The girls’ locker room smelled like lavender and desperation.

  To a human, it was just sweat and cheap body spray. To me, it was the cortisol spiking off the girl crying in the third stall, the sugary rot of an energy drink spilled near the showers, and the copper scent of anxiety hanging in the steam.

  I let the heavy door swing shut behind me, muting the roar of the hallway to a dull thrum.

  Safe. For now.

  I slumped against a row of lockers, the cold steel pressing through my cheer uniform, chilling the sweat on my back. My heart was still doing gymnastics against my ribs—a double-time rhythm that had nothing to do with cardio and everything to do with the boy who caught lunch trays like they were butterflies.

  Danny Troy.

  Just saying the name in my head made my wolf brain perk up, ears swiveling toward a threat that wasn't there.

  “Handy,” I whispered, sliding down the locker until my sneakers hit the damp tile. “Tell me you got something. Anything other than ‘tall, dark, and null.’”

  “Processing,” Handy’s voice clipped in my inner ear. “It’s ugly. This kid is a digital black box.”

  “Define black box.”

  “I’m hitting walls that shouldn’t exist. I tried to pull his transfer records. Corrupted. Social credit score? Redacted. Library card? Nothing. It’s like he dropped out of the sky yesterday afternoon.”

  I blinked. Green code rained down behind my eyelids. Usually, Handy projected a clean waterfall of data. Now, it was just static. Gray, fuzzy noise that twitched like a broken signal.

  “Show me,” I commanded.

  “You will not like it.”

  “I don’t like algebra, either, but I still have to look at it. Show me.”

  The overlay flickered into existence. It was a mess. Where Danny’s profile should have been—photo, age, blood type, favorite flavor of slushie—there was a jagged tear in the code. It looked like someone had taken a magnet to a hard drive. Lines of data formed, then dissolved into meaningless symbols.

  Error 404: Identity Not Found.

  Warning: Signal Scrambled.

  Warning: Active Encryption Detected.

  “See?” Handy sounded vindicated. “It’s aggressive. Every time I send a packet request, something swats it back. And not gently. It’s frying my sub-routines. I feel like I just stuck a fork in a toaster.”

  My stomach tightened. “Is it Pandora?”

  That was the question. The only question that mattered. If Danny was Pandora, then the tray catch wasn’t a Meet Cute; it was a demonstration. It meant they sent someone to watch me closer. It meant the ‘Daddy-Blocker’ excuse I’d fed myself in the hallway was dreaming.

  “It’s… sophisticated,” Handy admitted, his voice dropping the snark for a second. “Pandora uses heavy military encryption, lots of firewalls, bio-locks. This? This feels different. It’s noise. Intentional, weaponized noise.”

  I stared at the static dancing in my vision.

  “Weaponized noise,” I muttered. “Great. So he’s not a ghost. He’s a jammer.”

  I pulled my knees to my chest, resting my chin on them. The locker room was empty save for the crying girl in the stall, who had moved on to blowing her nose with the acoustic subtlety of a foghorn.

  I replayed the scene in the cafeteria. The way Danny moved. The blur. The impact.

  Thud.

  No human teenager moved like that. I didn't care how much "adrenaline" he claimed to have. You don't catch a five-pound metal tray moving at forty miles per hour without tearing a rotator cuff unless you’re reinforced.

  Like me.

  “Handy, replay the cafeteria footage. From my ocular feed. Slow motion.”

  “Loading… buffering… and action.”

  The scene replayed in my mind. The green gelatin arc. The flying tray. The blur of black motion.

  “Freeze it,” I said. “Frame 456. Right when he steps in.”

  The image paused. Danny was mid-step, his body angled perfectly to shield me. His jacket was open.

  “Zoom in on his belt,” I said.

  “Enhancing. You know, for a high school cheerleader, you’re remarkably bossy.”

  “I’m a werewolf with a deadline, Handy. Zoom.”

  The image grainy, pixilated, then sharpened as Handy applied the filters.

  There it was.

  Clipped to his belt loop, half-hidden by the hem of his t-shirt. A small, matte-black device, no bigger than a matchbox. It had no screen, just a single, pulsing red LED that looked angry.

