Chapter 3 - The FiftyBy three that afternoon, the fifty students whose Apex applications had failed gathered inside Engineering Auditorium 2.
Nobody had invited them formally.
They simply came.
Angry people often found one another quickly.
Brooke Jensen stood near the front.
Marcus Bell sat with his head between his hands.
Sofia Ramirez was crying quietly beside the wall.
Her mother cleaned offices at night.
Her father worked warehouse shifts.
Sofia had spent four years maintaining a near-perfect GPA while working twenty hours a week.
The Apex salary would have been more than both of her parents earned together.
Across the aisle sat Daniel Kim, who had already declined another position because an Apex recruiter had told him he was one of their strongest candidates.
Near him, engineering student Priya Shah stared blankly at her laptop.
Her application had included six recommendation letters and a twelve-page project portfolio.
All gone.
Or at least, officially, never received.
Leo entered on his temporary crutches.
Conversation stopped.
He hated that.
A day earlier, half these people wouldn’t have noticed him.
Now they watched him like he carried the answer to their lives.
Brooke approached first.
“Can you fix it?”
Not hello.
Not how are you.
Can you fix it?
Leo understood.
“I don’t know.”
“You built part of the network system.”
“I helped build diagnostics. I don’t control Apex’s servers.”
Marcus stood.
“But our files existed before noon, right?”
“On your devices.”
“And while uploading?”
“Possibly in temporary university cache.”
Hope moved through the room.
Leo immediately lifted a hand.
“Don’t assume that means recovery.”
“But maybe?”
“Maybe.”
Sofia wiped her eyes.
“What about the deadline?”
Leo looked around.
“That is the larger problem. Even if I recover every packet, Apex would have to agree to accept them.”
“They should!” someone shouted.
“Trent destroyed the connection!”
Another voice answered.
“Because Leo hacked the routing!”
The room shifted.
Leo turned.
Ethan Cole, a business major and reserve football player, stood in the back row.
He crossed his arms.
“Campus IT says the routing command came from his login.”
Brooke looked at Leo.
“Is that true?”
“It came from credentials assigned to me.”
“That’s not the same answer.”
“No,” Leo said. “It isn’t.”
Whispers spread.
Ethan smiled slightly.
“So maybe Trent was trying to stop him.”
Leo stared at him.
“By breaking my crutch?”
“I didn’t say he handled it well.”
“You think he randomly took my crutch, hit the exact networking box carrying all Apex traffic, and an anonymous accusation arrived seconds later saying I caused everything?”
Ethan’s smile disappeared.
Someone near the front asked, “What anonymous accusation?”
Leo looked at Professor Ward, standing near the door.
She shook her head slightly.
The investigation was supposed to remain confidential.
Leo understood.
But the room deserved something.
“Someone had prepared a story before the outage happened,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”
Ethan moved toward the aisle.
“You always hated Trent.”
“No.”
Leo adjusted his grip on the temporary crutches.
“I barely think about Trent when he’s not blocking a ramp or stealing medical equipment.”
A few students laughed.
Ethan didn’t.
Brooke stepped between them.
“Stop.”
She looked around the room.
“We have thirty hours before Apex begins selecting interview candidates. Fighting each other gets us nowhere.”
Leo appreciated the practicality.
He opened his laptop.
“I need something from everyone.”
“What?”
“Do not delete anything from the device you used to apply. No browser histories. No temporary files. No upload logs. Nothing.”
Students began taking notes.
“Second, send screenshots of your failure messages to Professor Ward.”
“Why her?”
“Because my university account is under investigation.”
That created another wave of murmuring.
Leo ignored it.
“Third, anyone who recorded what happened in Hallway A needs to preserve the original video.”
Several people looked uncomfortable.
Because many had recorded.
Few had helped.
Brooke looked down at her phone.
“I recorded part of it.”
Leo looked at her.
She swallowed.
“I thought Trent was just messing with you.”
“He was.”
“I should have done something.”
Leo could have punished her with silence.
Instead he said, “Then do something now.”
Brooke nodded.
She transferred the video to Professor Ward.
Marcus followed.
Then Daniel.
Within minutes, fourteen separate videos existed.
Different angles.
Different timestamps.
Professor Ward watched the first.
Trent grabbed Leo’s crutch.
Second video.
He turned.
Third.
He swung.
Then Priya suddenly spoke.
“Wait.”
Everyone turned.
She had been zooming into the background of Marcus’s recording.
“What?”
Priya pointed at the screen.
“Look behind Trent.”
Leo moved closer.
Twenty seconds before Trent attacked him, someone stood near the stairwell.
A man in a dark suit.
Only part of his face was visible.
But he was holding a phone toward Trent.
A message reached Trent.
Trent looked down.
Then immediately looked at Leo.
Three seconds later he approached.
Leo’s pulse quickened.
“Can you enhance that?”
“Not much.”
“Zoom on the phone.”
Priya enlarged the frame.
Blurry.
But there was a visible shape on Trent’s screen.
A photograph.
Gray rectangle.
Brick background.
Something metallic.
Leo stared.
Brooke whispered, “Is that…”
“The fiber box,” Leo said.
The room fell silent.
Someone had sent Trent a photograph of the exact equipment seconds before he attacked Leo.
The destruction wasn’t spontaneous.
A student near the back whispered, “Who was the man?”
Leo looked again.
He recognized the suit.
Not the person.
The suit had a small silver emblem on the lapel.
Westbridge Athletics Foundation.
Professor Ward’s face tightened.
Ethan Cole quietly slipped toward the exit.
Leo saw him.
“So where are you going?”
Everyone turned.
Ethan stopped.
“Practice.”
Leo checked the time.
“Football practice was canceled.”
Ethan said nothing.
Then his phone buzzed.
He looked at the screen.
And for one second, fear crossed his face.
Leo noticed.
“Who just texted you?”
Ethan shoved the phone into his pocket.
“Nobody.”
Leo stared at him.
“You might want to come up with a better answer.”
Because suddenly the fifty rejected applicants weren’t simply victims of one athlete’s cruelty.
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