As Remi and Nel walked down the hallway, the click of their boots echoed sharply. In response, the glyph-fish scattered ahead, their runic bodies darting towards the light at the tunnel’s end. Leading them towards whatever waited in the room beyond.

  The tunnel took little time to navigate, which was good as it reeked of wet peat. The smell of moldy grass clung thickly in the confined space, and Remi found it extremely cloying, so he was relieved when they stepped into a wider space and fresh air wafted across his face.

  It extended upwards—an impossible distance. The chamber reached up several stories, which should have been impossible given they had entered what had appeared to be a wall and not a tower the night before. Remi let it go, however. The Crucible’s lesson that logic didn’t matter in this place was already settling in, and he no longer frankly gave a shit.

  The top of the chamber was open to the air, causing the room to be illuminated with a glow of natural light. It was difficult to look straight up, but Remi attempted to do it anyway. At the lip, he thought he saw something perching. The prep vulture? It was too hard to tell, and he needed to avert his burning eyes. Again, he didn’t really give a shit. If it were going to be a problem, he would deal with it when it became a problem. For now, he needed to focus on the immediate issue of the memory chamber.

  The room itself was nothing to write home about. It was made of cobblestone walls mortared together with lines of dewy moss that sparkled in the sun. There was no door other than the one they had just exited from. Remi didn't have to look back to know that it too was gone. The Crucible didn't want its treads backtracking, at least here, in this part of its dungeon. The whole thing felt like they were in a funnel. That Nel and he were being led towards something unseen. What? He still wasn’t sure.

  As they made it to the center of the chamber, the hue of the light from above shifted. No longer were they bathed in natural light, but in an artificial neon orange. There was a scanning sound, like when the photocopier at school was making manual prints. Remi might have imagined it, but he thought he saw a thin line of lighter amber run down Nel’s body from head to toe.

  [Memory Scan Complete]

  High resonance, interconnected moment selected.

  The world flashed in the blinding light Remi’s eyes had tried to avoid earlier. He shut them instinctively, and as he blinked them open, he found himself no longer in the chamber. He also was no longer quite himself.

  He was back in school, but everything was black and white. A quick glance at his hands confirmed it. Remi was on the security footage of his school, somehow. It was like the picture he had given Astrid. Everything was grainy, and he appeared almost as if he had been drawn in chalk lines.

  In the top corner of his HUD, there was a bright red blinking circle, the letters REC nestled just to its right. There was a date in the opposite corner: March 19th, 2019, 8:14 am. He knew this day, and why he and Nel were here. In a panic, Remi realized that she wasn’t with him. But of course she wouldn’t be yet. She would be upstairs in his classroom waiting for first period. He often found her there before the day began, hoodie pulled low, playing on her DS or working on a computer.

  She had arrived early in the term. It had surprised him at first, how she always seemed to get into his locked room before he arrived for the day. He’d asked her once how she did it, but she smiled and said, trade secret. Remi had figured she likely had an in with the Janitor, but really it was fine. It was nice to have the lights on when he got there, and someone to chat with as he got his lessons together.

  When it had started, she sat in the back corner, as far from Remi’s desk as was physically possible. But as time passed, she had inched forward, moving one desk at a time, until now her regular desk was only one away from his. Close enough that they could talk easily, but still, a slight barrier between them.

  That is where he had found her on that Tuesday, in the same place she had been for many Tuesdays before. What made this day different was that on the Monday morning that preceded it, she had confessed something to Remi.

  The conversation had started routinely. “Mr. Page, I need to tell you something.”

  “Sure, Elena, what is it?” He recalled he hadn’t even looked up from his computer. He was trying to find slides for a lecture on To Kill a Mockingbird, and as always he couldn’t seem to remember what he had called the file. It was amid his frantic searching that the question came.

  Remi wasn’t sure what he had expected, likely a summary of her recent Letterboxd review. Instead, what she said came totally out of left field.

  “You know I do some coding in my spare time,” she said.

  “Ummhmmm.” He was only half listening, still scrolling through his files. Truthfully, he had not known about Elena’s extracurricular pursuits, so what came next was even more shocking.

  “Well.” She paused. Remi looked up from what he was doing. The silence broke through his distraction. As their eyes met, she continued. “Last night I was playing around with the school’s grade book software, and I discovered an exploit.”

  “What! Why would you do that?” He didn’t mean to sound stern, but it leaked in. He felt bad about it as she seemed to crumple a bit. “Sorry,” he had said. “I was just surprised.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Her smile had been hesitant, but she continued. “I know it was stupid. But I got a dare.” Elena had stumbled to a bit of a halt, but then sped up so that the rest of her words tumbled together one on top of the other. “That doesn’t matter, but anyway, I found that there is a hole in the security. It is really simple once you know the hole is there. So I wanted to tell you so you could have it plugged, maybe.”

  The world froze, as if the Crucible had found the moment it had been looking for. Remi could see the pause button on his HUD. The pause lingered longer than expected, the system hesitating, as if it waited for something more than the memory itself.

  Nel’s voice came from beside him. No longer the voice of the girl, but the woman who had become his partner.

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. So I did what I shouldn’t have.”

  Remi found that he could move, the scene in front of him was locked down, but he wasn’t. He was not sure when she had arrived. The smile he gave her was sad.

  “I wish I had trusted you. I would have found it and thought it just an entering error on my part.