  I frowned. I’d seen that tech before. Not at Pandora. Not in the labs.

  I’d seen it in the pages of Wired Underground, the illegal tech zine Cody kept hidden in his locker.

  “Handy,” I said, the tension in my chest loosening just a fraction. “Run a cross-reference on that device. Look for ‘The Silencer’ or ‘Ghost-Key’.”

  “Searching… ah. Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Omni-Scrambler X-7. Rich kid toy. Blocks Daddy’s tracking apps and keeps the chauffeur from listening in.”

  I let out a breath, my head thumping back against the locker.

  “So it is a Daddy-Blocker,” I said.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Essentially,” Handy confirmed. “It creates a localized electromagnetic bubble that scrambles GPS, facial rec, and data mining. Rich kids use them to keep their parents from tracking their location or reading their texts. It explains the static. It explains why I can’t get a read on him. He’s walking around inside a digital Faraday cage.”

  The relief washed over me, cool and cleansing.

  He wasn’t a Pandora agent. He wasn’t a hunter.

  He was just a rich kid with issues.

  “So,” I said, tracing the pattern of the tiles with my eyes. “He’s hiding.”

  “Looks like it,” Handy said. “Probably running from a dad who wants him to take over the family soy-futures empire. Or a mom who tracks his caloric intake via satellite.”

  It made sense. He wore his expensive clothes carelessly. The solitude. The refusal to engage. He was doing exactly what I was doing: hiding in plain sight.

  He wasn’t a hunter. He was just hiding. My shoulders dropped. Civilian. That made him safe. It also made him breakable.

  Safe.

  The word hung in the humid air.

  If he was safe, that meant he wasn’t a threat to me.

  But it also meant I was a threat to him.

  My hands curled into fists. I looked at my knuckles, imagining the claws that lived just beneath the skin. I thought about the Black Box in the Kennel; the target painted on my back, the monsters that hunted me.

  If I let Danny Troy in—if I let that strange, magnetic gravity pull myself toward him—I would drag him into the crossfire.

  Pandora didn’t care about collateral damage. To them, a human was just raw material. If they came for me and Danny was standing there…

  He wouldn't stand a chance.

  “He caught a lunch tray,” I whispered. “He thinks he’s tough.”

  “He probably is, for a human,” Handy said. “But you’re not fighting a service bot, Nikki. You’re fighting genetic abominations. If you get close to him, you put him on the menu.”

  “I know.”

  The sympathy hardened into resolve. It had to. It was the only way to keep him breathing.

  I couldn’t be his friend. I couldn’t be his crush. I couldn’t even be his acquaintance.

  I had to be a wall.

  “Categorize him,” I said, my voice flat.

  “Category?”

  “Safe Civilian. Non-Combatant. Do Not Engage.”

  “Updated,” Handy chirped. “Though, purely from a statistical standpoint, isolating yourself from potential allies decreases your long-term survival probability by 15%.”

  “He’s not an ally, Handy. He’s a liability. And I don’t do liabilities.”

  I stood up, pushing off the lockers. My legs felt stronger now, the shakes gone. The decision gave me structure. It gave me a script.

  “I’m going to freeze him out,” I said, grabbing my bag. “Cold shoulder. Dead air. If he tries to talk to me, I’m busy. If he looks at me, I’m looking away. He’s just a transfer student. I’m just a cheerleader. End of story.”

  “You say that like it’s going to be easy,” Handy noted. “But biology is a funny thing. And that heart rate spike earlier? That wasn’t fear, Nikki. That was chemistry.”

  “I got an A in chemistry,” I snapped, shouldering the bag. “I know how to neutralize a reaction.”

  “Sure you do. Just remember, vinegar and baking soda makes a mess, no matter how much you plan for it.”

  “Shut up, Handy.”

  I walked toward the exit, my sneakers squeaking on the wet floor. I caught my reflection in the foggy mirror above the sinks.

  White hair. Purple eyes. A face that looked too sharp, too hungry.

  Monster, the mirror whispered.

  Guardian, I corrected.

