13

I didn’t go to school the next day.
I couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the flames again — Emily’s voice, the panic, the sound of glass breaking.
It wasn’t just memory. It felt like the past was bleeding into the present.

Noah came to find me.
He looked worse than before — pale, tired, haunted. “They know,” he said as soon as I opened the door.
“Who?” I asked.
“The teachers. The ones who were supposed to lock up the lab that night.”

He told me there had been an experiment — a chemical test the school wasn’t authorized to run.
Emily had found the proof. She was going to expose it.
“That’s why they called it an accident,” Noah whispered. “It wasn’t.”

The room spun around me. All the pieces were falling into place — the fear, the silence, the lies.
We weren’t just covering for ourselves.
We were protecting them.

Noah grabbed my hand. “We have to tell someone,” I said.
He shook his head. “You don’t get it. They’ll destroy us before we can speak.”
And for a moment, I saw something in his eyes — the same terror I’d seen in my own reflection.

The truth was finally clear, but it didn’t set me free.
It only made everything heavier.
Because now I knew what Emily had discovered that night…
and why she never made it out.