined quiet. "If they are watching the outside, we make our next move entirely from the inside."

POV: Rora

The bathroom air felt heavy, smelling faintly of industrial soap and damp paper towels. I stood with my back against the heavy wooden door, my ears tuned to every passing footstep in the hallway while Da-eun smoothed out So-min’s note inside the stall.

Cloning the security feeds in real-time.

The words looped through my mind like an un-killable system script. If the stranger in the sedan had a mirror tap on the intersection gate node, they weren't just passively logging packets. They had a high-bandwidth, low-latency pipeline straight into the academy's localized hardware.

"We can't use a digital exploit to drop that camera," I whispered toward the stall door, my voice flat and urgent. "If I push a standard de-auth frame or flood the port with synthetic traffic, the tracker's mirror script will log the sudden bandwidth anomaly instantly. It’ll practically highlight our coordinates on his dashboard."

"Then how do we blind it?" Da-eun’s voice came back, quiet and tense. "We can't go near the shed while he's pulling that feed."

"We don't attack the software," I said, a cold, precise logic settling over my panic. "We use the environment."

I pulled out my phone, keeping it completely disconnected from any network—cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth entirely disabled. I opened a locally saved structural schematic of the school's older building infrastructure, zooming into the climate control and ventilation routing diagrams.

Every morning at exactly 10:15 AM, during the mid-morning break, the academy’s central cafeteria kitchens initialized their heavy-duty industrial steam vents. One of those massive pressure-release valves was located on the lower brick wall of the science wing, facing directly toward the Western alleyway—less than ten feet below the intersection camera.

"A thermal whiteout," I murmured, showing the offline diagram to Da-eun as she stepped out of the stall. "If the atmospheric humidity spikes instantly by eighty percent in that specific corner, the camera's auto-focus and lens-iris will clip. It's a natural blinding effect. To the tracker, it'll look like a routine maintenance steam purge. It won't trigger a single digital tripwire."

"And it gives us exactly a two-minute blind spot," Da-eun realized, her eyes shifting to the clock on the wall.

It was 9:58 AM. We had seventeen minutes to position ourselves at the edge of the corridor before the steam valve flipped open.

CHAPTER ENDS