  I wasn’t pushing Danny away because I was mean. I was pushing him away because I was dangerous.

  I shoved the guilt down. I fixed my short hair, checked my teeth for lipstick, and practiced my best "I’m better than you" sneer.

  “Game face,” I told the reflection.

  I pushed through the door and back into the hallway.

  The school was emptying, the noise level dropping to a manageable hum. I kept my head down, my HUD scanning for the quickest route to the exit that didn't go past the trophy case.

  I turned the corner, calculating the vectors. If I took the west stairwell, I could cut through the music wing and—

  I stopped.

  He was there.

  Leaning against the wall near the water fountain. Waiting.

  Danny Troy.

  He looked up as I rounded the corner. He wasn't looking at his phone. He wasn't looking at the floor. He was looking right at the space where I would appear, as if he knew my schedule better than I did.

  My pulse jumped.

  Stand down, I ordered the organ. We are freezing him out. Remember the plan.

  I tightened my grip on my bag and kept walking. My eyes fixed on a point somewhere over his left shoulder. I adjusted my face into a mask of boredom.

  Don’t look at the eyes. Don’t look at the eyes.

  As I got closer, he pushed off the wall. He didn't block my path, but he stepped into my orbit.

  “Nikki,” he said.

  His voice was low, vibrating in the empty hall.

  I didn't stop. I didn't slow down.

  “Busy,” I clipped, breezing past him. “Cheer stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You forgot this.”

  He held something out.

  I faltered. Just a step. My curiosity—the fatal flaw of every cat and werewolf in history—made me look.

  In his hand, resting on his pale palm, was a small, silver charm. A wolf head. It had fallen off my bag during the cafeteria brawl. My squad wore those like military dog tags so the crowd knew who we were. A typical clique thing.

  It was cheap plastic, worth maybe fifty cents. But the way he held it, you’d think it was a diamond.

  I stopped. I couldn't help it.

  “You dropped it,” he said, his eyes locking onto mine. “When you were… dodging.”

  The static in my head flared. Handy was screaming warnings about proximity and signal interference, but I tuned him out.

  I reached out, snatching the charm from his hand. I made sure our skin didn't touch.

  “Thanks,” I said, my voice sharper than I intended. “It’s just plastic. My captain gave me a hundred of them.”

  “Still,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  He wasn’t moving. He was standing there, in that relaxed, predatory stance, just… being.

  “Look,” I said, channeling my inner mean girl. “About the incident back in the cafeteria. I want to say thank you for the save with the tray. Seriously. But don’t think this makes us friends. I don’t do the whole ‘mysterious new guy’ thing. I have a squad, I have practice, and I have zero free time for drama.”

  It was harsh. It was rude. It was perfect.

  He should have flinched. He should have gotten defensive, or embarrassed, or walked away.

  Instead, he just watched me. A tiny, almost invisible smile touched the corner of his mouth.

  “I didn’t ask for your time, Nikki,” he whispered. “I just returned your property.”

  He wasn’t playing the game. He wasn’t following the high school script.

  “Right,” I said, clutching the plastic pom-pom like a talisman. “Well. Mission accomplished. Bye.”

  I turned and walked away. Fast. I didn't run, but it was close.

  My skin prickled. I could feel him watching me again. The weight of his gaze was physical, a warm pressure on the back of my neck.

  “He’s not buying it,” Handy whispered.

  “He bought it,” I hissed under my breath. “He thinks I’m a jerk. That’s the goal.”

  “He thinks you’re interesting,” Handy corrected. “Irony alert: You just engaged the ‘Hard to Get’ protocol. You made yourself a challenge.”

  “I hate you, Handy.”

  “The feeling is mutual. Now, can we please leave the building? The V-Space in here is giving me a rash.”

  I burst out the double doors and into the cool air of the parking lot. I sucked in a breath, tasting the ozone and the exhaust fumes.

  I had survived the cafeteria. I had survived the locker room. I had survived Danny Troy.

  But as I walked toward the tram station, clutching the silver Neon Wolf charm in my hand, I knew one thing for sure.

  The static wasn’t going away.

  And neither was he.