Chapter 4

The clock on the wall showed that a full hour had passed since the exam began.

Under normal conditions, two hours would have been enough for me to finish the paper and review my answers. Now half of that time had been stolen before I had even properly started.

I inhaled slowly and forced my anger down.

The paper was still in front of me. My future was still in front of me. I could not let him take both.

I began working.

But after only a few problems, the memory of being searched in the restroom flashed through my mind. My clothes pulled aside. My pockets turned out. My body treated like evidence. Shame hit me so hard that my pen slipped.

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

Then Stiazky began making noise.

He stood up and paced. He clicked his tongue. He dragged his chair closer. He leaned in until his shadow fell across the page.

"Mr. Stiazky," I said at last, unable to stand it, "please stay quiet. You're affecting my work."

"I'm observing a suspicious candidate," he said. "That is my job. Or are you trying to distract me so you can cheat?"

I stopped arguing.

There was no point. Every word I spoke gave him another excuse.

I focused on the paper again.

I skipped tedious calculations where I could, wrote only the key steps for proofs, and compressed my working down to the essentials. Stiazky kept watching me as if his eyes were glued to my hands.

I hated it. I hated the feeling of being hunted. But I kept writing.

With twenty minutes left, I reached the second-to-last long problem. It required heavy calculation, and my wrist already ached from writing so fast.

I gripped the pen harder and pushed through.

Some intermediate steps had to be omitted. I wrote the core logic, the final equations, and the conclusion. There was no time for elegance. Only survival.

When the final bell rang, I had just written the last answer on the sheet.

I put the pen down and exhaled for the first time in what felt like an hour.

It was ugly. It was rushed. But there were no blanks.

Stiazky stood at once and snatched the booklet and answer sheet from the desk.

He flipped through them quickly. As his eyes moved across the pages, a cold smile formed on his face.

"You finished all of it in that amount of time?"

He looked at me with open contempt.

"Then I was right. Someone gave you the answers in advance. No normal student could do this."

"I did not cheat," I said, standing and meeting his eyes. "I solved those problems myself."

"Whether you solved them yourself is not for you to decide."

His voice went flat.

"Letting someone like you pass would be the real insult to this exam."

Then, before I could move, he gripped my answer booklet with both hands and tore it down the middle.