The storm has passed, leaving Westbridge Academy slick with black ice and wrapped in a suffocating, frozen fog.
By 7:15 AM, the gothic stone archways look less like an elite sanctuary for future world leaders and more like the entrance to a high-security prison. I pull the lapels of my mother’s oversized wool coat tighter around my throat as my boots crunch over the gravel path leading toward the Administration Building. My knuckles are white around the leather strap of my bag, where the hard, rectangular outline of Enzo’s modified tablet sits like an unexploded ordnance.
We have forty-five minutes before the Board of Trustees convenes in the Founders' Room. Forty-five minutes before Vicente Tavares presents his fraudulent petition to strip me of my scholarship and seal my mother's finan