  “It’s fine,” she said. Remi wasn’t so sure. “Really,” she said in response to his body language. “But we should probably let this play out.”

  Remi turned to look forward and was shocked to find that the entire scene had shifted. Where he had been in the office before, now he was back in his classroom. Where before it had been a memory, now it was played out before them both. Remi could see himself at his desk, and Nel at her desk. A look at the time showed him it had been rolled back to Monday.

  The scene in front of them unfroze, and they watched their past interaction together.

  “I’m not sure what you think you could do,” he heard himself say, “but the software is expensive; we have been assured it is very secure.” The Nel shook her head in a no gesture.

  “I thought you might say that, so I changed my essay grade.”

  He watched himself blink in incredulity. Then log in to the grade portal. He remembered the shock at seeing the 89 beside her essay grade. It was weird to see the look of confusion on his own face. Remi had given her a 98 on the paper; she had lost a few paltry marks for some citation issues. He was going to give her a hundred, but it felt too early in the semester. The two marks were a gentle reminder to proofread carefully.

  Remi knew now that she likely didn’t need the numeric reminder. In his few days with Nel, he learned she was meticulous and didn’t make the same mistake twice—ever. A comment would have sufficed.

  Remi and Nel watched the conversation play out. His surprise at the grade change.

  The scene fuzzed as the REC shifted to FFWD. Static lines crisscrossed his vision, and when they stopped, he was back in the office. The time once again said Tuesday. They were still looking in from the outside, and so when the action resumed, Remi could see himself leave the front lobby and go towards his VP’s office.

  Nel watched him go too.

  “I guess this is when you ratted me out.” She was trying to be joking, but there was some tension in her voice.

  Remi looked at her. He didn’t need to follow himself to know what was happening in the room down the hall. “Yes,” he said, flushing a bit with embarrassment. “I went to tell them about the gap in the system. He didn’t believe it could be done either. When I insisted, he asked me how I knew. I told him about the grade change.”

  Nel nodded.

  “I really thought they would thank you for finding the flaw in the system.”

  The smile she gave him was sad but genuine. “I know you did, Remi. Actually, it is sort of cute. But no system likes to learn about its flaws. Ignorance is always easier than the truth.”

  The surrounding scene fast-forwarded again, to later in the day. Young Elena sat in the chair to their left. Ready to be called into the office. They both ignored the replay, as what mattered was what was happening between them now.

  “In the office, he told me that the situation would be handled. I thought it would be the security flaw; I didn’t realize that he was going to suspend you.”

  Nel again nodded, but didn't respond.

  “When I found out I came in and yelled at him, but they said by changing the grade you had committed academic misconduct.” Remi sighed.

  “I know.” Her voice was surprisingly low.

  “But it was only three days out of school.” He shrugged. “So I figured it was no biggie.”

  Her response surprised him. “It was bigger than you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She paused. A look of calculation flashed across her face, but it was replaced with resolve.

  “I got sent home for three days. But it also meant that I didn’t get to go to the coding competition with the school’s computer science team. It was nationals, and we had been working towards it the whole year. We were really good, so they took someone in my place. They used some of the practice code I had written to win. They all got scholarships to MIT. I didn’t.

  Remi’s breath caught hard in his chest, sharp and shallow, he felt his chest constrict. Bile rose in his throat. “I didn’t know.”

  Nell tugged at the cuffs of her hoodie and then thrust her hands in the front pocket. “How could you?” she said. “It’s fine; university is stupid. I get work without it.”

  The memory Elena waved her finger in admonishment at Nel. Her lip curled slightly as she hissed, “No.” She turned her back on the memory. “I will not do it. You want me to hurt him. There is no value in it. I got over it. I’m really fine now.” The memory got up, walked in front of Nel and shook its head no.

  “Fine,” she said. Nel pushed past her old self, so that she and Remi were face to face. She stepped in close, no longer was there an empty desk between them.

  “The truth is, Remi. I really wanted to go to MIT; it had been my dream for a long time.”

  It was Remi’s turn to get quiet. “I didn’t know.”

  “It really is fine. I am really fine.” Her tone was warm, but then quickly shifted to hard and clipped as she lifted her chin to yell at the sky. “There, I did it. Unlock the fucking door. I hurt him. You made me do it.”

  The Crucible responded with silence.

  Remi collected himself quickly. “It isn’t over yet. It wants confession, remember.”

  Nel’s attention returned to him.

  “I’m so sorry, Nel. They told me that if I pressed the issue. They would put me on administrative leave. That they would remove you from my class.”

  “That I didn’t know.” She looked interested.

  “Let me finish, please. I owe you that. I should have stood up for you. I should have fought harder. I should have taken the suspension instead of you. I was scared, and I didn’t want to have you leave my class. I was selfish.”

  She laughed. It wasn't the response he had expected.

  “Oh, Remi. You’re sweet. If you had done what you suggested, they just would have suspended us both. They are the system, and as you are learning, the system doesn’t play fair.”

  “But—.”

  “No buts, Remi. It really is fine. Remember, I sold the solution, and I used that money to start my own cyber-security business. I didn’t need MIT. Also, I would have missed the rest of the semester with you.” She smiled again. “It means a lot to me to know what you are willing to sacrifice for me now.”

  Remi looked at her. “I promise I will not abandon you again.”

  Her smile was a bit sad. “I know. Of that, I no longer have any doubt.”

  The Crucible responded with CLICK!