Chapter 3

"She's just better, Sarah."

Mark' s voice, when I finally called him, was flat, dismissive.

My boyfriend. Or, he was supposed to be.

"Tiffany has natural talent, you know? And resources. You can't compete with that."

"Mark, it's always exactly twenty points! Don't you find that weird?"

"Weirdly consistent, maybe. Consistently better."

He was already pulling away, I could hear it. Tiffany, with her father' s tech empire and her shiny convertible, was a brighter star.

"Maybe you're just not as good as you think you are," he added, a casual cruelty that stung.

He was already siding with her. In the nightmare, he' d ended up dating her. It seemed this timeline was speeding things up.

The call ended with a hollow click.

I felt a surge of anger, then a wave of despair.

Isolated. He made me feel isolated.

I sank onto my bed, my mind racing.

The offline work, the decoy functions – none of it mattered.

What else was there? What was I missing?

Then, a flicker of memory.

My birthday. It was also the day the InnovateNext competition officially began.

Mark had given me a gift.

A "lucky" ergonomic keyboard.

"You have to use this, Sarah," he' d insisted, his smile a little too bright. "It'll bring you good luck. For the competition."

I' d been using it for Round 1.

A brand new, sealed keyboard. How could it be bugged?

But the way he' d insisted...

I looked at it, sitting on my desk. Sleek, black, expensive-looking.

A gift from Mark. Mark, who was now openly championing Tiffany.

Could it be? A hardware keylogger? Something transmitting my keystrokes?

It seemed far-fetched, but the "20 points" were far-fetched.

Before Round 2, in my frenzy to go offline, I had already swapped back to my old, clunky keyboard, the one I trusted.

I' d tossed Mark' s gift into the back of my closet, under a pile of old clothes, intending to examine it later.

But the results of Round 2 were the same.

So, the keyboard wasn't the only thing. Or maybe it wasn't the thing at all.

The consistency was the terrifying part.

It wasn't about her being slightly better. It was about that fixed margin.

Twenty points.