All Chapters of The Girl the Alpha Academy Couldn't Break: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Neris's POVMy eyes are gold.Not brown. Not the tired hazel I've looked at in mirrors for eighteen years. Gold, bright and unmistakable, staring back at me from the cracked glass above my sink, and by the time I blink they're already fading back to normal, like they were never anything else."No," I whisper. "No, no, no."I lean closer, gripping the edges of the sink, waiting for it to happen again. It doesn't. My reflection stays stubbornly ordinary, brown-eyed, pale, exhausted from three nights of barely sleeping since Gideon's call went dark and Ysolde's warning followed me back to this room like a shadow that won't detach.You saw it too, something says, low and clear, from somewhere behind my ribs.I go very still. "You've never talked to me like that before. Not in actual words."I've always talked. You've only started listening.The voice isn't mine. It never has been, not really, but before now it's only ever been pressure, instinct, the wordless shove that took over in the f

Neris's POV"Voss."Cassian says the name like it costs him something, sliding a folder across the table hard enough that it skids into my hands."Instructor Voss," Lucien confirms, tapping the page. "Combat theory and academy archives. He has clearance to both the ward chamber logs and the external relay system Cassian traced last night.""That's not proof," Evren says. "Half the senior staff has that clearance.""It's not just clearance." Cassian pulls up another document on the tablet, turning it toward the rest of us. "Voss requested access to Neris's intake file four separate times over the past two months. Before the forest. Before anyone had a reason to be curious about her."Something cold moves through my chest. "Why would he care about me before any of this started?""That's what we're about to ask him," Cassian says."You want to just walk up and confront him?" I ask."I want answers before he realizes we suspect him." Cassian stands, already moving toward the door. "Which

Neris's POV"Say her name."Lucien looks up from the desk, startled by the demand in my voice. "Whose name?""My mother's. You've been researching for two days and you haven't said it once. Not to me." I sit across from him, hands flat on the table so they don't shake. "That's not an accident with you. Nothing you do is an accident.""I've been careful," he admits, "because I wasn't certain what I found was real until an hour ago.""Tell me anyway."He slides a folder across the table, thinner than I expected for something that's apparently kept him up two nights running. "Her name was Adaeze. Adaeze Solari, before she married your father. She attended this academy roughly twenty-five years ago."The name lands somewhere deep in my chest, unfamiliar and impossibly personal at once. "She went here?""According to the fragments I've managed to reconstruct, yes." Lucien's jaw tightens. "I say fragments because her file has been deliberately gutted. Not simply sealed, like yours. Erased.

Neris's POV"Open your bag."Two instructors are standing outside my dormitory door when I get back from morning training, flanked by a third I don't recognize wearing the formal grey of academy security. None of them look like this is a request."What's going on?""Open your bag," the security officer repeats. "Now, please."I set it down slowly, hands steady even though my pulse has already started climbing. "Can someone tell me what I'm being accused of?""Theft," the first instructor says. "A serious one."They search my bag first, methodical and thorough, finding nothing but training gear and the folded sheet of paper Cassian gave me two days ago about access logs I've been helping cross-reference. Then they move past me into my room, and I follow because refusing would look worse than whatever they're about to find, though something cold is already settling in my stomach that says they're going to find something regardless.The security officer pulls back my mattress, and there

Neris's POV"Kaelith wasn't a person. It was a covenant."Lucien says it like he's still trying to convince himself, three books open across the table in front of him, one hand pressed flat against a page dense with genealogy charts too faded to read from where I'm sitting."Explain that," I say. "Because right now I just have a name a two-hundred-year-old rock decided to give me.""The Kaelith bloodline wasn't simply a family line. According to this text, they were considered the original vessel of Alpha authority before the current territorial system replaced them. Every ruling bloodline today claims descent from them, whether they can prove it or not." He turns the book toward me, tapping a symbol at the center of a family tree branching into dozens of smaller lines. "Three interlocking crescents. One point."The same mark under my collarbone. The same symbol from my father's photograph."So I'm not descended from some minor extinct bloodline," I say slowly. "I'm descended from the